The SAGE Handbook Of Cultural Analysis [[Enhanced Credo edition].] 147397173X, 9781473971738, 0761942297, 9780761942290, 1446206807, 9781446206805

Table of contents :
Introduction: Vocabularies of Culture --
Frameworks of Analysis. 1 Anthropology and Culture / Eric Gable and Richard Handler --
2 Cultural Geography: An Account / Kay Anderson --
3 Psychology and Cultural Analysis / Valerie Walkerdine and Lisa Blackman --
4 Sociology and Culture / Tony Bennett --
5 Cultural History / Peter Burke --
6 Literary Studies / James F. English --
7 Culture and Music / Tia DeNora --
8 Visual Analysis / Mieke Bal --
9 Film Studies / Tom Gunning --
10 Broadcasting / Toby Miller --
11 Cultural Studies / Ien Ang --
12 Feminism and Culture: Theoretical Perspectives / Griselda Pollock --
13 Material Culture / Daniel Miller --
14 Culture: Science Studies and Technoscience / Andrew Pickering. Current Issues. 15 Culture and Nation / David McCrone --
16 Culture and Modernities / Joel S. Kahn --
17 Globalization and Cultural Flows/Networks / Diana Crane --
18 Colonialism and Culture / Christopher Pinney --
19 Indigenous Culture: The Politics of Vulnerability and Survival / Tim Rowse --
20 Cultural Property / John Frow --
21 Culture and Economy / Timothy Mitchell --
22 Culture, Class and Classification / Mike Savage --
23 Analysing Multiculturalism Today / Ghassan Hage --
24 Culture and Identity / Simon Clarke --
25 Culture, Sex and Sexualities / Elspeth Probyn and Gilbert Caluya --
26 Cultural and Creative Industries / David Hesmondhalgh --
27 Cultural Technologies / Celia Lury --
28 Cyberculture and New Media / Tiziana Terranova. Research Theory and Practice. Introduction --
29 Ethnography / Johannes Fabian and Vincent de Rooij --
30 Visual Anthropology / Sarah Pink --
31 Thinking by Numbers: Cultural Analysis and the Use of Data / Justin Lewis --
32 Discourse Analysis / Lilie Chouliaraki --
33 Cultural Activism / Pepi Leistyna.

Citation preview

The SAGE Handbook of

Cultural Analysis

Edited by

Tony Bennett and John Frow

Los Angeles • London • New Delhi • Singapore

© Editorial arrangement and introduction Tony Bennett and John Frow 2008 Chapters 1–25, 27–33 © Sage Publications Ltd 2008 Chapter 26 © David Hesmondhalgh 2008 First Published 2008 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 Library of Congress Control Number: 2007927716 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-7619-4229-0

Typeset by Cepha Imaging Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore, India Printed in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wiltshire Printed on paper from sustainable resources

Contents

Acknowledgements Advisory Panel Notes on Contributors INTRODUCTION: VOCABULARIES OF CULTURE PART I

FRAMEWORKS OF ANALYSIS

v vi vii 1 17

1

Anthropology and Culture Eric Gable and Richard Handler

25

2

Cultural Geography: An Account Kay Anderson

46

3

Psychology and Cultural Analysis Valerie Walkerdine and Lisa Blackman

66

4

Sociology and Culture Tony Bennett

86

5

Cultural History Peter Burke

107

6

Literary Studies James F. English

126

7

Culture and Music Tia DeNora

145

8

Visual Analysis Mieke Bal

163

9

Film Studies Tom Gunning

185

10

Broadcasting Toby Miller

206

11

Cultural Studies Ien Ang

227

12

Feminism and Culture: Theoretical Perspectives Griselda Pollock

249

13

Material Culture Daniel Miller

271

14

Culture: Science Studies and Technoscience Andrew Pickering

291

iv

CONTENTS

PART II

CURRENT ISSUES

311

15

Culture and Nation David McCrone

317

16

Culture and Modernities Joel S. Kahn

338

17

Globalization and Cultural Flows/Networks Diana Crane

359

18

Colonialism and Culture Christopher Pinney

382

19

Indigenous Culture: The Politics of Vulnerability and Survival Tim Rowse

406

20

Cultural Property John Frow

427

21

Culture and Economy Timothy Mitchell

447

22

Culture, Class and Classification Mike Savage

467

23

Analysing Multiculturalism Today Ghassan Hage

488

24

Culture and Identity Simon Clarke

510

25

Culture, Sex and Sexualities Elspeth Probyn and Gilbert Caluya

530

26

Cultural and Creative Industries David Hesmondhalgh

552

27

Cultural Technologies Celia Lury

570

28

Cyberculture and New Media Tiziana Terranova

587

PART III

RESEARCH THEORY AND PRACTICE

609

29

Ethnography Johannes Fabian and Vincent de Rooij

613

30

Visual Anthropology Sarah Pink

632

31

Thinking by Numbers: Cultural Analysis and the Use of Data Justin Lewis

654

32

Discourse Analysis Lilie Chouliaraki

674

33

Cultural Activism Pepi Leistyna

697

Index

717

Acknowledgements

We are particularly grateful to Chris Rojek at Sage for asking us to edit this Handbook in the first place, and for his willingness to let us stretch the envelope a little in our approach to the genre of ‘the Handbook’ by encouraging our contributors to write with a little more ‘edge’ than the genre customarily allows. We have also appreciated his patience in giving us the time both to assemble the team of contributors we wanted and then giving them the time to write to the demanding briefs we had prepared for them. We are grateful too to Mila Steele at Sage for her help through all stages, from initial contacts with authors through to the handover of the completed manuscript and the efficiency of her management of the production process. And we thank Karen Ho from the Open University for her invaluable assistance in formatting the manuscript to ensure consistency between the different chapters. We are grateful, too, to the members of our editorial advisory panel. They were, collectively and individually, of real help to us at many stages in the process. Their advice was invaluable at the time when we were struggling to give some shape to the collection and even more so, later, when devising briefs for specific chapters where we found ourselves in territory that was relatively unfamiliar to us. We thank them too for their good service in helping persuade prospective contributors to sign up to this project. But our greatest debt is to our contributors. We are grateful to all of them for the productive and collegial ways in which they have responded, first, to our initial briefs, and, second, to our comments on their first and subsequent drafts. It is rare in a venture of this kind to be able to say that we have not encountered any sense of authorial self-interest standing in the way of the business of shaping a collective product, but we haven’t and we’re grateful for it. To those contributors who finished first: our thanks for your patience in waiting for the whole to come together. To those who finished last: our thanks for pulling out all the stops when it was needed. And, having first started work on this project in 2001, we are, finally, thankful that it is completed!

Advisory Panel

Professor Roger Chartier, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania Professor Rey Chow, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Department of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University Professor Dana Polan, Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University Professor Rita Felski, English Department, University of Virginia Professor Jonathan Spencer, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh Professor Nicholas Dirks, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University Professor Meaghan Morris, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong; Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney Professor Andrew Ross, American Studies, Faculty of Arts and Science, New York University Professor Nigel Thrift, Vice Chancellor, University of Warwick Professor Margaret Wetherell, Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University

Notes on Contributors

Kay Anderson is Professor of Cultural Research at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney. She has a long history of engagement with issues of race, culture, nature, and colonialism in Human Geography, as signalled by her (award-winning) Vancouver’s Chinatown (1991) and Race and the Crisis of Humanism (2007). She has co-edited texts on the culture concept (Inventing Places, 1991; Cultural Geographies, 1999; Handbook of Cultural Geography, 2003), and is elected Academician of the Academy of the Social Sciences (UK) and Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Ien Ang is Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Western Sydney, where she was the founding director of the Centre for Cultural Research. At present she is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow. She is the author of a number of books, including Watching Dallas (1985), Desperately Seeking the Audience (1991), Living Room Wars (1996) and On Not Speaking Chinese (2001). She is an elected fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Mieke Bal, a well-known cultural critic and theorist, holds the position of Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences Professor (KNAW). She is also Professor of the Theory of Literature in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. Her many books include A Mieke Bal Reader (The University of Chicago Press, 2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (University of Toronto Press, 2002) and Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (University of Toronto Press, 1997). She is also a video artist. Tony Bennett is Professor of Sociology at the Open University, a Director of the Economic and Social Science Research Centre on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), and a Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. Recent publications include Culture: A Reformer’s Science; Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism; and New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (edited with Larry Grossberg and Meaghan Morris). He was elected to membership of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998. Lisa Blackman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, UK. She works at the intersection of critical psychology and cultural theory, and particularly on the relationships between the body, affect and the psychological. She has published two books: L. Blackman and V. Walkerdine (2001) Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies (Palgrave); and L. Blackman (2001) Hearing Voices: Embodiment and Experience (Free Association Books). She is currently completing two monographs. The first is under consideration by Duke University Press: L. Blackman (forthcoming), Feeling FINE: Affect, Relationality and the ‘Problem of Personality’. The second is a general introduction to body theory: L. Blackman (2008) The Body: The Key Concepts. London: Berg.

viii

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Peter Burke recently retired from his post as Professor of Cultural History, University of Cambridge, but remains a Fellow of Emmanuel College. His studies of cultural history, which have been translated into 30 languages, range from Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy (1972) to What Is Cultural History? (2004). Gilbert Caluya is currently completing his PhD on the spatial politics of everyday fear in the Gender and Cultural Studies Department, University of Sydney, where he also lectures on feminist, postcolonial and queer theory. He was awarded the University of Sydney Medal in 2003 for his ethnography of gay Asian males in Sydney’s gay scene, which also received the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives Thesis Prize. He has work published in the Journal of Intercultural Studies and ACRAWSA e-Journal. Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE and Research Director of POLIS, LSE’s think tank on media and society. Her recent publications include The Spectatorship of Suffering (Sage, 2006) and The Soft Power of War (Benjamins, 2007). Simon Clarke is Professor of Psycho-Social Studies and Director of the Centre for PsychoSocial Studies at the University of the West of England, UK. He has published numerous articles, essays and reviews on the psychoanalytic understanding of racism, ethnic hatred and social conflict. Recent publications include: Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (2003); From Enlightenment to Risk: Social Theory and Contemporary Society (2005) and Emotion, Politics and Society (2006; with Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson). He is currently working on a new book, Constructions of Whiteness, and is Consulting Editor (with Paul Hoggett) of a new Karnac Book series, Exploring Psycho-Social Studies. Simon is editor of the print journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (Palgrave) and is currently directing a research project which forms part of the larger £4 million ESRC ‘social identities’ programme. The project looks at notions of home and identity in contemporary Britain. Diana Crane is Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a specialist in the sociology of culture, arts, media and globalization. Her books include Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing (University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy and Globalization (co-edited with Nobuko Kawashima and Ken’ichi Kawasaki) (Routledge, 2002), as well as numerous articles in journals and chapters in books. Tia DeNora is Professor of Music Sociology at Exeter University. She is author of Beethoven and the Construction of Genius (California/Fayard, 1995), Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge, 2000) and After Adorno (Cambridge, 2003). She is currently doing research in collaboration with Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy Centre on music and mental health. James F. English is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His recent work focuses on the sociology of literature and especially on its institutional and transnational dimensions. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard UP) was named Best Academic Book of 2005 by New York Magazine. Also published in 2005 was the Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, from Blackwell. Johannes Fabian is Professor Emeritus of cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He did research on religious movements, language, work and popular culture in the

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

ix

Shaba/Katanga mining region of Zaire, now Congo (1966–1967, 1972–1974, 1985, 1986). In his theoretical and critical work, he addressed questions of epistemology and of the history of anthropology. His most recent publications include Out of Our Minds. Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (2002), Anthropology with an Attitude (2001), Memory Against Culture: Arguments and Reminders. Anthropological Essays 2000–2005 (to be published in 2007 by Duke University Press). John Frow is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Marxism and Literary History (1986), Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader (edited with Meaghan Morris, 1993), Cultural Studies and Cultural Value (1995), Time and Commodity Culture (1997), Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures (1999; with Tony Bennett and Michael Emmison) and Genre (2006). There is a detailed bibliography at . Eric Gable teaches cultural anthropology at the University of Mary Washington. He has done ethnographic research on history museums in the USA, in highland Sulawesi, Indonesia, and in rural Guinea-Bissau. His book (with Richard Handler), The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (1997, Durham, NC: Duke University Press), explores the politics of the production and consumption of public history. Tom Gunning is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities at The University of Chicago in the Department of Art History and the Committee on Cinema and Media. He is author of two books, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press) and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (British Film Institute), as well as over a hundred articles on early cinema, the avant-garde, film genres and issues in film theory and history. His publications have appeared in a dozen languages. He is currently writing on the theory and history of motion in cinema. Ghassan Hage is Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne. His research interests are in the comparative analysis of Nationalism and Racism, and in Lebanese transnational migrant cultures. He is the author of White Nation and Against Paranoid Nationalism. Richard Handler is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. He received his BA in English Literature from Columbia University (1972) and his PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago (1979). He has written extensively on nationalism and culture theory. He conducted fieldwork in Quebec, Canada, between 1975 and 1984, which led to the publication of Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (University Wisconsin Press, 1988). With Eric Gable, he published The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Duke University Press, 1997). He is currently the editor of History of Anthropology. David Hesmondhalgh is Professor of Media Industries at the Institute of Communications Studies and Co-Director (with Justin O’Connor) of CuMIRC, the Cultural and Media Industries Research Centre, at the University of Leeds. His publications include The Cultural Industries (2nd edition, 2007), and five edited volumes: The Media and Social Theory (with Jason Toynbee, 2008), Media Production (2006), Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity (with Jessica Evans, 2005), Popular Music Studies (with Keith Negus, 2002) and Western Music and its Others (with Georgina Born, 2000.

x

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Joel S. Kahn is Emeritus Professor in the Sociology and Anthropology Program at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He has been carrying out research and publishing books and articles on issues of development, globalization, modernity, race, culture, Islam and identity particularly in Southeast Asia for more than 30 years. His current research is on cosmopolitanism and the formation of translocal identities in the modern Malay World. His latest book, published in 2006 by Singapore University Press, is entitled Other Malays: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World. Pepi Leistyna is anAssociate Professor ofApplied Linguistics Graduate Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he coordinates the research programme and teaches courses in cultural studies, media literacy and language acquisition. His books include: Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy; Presence of Mind: Education and the Politics of Deception; Defining and Designing Multiculturalism; Corpus Analysis: Language Structure and Language Use, and Cultural Studies: From Theory to Action. His recent documentary film is called Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class for which he is the 2007 recipient of the Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism. He is a research fellow for the Education Policy Research Unit and a board member of the Working-Class Studies Association and the Association for Cultural Studies. Justin Lewis is Professor of Communication at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He joined Cardiff in 2000, having worked for 12 years in the USA at the University of Massachusetts. He has written several books about media and politics, including Constructing Public Opinion (Columbia University Press) and Citizens or Consumers: What the Media Tell us About Political Participation (Open University Press). Celia Lury is Professor in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She studied at the Universities of York and Manchester and has previously taught at Lancaster University, where she was co-director, with Professor Beverley Skeggs, of the Centre for Women’s Studies. Her research interests are in the fields of cultural and feminist theory. She has developed these theoretical interests through a series of projects on: the culture industry with special emphasis on intellectual property (Cultural Rights, Routledge, 1993), consumer culture (Consumer Culture, Polity, 1996) and self-identity (Prosthetic Culture, 1998, Routledge). She co-edited Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism (Routledge, 2000), and Inventive Life: Towards A New Vitalism (Sage, 2006). Her most recent publication, with Professor Scott Lash, is Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things (Polity, 2007). David McCrone is Professor of Sociology, and co-director of the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Governance. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He coordinated the research programme funded by The Leverhulme Trust on Constitutional Change and National Identity (1999–2004), and on National Identity, Citizenship and Social Inclusion (2006–2010). He has written extensively on the sociology and politics of Scotland, and the comparative study of nationalism. His recent books include: Has Devolution Delivered? (2006); Living in Scotland: Social and Economic Change Since 1980 (2004); Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Nation (2001); New Scotland, New Society? (2001); New Scotland: New Politics? (2000); and The Sociology of Nationalism: Tomorrow’s Ancestors (1998). Daniel Miller is Professor of Material Culture at the Department of Anthropology University College London. Recent books include The Comfort of Things (Polity, 2008), The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (with H. Horst Berg, 2006), Materiality (ed. Duke, 2005),

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xi

Clothing as Material Culture (edited with S. Küchler) (Berg, 2005). He also co-founded materialworldblog.com. Current projects include (a) the experience of loss, (b) au pairs in London, (c) global denim and (d) the use of media by separated families. Toby Miller works at the University of California, Riverside. He edits the journals Social Identities and Television & New Media. His latest book is Cultural Citizenship and he is the author and editor of over 20 other volumes. Timothy Mitchell is Professor of Politics at New York University, where he has served as director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies and as program director of the International Center for Advanced Studies. His books include Colonising Egypt, Questions of Modernity, Rule of Experts, and two volumes of essays published in Arabic translation, Egypt in American Discourse and Democracy and the State in the Arab World. Andrew Pickering is Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics and The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science, and the editor of Science as Practice and Culture and The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming (with Keith Guzik). His new book is Sketches of Another Future: Cybernetics in Britain, 1940–2000. Sarah Pink is Reader in Social Anthropology in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. Her publications include The Future Of Visual Anthropology (2005), Working Images (co-edited in 2004), Doing Visual Ethnography (2007 [2001]), and Visual Interventions (forthcoming in 2007). Her current research involves a sensory ethnography of the Cittaslow movement in the UK. Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London and Visiting Crowe Chair in Art History at Northwestern University. He has held visiting positions at the University of Chicago, Australian National University, University of Cape Town and Jawarharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. His most recent book is Photos of the Gods (2004). The Coming of Photography in India, based on the 2006 Panizzi Lectures, is forthcoming. Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds. Committed to feminist studies and author of over 20 books, she is currently focusing on psychoanalysis and aesthetics, and issues of trauma, art and catastrophe. Recent books include edited collections Psychoanalysis and the Image (2006), Encountering Eva Hesse (2006) and Museums after Modernism (2007). Forthcoming are monographs Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive (2007) and Theatre of Memory: Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? oder Theater? (2007), as well as articles on the death of Anne Frank in Mortality and on Charlotte Salomon in Art History. Elspeth Probyn is the Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She has published several books in the area of cultural research, including Sexing the Self (Routledge, 1993), Outside Belongings (Routledge, 1996), Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (Routledge, 2000), Sexy Bodies (co-edited with Elizabeth Grosz, Routledge, 1995), and Blush: Faces of Shame (University of Minnesota Press, and UNSW Press, 2005). Vincent de Rooij is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam. He holds an MA in Anthropology and a PhD in Linguistics, both from the University of Amsterdam. His current research interests include: youth vernaculars

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

in The Netherlands, social and cultural dimensions of language contact, and the impact of new media on behaviour and cognition. Together with Johannes Fabian, he is the editor of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa (LPCA) web site (http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/lpca/). Tim Rowse is in the History Program, Research School of Social Sciences, the Australian National University. Since the early 1980s, his primary research and teaching interest has been in Australian Indigenous Studies, in particular: the colonial history of Central Australia; postWorld War II public policies towards Indigenous Australians; and Indigenous autobiography as a medium for Indigenous historical consciousness. His latest book (co-author Murray Goot) is Divided Nation? Indigenous Affairs and the Imagined Public (Melbourne University Publishing, 2007) – a study of public opinion polls and their place in the political process. Mike Savage is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, where he is convening Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC). His interests lie in the intersections between studies in stratification and inequality, historical sociology, urban studies and cultural sociology. His recent books include Globalization and Belonging (with Gaynor Bagnall and Brian Longhurst, Sage, 2005), and Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities and Lifestyles (edited with Fiona Devine, Rosemary Crompton and John Scott, Macmillan, 2004). His book Discovering English Society 1950–2000: Popular Identities in the Social Science Imagination will be published by Clarendon during 2008. Tiziana Terranova is Associate Professor in the Sociology of Cultural Processes at the Università degli Studi di Napoli, ‘L’Orientale’ under the sponsorship of the Italian Ministry of University and the Research Programme ‘Rientro Cervelli’. She is the author of Corpi nella Rete (Costa and Nolan, 2006) and Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Pluto Press, 2004) and numerous essays on the cultural politics of new media. Valerie Walkerdine is Professor of Psychology in the interdisciplinary social sciences in the School of Social Sciences in Cardiff University. She has worked on issues of subjectivity for many years, bringing together cultural and social theory with critical psychology and psychoanalysis. Her latest book is Children, Gender, Videogames: Towards a Relational Approach to Multimedia (Palgrave, 2007). She is currently working on theoretical issues in connection with subjectivity and relationality, attempting to bring into dialogue notions of affect taken from social theory and object relations psychoanalysis.

Introduction: Vocabularies of Culture

We hesitated for some time before finally settling on a title for this handbook. We were clear from the outset that we didn’t want to call it a handbook of cultural studies – a term whose currency suggests theoretical allegiances of particular kinds and is too restrictive for the purpose we had in mind. For while there have been many handbooks focused on particular areas of cultural analysis – handbooks of cultural geography and, indeed, of cultural studies – there is none that addresses the work that culture is now called on to do across a range of social science and humanities disciplines. This is the gap that this handbook aims to fill by reviewing the varied forms of analysis that are now described as cultural across both those traditions of intellectual work that are conventionally described as disciplines and, just as important, those that are not. For a purely disciplinary focus would be beside the point, given the key role that a number of areas of interdisciplinary work have played in moving questions of culture and its analysis higher up the agendas of a wider array of intersecting areas of inquiry. A brief survey of the amount of space and scope of the attention that is paid to

entries connected with culture in the 1968 International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Sills, 1968) and its recent replacement, the 2001 International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences (Smelser and Baltes, 2001), gives a good sense of the extent to which this is so. In the 1968 Encyclopedia, there is one main entry on Culture, written by Milton Singer, and then subsidiary entries on a limited range of connected issues: Cultural Relativism, Culturology, Cultural Adaptation, Cultural Change, Culture and Personality, and, finally, Culture Area. There is, as this last entry suggests, a heavily anthropological bias to the balance of issues that are addressed across the entries, although there are some sociological and psychological resonances too. There are seven entries in all, taking up 41 pages. In the 2001 Encyclopedia, by contrast, there are 34 entries spread over 152 pages. More important by far, however, is the much broader range of disciplines that is encompassed by the entries. Anthropology remains an important framework of reference, with entries on anthropological approaches to cultural critique and anthropological perspectives on cultural relativism. There is

2

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CULTURAL ANALYSIS

only one entry that is explicitly sociological, while history – which only rates a crossreference in the 1968 Encyclopedia – merits a full entry on cultural history. Psychology, though, still features strongly – more so than in 1968, and more so than any other discipline, with entries on Cultural Expression and Action, Cultural Psychology, Cultural Variations in Interpersonal Relationships, Culture and Emotion, Culture and the Self, Culture as a Determinant of Mental Health, and one on the psychological and educational aspects of Culture-Rooted Expertise. The biological sciences, which did not figure at all in the 1968 Encyclopedia, make a strong showing, with four separate entries addressing different aspects of cultural evolution and a fifth focused on culture in nonhuman organisms. The same is true of geography and the environmental sciences, with one entry on cultural geography and two on different approaches to the analysis of cultural landscapes. Economics and archaeology complete the list of established disciplines that are featured, with two entries addressing different aspects of development economics and one on archaeological approaches to culture contact. Cultural studies has an entry of its own, as does the cultural study of science, and there are a number of entries focused on general issues – one on culture shock, an entry surveying contemporary views of culture, and a further entry on the function of culture as an explanatory category. Perhaps the most distinctive addition of all, however, is a series of entries focused on questions of cultural management and administration – topics that did not figure at all in the 1968 Encyclopedia. There are two entries on cultural policy, an entry on cultural property that is focused on the repatriation of ancestral remains, an entry on cultural resource management that is concerned primarily with the conservation of cultural heritage, and a connected trio of entries focused on questions of cultural diversity, cultural rights and cultural assimilation. This is, of course, only a rough and ready way of gauging the increasing prominence of cultural concerns within contemporary academic inquiry. It is, nonetheless, sufficient

to show that, although no doubt often overdone, references to the ‘cultural turn’ in the humanities and social sciences do register a real and significant shift in the objects of attention that intellectual work has addressed over the past 30 years or so. It is also clear that this change in intellectual priorities is related to a change in practical priorities as questions of culture and its management have been accorded increasing significance across a wide range of social and political concerns. Indeed, the entries in the 2001 Encyclopedia tend, if anything, to underrepresent the degree to which culture is now registered as a matter of pressing practical concern. For it takes little account of the degree to which cultural resources of various kinds have become increasingly important to the value chains of advanced economies, with the consequence that references to the ‘cultural industries’ or the ‘cultural economy’ are now a part of everyday political and policy concern just as much as they are areas of special attention in emerging academic sub-disciplines. These relations between culture as an object of intellectual attention and the degree to which, at the same time, questions of culture have assumed an increasingly pressing economic, social and political significance have played a central role in our conception of the architecture for this handbook. The chapters commissioned for Part I thus focus on the various intellectual frameworks that have been proposed for the analysis of culture, and of its social and political articulations, as the ‘cultural turn’ has prompted both a realignment of the concerns of traditional disciplines (history and art history, for example) and the development of new interdisciplinary intellectual formations (material culture studies, for example). In Part II, by contrast, our attention focuses on a range of contemporary political, public or policy issues that are defined primarily in cultural terms (multiculturalism, the changing organization of cultural property, and sexuality, for example) and whose study draws on one or more of the intellectual frameworks reviewed in Part I. In Part III, finally, we focus on the development of

INTRODUCTION: VOCABULARIES OF CULTURE

research methods in the context of the intellectual frameworks considered in Part I and as applied to a selected range of the topics reviewed in Part II. The role that is played by different chapters in fulfilling the briefs for the Parts in which they are located will be addressed in the introductions to Parts I, II and III. In the remainder of this general introduction we address three issues. First, in the next section, we review some of the contrasting meanings that are now associated with the term culture, and selected aspects of their use in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forms of cultural analysis and action. This provides the necessary context for us then to consider the kinds of reframing and refocusing of intellectual attention that the ‘cultural turn’– or, more accurately, a series of different cultural turns – has prompted in different areas of inquiry. At each point in our argument we seek to give some consideration to the limits and limitations of the concept of culture. For, whatever the strengths and virtues of the current preoccupation with questions of culture, and while recognizing that, from a certain perspective, culture – understood as the realm of meanings – imbues all social practices, we feel it important to register the force of the realities that cultural analysis cannot address and to caution against the risks of overreaching that are associated with incautious interpretations of the cultural turn.

GENEALOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ‘Culture’ is – like ‘economy’, ‘society’, ‘technology’, and so on – one of those expansive words that designate apparently real structures of social life, but which on closer inspection tend to break down into myriad component parts without any necessary coherence. It seems to work as a shorthand for a complex of different media (talk, writing, images and sound) and for different modes of cognition and affect (believing, valuing, understanding, feeling). It can be used in the plural, to refer to sets of relatively self-contained ways of doing things and understanding the world (Javanese

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culture, the culture of a workplace), or in the singular to refer to a set of more or less universal attributes: to have culture, to be cultured, is to be more fully human than those who lack culture. And it works through different kinds of semantic opposition: it can be counterposed to alternative modes of sociosymbolic organization such as ‘civilization’ (usually understood as a more superficial level of common values, as opposed to the inner intensity of self-formation or Bildung) or to its value-laden opposites (barbarism, savagery), or to structural difference (‘nature’, on the one hand; economy and society on the other). Despite its notorious complexity, the concept of culture is fully a part of everyday discourse. We use it to explain how the aesthetic universe is organized (‘high culture’, ‘everyday culture’), why gangs engage in anti-social activities (‘a culture of violence’), why a business isn’t innovative (‘a culture of dependence’). This explanatory force is reflected in a number of disciplines of knowledge where the so-called ‘cultural turn’ from around the middle of the last century has shifted the centre of gravity in the social sciences and where the concept of culture itself has undergone important shifts of emphasis in the traditional ‘cultural’ disciplines. Our interest here is not so much in trying to think about what culture really is, as in exploring the reasons why it has become so prominent, and so embedded in both institutional and everyday understandings. This has to do chiefly with what is, for many commentators, a source of frustration: the concept’s looseness and pliability. While this has meant, as Adam Kuper notes (Kuper, 1999), that it has proved impossible to define culture with any precision, it is also precisely this flexibility and elasticity that has enabled the concept to be adapted to many different uses and purposes. At the same time, however, this elasticity is not infinite. Allowing for a little rough shaving at the edges, there are four main traditions of use that are central to the forms of analysis that the concept has been called on to perform. These are, first, a universalist tradition in which culture stands for certain standards of human perfection

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that are universally binding. In a second tradition, the apparent antithesis of this first one, culture is relative to time and place, with all cultures being regarded as equally ‘close to god’ so far as their value is concerned. The third tradition we shall be concerned with differentiates culture from other areas or forms of practice, most particularly the social, the political and the economic, and then seeks to identify the principles governing the organization of the relations between these. Fourth and finally, to borrow a term from Paul DiMaggio (1997) and George Yudice (2003), there is the conception of culture as a resource that can be bent to a variety of social, economic and political purposes. There are, moreover, significant connections between these different meanings which have developed as parts of a complex weave of interacting uses rather than as hermetically separated traditions. To illustrate this we comment first on the origination of these different uses in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then, in the next section, outline the ways in which contemporary understandings of culture have been reworked within and across these different fields of use in the context of current theoretical debates. The universalist tradition is, by and large, a post-Kantian formation deriving its impetus from Kant’s transcendental analysis of the principles underlying the exercise of aesthetic judgement. In his account of the judgements of beauty and of the sublime (Kant, 1987 [1790]), Kant accords aesthetic culture a key role in his conception of history as a process of free human self-making whose realization he projects in the form of a sensus communis that will be characterized by universal participation in and appreciation of the works of genius that embody the perfection of human culture. This account was partly shaped by Kant’s critical engagement with and redeployment of aspects of the earlier British civic humanist tradition in which an extended debate about judgements of taste provided models for the development of new forms of self-inspection and selfgovernance on the part of free men in a

society where the integrative capacities of both sovereign and church had been weakened by the Civil War and its aftermath (see Caygill, 1989; Chytry, 1989; Guyer, 2005). They were also shaped by German pietism as a radical interpretation of the Protestant ethos of the responsibility of individuals to freely interpret and put into effect god’s will for themselves independently of any priestly mediation. These aspects of Kant’s concept of culture, and its relationship to the broader German tradition of Bildung in which works of aesthetic culture served as the resources for a work of free, inner self-development, constituted a distinctive engagement with the Enlightenment. In Kant’s work, as in Bildung more generally, the didacticism of the Enlightenment in its commitment to authoritarian programmes of instruction ‘from above’ was to be both more fully realized and broken with by the development of an orientation in which free individuals would take the responsibility for Enlightenment – for developing and perfecting their selves – into their own hands. This also meant, Reinhardt Koselleck (2002) argues, that this developmental logic of culture could, in its later, post-Kantian history, be extended from its initial association with individuals to provide the template for introducing a developmental dynamic into varied collectives: peoples, nations, classes, communities, etc. This has certainly been a significant aspect of the functioning and significance of this aspect of the concept in Anglophone debates. The influence of the Kantian conception of culture on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and on the Romantics more generally and, thence, on Matthew Arnold’s urging the need to spread the improving influence of culture across all classes so that their members might cultivate those capacities for self-regulation he considered necessary in order to avert anarchy is well known. Raymond Williams’s account of these developments in Culture and Society remains one of the most influential renderings of this tradition (Williams, 1958). However, by extending the concept of culture to include ways of life yet still interpreting the central

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critical and political task as one of integrating the relations between ways of life so as to provide the conditions for a common culture, Williams’s work remained within the orbit of the Kantian conception of culture and, as a number of commentators have observed (e.g. Hunter, 1988; Mulhern, 2000), the same is true of many aspects of the subsequent tradition of cultural studies. The Kantian approach to culture has also played a crucial role in distinguishing culture from nature. In the wake of Bruno Latour’s work, a good deal of attention has focused on the work of Hobbes and its role in establishing the terms of what Latour (1993) calls the ‘modern settlement’ and the separation of nature from the social that it produced. It is, however, Kant’s role in attributing to culture the responsibility for the distinguishing human capacity for free, self-reflective, purposive action by virtue of which man ‘holds the title of the lord of nature’ (Kant, 1987: para. 431) while also construing culture as the means for realizing the ultimate purpose of human selfdevelopment that man thus sets himself that has been pivotal in organizing the terms of the modern nature/culture divide. This is also a division that has played a key role in organizing hierarchical distinctions between cultures according to their varying degrees of distance from nature. In an important recent study, Sankar Muthu (2003) has argued that Kant’s work attributed a capacity for cultural agency to all human beings and, in a close examination of Kant’s writings, shows that Kant was a forceful critic of imperialist policies and conceptions. However, this does not gainsay the fact that other aspects of his work – his infamous remark to the effect that the African Negro has no history – and, in its later uses and interpretations, the Kantian conception of culture have also been invoked to construct hierarchical rankings of different cultures arranged in terms of different degrees of differentiation from, or immersion within, nature. This has been a significant aspect of the ways in which the cultures of different classes have been distinguished (Bourdieu, 1984); it has been central to racializing theories

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of cultural difference (Dias, 2004); and it has been centrally implicated in accounts of gender differences, with women often being denied the capacity to attain the same degree of cultural self-development as men as a consequence of being chained to nature by their child-rearing roles (Schiebinger, 1993). It has also been a significant aspect of the ways in which the relations between colonizers and colonized have been represented in evolutionary thought via the construction of the colonized as pre-historic primitives (Fabian, 1983). Yet it is especially in this last regard that Muthu’s corrective proves helpful. For within the history of anthropology it was the post-Kantian legacy of Bildung that proved crucially important in the development of what has proved to be the most significant early twentieth-century development of the concept of culture: that is, its application to the ways of life of different territorially defined peoples, and the contention that these need to be understood on their own terms as equally manifestations of a human capacity for cultural agency. Although Edward Burnett Tylor was the first anthropologist to propose that culture should be understood to include not just aesthetic culture but ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’ (Tylor, 1874: p. 1), the key figure here is Franz Boas. For, in spite of its apparent even-handedness, Tylor’s understanding of culture grafted an Arnoldian conception of culture as a particular standard of perfection onto evolutionary conceptions of social development, with the result that Western ‘civilized’ culture provided the normative standard against which other cultures were to be measured (Stocking, 1968). Tylor was, in this regard, the most important representative of the post-Darwinian tradition of evolutionary social anthropology that dominated Anglophone debates in the late nineteenth century. Boas’s formation was different. Moving to work in North America from Germany, he received his training in an anthropological

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tradition that was hostile to post-Darwinian arrangements of different cultures into evolutionary hierarchies while, at the same time, being marked by the post-Kantian tradition of Bildung and the responsibility this enjoined of recognizing cultural agency wherever it manifested itself (Bunzl, 1996). This led to a programme of ethnological collection and assemblage that aimed to bring together in museums material testimonies to the diversity of human cultural creativity (Penny, 2002; Zimmerman, 2002). Further developed by Boas into an area-based concept of cultures as territorially bound networks of customs, traditions, and ways of doing and making that had their own integrity and that needed to be understood on their own terms, this concept of culture was, with Boas’s active involvement, translated into new contemporary forms of material culture which challenged the evolutionary arrangements that dominated museum displays of ‘other cultures’ until well into the twentieth century (Griffiths, 2002; Hinsley, 1981). In these ways Boas’s work also recalled Johann Gottfried Herder’s conception of national cultures as territorially bound and his clear rebuttal of eighteenthcentury stadial conceptions according to which different cultures could be ranked in terms of the degree to which they supposedly reflected the infancy, childhood, maturity or old age of the species. In being the first person to speak of cultures clearly in the plural, and in his opposition to the racist and evolutionary frameworks that governed US government policies towards Afro-Americans, Native Americans, and immigrants, Boas was also an important precursor of the frameworks for managing differences associated with contemporary multiculturalism and culturaldiversity policies (Boas, 1996; Mennand, 2002). Our third tradition – we shall call it the structural tradition – was related more closely to the development of ways of thinking about those societies which, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were placed on the modern side of the system of contrasts between ‘modernity and its others’ which organized the birth of social theory. It was

perhaps most vividly expressed in Marx’s famous base-superstructure metaphor according to which society is conceived as a series of layers each of which – the social infrastructure and the ideological superstructures – is erected on the basis of an economic substructure or foundation. The term ‘ideology’ here functions as a loose synonym for the system of values and beliefs that, in other traditions of thought, were brought under the heading of ‘culture’. But the crucial aspect of this way of thinking about culture is its conception of society as something that can be divided into a number of distinct and analytically separable realms, thus posing the challenge as to how then to understand the orders of their interconnection. The determinist logic of Marx’s answer to this question, assigning a key determining role to the organization of economic production and exchange to account for the relationships between social classes and the refraction of those relationships in the contest between competing ideologies, is, of course, only one way of entering into the problematic of ‘separate-but-connected’ that defines the structural tradition. The later development of functionalism, in both sociology and anthropology, in its approach to societies as a series of separate-yetconnected subsystems is another variant of the same logic. So too is systems theory in its account of the progressive emergence of a number of differentiated sub-systems as a consequence of an in-built tendency leading to the increasing differentiation of multiple spheres of life that is generated by the inner momentum that each of these derives from its initial separation and differentiation from others (Luhmann, 2000). And so too, finally, is Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the differentiation of the economic, political and cultural fields from one another and, within the cultural field, its differentiation into subcomponents (the literary and art fields, for example), as a consequence of competitive struggles between agents within each of these fields (Bourdieu, 1993). This leads us finally to our fourth interpretation of culture as, in George Yudice’s terms, a resource that is to be managed with

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a view to harnessing it to the realization of economic and social goals. Where we part company with Yudice, however, is in his contention that the inscription of culture within contemporary neo-liberal programmes of governance constitutes a qualitative break with earlier histories of its use and reception. That there has been a change of a significant quantitative kind in approaches to culture as a resource to secure certain social ends – social cohesion or urban regeneration, for example – is not in question. However, we doubt the stress Yudice places on this as constituting a qualitative break that marks the development of a new logic of culture. To the contrary, the nineteenth century brims with examples of culture as a resource in the sense that Yudice intends it. It was conceived very much as an economic resource in the varied initiatives that were made to translate the lessons of the Great Exhibition of 1851 into museum and education programmes that would generate trade and industrial benefits by leading to improved standards of design and manufacturing (Minihan, 1977). And it was perceived as a political and governmental resource in Arnold’s prescriptions regarding the advantages to be gained from spreading culture as a means of warding off the threat of anarchy. Indeed, one of the most intriguing aspects of the Arnoldian programme and others like it concerns the respect in which the uses they propose for culture depends on its post-Kantian conception as a special realm that is distinct from both society and the economy. For it is only by virtue of the special qualities that were thus attributed to it that it made sense to suppose that the general diffusion of culture would give rise to the political and civic benefits its proponents envisaged.

THE LOGICS OF CULTURE The ‘cultural turn’ that we briefly mapped at the start of this introduction has accompanied, and in part contributed to, a sweeping transformation of the disciplines of knowledge that the French call the human sciences. On the one hand there has been a clear shift

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in the social sciences over the last 20 or so years from a primary focus on social, political and economic structures, understood as distinct from and in some sense prior to their ‘cultural’ embedding, to an understanding that the particularities of this embedding – the ways of life, the patterns of everyday interaction, the systems of meaning-making – are in crucial ways formative of social institutions. A stronger way of putting this would be to say that this shift in the social sciences has entailed a breaking-down of the dichotomy between institutional and symbolic structures and practices, a recognition that economic processes or technological systems or political frameworks or kinship structures are always made up, amongst other things, of discourses, of beliefs, of negotiations amongst social actors, of the indeterminacies of action occurring in time. This shift has in part been methodologically driven. In his widely influential The Interpretation of Cultures Clifford Geertz writes: ‘Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning’ (Geertz, 1973: p. 5). This antipositivist impulse (which is always of course accompanied by the continuing ambition of disciplines such as mainstream sociology and psychology to achieve apodictic status) was fuelled on the one hand by the advent of ‘French theory’ (the work of Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Bourdieu, Deleuze and others) and on the other by a line of hermeneutic analysis with which it in part converges, running through Heidegger, Gadamer, the Frankfurt School (both the older generation of Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin, and the younger generation of Habermas and Negt), the Konstanz circle (Koselleck and Jauss) and the work of cultural historians such as E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Hayden White, whose Metahistory (1973) understands the writing of history in terms of its tropological strategies of emplotment, genre and style.

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At the same time, there has been a convergence in which those disciplines that have traditionally been concerned with the detailed study of the symbolic order – cultural anthropology, textual studies, aesthetics, social psychology – have begun to seek to account for the systems of social relations within which the phenomena they study are in turn embedded. The shift in literary studies from the text-focused methods of deconstruction to the broader ‘social text’ that is the concern of the New Historicism, and the rise of cultural studies as a tense but often fruitful marriage of textual with social science disciplines, are examples of this movement. A defining moment for cultural anthropology, at least in the United States, was the publication in 1986 of Writing Culture, a collection of essays redefining ‘culture’ less as an object of analysis than as a product of the institutions of writing: the conventions of a disciplinary poetics, on the one hand, and the protocols of the Western academy, on the other (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). The result of this widespread shift has been a redrawing of disciplinary boundaries as previously distinct fields of study have converged in a more complex and multidisciplinary understanding of this mutual embeddedness of social and cultural phenomena. Anyone studying the social organization of the city, for example, will now as a matter of course draw upon political economy, architectural theory and town planning, but also on theories of the lived experience of spatiality and on the texts and images in which the experience of the city has been diversely registered. Theorists of technological change will similarly write not only about technical inventions but about the complex economic and institutional processes through which they are realized and about their uptake in and effects upon a rich series of social environments, as well as about the discourses and the struggles in which these processes are carried through. And a theorist of the mass media will make use of an equally heterogeneous array of disciplinary frameworks. In order to understand the field of force in which the concept of culture has come to

occupy so prominent a place, it will be helpful to try to think about the kinds of work it seems fitted to do. We distinguish three main logics, and three related areas of work, that are embedded in the concept. The first has to do with the discontinuity it posits in relation to the realm of ‘nature’. The particular rupture achieved here sets up a limit to the biological and instinctual, on the one hand, and to the mechanical and technological, on the other, which then founds a specifically human realm defined by the long period of socialization in which human culture – including language and the use of symbols, pattern recognition and inductive reasoning, the use of tools and material artefacts, and social organization – is learned. The human is thus that which transcends its ‘natural’ conditions of existence, and which extends itself by material and technological means without itself being affected by these extensions. The culture which constitutes our humanity is whatever we learn as socialized infants and children: cognitive, affective and practical schemata which divide the semantic universe in ways that are to some extent specific to the relevant social group. This is to say that at the core of this conception of culture is at once the universality of human being, and the particularity of the configurations through which it is structured at any one time and place. Human universality is both limited and shaped by the forms of organization of the social. To take a central example of the operation of this logic, Claude Lévi-Strauss, working in a Durkheimian tradition that posits the methodological priority of the social over the biological, and a Saussurean tradition in which the social is thought by analogy with language as a more or less closed system of arbitrary codes generating communication within and across groups, takes the ‘natural’ to be the raw material of the social – a raw material that can be configured in somewhat different ways to produce the variety of human cultures. Thus totemism is understood to be nothing other than a mechanism for translating the categories of the natural world, such as animal species, into

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the categories of the social world (groups, and the relation of individuals to groups) (LéviStrauss, 1963a: p. 84). Prohibitions on eating have to do not with the intrinsic properties of food but with endowing kinds of food with a significance that makes them ‘good to think with’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1972: p. 95). Most importantly for Lévi-Strauss, kinship systems, grounded in the incest taboo and the institution of the maternal uncle, mark a discontinuity rather than a continuity with biology: The biological family is ubiquitous in human society. But what confers upon kinship its socio-cultural character is not what it retains from nature, but, rather, the essential way in which it diverges from nature. A kinship system does not consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals. It exists only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a real situation. (Lévi-Strauss, 1963b: p. 50)

In a different sense, the discipline of cultural geography is grounded in, and has recently rediscovered, an understanding of space as a matter of apperception and meaning rather than a merely physical constraint. The renovation of geography as a discipline in publications such as Social Relations and Spatial Structures (Gregory and Urry, 1985) was, however, predicated not so much on the separation of the cultural from the physical dimensions of space as on the undoing of this simple opposition. Space is at once flooded with meanings, and fully material; at once extension and semiotic intensity. In a similar way, contemporary understandings of the human have moved beyond the dichotomies of natural and social, or human and non-human, to posit the integrally hybrid nature of human being. The second logic embedded in the concept of culture is in a sense the converse of the first, since it emphasizes the differences between a plurality of human cultures. As Fredrick Jameson argues, the concept of culture refers to a social group seen as other, or to my own group’s ways and customs as seen by another group: it is always ‘an idea of the Other (even when I reassume it for myself)’

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(Jameson, 1993: p. 34). Defined through an indefinite series of binaries, culture in this version is understood from within as a normative universe (my values as opposed to yours) and from without as an array of incompatible universes, each equal in value to the others. Yet this irreducible difference between cultures is at the same time a challenge to understanding: to be fully human is to seek to find one’s way into the culture of the Other, to cross between her cultural universe and mine and perhaps to incorporate that moment of otherness into my own, expanded culture. Something like this strategy of recognition and incorporation of otherness underlies the politics of multiculturalism, just as the refusal or the exoticization of otherness tend to inform racist and xenophobic forms of political understanding. Seyla Benhabib (2002: p. 7) writes that ‘cultures are formed through binaries because human beings live in an evaluative universe … To possess the culture means to be an insider. Not to be acculturated in the appropriate way is to be an outsider. Hence the boundaries of cultures are always securely guarded, their narratives purified, their rituals carefully monitored’. Yet this guarding – the politics of ‘identity’, of sameness with others – involves a kind of reification of the dynamic and constantly overlapping formations of culture in which the complexity of ‘identities’ is worked out (Appiah, 2005). Both progressive and conservative versions of this second logic of culture, in Benhabib’s argument, share a number of faulty epistemic assumptions: (1) that cultures are clearly delineable wholes; (2) that cultures are congruent with population groups and that a noncontroversial description of the culture of a human group is possible; and (3) that even if cultures and groups do not stand in one-to-one correspondence, even if there is more than one culture within a human group and more than one group that may possess the same cultural traits, this poses no important problems for politics or policy. (Benhabib, 2002: p. 4)

These are, in a sense, the reasons why the concept of culture has become at once so politicized (personal and group identity are worked out in terms of the rights and

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obligations that flow from cultural belonging) and so problematic both as a disciplinary instrument and as the actuality of attempts to keep communities pure and uncontaminated by otherness. The weight of contemporary theory has gone to a critique of the cultural essentialisms entailed by these assumptions. This is true of Bruno Latour’s critique of the model of purification and isolation of the social from the natural, the human from the technical in what he calls the ‘modern settlement’ (Latour, 1993). It is true, too, of constructivist accounts of gender and race as performative rather than always-alreadygiven modes of being (Appiah and Gutmann, 1996; Butler, 1993), as it is of Stuart Hall’s argument that popular culture, far from being either the culture of ‘the people’or an imposed and alien product, is rather the terrain on which social antagonisms are enacted (Hall, 1981). The understanding of the imperial experience, not as a simple domination of one group by another but rather as a matter of ambiguity, of a ‘hybrid’, emulative relation to the Other (Bhabha, 1994), or as an ‘entanglement’ of cultures which have always been, and continue to be, transformed by exchange, adaptation, and displacement (Thomas, 1991); and an emphasis on the flow of peoples around the globe, by way of migration, slavery, and refuge from war (Appadurai, 1996): these also generate a very different and more complex model of cultural belonging. The third major logic carried by the concept of culture has to do with the conceptual differentiation between spheres of human activity: the economic, the political, law, science, technology, morality, religion, the aesthetic, and so on. Culture is here conceived as a moment in an internally differentiated model of the social order, and it may play a crucial role in defining the causal and/or associative relations between the moments of this model. In particular, the concept of culture has frequently been used to complicate monocausal accounts of social dynamics by calling attention to the frameworks of meaning and value within which social action is embedded.

A classic example of this function of the concept of culture involves its relation to the category of the economy. Both terms are relatively recent formations in their present sense, dating from around the end of the eighteenth century (although there are arguments that the modern sense of ‘the economy’ as an object rather than a process is as recent as the midtwentieth century; cf. Mitchell in this volume). Although productive activity (the supplying of the necessities of human life) is a human universal, the particular forms it takes (and the way ‘necessities’ are defined) have varied considerably. Likewise, the concept of culture not only varies in its reference and valency in different historical periods, it is also closely bound up with terms such as ‘the economy’ and ‘society’ against and in relation to which it tends to be defined. In the history of thought that takes ‘the economy’ as an object of knowledge and manipulation, one can identify either a simplified model which takes account only of measurably productive processes and relations, or a more complex model which sees the processes of production, exchange, circulation and consumption of material and immaterial goods as taking place within and being strongly shaped and constrained by dense networks of social relations and their accompanying systems of norms and values. The formation that we know as ‘the economy’ is grounded in two key institutions, the market and contract. Economists tend to assume that these institutions are universal and in some sense ‘natural’: forms that correspond immediately to a given human propensity to trade. Yet both are complex and delicate mechanisms which have been structured and fostered by millennia of development and by a deep infrastructure of legal regulation, and both in turn have helped shape human subjectivity. Far from merely providing an arena for the interplay of equal interests, markets are constructed within a specific legal framework to create conditions of trust and fairness through a watchful protection of procedural equity (at least for the purposes of the game of market transactions).

INTRODUCTION: VOCABULARIES OF CULTURE

The central vehicle of market transactions, the contract, is similarly shaped by complex and culturally specific categories. The modern, bilateral executory contract establishes a relation between two legal persons (who may or may not be human individuals) for the purpose of mediating and securing an exchange of goods or services. Grounded in notions of simultaneous and enduring acts of will based in the autonomy and rationality of the contracting subjects, of mutually defined and freely chosen rights, and of a privately constructed and socially arbitrated consensus, the category of freedom of contract appeals directly to the liberal vision of a social order formed from the concurrence of multiple individual acts of freedom exercised in the commercial sphere but discouraged in the ‘private’ world of family and friendship. Like the market, it is a ‘cultural’ form in the sense that it relies upon a very particular model of the human subject (one that would be alien to many traditional societies), of the relation between public and private spheres, of the relation between persons and things, and of the distinction between commodity and gift relationships. It is rooted in values that have become profoundly naturalized and thus entirely normative. As Ray and Sayer put it: ‘Neoclassical economists tend to assume that “culture” need only be invoked where motivations diverge from selfinterest, but … the pursuit of self-interest and associated moral sentiments and social norms are themselves a cultural development associated with the rise of modernity and capitalism’ (Ray and Sayer, 1999: p. 7). The Weberian tradition in social theory has been the major source of the argument that economic activity is always configured by particular modes of embeddedness in a valueladen lifeworld. Weber’s central example was of course the formation of a capitalist economy within a cultural matrix characteristic of northern Europe in the Reformation period, deeply informed by Protestant values affecting the sense of personal autonomy and a commitment to the virtue of work. This argument – taken up in Karl Polanyi’s thesis that ‘abstract instrumental exchanges

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are culturally embedded in normative and institutional frameworks’ (Ray and Sayer, 1999: p. 16), in E.P. Thompson’s concept of the ‘moral economy’ (Thompson, 1991), and in Mark Granovetter’s influential paper on the cultural shaping of the economy (Granovetter, 1985) – comes into tension, however, with another, historically more differentiated argument that, in the course of modernization, economic behaviour becomes progressively disembedded from social and kinship obligations and more generally from ‘cultural’ influence. In advanced capitalism, ‘the part of the economy we call the formal or money economy differentiates out from the lifeworld to become a major social system standing to a certain extent opposed to it and dominating it’ (Ray and Sayer, 1999: p. 7). In Georg Lukács’s terms, it is with the capitalist autonomization of ‘the economy’ that social and cultural relations become epiphenomena of the market (Lukács, 1971: p. 230). The model is that of the disruption of stable cultural worlds by the ‘creative destruction’ of capital. Yet, while this differentiation of spheres and increased prominence of economic activity are in one sense clear historical effects of capitalist modernity, it is nevertheless the case that these effects are the outcome of a tension between cultures: a culture of individual self-interest and instrumental action, on the one hand, and of group solidarity and symbolic action on the other. ‘The economy’ doesn’t exist separately from the embedding conditions, the dense network of circumstances, within and through which social processes of change are realized, and social ‘determinations’ have effect only through and within this dense cultural medium. Implicit in the concept as it has developed over the course of the twentieth century is a sense that culture is the most strongly defining factor in human socialization, and that it is what makes us a member of this group, not another. Culture in this way of thinking is a strong and internalized constraint on action: a coherent system with an inner necessity, not a merely contingent configuration of social forces and structures. This is the paradigmatic

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‘anthropological’ conception of culture as it was developed from its Boasian origins into a ‘configurational’ model: ‘Instead of just culture as such one had cultures – bounded, coherent, cohesive, and self-standing: social organisms, semiotical crystals, microworlds. Culture was what peoples had and held in common, Greeks or Navajos, Maoris or Puerto Ricans, each its own’ (Geertz, 2000: pp. 248–249). And culture, in accord with Franz Boas’s construction of the concept in terms of its irreducibility to race, supplants biology as what makes us properly human (Boas, 1966). A contemporary reworking of this model is Jeffrey Alexander’s ‘strong program’ in cultural sociology, which he distinguishes from the sociology of culture and which foregrounds the determinant force of culture as an ‘internal environment … toward which the actors can never be fully instrumental or reflexive’. Culture is an independent variable ‘that possesses a relative autonomy in shaping actions and institutions, providing inputs every bit as vital as more material or instrumental forces’ (Alexander, 2003: p. 12); and this emphasis on the relative autonomy of culture entails a ‘bracketingout of wider, nonsymbolic social relations’ (Alexander, 2003: p. 14). The problem with strong programmes, however, is precisely that they focus on independent rather than interdependent variables: that, in this case, the concept of culture takes on a causal force rather than designating a set of relations between elements of habit, action, schemata, institutional forms, and indeed reflexivity; and that culture continues to be understood as a closed cognitive pattern. This has the effect of turning culture into a real bounded entity rather than a taxonomic term, a shorthand for sets of practices and understandings which don’t aggregate into a real unity. It becomes (Kuper, 1999: p. 11) a source of explanation rather than an object of description; and it has the effect both of consolidating those ‘identities’ it claims merely to describe, and of obviating the full complexity of relations that constitute the social: class, politics, institutions, the relation of humans to the

world of things, and the continuity of ‘nature’ with ‘culture’. It is this strong causal logic Paul DiMaggio tries to unpick when he argues that if culture is understood as ‘a latent variable – a tight network of a few abstract central themes and their more concrete entailments, all instantiated to various degrees in a range of symbols, rituals, and practices’ – then ‘we would expect to find that group members share a limited number of consistent elements – beliefs, attitudes, typifications, strategies – and that the inclusion of any one element in the collective culture implies the exclusion of inconsistent elements’ (DiMaggio, 1997: p. 267). The evidence, however – particularly from recent work in cognitive science – seems to suggest that culture lacks this kind of consistency and should be understood rather as ‘a grab-bag of odds and ends: a pastiche of mediated representations, a repertoire of techniques, or a toolkit of strategies’, and thus that ‘we might expect less clustering of cultural elements within social groups, less strong linkages among the elements, and weaker pressures for the exclusion of inconsistent elements’ (DiMaggio, 1997: p. 267). In particular, DiMaggio points to research findings that the cluster of elements we call culture ‘is stored in memory as an indiscriminately assembled and relatively unorganized collection of odds and ends’ (DiMaggio, 1997: p. 267), which are then put to selective use by social actors. In so far as there is an order of beliefs, practices and techniques that extend across social groups, this has to do with the schematic but not particularly coherent or consistent organization of knowledge and practice. DiMaggio’s critique seems cogent to us. Yet however loose or incoherent cultural schemata might be, there is nevertheless a logic to their deployment by social actors. The concept of culture – like that of the psychological schema – designates not just ways of doing things and patterns of belief and value, but habits and patterns which are persistent through time. Culture is an institution, the locking-in of forms of thought, belief and action to patterns of habituated

INTRODUCTION: VOCABULARIES OF CULTURE

repetition. Whether we think of this durability of culture as the exercise of a kind of constraint upon action or as the existence of a rich set of resources for action and thought, it is central to any account of it that it should be seen as having an institutionally grounded duration. If we are to think of the concept of culture in terms of its instituted force, it becomes important to recognize that cultural forms have historically specific modes of existence, and that they are themselves embedded in economic and social apparatuses which give them their particular shape and relationality. The knowledges and values that make up a cultural system range from the tacit and informal to the explicit and formal (for example, from bodily hexis to organized systems of knowledge such as law, science and religion), each of which is grounded in an infrastructure of learning and practice. Despite its common deployment in distinguishing symbolic action from economic behaviour and social structures, the realm of the cultural can never be separated from the social and economic relations that make up these infrastructures. Watching a television programme, for example, is not directly a ‘productive’ activity, but it does position viewers within an audience that is sold to advertisers, such that they quite involuntarily engage in an economic transaction. Similarly, traditional distinctions between ‘hard’ economic activity and ‘soft’ cultural (and therefore non-economic) activity have been undermined by the increasing importance of aesthetic design to company branding and, more generally, of the licensing of intellectual property as a key mode of organizing production (Rifkin, 2000). On the one hand, then, culture is always given its particular shape and its practical effectiveness by its grounding in formal or informal institutions; on the other, culture is ‘material’in the sense that it cannot be thought as disembodied ideation. Ann Swidler makes this argument in relation to what she calls the ‘practice turn’ in the social sciences (Schatzki et al., 2001): culture, she writes, is not the process or the results of symbolization but sets of rules or schemata embedded in habitual structures of practice, and these rules ‘are

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reproduced not by people directly knowing those rules but by people acting strategically in a world that presumes these rules’ (Swidler, 2001: p. 82): rules which are not necessarily either available to consciousness or deeply internalized. Culture on this view is enacted rather than thought, a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘believing’. The methodological advantage of thinking of culture in this way is that it gets rid of the problematic question of the relation of culture to action: ‘Culture cannot be treated as some abstract stuff in people’s heads which might or might not cause their action. Rather cultural practices are action, action organized according to some more or less visible logic which the analyst need only describe’ (Swidler, 2001: p. 76). Richard Biernacki gives a number of examples of how this might work: the experimental use of scientific equipment in consequential but unarticulated ways; accounting practices in early capitalism that have less to do with profitmaking than with the spatial representation of information; the small practices of discipline described by Michel Foucault, which work ‘silently’ and without conscious control to undermine Enlightenment discourses of free and purposive will; the growth of national consciousness as an effect less of explicitly nationalist ideologies than of what Benedict Anderson describes as the experience of virtual community made possible by print technology (Biernacki, 1999: p. 76). The force of these examples is to demonstrate that culture has to do with the schemata employed in practice at least as much as it has to do with ‘representations of or for practice’(Biernacki, 1999: p. 75). Rather than being a repertoire of stored materials, culture is always ‘culture in use’ (Biernacki, 1999: p. 78). This approach accords with our own unwillingness to separate cultural systems from their material and institutional conditions of existence.

CONCLUSION … Or perhaps we should say ‘by way of not concluding’, for no point would be served

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by seeking to distil a compact definition of culture from the foregoing discussion. It is, indeed, the very lack of compactness that is central to the varied interpretations and analytical mobilizations of the concept that have defined its use in and across the humanities and social sciences. Our purpose, then, has been to map the changing boundaries within which discourses about culture have operated, to identify the different kinds of work it has done within them, paying particular attention to what we see as significant mutations of use and interpretation associated with the different inflections of the cultural turn that have informed the more distinctive forms of cultural analysis developed over the last 50 years. We have also sought to identify the kinds of issues that are implicated in the different ‘logics of culture’ that are embedded in the accumulated histories of the concept’s use and application. Our introductions to the three parts of the book outline how they are informed by these perspectives and indicate the positions that our contributors take in relation to the debates we have introduced as well as in relation to the more fully argued and more richly exemplified debates that are their own proper concern.

REFERENCES Alexander, J.C. (2003) The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Appiah, K.A. and Gutmann, A. (1996) Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Appiah, K.A. (2005) The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Benhabib, S. (2002) The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Biernacki, R. (1999) ‘Method and metaphor after the new cultural history’. In Bonnell and Hunt (1999), 62–92.

Boas, F. (1966) Race, Language and Culture. New York: Free Press. Bonnell, V.E. and Hunt, L. (eds) (1999) Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, P. (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bunzl, M. (1996) ‘Franz Boas and the Humboldtian tradition: from Volksgeist and Nationalcharakter to an anthropological concept of culture’, in G.W. Stocking Jr. (ed.) Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge. Caygill, H. (1989) Art of Judgement. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Chytry, J. (1989) The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.E. (eds) (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dias, N. (2004) La mesure des sens: Les anthropologues et le corps humin au XIXe siècle. Paris: Aubier. DiMaggio, P. (1997) ‘Culture and cognition’, Annual Review of Sociology 23: 263–287. Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, C. (2000) Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Granovetter, M. (1985) ‘Economic action and social structure: the problem of embeddedness’, American Journal of Sociology 91(3): 481–510. Gregory, D. and Urry, J. (eds) (1985) Social Relations and Spatial Structures. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Griffiths, A. (2002) Wondrous Differences: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Guyer, P. (2005) Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics. Cambridge University Press. Hall, S. (1981) ‘Notes on deconstructing “the popular”’. In Samuel (1981), 227–240. Hinsley, C.M. Jr. (1981) Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

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Hunter, I. (1988) Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education. London: Macmillan Press. Jameson, F. (1993) ‘On “cultural studies”’, Social Text 34: 17–52. Kant, I. (1987) [1790] Critique of Judgement, Tr. Pluhar, W.S. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Koselleck, R. (2002) The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kuper, A. (1999) Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, Tr. Porter, C. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1972) The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963a) Totemism, Tr. Needham, R. Boston: Beacon Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963b) Structural Anthropology, Tr. Jacobson, C. and Schoepf, B. New York: Basic Books. Luhmann, N. (2000) Art as a Social System, Tr. Knodt, E.M. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lukács, G. (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Tr. Livingstone, R. London: Merlin Press. Mennand, L. (2002) The Metaphysical Club. London: Flamingo. Minihan, J. (1977) The Nationalisation of Culture: The Development of State Subsidies to the Arts in Great Britain. London: Hamish Hamilton. Mulhern, F. (2000) Culture/Metaculture. London and New York: Routledge. Muthu, S. (2003) Enlightenment against Empire. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Penny, H.G. (2002) Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Ray, L, and Sayer, A. (eds) (1999) Culture and Economy After the Cultural Turn. London: Sage.

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Rifkin, J. (2000) The Age of Access: How the Shift from Ownership to Access is Transforming Modern Life. London: Penguin. Samuel, R. (ed.) (1981) People’s History and Socialist Theory. London: Routledge. Schatzki, T.R., Knorr Cetina, K. and von Savigny, R. (2001) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge. Schiebinger, L. (1993) Nature’s Body: Sexual Politics and the Making of Modern Science. London: Pandora. Sills, D.L. (ed.) (1968) International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 3. New York: Macmillan Co and the Free Press. Smelser, N.J. and Baltes, P.N. (eds) (2001) International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, vol. 5. Kidlington: Elsevier. Stocking, G.W. Jr. (1968) Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. New York: Free Press. Swidler, A. (2001) ‘What anchors cultural practices?’, in Schatzki, Knorr Cetina and von Savigny (2001), pp. 74–92. Thomas, N. (1991) Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, E.P. (1991) Customs in Common. London: Merlin Press. Tylor, E.B. (1874) Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom. Boston: Estes and Lauriat. White, H. (1973) Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Williams, R. (1958) Culture and Society 1780–1950. London: Chatto and Windus. Yudice, G. (2003) The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham: Duke University Press. Zimmerman, A. (2002) Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

PART I

Frameworks of Analysis

INTRODUCTION It is clear from our discussion in the general introduction that it is impossible to tie the term ‘culture’ to a single concept or to a simple history of usage. It is better understood as referencing a network of loosely related concepts that has been shaped by the relations between the different histories and fields of usage with which the term has come to be entangled. A significant factor here has been the different meanings deriving from the ways in which the concept has been used and interpreted in the social science disciplines on the one hand and in the humanities on the other. These different disciplinary articulations of the concept are the focus of the contributions composing this first part of the book, which also assesses how the ‘cultural turn’ has affected developments within, across and between these different disciplinary ensembles. The first group of chapters explores the role that the concept of culture has played in the social sciences, beginning with Eric Gable and Richard Handler’s discussion of its role in the history of anthropological thought. Kay Anderson then looks at the role that questions of cultural analysis have played in constructing the human/nature divide that has played a key role in the development of, as it is sometimes still known, human geography. Valerie Walkerdine and

Tony Bennett then examine the forms of cultural analysis that have been associated with the development of psychological and sociological thought. Peter Burke’s discussion of cultural history provides a bridge into the next group of chapters focused mainly on text-based disciplines. James English’s account of the role that the analysis of form has played in the development of literary studies is followed here by Tia DeNora’s consideration of music as both text and performance. Mieke Bal then examines the relations between art history and the more recent development of visual culture studies. The next two chapters – Tom Gunning’s discussion of film studies and Toby Miller’s account of broadcasting – are concerned with the forms of cultural analysis that have been developed in relation to the two main media systems of the twentieth century. The final set of chapters explores the role played by a number of interdisciplinary perspectives in developing new and distinctive forms of cultural analysis. We include here Ien Ang’s account of the development of cultural studies, initially in Britain and subsequently as a wider international formation, and Griselda Pollock’s discussion of the varied traditions of cultural analysis that have been associated with the development of feminist theory and politics. Daniel Miller then reviews recent developments in the field of material culture studies, arguing the need for a dialectical

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perspective capable of taking account of the relations between subjects and objects, while Andrew Pickering, writing from a contrasting perspective, outlines the role that is accorded the relations between persons and things in the perspectives of posthumanist science studies and technoscience. Our brief to all our contributors was that they should write an engaged account of their topic, reviewing and assessing its most salient characteristics from the vantage point of their own position within the contemporary debates associated with the fields of cultural analysis in question rather than aspiring to a position of Olympian detachment. In responding to this brief, Eric Gable and Richard Handler seek to untangle the history of the relations between anthropology and the ‘culture concept’ that is most commonly associated with that discipline: that is, culture as the organized system of beliefs, customs, and practices comprising the way of life of a particular, territorially defined population. They see this as a task of untangling precisely because the histories of this concept and those of anthropology have sometimes followed separate paths, and sometimes converged, in ways that disqualify their often implicit equation with one another. Although focusing their attention for the greater part on the twentieth-century history of the discipline, they first show how Franz Boas’s work broke with the hierarchical and evolutionary assumptions informing Edward Tylor’s initial formulation of the ‘culture concept’to propose a more pluralist understanding of cultures as bounded wholes that had a value and validity that needed to be understood on their own terms rather than – as had been the case throughout anthropology’s earlier association with the history of colonialism – comparing non-Western cultures unfavourably to Western ones. Gable and Handler then turn their attention to the subsequent history of the relations between anthropology and fieldwork, paying special attention to the development, from Bronislaw Malinowski to Margaret Mead, of the ‘participant observation’ approach in which the anthropologist seeks to learn another culture by living it.

After reviewing how Anglo-American anthropology was influenced by French structural anthropology, and by the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss in particular, Gable and Handler examine the revival of a Boasian orientation in anthropology as evidenced by the work of Marshall Sahlins, Clifford Geertz and David Schneider. They conclude by assessing the varied forms of critical political selfreflexiveness that now inform contemporary anthropological approaches to culture. Kay Anderson’s concerns overlap with those of Gable and Handler at many points. She starts by reminding us that geography was included among the cultural sciences long before the emergence, since the 1980s, of ‘cultural geography’ in response to the perspectives of the ‘cultural turn’. However, she is equally clear that these perspectives have significantly revised what had earlier been the distinctive signature of geography’s contributions to cultural analysis: that is, the influence of space and place on the distribution and organization of human meaning systems and practices. The influence of structuralist and post-structuralist linguistics decisively shifted approaches to these questions by effecting what Anderson characterizes as a ‘move from a positivist understanding of space as a “surface” on which people, events and so on are distributed and arranged, to a notion of space as relational and co-constitutive of social process’ (Chapter 2). Anderson then asks what light this perspective throws on the history of earlier geographical understandings of the relations between space, place and human cultures. Adopting a posthumanist perspective derived from contemporary feminist thought and the related challenge to essentialist conceptions of the nature/human divide emerging from the work of Bruno Latour, she reviews the ways in which earlier Enlightenment and evolutionary conceptions of the geographical relations between space, place and culture equated the essence of humanness with distance from nature. In assessing the consequences of such conceptions for indigenous peoples who, throughout the history of colonialism, were seen as closer to nature and therefore less human than their

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colonizers, Anderson also shows how colonial encounters with indigenous peoples – and with Australian aborigines in particular – often unsettled the logic of such humanist ontologies. Valerie Walkerdine and Lisa Blackman also remind us that, at first, psychology too was closely related to the cultural sciences. However, the emerging dominance of AngloAmerican psychology in the early twentieth century, its commitment to an experimentally derived cognitive universalism, and the parallel parting of the ways between psychology and psychoanalysis saw an end to this until the 1960s, when the disciplinary hegemony of such conceptions was challenged from a variety of quarters. In reviewing these challenges and placing them in their appropriate political and theoretical contexts, Walkerdine and Blackman’s main concern is to trace the various attempts to develop discursive, narrative, social and cultural psychologies, and to consider the influence of all of these on the development of critical psychology. Focusing initially on cultural and narrative psychology, they show how perspectives derived from Soviet linguistics were translated into programmes of research by Michael Cole, Sylvia Scribner and others that incorporated a cultural perspective into American psychology. They then turn their attention to the parallel development of social psychology in Britain. This sets the scene for an analysis of the more general international currency of the linguistic and discursive turns in psychology and, in the context of these, the influence of the Althusserian and Lacanian approaches to subjectivity in reformulating the concerns of Freudian psychoanalysis. In considering the influence of the Foucauldian school of discourse psychology and the psycho-social approach to the understanding of subjectivity, Walkerdine and Blackman conclude by outlining those directions in current research which they believe offer a route beyond the social/psychic dualisms that have reflected a continuing failure to satisfactorily integrate the social and the psychological mechanisms of subject formation.

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Tony Bennett considers the relations between sociology and culture from three perspectives. The first of these focuses on sociological analyses of those practices and institutions which comprise culture as a distinctive level, field or subsystem of society: literary, musical and artistic institutions and texts, and the media and entertainment complexes comprising the culture industries. In reviewing these traditions of work, Bennett outlines the different ways in which sociologists have sought to explain social and historical variations in literary and artistic forms and practices, focusing particularly on sociological accounts of such genres as tragedy and the novel. He then considers the consequences of the ways in which literary and artistic forms are classified and organized into cultural hierarchies, and moves on to review different sociological accounts of the development of distinctive literary and artistic fields or systems, and of the nature and value of aesthetic experience. Bennett’s second main concern is with the role that the analysis of culture, understood as particular sets of beliefs and values, has played in the more general theoretical and political concerns of sociology. He illustrates this by considering the role of such conceptions in the work of Émile Durkheim through to contemporary sociological constructions of ‘social problems’ in the literature focused on the roles of social or civic capital in securing social inclusion or social solidarity. Finally, Bennett reviews a range of different accounts of the role of culture in constructing the social that derive from different interpretations of the ‘cultural turn’. His discussion here encompasses Stuart Hall’s account of ‘new ethnicities’, Foucauldian accounts of discourses and their role – in the context of governmentality theory – in ordering the social, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, and Bruno Latour’s approach to the social. In his account of cultural history, Peter Burke argues that while the concept – in the Germanic notion of Kulturgeschichte – is over 200 years old, it is only in the context of the cultural turn that cultural history has assumed a recognizable intellectual profile

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and influence alongside economic, social and political history. And it is only since the 1990s that it has achieved significant institutional form as reflected in the titles of journals, academic positions and programmes. It is, though, Burke suggests, a term that sometimes disguises as much as it reveals if account is not also taken of the significantly different meanings and uses of the concept of culture that it encompasses. He distinguishes three main understandings of culture, each of which has quite different implications for the project of a cultural history. According to the first, culture is interpreted as a synonym for the arts, with the tasks of cultural history accordingly being defined as being concerned with the development and functioning of specific artistic practices and institutions and, sometimes, the respects in which the relationships between these add up to a more encompassing account of the history of high culture. The second inverts the structure of attention associated with this conception to focus on popular cultural practices, and in particular the ways in which these have been shaped in opposition to the field of high culture. The third tradition adopts a more anthropological perspective to focus on the role of cultural practices in everyday life, no matter whether ‘high’ or ‘low’. In examining these different traditions, Burke considers the relationships between cultural history and parallel tendencies in neighbouring disciplines – sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and cultural geography, for example – and reviews some of the key conceptual and methodological problems that the project of a cultural history needs to address. The focus of James English’s account of literary studies is ‘to trace the longstanding connection between literary form and institutional form, between scholars’ concern with the formal particulars of “literature itself” and their collective, ongoing struggle for recognition and security in the modern university’ (Chapter 6). No matter what phase of its history is considered, he argues, the contention that the defining characteristic of literary studies consists in its capacity to analyse the formal organization and

operations of literary texts has been central to its claims to distinctive forms of academic legitimacy and authority. Exactly how such claims have been pitched, however, and the consequences that have followed from this, have varied significantly depending on how the relationships between literary studies and other disciplines have been organized in different historical moments, national settings and institutional contexts. It is on the shifting contours of what has been at stake in literary studies’ commitments to the analysis of form that English focuses his attention. This ranges across the influence of the programmes of formal analysis proposed by the Russian Formalists, Practical Criticism and the New Criticism and the reaction against these by the moral and communitarian forms of criticism associated with the ArnoldLeavis-Williams tradition – which nonetheless remained deeply affected by a formalist impulse – through to moments of Theory in American literary criticism. It is also, English suggests, the continuing influence of formalist principles of textual analysis on the methods of cultural studies that explain why cultural studies, while imaginarily opposing itself to literary studies, has in fact served as the vehicle through which the reach of formalist techniques of analysis has been expanded beyond the narrow confines of the literary canon to encompass all cultural practices. A concern with aesthetic form and its analysis has been equally strong in the history of Western musicology, albeit that its influence has been challenged by the development of new forms of socio-musical analysis that have significantly expanded the repertoire of methods that the study of musical practices can now draw on. To trace the paths and the logics of these transformations is the task that Tia DeNora sets herself in her account of the relations between cultural and musical analysis. Her starting point is with the high/low music distinctions of the modern Western musical system. Taking a leaf out of Pierre Bourdieu’s accounts of the autonomization of art and literature in the course of the nineteenth century, DeNora examines the related processes through which a composer-centred musical

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canon was differentiated from other musical forms. A failure to take adequate account of the relativity of this musical system is, for DeNora, one of the main shortcomings of TheodorAdorno’s otherwise exemplary – and, for twentieth-century musicology, absolutely indispensable – contributions to musical theory. But it is, DeNora notes, echoing some of the points made by James English in his discussion of literary studies, a contribution focused largely on the analysis of musical forms. In approaching these as capable of generating distinctive cognitive effects with specific political consequences that might be read off from their formal properties alone, DeNora argues, Adorno’s work did not adequately question some of the founding assumptions of the composer-centrism of the modern Western musical system. Her concerns in the rest of the chapter consequently focus on a broadened set of approaches to the analysis of the sociocultural aspects of musical practices. She looks first at the new cultural musicology, exploring both the strengths and some of the weaknesses associated with its understanding of texts as social representations. Her final concern is with music as a technology of social action and the role it plays in providing a resource for the everyday performance and embodied enactment of social relations. Mieke Bal takes Rembrandt’s Judith Beheading Holophernes as the point of entry into her discussion of the topic of visual analysis (or, more fully, of visual culture studies). By contrasting an art-historical reading of this painting, a reading concerned with rediscovering an original and canonical meaning, and a more visual meaning, one that responds to the painting without trying to convert it into a series of art-historical clues, Bal maps out the territory of visual analysis as a distinctive set of concerns that has developed along three paths: an internal critique of art history, the ‘visual turn’ evident in the development of visual sociology and visual anthropology, and the democratic extension of the visual as a field of study outside the narrow confines of the arts to include everyday practices and performances. She is adamant, however, that the object of visual culture

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studies is not to be confused with visual culture understood, in its most obvious sense, as the field of visual images and objects. While including these, Bal argues the case for a more extended field of study that will encompass the ways in which different scopic and visual regimes organize particular forms of visibility and draw objects, images and persons into them. The inclusion of distinctive forms of visuality – different ways of performing the act of seeing – and their organization in the context of different historical configurations of the relations between the senses is an equally significant component of an adequately theorized conception of the remit of visual culture studies. Having defined the field of study in these ways, Bal proposes a set of principles for analysing the role of the visual in social life. Tom Gunning’s account of film studies is, in some respects, at odds with Bal’s advocacy of the virtues of a visual culture studies paradigm. While in no way wanting to separate film from other visual media or to deny the significance of the ways in which, historically and in the present, film is significantly shaped by its ecological struggles with other media, Gunning argues that the absorption of film studies into the more general concerns of media or visual culture studies comes at too high a price: that of neglecting the specificity of film. This is not, though, a case of special pleading for film and film studies as somehow unique in this regard. To the contrary, Gunning argues, it is necessary, when studying visual media, to recognize the specificity of each medium – the specificity of its aesthetic, technical and industrial forms, the specific organization of its relations to other media, and the specific histories of its uses and reception. Nor is his argument one in favour of a purely formal concern with film. While acknowledging the importance of Classical Film Theory, and the work of Bordwell and Thompson in particular, for the enormous contribution of its approach to film as language, Gunning argues the need for a broader approach, one which, focused on the analysis of the heterogeneous array of activities which comprise what he calls ‘film

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practices’, stresses not the ‘division between texts and context, between the aesthetic and the social, the ideological and the cultural – but rather a continuous process of exchange and interaction which explains the power of film (or cinema) as a cultural force’ (Chapter 9). For Toby Miller, too, the study of broadcasting necessarily encompasses not just the practices of broadcasting institutions, their distinctive textual regimes, their technical infrastructures and industrial organization, but their uses, the modes of their regulation, and the more general social discourses in which their roles are debated and contested. Dividing the study of broadcasting media into three broad traditions of work focused on the political economy of their ownership, organization and control, their textual regimes, and their influence on or uses by their audiences, Miller discusses how these have been differently applied in relation to radio and television. Common to both, however, has been a concern with the (usually deleterious) effects that broadcast media, in one moral panic after another, are supposed to have had on their audiences. Miller therefore reviews in some detail the different ways in which media effects have been theorized and operationalized in programmes of research. Focusing initially on the ‘domestic effects model’ in its concern with the media as forces that can shape the activities and identities of citizen-consumers, he then turns his attention to the ‘global effects model’ centred on the role of the media in either subverting or maintaining distinctive national cultures in the context of global media flows. Miller is also concerned with the forms of cultural analysis that are conducted within and by broadcasting institutions themselves, usually as aspects of their marketing strategies, and throws valuable light on the role that this has played, particularly in the USA, in the development of new forms of faithbased audience segmentation. In concluding, Miller draws on the varied repertoire of the different forms of cultural analysis reviewed earlier in the chapter for the light they collectively throw on TV weather

programming as a case-study that illustrates broadcasting’s continuing centrality in spite of widespread predictions of its impending demise. In the first of the contributions focused on interdisciplinary traditions of cultural analysis, Ien Ang argues that cultural studies has played a significant catalytic role in placing questions concerning the relations between culture, politics and the social on the agendas of a wide range of humanities and social science disciplines. This has, however, been accompanied by significant disputes and tensions within cultural studies as to what exactly it is or should aspire to be. Rather than taking sides between such contending views Ang seeks to distil from them what they share and, taking her bearings from this, to offer an assessment of where cultural studies currently stands and what it still has to offer in a context in which many of its original arguments have become more widely shared. She bases this assessment on a thumbnail sketch of the historical development of cultural studies. While stressing that cultural studies has always been a transnational critical discourse and, as such, not one that can be accorded an origin in any particular national context, she argues that the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham has nonetheless played the role of an exemplary harbinger for cultural studies – instantiating and developing its concerns in ways that have greatly facilitated its parallel development in other national contexts. This is followed by a discussion of the distinctive moral and political registers of the ‘culture and society’ tradition in British cultural studies, and of the later, more dispersed understanding of culture associated with the revisions within cultural studies prompted by its relationships to postmodernism. After reviewing the multiplication of the sites of political struggle that cultural studies has become engaged in since its original class-centrism, Ang draws on complexity theory to argue that an engagement with cultural complexity entails that the business of cultural studies will always be unfinished and, as a consequence, not susceptible to neat or tidy definitions.

FRAMEWORKS OF ANALYSIS

Griselda Pollock, in seeking to unravel the intricate set of connections between feminism as always both a social movement and an intellectual practice, is similarly alert to the open-ended and necessarily unfinished forms of cultural analysis that have been developed in association with feminist projects. She is alert, too, to the ways in which feminist cultural analysis has been affected by its relations to the changing dynamics of feminist struggles centred on questions of gender and sexuality and by the ways in which these have been connected to questions of class and race, particularly in the context of postcolonial struggles. Her point of entry into these questions is to consider how the question ‘What is woman?’has been answered in different traditions of feminist thought. Beginning with the terms in which Simone de Beauvoir first posed and answered this question, Pollock reviews the different terms in which the question has since been engaged with by Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler and Monique Wittig. This account teases out significant differences in the ways in which cultural factors have been invoked in feminist accounts of sexed and gendered differences and sets the scene for a more detailed account of the ways in which feminism has been shaped by, and has in turn helped to shape, a range of different traditions of post-war cultural analysis. The relationships between feminist cultural analysis and psychoanalytic theory and practice; the significance of critical work on the nature/culture divide by Donna Haraway and others for the agendas of ‘cyborg feminism’; feminism’s critical engagement with structuralism, particularly as represented by the work of Claude LéviStrauss; the influence of post-structuralist thought, particularly of Michel Foucault’s work on sexuality; and the influence of Foucault’s concern with technologies of the self on Theresa de Lauretis’s approach to technologies of gender: these are among the traditions of engaged feminist analysis that Pollock’s account encompasses. In concluding, she reviews the implications of these traditions of work for the process of working towards a social ordering of sexuality and

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difference that will displace the formations of phallocentric masculinity. While disciplines such as architecture and archaeology have been concerned with the study of material culture, understood, in Daniel Miller’s pithy summary, as ‘objects created by us’ (Chapter 13), material culture studies is a much more recent development. Its contemporary formation, Miller argues, can partly be explained in terms of the realignments between these disciplines and others, most notably anthropology, that share a concern with the role of humanly produced material phenomena in social life. However, he also suggests that the lateness of the arrival of material culture studies and, related to this, its failure to engage fully with the materiality of its objects of study have reflected a deep bias against materiality on the part of Western religious and secular cosmologies, in which the central purposes of human existence are defined in opposition to the merely material world. One of Miller’s purposes is therefore to review those aspects of the major world religions, particularly Christianity, that have impeded a theoretically frank and open engagement with materiality. In doing so he shows how this anti-material bias has significantly affected the intellectual trajectories of disciplines such as anthropology and archaeology by bending them away, for large parts of the twentieth century, from the strong concern with material things that had characterized their work in the nineteenth century. According some importance to the role played by the revived interest in Marxist thought in the 1960s and 1970s in placing questions of matter and materialism back onto the intellectual agendas of the humanities and social sciences, Miller then traces the contours of two different approaches to the role of things in social life. In one tradition – exemplified by the work of Bruno Latour’s approach to actor networks, Marilyn Strathern’s account of personhood, and Alfred Gell’s anthropology of art – attention focuses on identifying the independent agency that is exerted by things in particular contexts and situations. In the second – Miller calls it the dialectical tradition, which he traces

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to Hegel and, in the present, associates with Pierre Bourdieu’s work – the object world is an externalization of human creativity and, as such, is then appropriated in practices of human self-creation. In giving reasons for favouring this tradition, Miller proceeds to show how different aspects of the two traditions inform current work in material culture studies by reviewing current research on housing, clothing and new media. In the final chapter Andrew Pickering articulates a set of concerns that resonate very strongly with those discussed by Kay Anderson. Addressing the relevance of recent developments in science studies (defined by the work of scholars such as Karen Knorr Cetina) and technoscience (exemplified by figures such as Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour) to the development of new forms of cultural analysis, he is additionally concerned to situate these within a posthumanist ontology of the social. The implications of this last step are, as Pickering frankly acknowledges, radically unsettling for the assumptions underlying many of the ways in which the relations between culture and the social have hitherto been represented in Western social and cultural theory. The ‘key features of “culture” as it appears in posthumanist science studies’, he argues, are that it should be conceptualized ‘as visible; as visibly multiple and heterogeneous (material, conceptual, social); as having no outside (in the sense of base/superstructure models; there is nothing basic that explains culture); as a decentred field of symmetric encounter of multiple agencies (including, importantly, that of the material world itself); as having no

pregiven boundaries (the question of units of analysis); and as evolving open-endedly and emergently in time’ (Chapter 14). In fleshing out what such a programme for cultural analysis might look like, Pickering reviews the history of the relations between science studies and technoscience on the one hand and earlier work in the ‘sociology of knowledge’ tradition on the other. He then shows how the reformulations of the concerns of the latter by the former have been generalized to other areas of work through the new terms for the analysis of cultural practices, human-animal relations, the environment and politics that they propose. It is difficult, when surveying these commanding reviews of such a wide and varied body of work, not to be impressed by the sheer scope and diversity of the methods of analysis that are now available for probing the organization of cultural practices and their relations to social processes. It is also not difficult to see how far some of the new theoretical logics that are in play in these debates unsettle, and often quite radically so, the founding assumptions of the forms of cultural analysis developed during the latter half of the last century. It is too early to assess how enduring the influence of these new modes of reasoning will prove to be. From all the indications of the approaches reviewed here, however, questions concerning the definition of culture and the appropriate methods for its analysis seem likely to be just as centrally implicated in the key theoretical and methodological controversies of the twenty-first century as they have been over the past fifty years.

1 Anthropology and Culture Eric Gable and Richard Handler

Concerned, as were many of the early ‘Boasian’ anthropologists, to comment on a distinction between the objects of ‘historical science’ and ‘natural science’ that Franz Boas (1887) deemed crucial, Alfred Kroeber once wrote, ‘the tree of life is eternally branching, and never doing anything fundamental but branching, except for the dying-away of branches. The tree of human history, on the contrary, is constantly branching and at the same time having its branches grow together again’ (Kroeber, 1943: p. 86). Kroeber’s metaphor of entanglement can serve well enough for the history of anthropology, and of the culture concept in relationship to the discipline. But to untangle the strands of such intellectual and institutional histories, we should remember that the history of the culture concept is not the same thing as the history of anthropology. Indeed, in one of the seminal papers that led to the recognition of ‘history of anthropology’ as a subfield within anthropology, the historian George Stocking (1968) disputed Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn’s nomination of Edward Burnett Tylor as the apical ancestor of modern cultural anthropology. Kroeber and Kluckhohn claimed that Tylor, in 1871, had ‘established’ the ‘modern

technical or anthropological meaning’ of culture ‘in English’, thereby ‘deliberately establishing a science by defining its subject matter’ (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952: pp. 9, 150). Stocking countered that Tylor’s definition of culture was more Victorian and evolutionary than modern and relativistic. Following Stocking, we can conclude that whatever anthropology was in 1871, it was not dependent on the later, Boasian understanding of culture around which the twentieth-century discipline formed in North America. And we can ask what culture meant to anthropologists before Boas. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, anthropology came together as a discipline institutionalized in museums, universities, government bureaus, and amateur and professional societies. The story is one of branching and growing-together-again. In Stocking’s overview (2001), not so different from Boas’s telling a hundred years earlier (Boas, 1904), ‘anthropology represents an imperfect fusion of four modes of inquiry … including not only natural history, philology, and moral philosophy, but also antiquarianism’ (Stocking, 2001: p. 308). As different schools and national traditions emphasized one or another of those

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strands, anthropology in North America and Europe became a discipline more interdisciplinary than the other social sciences, one that spanned a range of approaches from the natural scientific and positivistic to the historical and hermeneutic. Its object was apparently humankind in all its biological, historical, linguistic and cultural diversity. In practice, it developed as the science of ‘the people without history’ (Wolf, 1982), of those people deemed unworthy by the storytellers in the other social sciences, for whom ‘civilization’ and ‘Western’ were more or less synonymous (Segal, 2001). Anthropology’s ‘peripheral’ peoples, its objects of study, had ‘dropped through the boundary spaces between the gradually separating disciplines’ of the human sciences during the nineteenth century (Stocking, 2001: p. 311). Thus the ‘work’of studying them fell to anthropologists only because, as Boas put it, ‘no one else cares for it’ (Boas, 1904: p. 35; see Bunzl, 2004: p. 437). Only in North America did anthropology develop institutionally as a single discipline that contained within itself the four ‘subfields’ of physical anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and social or cultural anthropology – subfields that to some extent replicated the four modes of inquiry from natural history to philology. In Great Britain and Europe, ‘social anthropology’ or ‘ethnology’ has tended to be institutionally distinct from archaeology, linguistics, and physical anthropology and imagined as a branch (albeit an institutionally independent one) of sociology (Kuper, 1973). The culture concept has been relevant to all of anthropology’s four fields, as these have developed in various national traditions over the twentieth century. But only in the North American four-field tradition did the concept come to define the discipline. Moreover, it has also distinguished North American anthropology from the British tradition of social anthropology, which more or less explicitly rejected culture as a central intellectual concept even while deploying the word as a synonym for ‘society’– a way of life practiced by a people in a place (as in John Beattie’s textbook, Other Cultures [1964]). Because

our concern in this essay will be culture in relation to North American and British (and, to a lesser extent, European) anthropological studies of society and culture, we will consider the social or cultural anthropology of both regional traditions, including the central role that culture has played in what one of the few major scholars who was able to appeal simultaneously to both traditions, Gregory Bateson, might have called their schismogenic relationship (Bateson, 1936). The study of culture and society within anthropology – which we can call sociocultural anthropology when we wish to elide the differences between the North American and British traditions – combines two intellectual traditions in the human sciences broadly conceived. One tradition (most strongly reflected in British and French social anthropology) emerged out of classical European sociology. Here the emphasis was on the grand-theory dichotomy between primitive or traditional society and modern or capitalist society, a pressing issue in the context both of the demise of feudalism and the rise of democracy and capitalism in Europe, and of the contemporaneous European colonization of Africa and Asia. Anthropologists working within this tradition have, in some instances, confirmed or exaggerated the difference between ‘the West and the rest’ (for example, by positing diametrically opposed value systems in gift versus commodity societies). In some instances, anthropologists inverted difference in order to make sense of the societies they encountered (by mediating in ironic ways [e.g. Dumont, 1970] the contrast Durkheim [1893] drew between ‘mechanical’ [egalitarian, undifferentiated] solidarity in primitive societies, as opposed to the ‘organic’ solidarity generated by Western societies’ hierarchical and complex division of labour). Or they have tended to erase difference by stressing the degree to which human motivations and interests are everywhere the same, albeit expressed through locally distinctive cultural practices (arguing, for example, that magic and ritual satisfy basic human needs or reflect similar tendencies for humans towards rationality).

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Much of social anthropology has used either the erasures or the exaggerations of the dichotomizing tradition to enact what is now known as ‘cultural critique’, usually directed at Western arrogance or complacency. A typical narrative tactic in this kind of critical social anthropology is to treat what used to be considered as the most lurid and disturbing of so-called primitive or traditional cultural practices – such as witchcraft – as symptoms of the malaise of modernity itself (e.g. cf. Gable, 1995, 2002; Gluckman, 1963). As a rule, anthropologists working within the sociological tradition tended towards a science of society – an effort to discover, for example, ‘general principles of political manoeuvre which transcend cultures and which could be the tools of research in a variety of different cultures’ (Bailey, 1969: p. xiii). In all cases, grand-theory dichotomies drove and shaped what anthropologists call ethnography – the written product of research in a particular place among a particular group of people. Another tradition emerged out of romanticera European theorizing in political philosophy and cultural history about the nation and the Volk (Kuper, 1999). Carried to North America by Boas, it blossomed as American cultural anthropology in the context of the development of the USA as a pluralist, yet often racist, nation of emigrants and the descendents of slaves along with an enduring population of indigenous tribal peoples. Such theorizing had an ironic relationship to essentializing theories of human difference based on biology – or ‘race’ – in that the positing of national or cultural difference could serve, on the one hand, as a critique of racialism and, on the other hand, as a replacement for it (Evans, 2006). Here the emphasis was on the plurality of cultural features that could define a people as a people. For Boasian anthropologists, influenced not only by Herderian romanticism but also by European philological studies, language was often seen as the essential component (or, at least, the primus inter pares) of cultural identity (Hymes, 1970). Hence their early interest in myths and folktaxonomies, and their efforts to understand

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and document indigenous artists as producers of the primitive equivalents of literature – of ‘texts’. Socio-cultural anthropologists today (whether in Britain, the USA or elsewhere) tend to combine (sometimes unconsciously) elements from both the culturalist and the sociological traditions in their efforts to explain, as coherent or systematic, a particular group of people acting and talking in a particular place. This reflects both the fact that since the 1930s, anthropologists trained in Britain became key players in the development of university departments of anthropology in North America, and a certain trans-Atlantic confluence of theorizing about the cultural. Especially salient here have been the ways that Anglophone anthropologists have borrowed from and critiqued French anthropologists and scholars in other disciplines (e.g. Durkheim, Mauss, LéviStrauss, Dumont, Bourdieu and Foucault). Currently the best anthropologists tend to disrupt old paradigms precisely as they call into question assumptions of social or cultural coherence. Anthropologists do so as they attempt to reintroduce historical contingencies into their ethnographies, or as they try to re-centre the stories they tell around individual actors who are often resistant to, or creating against, what these actors see as dominant ideologies or practices. As anthropologists do so, however, they are also always looking over their shoulders to evaluate whether they are importing into their descriptions of history or of the person notions of agency and causality that are the outgrowths of their own cultural traditions. The best modern socio-cultural anthropology has become, in short, doubly reflexive or sceptical. On the one hand, anthropologists are leery of the power of culture to permeate their analyses such that they ‘re-naturalize’ their own presuppositions in what they write about others. On the other hand, anthropologists worry at their tendency to exaggerate pattern, difference, or coherence at the expense of understanding particular people at particular moments in time.

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ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURE AND RACE The history of the culture concept and the history of modern anthropology came together in the Boasian critique of Tylorian (Victorian) anthropology. Boas transplanted an orientation to culture drawn from nineteenth-century German romanticism and historicism to North America (Bunzl, 1996). From there, he set about systematically demolishing the Victorian anthropological synthesis, grounded in notions of inevitable civilizational progress and universal human rationality, both often crosscut by theories of racial hierarchy. The Germanic version of culture was part of a longer, Continental tradition of speculation about human development and progress, a tradition of thought Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) meticulously documented. At issue in that centuries-long discussion was collective human progress in both the material and spiritual domains, with culture and civilization (and, later, race) being the key terms. From some points of view, human history was a story of ‘progress’, as mastery of nature increased, as social arrangements became more rational, or more in accord with a transcendent moral order, and as hard-won wisdom accumulated for all humankind. For other thinkers, the agents of human history were individuated peoples, and history itself consisted of local progressions and retrogressions. Retrogression, or degeneration, could be imagined either in terms of the Biblical narrative of a fall from divine perfection, or secularly and episodically, that is, lacking an overall direction, with local advances followed by local degenerations. From either perspective, progress could be imagined for all domains of human experience, or in some but not others; thus, writers might assert that progress in the material domain was, or was not, matched by progress in the spiritual or moral domain. Civilization and culture were often the terms used to distinguish the material and the spiritual, although culture in one writer’s system might be analogous to civilization in another’s.

Thus, for example, Matthew Arnold thought civilization (the civilization of steel and railroads) had advanced in the England of the industrial revolution, but culture (inward cultivation, ‘sweetness and light’) had declined (Arnold, 1868). Tylor, then, set out to prove that humanity had progressed in the moral as well as the material realm; hence, his overriding concern with ‘primitive religion’ in the past and ‘superstition’ in the present, both doomed, he thought, in the face of the inevitable progress of civilization, or culture (for him, those terms were synonymous; see Stocking, 1968: p. 73). Both Tylor and Boas had to define culture in relationship not only to civilization, but also to race. By the late nineteenth century, race had become another keyword in Western understandings of human diversity. Its conceptual history is as tangled as that of culture. As Stocking put it, the term brought together ‘the residues’of several traditions of thought – ‘the ethnological, the Lamarckian, the polygenist, and the evolutionist’ (Stocking, 2001: p. 9). Race was often synonymous with nation, tribe or breed. And culture (or way of life, mentality, tradition, etc.) was often imagined to be carried ‘in the blood’ of racial-national groupings. Lamarckian ideas made it possible to imagine that such racial-national groups were trans-historical entities with fixed sociogeographic boundaries, but open nonetheless to the impress of history and environment, the forces of which were over time absorbed into and carried in the blood of the people. Tylor believed in the psychic unity of mankind. Human difference was to be explained not by race, but by the ‘different grades of civilization’ through which humankind progressed, more or less unidirectionally (Tylor, 1871: p. 7). For Tylor, the human mind and human rationality were essentially the same everywhere, but in primitive cultural stages, people did not have access to accumulated knowledge. Their minds worked in rational fashion, but, ‘in a mental condition of intense and inveterate ignorance’, their progress was slow (Tylor, 1871: p. 23). Nonetheless, most social-evolutionary anthropologies were easily racialized, as the

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stages of cultural development (e.g. savagery, barbarism, civilization) could be explained as a function of collective biological differences. Boas and his students articulated a nurture-over-nature position that by the midtwentieth century had become dominant in the Anglo-American academy (although scientific racism has never been laid to rest and reasserts itself with regularity). From the 1880s through the 1920s, Boas attacked the notions that ‘race, language, and culture’ (the title of his 1940 collection of essays) moved together through history; that it was possible to establish a hierarchy of racial achievement based on an absolute standard; and that biological race determined mental or cultural capacity. In a striking historical irony, this anti-racist anthropology, borrowed from the German historical tradition of Herder and the brothers Humboldt, flourished in its transplanted, North American version, while it languished in Germany. As Proctor (1988) and Bunzl and Penny (2003) have shown, midnineteenth-century German anthropology was cosmopolitan and anti-racist; it emphasized the variety of world cultures, conceived to be local developments each one of which constituted a contribution to the full story of human civilization. Yet by the turn of the twentieth century, just as Boas was drawing together the threads of his attack on racialist evolutionism, German anthropology, and German society, veered rightward towards increasingly racist explanations of human difference. Indeed, the judgement of contemporary German historians of anthropology seems to be that the discipline never recovered in that country (Gingrich, 2005). But in North America, Boas tirelessly propagated the anti-racist position, from one social crisis (such as American antiimmigration hysteria after World War I) to another (the rise of Nazism in the 1930s). Again and again, Boas pointed out that throughout history, people of one physical ‘type’ had taken on (either through borrowing or imposition) the language or culture of another; and that two groups might share a language but differ in culture, or vice versa. It was also possible to show that culture and

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language changed at different rates than racial type (which Boas considered more ‘stable’ than the other two, although he showed, in his important study of immigrant head form in New York City [1911a], that type, too, changed with changing social circumstances). Indeed, Boas argued that there had never been an original moment when race, language and culture coincided (Boas, 1911b: p. 136). Empirically grounded, inductive history, then, gave the lie to the social evolutionists’ deductive scheme of uniform stages of human development, in which race, language and culture marched in lockstep, such that a primitive race by definition was possessed of a primitive language and a primitive culture. But it was not only the uniform directionality of the social evolutionary notion of development that was at issue. Boas mistrusted, and over time decisively refuted, the assumption that it was possible to establish an absolute standard by which to measure the degree of culture of different human groups. This was perhaps most easily shown in language, where the categorical features of linguistic structure (and, ultimately, of thought itself) were least available to native speakers for conscious scrutiny. Social evolutionists presumed they knew what a primitive language was: for example, a primitive language had a primitive sound system, so primitive, in fact, that the sounds were not fixed. In an early essay that Stocking (1968: pp. 157–160) considered seminal for all Boasian anthropology, ‘On Alternating Sounds’ (Boas, 1889), Boas showed that alternating sounds were a function of the observer’s misperceptions. Unfamiliar with the phonemic systems of the languages they were studying, observers heard sounds now one way, now another, with the alternatives related to the phonemics of their own, native language. In reality, all languages had a fixed system of sounds, and each such system was fully adequate to the work of expressing the culture and thought of its speakers. What was true of sound patterns was true of grammar, syntax and semantics. Boasian linguistic anthropology, developed to an exquisite art by Boas’s great student,

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Edward Sapir, and Sapir’s protégé, Benjamin Lee Whorf, rested ultimately on the notion that language was by definition a system of abstractions, of categories, that made it possible for a finite human mind to make sense out of an infinitely complex natural world. Boas himself was somewhat timid in his treatment of the capacity of ‘primitive’ peoples to develop abstract thought. If the Indians he studied on the Northwest Coast of North America did not have words for the philosophical abstractions of Western cultures, it was not because their mental (racial) capacities or their languages were inferior to those of Europeans; the Indians simply didn’t have use for such concepts in their daily life (Boas, 1911b: pp. 148–153). It was left to Sapir and Whorf to state the matter more boldly: all languages are logical, or deductive, systems, each equally arbitrary from the point of view of all others (Sapir, 1921; Whorf, 1956). And human thought, grounded by necessity in language, was always ‘abstract’ (that is, not merely reflecting the world, but structuring it, editing it, categorically). The arbitrariness of one set of grammatical categories from the point of view of another became a metaphor for Boasian cultural relativism. Indeed, Boas phrased his critique of the social-evolutionary synthesis in similar terms: ‘attempts to classify mankind, based on the present distribution of type, language, and culture, must lead to different results, according to the point of view taken’ (Boas, 1911b: p. 133). More generally, in Boas’s conception of a ‘historical science’, the object of study (a culture or a historical epoch) ‘originat[ed] in the mind of the observer’, not in the natural world (1887: p. 642). From the infinite complexity of human history, anthropologists (and historians) abstracted their objects of study, based not only on the empirical facts available, but also on their own culturally (and personally) grounded viewpoints and interests. Studying culture, then, was a matter of establishing interpretive relationships between anthropologists and the peoples of interest to the discipline.

Boas himself never abandoned his nineteenth-century notion of scientific truth, but the possibility of establishing such truths (perhaps in the form of general laws of mind) receded as he pursued his particularistic studies of Northwest Coast (and other) cultures. As Stocking has noted (1974b: p. 17), it was left to Boas’s students to develop the full implications of his anthropology, and, on the epistemological issue of the relativity of scientific knowledge, it was Sapir who did so most incisively: ‘Now fantasied universes of self-contained meaning are the very finest and noblest substitutes we can ever devise for that precise and loving insight into the nooks and crannies of the real that must be forever denied us’ (Sapir, 1939: p. 581). Other Boasians, however, favoured other combinations of models and truths, and other ideas about anthropology’s status as a science. Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) is the most important (and widely read) statement of Boasian cultural anthropology, presenting the discipline as an authoritative science equipped not only to discern, describe and interpret cultures, but also to make suggestions to improve them. Benedict relied on vision metaphors: culture is a lens through which people see the world. The lens structures their vision, but they cannot themselves see the lens or analyse its formula: ‘No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs’ (Benedict, 1934: p. 2; see also Benedict, 1946: p. 14). In each culture, customs and institutions fall into ‘patterns’. Over time, cultures tend to ‘integrate’themselves in terms of a few key values, values which, then, come to inflect all aspects of the culture, even those borrowed from other peoples, for whom that material might have a very different meaning than it would come to have when integrated into the borrowers’ culture. And as cultural materials and ‘traits’ become integrated into a culture, a way of life, they become invisible

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to the people who make habitual use of them. Indeed, people rarely have the ability rationally to scrutinize their culture; rather, when challenged, they provide rationalizations to defend their practices, as Benedict noted in remarks on the absurdity of war: ‘War in our own civilization is as good an illustration as one can take of the destructive lengths to which the development of a culturally selected trait may go. If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits’ (Benedict, 1934: p. 32). Benedict’s sally against Western violence is a fundamental feature of her anthropology; it complements, and even undercuts, the rhetoric of objective scientific authority she elsewhere establishes (Handler, 2005: Chapter 5). As a scientist, she claimed to be able to describe the pattern of a culture, as if that culture were an object available naturally to scientific inspection. Yet Benedict was also a moralist (see Geertz, 1988: pp. 102–128), and sometimes in her work the voice of the engaged, even partisan, moralist clashes with the calmer tone of the detached scientist. The word ‘pattern’ could be bent to either purpose. As Stocking suggested (1976: p. 22), that word implies a less rigid, more openended form of organization than the word structure, the preferred term among both British and French social anthropologists of the period. Indeed, ‘weaving’ metaphors were as central as vision metaphors to the Boasians. Terms such as pattern, weaving and warp and woof facilitated their discussion of cultures as historically active organizations. Cultures, as Boasians such as Benedict construed them, were animated by an organizing energy, the drive to ‘integrate’ the multiplicity of a people’s experiences into a coherent way of life. But cultures might also fail to integrate aspects of collective experience, or fail, even, to cohere over time as ‘a’ culture (Benedict, 1934: pp. 223–226). And just as saliently, cultures might transform themselves for the better. Boasians were especially eager to stress that because cultures were historically open-ended organizations,

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individuals might change them through their creative efforts. In particular, Benedict and her equally famous protégé Margaret Mead were cultural pluralists who wished to make room for the marginalized within what now is called the mainstream – for racial and ethnic minorities, and for the sexually deviant. By writing about other cultures and other patterns of the normal and the deviant, and by making cultural otherness a popular topic, Boasians hoped to make Americans more tolerant and America a more capacious cultural place.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND FIELDWORK In order to capture and catalogue the range of human diversity, both American cultural and British social anthropology developed strong fieldwork traditions along the lines of natural history. Fieldwork initially drew on an older practice of scientific expeditions (team fieldwork), as in the polar research projects so popular at the end of the nineteenth century (one of which took Boas to the Eskimo; Cole, 1999: pp. 63–82) or the Torres Straits expedition of 1898–1899 (Stocking, 1983). But by the 1930s the ideal became to replicate what later was to be recognized as the myth of Bronislaw Malinowski’s lone anthropologist-hero exploring the heart of darkness (Kuper, 1973). Malinowski spent years in the Trobriands living with his subjects (as did Boas in the 1890s on the Northwest coast of North America). In what quickly became one of the canonical works of anthropology, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Malinowski set out the basic methods of anthropological research. ‘The ethnographer’s magic’ entailed combining good theory with living ‘without other white men right among the natives’ (Malinowski, 1922: p. 6). The goal of such fieldwork was to transform ‘a strange, sometimes unpleasant, sometimes intensely interesting adventure’ into something more mundane and familiar. To do this the anthropologist had not only to learn the local vernacular and eschew scheduled interviews in favour of spontaneous conversations, but also to take advantage of

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serendipitous events: ‘it must be emphasized that whenever anything dramatic or important occurs it is essential to investigate it at the very moment of happening’ (Malinowski, 1922: p. 8). Like animal ethologists, the anthropologist’s goal was to carry out research in the natural habitat of his subjects; but because his subjects were human, the anthropologist also had to understand their habitat from what Malinowski called ‘the native’s point of view’ (Malinowski, 1922: p. 25). Hence the invention of what later came to be known as the method of ‘participant-observation’, or later still and more critically, as the rhetorical evocation of the authority of ‘being there’ or ‘I witnessing’. If fieldwork entailed an effort to ‘enter into the soul of the savage’ to see the world ‘through his eyes’, Malinowski stressed that such an awareness of basic cultural difference would allow us (that is, Westerners) ‘to understand our own nature and make it finer, intellectually and artistically’ (Malinowski, 1922: p. 518). Indeed, early ‘being there’ ethnographic accounts filled an important and long-standing role in what might be called the politics of culture in the West, by providing nuanced accounts of the ‘savage slot’ (Trouillot, 1991). Untouched or undistorted by civilization, ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ people were assumed to be closer to a state of nature and therefore paradigmatic of human nature. Arguing that savages had a culture, and that ‘every human culture gives its members a definite vision of the world, a definite zest of life’, Malinowski used Trobriander material to debunk generalizing theories of human nature and to assert or imply a basic human pluralism. Thus, for example, Malinowski attacked the universalizing excesses of Freudian psychoanalytic theory: since it is ‘essentially a theory of the influence of family life on the human mind’ (Malinowski, 1927: p. 2), a culture with a family structure dramatically different from that of the West would not generate a Western-style Oedipus complex, but different neuroses, different repressions – in short, different ‘psychologies’. A decade later Margaret Mead (1935) used the authority of two years of intensive

fieldwork among three dramatically different New Guinea societies to make a similar argument about the cultural construction of core temperaments associated with gender along with core experiences of sexuality, of the body and of pleasure. Malinowski, Mead and their peers developed what has become a standard form of cultural criticism. First, fieldwork provides data showing that what was once taken to be a human universal is a cultural norm. The Oedipal complex makes sense but only among ‘the overfed and nervously overwrought people of modern Vienna, London, or New York’ (Malinowski, 1927: p. 15). Then a different set of cultural practices is demonstrated as leading to a different set of basic human motivations and attitudes – Arapesh women and men do not experience or seem to desire sexual ‘climax’ or orgasm (Mead, 1935: p. 105). The exercise should lead to the acceptance of alternative ways of being, as well as the recognition of one’s implicit prejudices. Thus did Malinowski and Mead, and indeed many of the anthropologists of the discipline’s formative years, anticipate and theorize about the kinds of preoccupations that would later be associated with cultural constructivism in post-structuralist philosophy. If in the work of Judith Butler, and contemporary scholars like her, the cultural Other whose perspective is used to attack the universalizing claims of a dominant perspective are homosexuals, women and racial minorities, then in Mead’s and Malinowki’s anthropology ‘other cultures’ provided the necessary ammunition. After Malinowski, Boas, and then Mead and others, ‘participant observation’ became the standard for the discipline. Most anthropologists spent long periods living among their subjects. Their ethnographic accounts were often deployed, both as a rhetorical device and as data to be analysed, to give an intersubjective sense of what it was like to be an outsider trying to gain a foothold in a strange community. Such encounters in the field with a congeries of individuals, whose actions and beliefs were conventionally taken to be representative of a culture or a society, became at once the method and the implicit theory of

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anthropology (Wagner, 1975). Indeed, it is in the various ways that fieldwork allows for this kind of representation to occur that the notion of societies or cultures as entities in and of themselves came to be the standard view of anthropology. As Evans-Pritchard remarked, comparing his fieldwork with the hierarchical Azande and the egalitarian Nuer: ‘Among Azande I was compelled to live outside the community; among Nuer I was compelled to be a member of it. Azande treated me as a superior; Nuer as an equal’ (Nuer, 1940: p. 15). Here Evans-Pritchard’s assertion of experience among each group heightens the ‘reality effect’ of the two ‘case studies’ he had created (1937, 1940) out of those experiences. For the full effect, one needs to hold in one’s hand a monograph from a monograph series, perhaps Napoleon Chagnon’s Yanomamo, the Fierce People, the best-selling of all the many titles produced in the Holt, Rinehart and Winston series, Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology (Chagnon, 1968). On the back covers of the books in that series, students found a list of all the other titles in the series, and thereby learned that the world is made up of discrete, bounded cultures – despite the fact that over and over again in the history of anthropology, field workers have had to admit that boundaries they assigned to the societies under study were not the boundaries that the natives themselves used. Evans-Pritchard’s juxtaposition of the ‘ethos’ of Nuer and Azande was a rhetorical ploy that tended to remain undeveloped in British anthropology, even as many of the most famous social anthropologists undertook fieldwork in several societies. While such juxtapositions were, for example, central to the arguments about the cultural construction of personhood that Mead made when she compared three Melanesian societies in Sex and Temperament (1935); and to Benedict’s argument about culture as ‘personality writ large’ in Patterns of Culture (1934); and much later in Geertz’s deployments of ‘Bali’, ‘Java’ and ‘Morocco’to illustrate the proposition that to be human is to experience a world through the lens of a particular culture (Geertz, 1968, 1980, 1983), Evans-Pritchard did not develop

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a sustained comparison of Nuer and Azande. Rather, he used ethnographic accounts of each society to comment on the stock contrast between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ that was inherent in the dichotomizing tradition of classical sociology. If, for example, Nuer time was experienced as relative to social structure, to the movement of cattle and people, to the closeness or distance among kin groups (Evans-Pritchard, 1940: pp. 94 –110), so too was a seemingly objective conception of time in the twentieth-century West a product of ticking clocks and the reiterated routines of the factory floor. If Azande could be sceptical about the powers of particular witch doctors but credulous about witchcraft, so too could Westerners damn this doctor or disparage that treatment while bowing to the god of medicine. By focusing on the persistence of religious practices in the face of scepticism about the efficacy of particular diviners, rites and charms, and the accuracy of particular witchcraft accusations, EvansPritchard’s monograph explicitly blurred the boundaries between Western and African modes of thought. For him, Azande were just as suspicious of the truth claims of others, just as likely to test forms of curing empirically, as were Westerners. By contrast, Americans, often as not, used the estrangements of the fieldwork encounter to stress fundamental cultural differences. If British anthropologists noted how similarly blinkered were Western and non-Western rationalities, Americans, for their part, stressed that people of different cultures experienced even basic perceptions (as in the case of colour, for example) in radically different ways. As such, despite the practical similarities of their fieldwork traditions, American and British anthropology split (quite self-consciously) along a culturesociety fault line. The British tradition defined itself as a branch of sociology and its practitioners often eschewed the word ‘culture’in favour of ‘society’. As sociologists of ‘primitive societies’, or of ‘small-scale’ or ‘rural’, or ‘non-modern’, or ‘pre-literate’, ‘pre-capitalist’, or ‘non-Western’ societies, they were always defining their terrain in

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relationship to the societies of the colonizers, the modern world, capitalist society and the like. As sociologists they inherited not only the dichotomizing vision of classical sociology, but also its tendency to divide human imaginative actions into the social and the cultural, with the social defined as pertaining to interests and goals, and the human propensity to organize to obtain them, and the cultural defined as all those activities that might be lumped together under the category ‘not obviously useful’. Thus, for example, marriage practices and rules or political institutions and the ideas that were implicated in them were social, while games, art, myths, beliefs in spirits and the practices such as ritual and ceremony associated with those were cultural. In general, the social took precedence over the cultural. If, for American cultural anthropologists, the focus was on how particularly situated people comprising ‘a culture’ projected their imagination, through action, onto the world they made, British social anthropologists tended to be concerned with how particular forms of imagination arose out of or justified particular kinds of social order, or how imaginative forms were used to critique or subvert particular kinds of order. It was, in a word, a discipline characterized by discourses of functionalism. By looking at how people in societies subverted as much as maintained order, anthropologists such as Frederik Barth, Max Gluckman and Edmund Leach focused on people ‘competing with one another to enhance their means and status, within the framework set by often conflicting rules’ (Kuper, 1973: p. 177). In focusing on political activity, they and the anthropologists who followed them (e.g. Arjun Appadurai and John and Jean Comaroff) tended to be interested in the utility of the cultural. The goal became to show why such things had a political significance – why, for example, witchcraft beliefs could be read as a warped critique of the cannibalism of capitalism, or why Indian enthusiasm for cricket makes Indian nationalism as much as reflects it. As such the British tradition of anthropology – sociology, as it were, in ‘out of the way

places’ – continued to reflect and draw from the sociological canon, with that canon coming to include not only Durkheim and Marx, but also Foucault, Bourdieu and de Certeau. French social theorists have had a large impact on Anglo-American anthropology. Lévi-Strauss is a crucial example, not to mention a seminal figure in anthropology and human studies more generally. Lévi-Strauss applied structuralist theories of linguistic communication to a variety of cultural practices that combine literal language with ritualized performance. He argued that kinship, for example, could be understood not merely as a way to organize persons and groups, but as a communicative system. He subsumed more sociologically oriented questions about marriage as a form of economic exchange to the exchange of signs and the production of codes. He also applied the structuralist method to studying myth and ritual, extending the project of social anthropology to the problem of human rationality. In The Savage Mind (1966), he argued (in a sense, pace Durkheim) that all human beings created structures of thought by recognizing and deploying sensory contrasts available to them in nature, and that recognizing and elaborating upon structure was a basic human desire and source of pleasure. Lévi-Strauss, like the Boasian anthropologists whose works supplied him the raw materials he used for his analyses, argued against utilitarian views of human nature. Humans created myths and rituals because symbolic contrasts, metaphor and metonymy, are ‘good to think’. Neolithic humans, like modern scientists, enjoyed classifying for the pleasures it afforded. They created cultural values out of natural phenomena and mapped those values back onto nature, naturalizing them, albeit in arbitrary ways. American anthropologists, most famously Marshall Sahlins, used Lévi-Straussian structuralism to argue against inevitable or universal categories of value, thus using structuralism to further the project of cultural constructivism inaugurated and enacted by Boas, Malinowski, Benedict, Mead and Geertz (Sahlins, 1976). Like his British

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counterparts (e.g. Douglas, 1966, 1970; Leach, 1976; Needham, 1973), Sahlins was especially eager to borrow from Lévi-Strauss a method for unpacking how cultural systems of meaning could be de-coded and revealed to be social products. In Culture and Practical Reason (1976) and How “Natives” Think (1995), he uses a structuralist reading of American and Polynesian culture to mount ‘an anthropological critique of the idea that human cultures are formulated out of practical activity and, behind that, utilitarian interest’ (Sahlins, 1976: p. vii). By stressing that ‘the distinctive quality of man is not that he must live in a material world, circumstances that he shares with all organisms, but that he does so according to a meaningful scheme of his own devising’ (Sahlins, 1976: viii), Sahlins argued that culture is not ‘precipitated’ from ‘rational activity’ (vii). Rather, it is ‘culture which constitutes utility’ (Sahlins, 1976: viii). Sahlins liked Lévi-Strauss for offering a corrective to Marx – for developing a science of signs as systems to develop a ‘theory of superstructures’ ( Lévi-Strauss, 1966: p. 130). Read anthropologically, that is, through the lens of Lévi-Strauss, Marx was redefined as a cultural anthropologist who recognized early that the West was itself a culture, and that mid-nineteenth-century appraisals of nature were ‘the re-presentation of culture to itself in the form of nature’ (Sahlins, 1976: p. 53). Sahlins also emphasized that such a critique of the ideological underpinnings of science is hard to demonstrate from the perspective of one society. It requires comparison. This is what cultural anthropology can provide: ‘other cultures, other rationalities’ (Sahlins, 1995: p. 14). In Culture and Practical Reason, Sahlins offers a succinct definition of culture: ‘Cultures are meaningful orders of persons and things. Since these orders are systematic, they cannot be free inventions of the mind’. Sahlins realizes that saying it does not make it so. For him, ‘anthropology must consist in the discovery of the system’ (Sahlins, 1976: p. x). If there is a system, then our job is to find it and reveal its workings to others. He was also interested in how such systems

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of codes acted as interpretive grids that were transformed by historical events. This became the major theme in his interpretation of Hawaiian responses to the arrival of Captain Cook and their eventual murder of him (Sahlins, 1981, 1985, 1995). Cook’s arrival enacted a mythical scenario of the arrival of a god, Lono. His inappropriate return required that he be killed. But the events of British contact with the Hawaiians also promoted the transformation of mythologically naturalized codes of conduct between the Hawaiian aristocracy and their commoners. For Sahlins, structure plus history yielded transformation. Like Sahlins, British anthropologists were interested in tracing how particular cultural codes (embodied in myth and ritual) naturalized particular ideologies and served particular interests. This was the lesson they took from Lévi-Strauss as they used structuralism for their purposes. A case in point is the way social anthropologists read Lévi-Strauss’s seminal essay on the structural analysis of myth, ‘The story of Asdiwal’. In this essay Lévi-Strauss attempted to reveal the complex confluence of ‘codes’, at once geographical and ecological, contained in a Tsimshian story about the birth and death of a mythological hero known as Asdiwal. Lévi-Strauss argued that the myth highlights or reveals contradictions in life as lived and then resolves them, thereby erasing the destructive effect of contradiction, at least in terms of the imagination, or thought. The ultimate ‘function’ of myth is a kind of naturalizing mediation of life as it is – a way of revealing contradictions while coming to terms with them. As Mary Douglas put it in a famous summary of his work: ‘The myth is a contemplation of the unsatisfactory compromises which, after all, compose social life. In the devious statements of myth, people can recognize indirectly what would be difficult to admit openly and yet what is patently clear to all and sundry, that the ideal is not attainable’(Douglas, 1967: p. 59). Myth, in short, is a kind of propaganda. But the best myth is artful propaganda. And myth, as the social anthropologists pointed out, always, in Lévi-Strauss’s scheme, supports the status quo

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because it is a story a people collectively make and collectively consume. In ‘The story of Asdiwal’, Lévi-Strauss’s central concern was the contradiction in residence and marriage patterns in a society that has matrilineal clans. But social anthropologists who engaged with Lévi-Strauss pointed out other perhaps far more important contradictions. Douglas, for example, stressed the contradiction between the gendered value of labour (female gathering was less esteemed than male hunting) and the subsistence value of different kinds of food in the Northwest Coast region (gathered foods such as salmon and candlefish were more central to the diet than hunted foods). Thus for Douglas, the central contradiction of the myth of Asdiwal was Marxian: while hunting took precedence in the region in terms of prestige and general ethos, gathering (women’s work) was the foundation of the economy and society. Hence her remark: ‘the myth could well be interpreted as playing on the paradox of male dominance and male dependence on female help’ (Douglas, 1967: p. 52). She went on to argue that the ‘general effect’ of the myth is to convey the message that ‘women are necessary but inferior beings, and men are superior’. For social anthropologists, the cultural, again, was yoked to the social. Yet Lévi-Strauss, because he soon abandoned the kinds of sociologically oriented analyses of myth associated with the myth of Asdiwal in favour of analyses of mythological transformation chiefly concerned with the properties of human thought to the exclusion of the social, was taken to task by them. Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism opened up new terrain for anthropology. It made myth and ritual useful again – good to think. And because social anthropology had always been concerned with action, many social anthropologists became especially creative in theorizing about the centrality of ritual in human experience, among these Victor Turner, whose analyses of the ‘dramaturgical’ became foundational texts in a soon to emerge crossdisciplinary interest in ‘performance’ (Turner, 1966, 1967, 1974, 1982; also Schechner, 1985). But structuralism eventually prompted

anthropologists to assert the authority of fieldwork against yet another all-encompassing theoretical apparatus. Like the practitioners of cultural studies who reacted to the excesses of textual analysis by resorting to ethnographies of textual reception, so, too, did anthropologists argue for looking at audiences, at polysemy, at conflict and context at the local level, thus anticipating, through a faith in fieldwork-based ethnography, poststructuralism avant la lettre (Ortner, 1984).

THE REBIRTH OF BOASIAN (BY WAY OF SYMBOLIC) ANTHROPOLOGY As British and French structuralism were gaining coherence and prominence, Boasian cultural anthropology in North America began to lose its cohesion (as a community of likeminded scholars), diversifying as it expanded within the fast-growing university system, while also capitalizing on the increasing availability of government and foundation grant monies during and after World War II. In the 1950s and 1960s there was yet another (see Stocking, 1968: pp. 270–307) scientific reaction against Boasian historical particularism, and various neo-evolutionisms flourished, in the work of such people as Julian Steward (1955), Leslie White (1949), Eleanor Leacock (1954), (the early) Marshall Sahlins (Sahlins and Service, 1960) and (the later) Irving Hallowell (1960; see Stocking, 2004). Evolutionary and ecological approaches to culture and cultural development ranged across a political and intellectual spectrum, from the work of the politically liberal Steward, whose interest in the interaction between humans and the natural environment stemmed from a long American tradition of scientific exploration, to that of a generation trained after World War II (including Sahlins, Service, Robert Murphy and Sidney Mintz), who studied with Steward but also drew theoretical inspiration from various European social theorists, especially Marx (Kerns, 2003: pp. 235–262). The post-war opposition between science and history, evolutionism and cultural

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particularism, was mediated by Talcott Parsons, doyen of American sociology, and Alfred Kroeber, the most senior and distinguished surviving student of Boas. In a 1958 two-page manifesto on ‘The concepts of culture and of social system’, they tried to clear up confusion about the terms ‘society’ and ‘culture’ (or, more precisely, about the routine conflation of the two). They did so by defining both terms as analytically distinguishable components of human ‘behavior’. ‘Society’, or ‘social system’, in the scientific terminology they proposed, referred to the ‘system of interaction among individuals and collectivities’; while ‘culture’ was ‘restrict[ed] … to transmitted and created content and patterns of values, ideas, and other symbolic-meaningful systems as factors in the shaping of human behavior and the artifacts produced through behavior’ (Kroeber and Parsons, 1958: p. 583). With these definitions, they attempted to mandate the proper division of labour between sociology and anthropology. More generally, they envisaged a coordinated scientific enterprise, to eventuate in ‘a general theory of [human] action’, as the title of a contemporary work put it (Parsons and Shils, 1961). The conceptualization of this unified theoretical enterprise drew on the nineteenthcentury German philosophy of science and history that Kroeber had absorbed from Boas: human behaviour or action was seen as a ‘level’ of phenomenal reality organized in terms of principles or forces different from those that organized the physical, biological and psychological levels of reality. Given such differences, scientific disciplines and concepts had to be established and defined based on the ‘level’ to be studied, or, in a related epistemological approach, on the analytic problems of interest to the student of human action. It is worth noting that while Parsons had come to this position by way of an intellectual trajectory quite separate from that of Kroeber (Parsons’s reading [1937] of European social theorists, particularly Durkheim and Weber), his studies had led him back to the same sources that had nourished Boas. Indeed, Boas and Weber may be envisaged

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as alternate ‘carriers’ of the same intellectual tradition, with Boas bringing that tradition to North America and developing it as fourfield anthropology, while Weber contributed to professional sociology in Europe. In any case, the Kroeber-Parsons mandate can be seen, retrospectively, to have licensed Parsons’s (and Kluckhohn’s) Harvard anthropology students, Clifford Geertz and David Schneider, to consider ‘culture’ their special domain. The two converged in the early 1960s in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago (although Geertz soon left for the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton [see Geertz, 1995: pp. 109–128]). In different ways, both grappled with the relationship between culture and the social system, and both eventually lost interest in the second analytic term, as they focused their efforts on ‘culture theory’. The flourishing of culture theory in the 1970s and 1980s can be seen retrospectively (and to some extent was seen at the time) as a renewal of older Boasian approaches to culture; the most common labels at the time were ‘symbolic anthropology’(Dolgin, Kemnitzer and Schneider, 1977) and ‘interpretive anthropology’ (Rabinow and Sullivan, 1979). But symbolic anthropology also brought together as a collective reading community Geertz and Schneider and those who were inspired by them along with European social anthropologists such as Edmund Leach, Rodney Needham, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas and Marilyn Strathern – most of whom were influenced by LéviStrauss’s structuralism and all of whom, like their American counterparts, stressed that ‘culture communicates’ (Leach, 1976: p. 2). Some British social anthropologists construed this interest in the symbolic as a shift away from what Edmund Leach characterized as an ‘empiricist’ approach to understanding ‘ethnographic data’ or ‘customary behavior’ and, as such, wrote books which were as explicitly critical of Western commonsense constructions as were the American ‘culturalists’. According to Leach, much of social anthropology was premised on the empiricist notions that humans act to achieve recognizable ends, compete for scarce resources,

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and generally try to control one another. The model was economic as economics was conceived in the West. Leach argued instead for what he called a ‘rationalist approach’ to the study of ethnographic material, one based on the premise that people act to send and receive recognizable messages; the model is linguistic. In the former, the goal is to understand the structure of rules that limit and channel action; in the latter, structure is the system that limits and channels thought, meaning, expression. Some social anthropologists used these insights to make more incisive critiques of the structure of anthropological ideas themselves. Marilyn Strathern (1988), for example, showed how anthropologists usually posited as if they were universals contrasting binaries such as nature/culture, society/individual, and male/female and as a result misconstrued native conceptions. Strathern’s critique of anthropological structures of ideas dovetailed in significant ways with Derrida’s critique of structuralism itself, while remaining ethnographically grounded in illuminating the ways Hageners of New Guinea imagined their world through categories of their own invention. Strathern is also sometimes read as a part of a pervasive feminist critique of anthropology’s androcentricity, although her work is also critical of the misapplication of a Western concern for equality among individuals in societies where neither the individual nor equality exist as indigenous concepts. Similarly, American anthropologists such as Geertz and Schneider yoked ethnographies of (what Geertz famously called) ‘out of the way places’ to critiques of Western scholarly common sense. Geertz has had perhaps the greatest impact of any anthropologist (other than Lévi-Strauss) outside the discipline. Typical of Geertz’s attack on common sense via the development of a culture theory is his 1966 essay, ‘The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man’ (reprinted in Geertz, 1973: pp. 33–54). There he distinguished what he claims to be cultural anthropology’s contribution to an understanding of human beings from an Enlightenment understanding. In the Enlightenment view, as Geertz characterizes

it, culture is like a costume that hides or covers over an essential human nature. The costume is either good, because it shapes and moulds human nature in salutary ways, or it is bad because constraining, imprisoning. But in either case Enlightenment thought posits ‘a uniformitarian view of man’ in which there is a universal human nature. For Geertz, pace Enlightenment thinkers, cultural difference is ‘not a mere matter of garb and appearance, of stage settings and comedic masques’ (Geertz, 1973: p. 36). Culture, for Geertz, is core, not surface. In this and other essays Geertz argues that much of twentieth-century social science is also misguided in its study of ‘man’. Cognizance of cultural diversity caused the earlier uniformitarian model to morph into a ‘stratigraphic’model, one in which the posited universals of biology, psychology and society underpin culture, which becomes little more than the icing on the layer cake. Geertz objects that, again, such models treat culture as an outcome of more fundamental facts of human life. If Geertz dislikes both uniformitarian and stratigraphic models, his concept of culture also was explicitly framed as an exercise in interpretation rather than explanation – an idea he derived from Weber but also from Boasian anthropology more generally. The goal of the ethnographer, in Geertz’s scheme, was to understand how people in any given society tended to make ‘models of’ reality into ‘models for’ action – both ritual and practical – thereby inscribing a particular worldview into everyday and ceremonial life. Interpretation entailed uncovering (or even abstracting) such models. With its emphasis on drama, theatre, text and ritual as metaphors for interpreting human action, Geertz’s work appealed to scholars outside anthropology, especially in the humanities. Cultural forms are (like) art in that their effect is aesthetic. But unlike so much of the art that Westerners know, the distinction between writer and reader, artist and viewer, actor and audience, producer and consumer (for is it not the case that even connoisseurs are primarily consumers, educated, and therefore ‘cultured’ consumers, but nevertheless not producers?)

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is always blurred in the societies Geertz talks about. People act in rituals, they perform for themselves, they live the art they make, and as a result, the meanings dramatized in art forms are internalized – as ‘culture’ in the sense that American cultural anthropologists use the term. By focusing on the tropes of art to make a case for the ‘construction’ of culture (all those models of becoming models for), and for a model of culture as a system of meaning that is at once internal to a subject and constitutive of the public domain, Geertz is a lot like Victor Turner, his British counterpart. Turner offered the humanities a social science of the dramaturgical (1982). His emphasis was on performance – on stages, dramas, denouements – and their transformative powers (1966, 1967). He, too, became a favourite among the literary critics of the late twentieth century, especially those carving out that new discipline, performance studies. But unlike Geertz, Turner remained squarely within the traditions of social anthropology. Turner’s goal was to search for human universals in how theatre worked its magic. He used examples from a number of societies – juxtaposing, say, an essay on Hidalgo’s march on Mexico City with Becket’s murder by knights loyal to Henry – to show how the dramaturgical worked (Turner, 1974). By contrast, when Geertz described the Balinese theatre state it was only in part to argue for the theatricality of politics; it was also (inevitably) to assert a certain cultural quality (revealed in politics) that was typically and quintessentially Balinese. The Javanese proverb, ‘Other fields, other grasshoppers’, served as a reminder that human nature is plural because cultural (Geertz, 1973: p. 53). David Schneider is less well-known outside anthropology than Geertz, but took what was considered within anthropology to be the more radical position concerning the cultural. In American Kinship: A Cultural Account (1968), he proposed a study of cultural symbols in and of themselves (in this case, the symbols that defined kinship in American culture), irrespective of their connections to the social system and to their realization

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in social action. The symbols of kinship ought also to be considered, Schneider argued, independently from biology. The ‘scientific facts’ of biology were not the basis of kinship in cultures; rather, those scientific facts could never be formulated apart from culture, and, furthermore, there were many kinship systems that made no reference to what Westerners call ‘biology’ at all. Putting the matter generally, Schneider argued: ‘the notion of a pure, pristine state of biological relationships “out there in reality” which is the same for all mankind is sheer nonsense’ (Schneider, 1965: p. 97). These arguments deconstructed (in the sense of ‘did away with’) what had been a core subject for anthropologists (kinship, considered, in social-evolutionary terms, to be the central organizing principle of ‘primitive’ societies) and, for a while, anthropologists lost interest in the topic. But over the longer run, Schneider’s cultural approach to kinship stimulated revitalized kinship studies, freed to consider such ‘non-natural’forms of kinship as gay and lesbian families (Lewin, 1993; Weston, 1991), adoptive children (Modell, 1994) and the ‘new reproductive technologies’ (for an overview of these new kinship studies, see Franklin and McKinnon, 2001). More generally, Schneider’s cultural approach to the Western analytic categories that mediated anthropologists’ interpretations of other cultures dovetailed with other trends in the discipline (reflexivity, historicism) that were prompting a renewed understanding of anthropology itself as a culturally distinctive phenomenon. Geertz’s work had a similar effect, both within anthropology and (as Schneider’s did not) beyond it. Geertz never saw the need to rule out social action as an object of cultural analysis. Indeed, his earlier work (1960, 1963a, 1963b) grappled explicitly with the relationship between social change and cultural change. But his interests eventually settled on a conception of culture as ‘an acted document’, and of the study of culture, anthropology, as ‘an interpretive [science] in search of meaning’, not ‘an experimental science in search of law’ (Geertz, 1973: pp. 10, 7). To see anthropology as an interpretive science is, of course, a Boasian or Weberian position.

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What was new in Geertz’s approach, however, was the consequence he drew from that orientation: if culture is an ‘acted document’, then the anthropologist who studies it is a reader, a literary critic. ‘Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript – foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior’ (Geertz, 1973: p. 10). Moreover, the people that anthropologists study are doing the same thing: ‘what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to’ (Geertz, 1973: p. 9). Taken together, Schneider’s injunction to study cultural symbols apart from social action and Geertz’s assertion that to ‘do’ anthropology is to ‘interpret’ culture (itself construed as publicly acted texts) prompted a generation of younger anthropologists to conceive of their ethnographic work (both the fieldwork itself and the written results) as an interpretive or literary endeavour. And that work, in turn, led to a new theoretical interest in fieldwork and anthropology itself as a Western or scientific practice, one in which anthropologists ‘invent’ culture (both the anthropological concept and specific examples of it). Schneider’s student Roy Wagner provided perhaps the earliest discussion of ‘the invention of culture’, a process he saw in terms of ‘objectification’: We might actually say that an anthropologist ‘invents’ the culture he believes himself to be studying … It is only through ‘invention’ of this kind that the abstract significance of culture … can be grasped, and only through the experienced contrast that his own culture becomes ‘visible’. In the act of inventing another culture, the anthropologist invents his own, and in fact he reinvents the notion of culture itself. (Wagner, 1975: p. 4)

Over the next decade, anthropologists and critics of anthropology became especially interested in the literary aspects of such inventions. The work of anthropology came to be seen as ‘writing culture’ (Behar and Gordon, 1995; Clifford and Marcus, 1986),

and the results of that work were open for literary-critical analysis, with an eye for both its ‘poetics’ (the relationship between the literary conventions of ethnography and the knowledge conveyed in the genre) and its ‘politics’ (the relationship between the scientific authority of anthropologists and the social position of those about whom they had the power to write).

THE POLITICS OF CULTURE Although it sometimes seems that scholars have only recently discovered that anthropological writing is a form of politics, it is worth recalling that anthropologists have consistently imagined that their work would have a transformative impact on their own society, that it would be political in that sense. So, to speak of the politics of anthropological writing is to speak of two (at least analytically separable) perspectives about this politics – a celebratory perspective and a critical perspective. Arguably texts from a celebratory perspective have had a greater impact both on cultural politics within modern societies and on the shape of knowledge within the academy. In the celebratory perspective, the anthropologist sees herself or himself as a spokesperson for non-Western others and uses their authority to mount a critique of Western society. Clearly, it has not been anthropologists alone who have used the savage as the source of utopian dreams. One has only to think of Montesquieu, Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson, the latter who made Indians into honorary American ancestors, to realize how pervasive this practice has been. Yet, anthropologists came to speak with a special authority for this kind of perspective. Paradigmatic of this kind of cultural critique is Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, published in 1924 and translated into English 30 years later. In The Gift, Mauss travelled in time and space, from Old Norse to New Caledonia to the Northwest Coast of North America to ancient India, in order to argue for the gift’s ubiquity in ‘archaic’ societies. Gift-exchange

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existed, he wanted to emphasize, as a fundamental social fact which created and signalled essential social solidarities even in an archipelago of individuals – even, that is, in the modern France Mauss lived in and never left. Mauss was writing against what he felt was an ultimately impoverishing, if increasingly dominant, discourse in Western economics which equated the individual pursuit of economic interest via the commodity with ‘liberty’. He wanted modern Europeans to learn from the long and pervasive precedent of the archaic world that societies can survive and thrive only if their members come to recognize their mutual obligations and their interdependence. The Gift continues to be widely read inside and outside anthropology (Godelier, 1999; Schrift, 1997; Strathern, 1988), usually to endorse as an alternative to neoliberal ideology the social intertwinement that giftexchange entails. More than Mauss himself, scholars re-reading him today tend to make dichotomizing comparisons – between gift and commodity, between the person who knows he is the sum of his social relationships and the individual who suffers – yes, suffers! – the illusion that everyone is an island (e.g. Gregory, 1982; Strathern, 1988). In such ongoing critiques (which deploy the non-Western other as an alternative) it is the commodity, not the gift, that poisons (Godelier, 1999; cf. Raheja, 1988). Thus anthropology has a long-standing role in Western utopian discourses, and old texts continue to find new readers as Westerners struggle with social and moral contradiction. But more recently anthropologists have also participated in more critical self-reflection. Another motivating factor has been postcolonial guilt among anthropologists themselves, who came to see that they were as patronizing of ‘natives’(if primarily textually) as were their cousins among the ranks of colonial administrators and among the runof-the-mill tourists who visited the exotic and the primitive for the pleasures such a visit provided. Since at least the time of the American and French Revolutions, and probably for several centuries before that

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(Koester, 2006), a global politics has developed from encounters between European, Asian and African polities and the lands they subjugated; moreover, that politics was defined in part in terms of objectifying ethnographic practices. Geographers and ‘explorers’ mapped territories, and in doing so they described local peoples, often as though such people were part of a natural landscape. With the rise of the social sciences, concepts such as ‘society’, ‘culture’, ‘tradition’, ‘folklore’ and even ‘history’ became key terms in that practice. Throughout the twentieth century, and perhaps from the mid-nineteenth century, the politics of decolonization and national liberation has been at least in part a ‘politics of culture’ (Handler, 1988). Intellectuals of and for subordinated groups worked to provide cultural and historical legitimacy for liberation movements, creating exemplary knowledge (books, monuments, archaeological sites, museum collections) necessary to establish a group’s claim to independent existence, and hence the right to political sovereignty. The ‘native’ production of culturalhistorical studies with explicit nationalist or liberationist motives has put increasing pressure on anthropological culture theory, and on the politics of anthropology. With respect to culture theory, it has become increasingly difficult for anthropologists to believe they can extract culture as an object of study from the cultural practices that precipitate such objects. Studying people who are acting like anthropologists – people who are busy writing, collecting and representing culture – anthropologists cannot fail to see that their own disciplinary practices are of the same order or level of social reality as the native culture-constructing practices. The conventional anthropological notion of fieldwork as ‘participant-observation’ was conceived to grapple with a similar problem, the awkward positioning of the researcher as at once a member (temporarily) of the group under study, and an observer or analyst. But the current widespread, everyday, and self-conscious use of the culture concept makes even ‘participant-observation’ seem an

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inadequate gloss for anthropological praxis: perhaps when one imagined oneself to be studying kinship or ritual, it was possible to keep ‘anthropology’ and ‘native life’ conceptually separate; it seems impossible to do so today, when those natives are culture theorists. One casualty of the present situation is the concept of ‘authenticity’. It is no longer possible to imagine a pristine cultural identity, a people who do not reflect upon their culture (and thereby change it) as they come routinely into contact with others. This new politics of culture has complicated the politics of anthropology. In practical terms, it is increasingly less easy for anthropologists to gain ‘access’ to people who, in the past, would have had no power to exclude a researcher from their community. Today, when subordinated but politically organized and self-conscious communities cooperate in anthropological research, it is often at least partially on their terms; indeed, for land-claim cases, language preservation and social welfare programmes, communities hire anthropologists to help them. But such political programmes generally require a kind of culture theory that ‘postmodern’ or ‘neo-Boasian’ (Bashkow et al., 2004) anthropologists have tried to transcend – one that presupposes cultures as bounded communities in possession of clearly demarcated, and ‘authentic’, culture (Clifford, 1988: pp. 277–346). In a world of nation-states conceptualized as bounded units, groups within or between those units can gain political recognition only by presenting themselves as similarly delineated and endowed cultural entities. The long history of anthropology – with its scientific racism and its countervailing cultural relativism, its tradition of living ‘in the field’ among the people being studied, and its cultivation of ‘empathy’ as a method of cross-cultural understanding – has bequeathed to today’s anthropologists a deep sympathy for the struggles of the subordinated peoples they study. There is a romantic tradition of celebrating the cultures of such people, and there is also, today, good political reason to do so. But such practices contradict the theoretical consensus among symbolic,

interpretive or neo-Boasian anthropologists concerning the ontological status of culture: culture is conceptualized best not as a thing, but as a semiotic process. At the turn of the twentieth century, the institutionalization of anthropology in the academy gave the discipline a social unity that many anthropologists, at the turn of the twenty-first century, fear is increasingly fragile. These worried anthropologists, almost as postmodern as the Boasians, know all cultural phenomena to be historically situated symbolic creations and, as such, subject not just to change, but also to radical reinterpretation, from multiple points of view. One consequence of such a perspective is the understanding that anthropology itself may well disappear as a discipline or even as a concept. ‘Culture’, a longer-lived and socially more salient term than ‘anthropology’, will probably not disappear, but will continue to mutate, as it has for centuries in Western and more recently in world locales, and it will continue to migrate among a variety of disciplines and institutions, and to come into opposition with a contingent set of equally ‘key’ words.

REFERENCES Arnold, M. (1868) Culture and Anarchy. London: Smith, Elder. Bailey, F.G. (1969) Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics. New York: Schocken Books. Bashkow, I., Bunzl, M., Handler, R., Orta, A. and Rosenblatt, D. (2004) ‘A New Boasian Anthropology: Theory for the 21st Century’, American Anthropologist, 106(3): 433–494. Bateson, G. (1936) Naven. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beattie, J. (1964) Other Cultures: The Aims, Methods, and Achievements of Social Anthropology. New York: Free Press. Behar, R. and Gordon, D. (eds) (1995) Women Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Benedict, R. (1934) Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Benedict, R. (1946) The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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Boas, F. (1940) ‘The study of geography’, in F. Boas (ed.), Race, Language and Culture (1st edn, 1887). New York: Macmillan, pp. 639–647. Boas, F. (1974a) ‘On alternating sounds’, in Stocking, pp. 72–77. (1st edn, 1889.) Boas, F. (1974b) ‘The history of anthropology’, in Stocking, pp. 23–36. (1st edn, 1904.) Boas, F. (1911a) Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants. Senate Document 208, 61st Congress, Second Session. Washington: Government Printing Office. Boas, F. (1911b) The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Macmillan. Bunzl, M. (1996) ‘Franz Boas and the Humboldtian tradition: From volksgeist and nationalcharakter to an anthropological conception of culture’, in G. Stocking (ed.), Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition (=History of Anthropology, vol. 8). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 17–78. Bunzl, M. (2004) ‘Boas, Foucault, and the “native anthropologist”: Notes toward a neo-Boasian anthropology’, American Anthropologist, 106(4): 435–442. Bunzl, M. and Penny, H.G. (2003) ‘Introduction: rethinking German anthropology, colonialism, and race’, in Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, pp. 1–30. Chagnon, N. (1968) Yanomamo, the Fierce People. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Clifford, J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (eds) (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cole, D. (1999) Franz Boas: The Early Years, 1858–1906. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Dolgin, J., Kemnitzer, D. and Schneider, D. (eds) (1977) Symbolic Anthropology: A Reader in the Study of Symbols and Meanings. New York: Columbia University Press. Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Praeger. Douglas, M. (1967) ‘The meaning of myth, with special reference to “La gest d’Asdiwal”’, in E. Leach (ed.), The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism. London: Tavistock, pp. 49–69. Douglas, M. (1970) Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York: Pantheon. Dumont, L. (1970) Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Durkheim, E. (1893) De la division du travail social. Paris: F. Alcan.

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Evans, B. (2006) ‘Where was Boas during the Renaissance in Harlem? Diffusion, race, and the culture paradigm in the history of anthropology’, in R. Handler (ed.), Central Sites, Peripheral Visions: Cultural and Institutional Crossings in the History of Anthropology (=History of Anthropology, vol. 11). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 69–98. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1937) Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1940) The Nuer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Franklin, S. and McKinnon, S. (eds) (2001) Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham: Duke University Press. Gable, E. (1995) ‘The decolonization of consciousness: local skeptics and the “will to be modern” in a West African village’, American Ethnologist, 22(2): 242–257. Gable, E. (2002) ‘An anthropologist’s (new?) dress code: some brief comments on a comparative cosmopolitanism’, Cultural Anthropology, 17(4): 572–579. Geertz, C. (1960) The Religion of Java. New York: Free Press. Geertz, C. (1963a) Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Geertz, C. (1963b) Peddlers and Princes: Social Change and Economic Modernization in Two Indonesian Towns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Geertz, C. (1968) Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, C. (1980) Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Geertz, C. (1983) ‘ “From the native’s point of view”: on the nature of anthropological understanding’, in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, pp. 55–70. Geertz, C. (1988) Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Geertz, C. (1995) After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gingrich, A. (2005) ‘The German-speaking countries’, in Fredrik Barth et al., One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 61–153. Gluckman, M. (1963) Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa. New York: Free Press.

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Godelier, M. (1999) The Enigma of the Gift. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gregory, C. (1982) Gifts and Commodities. London: Academic Press. Hallowell, A.I. (1960) ‘Self, society and culture in phylogenetic perspective’, in S. Tax (ed.), Evolution after Darwin, vol. 2, The Evolution of Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 309–372. Handler, R. (1988) Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Handler, R. (2005) Critics against Culture: Anthropological Observers of Mass Society. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Hymes, D. (1970) ‘Linguistic method in ethnography: its development in the United States’, in P. Garvin (ed.), Method and Theory in Linguistics. The Hague: Mouton, pp. 249–325. Kerns, V. (2003) Scenes from the High Desert: Julian Steward’s Life and Theory. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Koester, D. (2006) ‘The power of insult: ethnographic publication and emergent nationalism in the sixteenth century,’ in R. Handler (ed.), Central Sites, Peripheral Visions: Cultural and Institutional Crossings in the History of Anthropology (=History of Anthropology, vol. 11). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 8–40. Kroeber, A.L. (1943) ‘Structure, function, and pattern in biology and anthropology’, in The Nature of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1952), pp. 85–94. Kroeber, A.L. and Kluckhohn, C. (1952) Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Cambridge, MA: Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 47(1), Massachusetts. Kroeber, A.L. and Parsons, T. (1958) ‘The concepts of culture and of social system’, American Sociological Review, 23(5): 582–583. Kuper, A. (1973) Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School, 1922–1972. New York: Pica Press. Kuper, A. (1999) Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leach, E. (1976) Culture and Communication: The Logic by which Symbols Are Connected. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leacock, E. (1954) The Montagnais Hunting Territory and the Fur Trade. Washington: American Anthropological Association, memoir 78. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966) The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1967) ‘The story of Asdiwal’, in E. Leach (ed.), The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism. London: Tavistock, pp. 1–48.

Lewin, E. (1993) Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Malinowski, B. (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: Dutton. Malinowski, B. (1927) Sex and Repression in Savage Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mauss, M. (1990) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: W.W. Norton. Mead, M. (1935) Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: Morrow. Modell, J. (1994) Kinship with Strangers: Adoption and Interpretations of Kinship in American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Needham, R. (1973) Right and Left: Essays in Dual Symbolic Classification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ortner, S. (1984) ‘Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26: 126–166. Parsons, T. (1937) The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers. New York: McGraw-Hill. Parsons, T. and Shils, E. (1961) Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Proctor, R. (1988) ‘From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde in the German anthropological tradition’ in G. Stocking (ed.), Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology (=History of Anthropology, vol. 5). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 138–179. Rabinow, P. and Sullivan, W. (eds) (1979) Interpretive Social Science: A Reader. Berkeley: University of California Press. Raheja, G. (1988) The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation, and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, M.D. (1976) Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, M.D. (1981) Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sahlins, M.D. (1985) Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, M.D. (1995) How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, for Example. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, M.D. and Service, E.R. (eds) (1960) Evolution and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sapir, E. (1921) Language. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company. Sapir, E. (1939) ‘Psychiatric and cultural pitfalls in the business of getting a living’, in Selected Writings of

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Edward Sapir. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 578–589. Schechner, R. (1985) Between Theatre and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schneider, D. (1965) ‘Kinship and biology’, in M. Levy Jr. (ed.), Aspects of the Analysis of Family Structure. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 83–101. Schneider, D. (1968) American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Schrift, A. (ed.) (1997) The Logic of the Gift: Towards an Ethics of Generosity. London: Routledge. Segal, D. (2001) ‘ “Western Civ” and the staging of history in American higher education’, American Historical Review, 105(3): 770–805. Steward, J. (1955) Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Stocking, G.W. (1968) Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. New York: Free Press. Stocking, G.W. (1974a) The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911: A Franz Boas Reader. New York: Basic Books. Stocking, G.W. (1974b) ‘The basic assumptions of Boasian anthropology’, in Stocking, 1974a, pp. 1–20. Stocking, G.W. (1976) ‘Ideas and institutions in American anthropology: toward a history of the interwar period’, in G. Stocking (ed.), Selected Papers from the American Anthropologist, 1921–1945. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association, pp. 1–44. Stocking, G.W. (1983) ‘The ethnographer’s magic: fieldwork in British anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski’, in G. Stocking (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork (=History of Anthropology, vol. 1). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 70–120.

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Stocking, G.W. (2001) Delimiting Anthropology: Occasional Inquiries and Reflections. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Stocking, G.W. (2004) ‘A.I. Hallowell’s Boasian evolutionism: human irrationality in cross-cultural, evolutionary, and personal context’, in R. Handler (ed.), Significant Others: Interpersonal and Professional Commitments in Anthropology (=History of Anthropology, vol. 10). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 196–260. Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Trouillot, M-R. (1991) ‘Anthropology and the savage slot: the poetics and politics of otherness’, in R. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 17–44. Turner, V. (1966) The Ritual Process: Structure and AntiStructure. Chicago: Aldine. Turner, V. (1967) The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Turner, V. (1974) Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Turner, V. (1982) From Ritual to Theatre. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Tylor, E.B. (1871) Primitive Culture. London: J. Murray. Wagner, R. (1975) The Invention of Culture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Weston, K. (1991) Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press. White, L. (1949) The Science of Culture. New York: Farrar, Straus and Company. Whorf, B.L. (1956) Language, Thought, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wolf, E. (1982) Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

2 Cultural Geography: An Account Kay Anderson

Human geography, no less than other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, has been swept by the energy of a ‘cultural turn’ in the past two decades. In its wake, geography’s disciplinary engagement with culture has been redistributed well beyond the concerns of those who identify themselves as ‘cultural’ geographers per se. There have even been suggestions that ‘the cultural’ has colonized human geography, as economic, political and social geographers inform their analyses with questions of discourse, identity, meaning and representation (e.g. Barnett, 1998; Crang, 1997; Peach, 2002; Sayer, 1994). Cultures of labour, money, consumption, geopolitical cultures, and culture/nature are just some of the titles of sections in the Handbook of Cultural Geography (Anderson et al., 2002) that gathered together diverse contributions to the ‘style of thought’ geographers are calling ‘cultural’. As the term ‘culture’ transformed beyond a reified concept – of sedimented values adhering to a particular racial, ethnic or national group – so geographers have engaged ‘practices

of meaning’ with radically diverse subject matters. Consistent with the stock-in-trade concepts with which geography as a discipline grew up, such work pursues an interest in the constitutive role of space and place in human meaning systems and practices. In this endeavour, geographers, perhaps more than other culture scientists, have been careful to consider the material conditions of possibility of discursive regimes (from the likes of Cosgrove, 1983, to Henderson, 1999). In other ways, too, they push at the limits of an endeavour focused solely on meaning-making subjects. Within contemporary cultural geography there is as much interest in affective, embodied and sentient subjectivities as symbolizing ones (signalled particularly in the work of Nigel Thrift and others on ‘non-representational geographies’). The focus of the cultural turn in geography on human meaning is also under pressure from work at the culture/nature interface, anticipating some intriguing fragility in the culture concept that has underpinned the post-structural turn of the 1980s – a point

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to which I return in this chapter. In short, ‘cultural analysis’ continues to be a lively and influential presence in geography, animating theoretical debate within and beyond that discipline. In this chapter, I resist the task of marking out the key shifts in direction of cultural geography in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. This is a task that has been comprehensively undertaken in texts almost too numerous to cite, but which include: Anderson and Gale (1992/1999); Anderson et al. (2002); Atkinson et al. (2005); Blunt et al. (2003); Cook et al. (2000); Crang (1998); Duncan, Johnson and Schein (2004); Foote et al. (1994); Jackson (1989); Mitchell (2000); and Shurmer-Smith (2002). This is to name only some of the major book treatments of the subject’s scope and genealogy. The so-called (but no longer) ‘new’ cultural geography has also spawned at least two specialized outlets for the publication of articles in the field, namely the journals Cultural Geographies and Social and Cultural Geography. It follows that charting the succession of traditions in the prevailing Anglo-American narrative of cultural geography’s evolution is increasingly redundant. Such is the vastly proliferating terrain of cultural geography, a field whose genealogy is not itself singular and instead nationally and regionally differentiated. A single sub-disciplinary road map increasingly becomes an impossibly dispersed exercise (see Livingstone, 2003). In a post-colonial world it is also intensely fraught for anyone taking seriously the designation of ‘cultural’ – and however increasingly difficult it is to specify the meaning of that complex and contested term.

FROM CULTURE AS ‘FIXITY’ TO CULTURE AS ‘FLOW’ The transformation that took place in AngloAmerican cultural geography in the 1980s from an ‘old’ to a ‘new’ school of thought is often read in terms of a wider shift in the definition of culture, from an essentialist to

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a non-essentialist theorization. Specifically in relation to geography, this shift was registered in the challenge in the 1980s to the prevailing American Berkeley School’s use of the term ‘culture’ as a ‘superorganic’ entity (Duncan, 1980). The Berkeley School had pursued an approach to culture that underpinned the (often sophisticated) studies of premodern and rural ‘ways of life’ undertaken by that school’s leading exponent, Carl Ortwin Sauer (1889–1975). Sauer drew on the evolutionary model of culture that was given its first formal definition in Edward B. Tylor’s work, Primitive Culture (about which more later). In that work, Tylor defined culture as ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man [sic] as a member of society’ (1924 [orig. 1871]: p. 1). This idea of culture as an inherited bundle of traits shaping human life also informed the significantly more naïve National Geographic style of study of the customs, foods, clothing, music, architecture, religions and languages of the world’s people and places. In this way of thinking, culture was an inter-generational governing force. It was attributed its own explanatory power, as if impacting life and landscape from a position beyond time and space. In conjunction with the rise of cultural history and the field of cultural studies (notably Hall et al., 1980, and Williams, 1973), a more sociological and political theorization of culture arose in geography in the 1980s. As for a number of allied disciplines, culture came to be viewed as a multiple, contested and contradictory system of meanings and practices. In this more interpretive tradition, culture has been defined less as a ‘thing’ in itself, than as a process. Culture is seen as relationally embedded in the societies, economies, histories, geographies and polities that co-construct human discursive and affective practices. In this endeavour, the emphasis on ‘culture’s geograph-ies’ (Ley and Gregory, 1988) implies a distinctive task: demonstrating the engagement of human sensibilities and symbolizations with the multi-scalar processes through which

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people’s lived and material spaces are made, unmade and remade. As mentioned earlier, this mandate enlarged cultural analysis in human geography well beyond the domain of cultural geography per se, with its traditional emphasis on culturally diverse regions and landscapes. To use the laboratory of the city only, cultural analysis in human geography expanded to such diverse subject areas as gentrification, citizenship, public space, consumption, segregation and even topics once the concern of Marxist geographers, including the local relations of class struggle, homelessness and locational conflicts over land use. The post-structuralist reorientation in culture’s theorization in turn fed a much broader conceptual shift in the field of human geography as a whole in the 1980s. This can be summarized in the move from a positivist understanding of space as a ‘surface’on which people, events and so on are distributed and arranged, to a notion of space as relational and co-constitutive of social process (e.g. Massey et al., 2000).

CULTURE’S HUMANIST ONTOLOGY Much has been made in human geography of the radically distinct formulations of the culture concept brought on by this critical engagement with social process. The historicization of human discursive practice and its problematization within the dynamics of social process profoundly transformed cultural (as well as economic and political) analysis in geography and elsewhere. The purpose of this chapter is not to dispute the significance of that transformation, nor to imply any criticism of it. It is fair to say the cultural turn in human geography has been extraordinarily generative in intellectual terms. My interest in what follows is the slippery ‘culture concept’ itself. What bears more attention is the persistence, through the shift in culture’s theorization sketched above, of an anthropological identification of culture with the realm of human experience – that is, with ‘man as a member of society’ in

Tylor’s (gendered) description. Both in the essentializing logic of culture’s presumed naturalness, as for Carl Sauer and others before him like Tylor, and the anti-essentialist logic more recently implied by a Geertzian network of meanings, culture connotes the sphere of ‘sense-making’assigned to the being called ‘the human’. In the terms I wish to employ in this chapter, the positions share a humanist ontology (see below). This persistent humanist baggage need not concern all scholars studying human discursive practices – their nuances, sites of articulation, and power-differentiated effects – as they shape the worlds of work, home, policy, religion, design, shopping, social movements, music, nationalism, tourism, sport and so on. In other words, it does not diminish most of the work on human sense-making and the representation of space and place that passes under the heading of the cultural turn! The endurance of a specifically humanist idea of culture as agency should, however, be of relevance to geographers engaged with fields bearing on the study of human difference – for example of race, indigeneity, cultural diversity, modernity and colonialism. Beyond geography, where cultural theory has had a sustained concern with alterity, the ‘cultural geographic’ account pursued in this chapter is also pertinent. For in this case, we shall see that a historically specific humanism has handed down a distinctive figure of the human – one that has sat and continues to sit in foundational articulation with that profoundly othered figure of ‘the animal’. Confronting the epistemological implications of this humanist legacy is a task barely begun in contemporary critical cultural studies (Wolfe, 2003), and in what follows I make that task urgent by putting humanism into contact with knowledge about not animals, but race. By ‘humanist ontology’is meant something quite specific here. Customarily, humanism is taken to refer to a philosophy of mediation between different human histories and worldviews (e.g. Chambers, 2001; Said, 2002). Said’s (2004) posthumously published Humanism and Democratic Criticism acknowledges the range of literary works that

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are thought to embody a universal human achievement. Said’s ‘humanistic’ purpose in that collection is to fight for the extension of the literary canon to groups and peoples it had historically shunned. Without here disputing this democratic and cosmopolitan impulse, my focus is on alternative humanist ontology – where ontology is taken to imply a framework of thought that is ‘always already’ an outcome of socially constructed ways of knowing. My interest is the anthropological paradigm of a ‘fundamental humanism’ (Derrida, 2003) – present in Western philosophy since classical times – whose point of departure has been the premise of human distinction from the nonhuman world. Not necessarily humansupremacist, this version of philosophical humanism has presumed human uniqueness in the idea that people become ‘human’ as they take distance from nature. In so separating themselves from nature, they exercise what is held to be agency. The intellectual influence of this variant of philosophical humanism is not often acknowledged in histories of the culture concept, in geography or elsewhere (e.g. Eagleton, 2000; Rendell and Mennell, 1998). The split in consciousness between the human and natural sciences has probably reinforced this silence. That knowledge divide is currently being redressed in geography, where the influence of humanism on ideas of human relationship with the nonhuman world is being re-theorized as part of what Whatmore (2002) calls a ‘more-than-human geography’ (see also Castree, 2003; Harrison, Pile and Thrift, 2004; and differently, Wolch and Emel, 1998). Diverse geographic contributions to the field of Social Nature (after Castree and Braun, 2001) demonstrate the sense in which culture and nature are never themselves ‘pure’ domains. Instead they are ‘hybrid’ assemblages of ideas, practices, organic/nonorganic and artificial entities. In these ‘more-than-human worlds’, spaces are opened for new subjects and subjectivities, as well as methodological approaches that refuse a subject/object separation. These varied ‘rhizomatic’ treatments of culture/nature entanglement call attention to

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the legacy of a humanism that closes its ontological gates tightly around a sphere of ‘the human’. Another strategy for so doing is to critically engage humanism’s truthclaims with their own historicity. In such a way, we glimpse the cultural specificity of this most ‘fundamental’ of anthropologies, exposing it as a fraught and fragile ‘event’. After all, Western people’s relationship to nature has never been certain and always loaded with ambiguity. As Williams (1985) asked some years ago: are we ‘in’ or ‘out’ of nature? This is a question that has become all the more controversial in an age of genetic engineering, eliciting an everpresent anxiety and irresolution about Western peoples’ relation to nature. Turning to my purpose here, the chapter dwells less on geographies of social nature than on the impact of Western humanism on formulations of difference between the world’s people. It explores how a certain figure of the human – as a nature-transcending being – has interacted with the identity differentiations of colonial culture. In the spirit of Chakrabarty’s (2000) Provincializing Europe, it tracks the buried ontology of humanism in the innatist and evolutionary paradigms that informed understandings of human difference over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a situated interpreter (rather than an expert decoder), I bring the tools of ‘cultural geographic analysis’ to an account of an ontologically inexplicable savage in a strangely inverted land. In so doing, the story holds up a mirror to ideas that go to the heart of contemporary cultural analysis more generally – those of cultural difference, hierarchy, and what it was and is to be ‘modern’.

POST-HUMANISM AND THE QUESTION OF HUMAN SEPARATENESS FROM NATURE A number of philosophical perspectives have recently engaged in rethinkings of the ‘boundary work’at the interface of culture and nature.

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After the writings of Bruno Latour (e.g. 1987, 1993), there are the reasonably familiar tools of actor network theorists which trace the way that human and nonhuman actors are enrolled in diverse networks through which social action – from agriculture to industry, research to planning – is made to happen. Such perspectives are increasingly joined by philosophies of ‘post-humanism’ that have been set to work on the various dualisms of culture versus nature, civilization versus savagery, that adhere to the human (in geography, see Castree and Nash, 2004). To give far too condensed an explication of post-humanism’s increasingly diffuse and disputed uses, there are the likes of Glendinning’s (1998) On Being with Others, Sheehan’s (2003) Becoming Human, Agamben’s (2004) The Open, Derrida’s (2003) essay ‘And say the animal responded?’, Fernandez-Armesto’s (2004) So You Think You’re Human? and an issue titled ‘Man and Beast’ of the Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (Schor, Weed and Rooney, 2004). Each of these interventions, and by now many more, start from the ontological point that the ‘humanness’ of human beings is not pregiven in any absolute contrast with animals, or in any fixed split within human ‘being’ between a layer of reason, consciousness and symbolizing capacity – some call it culture – existing like a superstructure on top of a bodily substrate identified with instinct, emotions and passions. The speciesspecificity of people is not disputed in this philosophy. There is no shrill naturalism at work which wants to remind us, after Darwin, that, at the end of the day, ‘we are all animals’. Nor is there the suggestion among post-humanists that people are only ‘fully human’ as and when they reconnect with animals and nature. Instead post-humanism’s point of departure, after many decades of influential feminist deconstructions of the mind/body duality, is to refuse the humanist account of living things which begins by presuming a break between humanity and animality. As suggested earlier, much of the work in the post-humanist vein has been driven

by a quest to evoke the agency (or capacity to influence action) of entities in a morethan-human world. Hybrid mixes of human, nonhuman and machine (from soy beans to cows to door hinges) make up the enlarged ethical constituency of what Bruno Latour (1993: pp. 144–145) has called the ‘Parliament of Things’. Latour convincingly argues that the Cartesian divide between nature and culture, humans and other things, is a false one that has given rise to both epistemological confusion and practical problems. For Latour it’s time to find ways to be in the world of which we are part. This line of post-humanist work tends to be inspired by an environmental ethics, though it is one that is distinctly careful to avoid the anti-humanism of animal rights advocacy, deep ecology, some eco-feminist writings, and polemics such as Lines’ (1991) Taming of the Great South Land. In Lines’ shrill anti-humanist account, human-centredness in relation to nature – specifically British settlers’ modern and colonial senses of themselves as superior to nature – is the dominant critical thrust. Anti-humanism also informs the likes of the popular Wisdom of the Elders by Suzuki (1992), where indigenous people are invoked for moral guidance on ‘proper’ ethical relations with nature. In contrast to this vein of anti-humanism, post-humanism gathers together a set of philosophical interrogations of the figure of ‘the human’ (Braun, 2004). In feminist and science studies, the issue of ‘the becoming of the human’ and ‘the post-human’ are being increasingly widely conceived and mapped out. Dominant concerns have been the mediation of human life by technology in late capitalism, including the emergence of artificial intelligence; corporeality and the Internet; the post-human in science fiction; so-called ‘trans-human’ devices designed to surpass one’s biology; and a wide series of other deconstructive rethinkings at the human/machine interface that began with Hayles’ (1999) How We Became Posthuman and continued through the likes of Malik’s (2000) Man, Beast and Zombie to Badmington’s (2004) Alien Chic. Such authors have a series of philosophical

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rethinkings of the figure of the ‘human’ on which to draw. The flight from the humanist definition of man [sic] recalls Nietzsche’s use of animal voices to articulate a rejection of dualism (‘body I am entirely’), and Heidegger’s insistence that man [sic] is not the imperious subject of European thinking since Plato, but merely the bearer of ‘being’; not the creator of language, but its creature (see Davies, 1997: p. 129). Deleuze’s invocation to ‘become-animal’as an experiment in nomadic thought is another post-humanist philosophy that shakes up any presumed fixity to the figure of the human, as does Baudrillard, who sees the fascination of humans with animals as an instance of seduction, a moment that disrupts rationalist readings of ‘the animal’ (see Fudge et al., 1999). These examples of post-humanist thought are intriguing in the way they draw ‘the nonhuman’into a condition of ‘becoming’that has until recently been seen as the prerogative of people. In that regard, they point to an overwhelming repression in a human and social science that continues to assume its subject is ‘always already human’ (Wolfe, 2003).

A ‘CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY’ ACCOUNT AT THE LIMIT OF THE HUMAN My own excavations at the interface of the human/nonhuman have been somewhat different. Taking post-humanist problematizations of ‘the human’ as my point of departure, I have crafted a critical re-reading of relations between civilized and savage people in a site of empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Anderson, 2007). In that work, I argue that Australia’s Aboriginal civilization (more so than the NativeAmerican livelihoods in European encounters in the 1600s) tested the logic of the Enlightenment paradigm that humans realize their very humanness as they take distance from nature. So intractable was Aboriginal civilization to this seventeenth and eighteenth century discourse of human development, that encounters with both this savage and the apparently unimproved

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Australian landscape elicited the anxious speculation by the early nineteenth century that groups of humans might be innately different from each other. In this innatist, and, increasingly from mid-century, evolutionary logic I argue that the Australian was a referential figure in metropolitan theorizations of human difference. In this chapter, with its concern to provide a ‘cultural geographic analysis’, I draw out from that argument the sense in which ‘place’ is central to its logic, both in conceptual and descriptive terms. In regard to colonial Australia, we shall see it was this place – as a specific conjuncture of space and time – that was crucial in the rise and formulation of certain concepts of human difference. My concern in writing a ‘cultural geographic account’ is thus to use Australia not as a regional ‘case study’ of aspects of the European colonial project (which in any event would be to focus on a relatively minor theatre of only one such empire). Instead, my methodological interest in Australia lies in the practice of theorizing from a ‘situated perspective’ (Haraway, 1988) – pursuing a mode of ‘situated writing from new points of view’ (Turner, 1993: p. 12), rather than searching out theory to explain and ‘apply’ (see also Instone, 2004). This entails engaging the possibility that Australia’s real and perceived environmental character and time/space positioning in British imperial extension enable a fresh tale to be told of race, nature and ‘the human’ as entangled ontologies. Generations of scholars well beyond geography have already observed that in midnineteenth century Europe and its derivatives abroad, ideas about human differentiation hardened (e.g. Stepan, 1982; Stocking, 1968, 1987). The idea arose that there were distinct groups of people in the world whose appearance, character and worth were innate and hereditary. But explanations of this shift to ‘innatism’ are surprisingly difficult to find. Even Stocking’s seminal reviews claim to do no more than ‘suggest speculatively several broader contexts’ (for example, a defensiveness in the USA over the abolition

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of slavery; growing strain on the idea of a Christian time scale with the discovery in the 1830s of ‘geologic time’ and human remains on earth; Cook’s voyages and the avalanche of data on human difference they threw up). Stepan, too, falls back on the claim that come the mid-nineteenth century, ‘a new biological and racial determinism was in the air’ (Stepan, 1982: p. 41). The most that Jahoda (1999: p. 75) comes up with is that the discovery of geologic time cast doubt on the biblical account of creation, so ‘facilitating the biologization of human difference’. More recently, the thrust of anti-colonial discourse analysis and critical race theorization has been to implicate the rise of racial discourse in colonialism’s legitimation. In critical historiographies of race and racism and some postcolonial treatments following Said (1978), explanation has been attributed – after Foucault’s work on ‘dividing practices’– to processes of power differentiation under colonialism. In this line of argument, innatism is said to have arisen to justify European privilege and (dis)possession, with the burden of explanation on the will of the European ‘self’ to domination over its negated or denigrated ‘others’ (e.g. Attwood, 1992; Spurr, 1993; Young, 1995). Power’s legitimation has also been invoked to explain the intellectual transition that happened later in the nineteenth century, when the power of ‘biology’ was carried into an idea of evolutionary difference between the world’s people (and beyond, again, to the postcolonial racisms of today, e.g. Balibar, 1991; Gilroy, 2000). Although reasonable, this line of argument concerning the justification of power, in all its contradictory instrumental and conceptual dimensions, is one that benefits from augmentation. Let me now all too briefly read back into a set of Enlightenment writings to inject more precision into accounts of the rise of a discourse of inalterable human difference. Using the tools of post-humanist criticism, my purpose in the following section is to contextualize the chapter’s subsequent account of the rise of innatism and its extension into evolutionary notions of ‘culture as agency’ later in the nineteenth century.

As I hope to show, the real and perceived character of people in place is by no means incidental in this analysis.

AREAL CLASSIFICATION AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT The idea of geographical regions of the world, taken for granted all too effortlessly by people if not scholars today, has its own historicity. A tradition of dividing the world into continents to which separate identities were attributed was rooted in Greek and biblical thought. Browne (1996: p. 314) tracks the beginnings of a more rigorous interpretation of world geography to late Enlightenment writings, arguing it ‘was crystallized in part by Carl von Linnaeus’ (1735) emphasis on the discrete, self-contained nature of faunas and floras’, which gave force to growing public awareness that ‘different kinds of animals and plants were specific to different areas’. The idea that plants and animals had a ‘geography’ was symptomatic of an increasingly specialized effort to classify living species in the hope and expectation of understanding the relationships between them (Bowler, 1992: Chapters 5 and 6). This fascination with the distribution and patterning of living things depended on acquiring and understanding foreign species. Pattern comprehension – above all a visual practice – lay in assimilating collections both near and far into a textual whole. In this plant and animal geography, the location where specimens were found was considered to be fundamentally diagnostic, such that establishing which forms were local to a particular country gave rise to regional floras and faunas in the 1700s and 1800s. Often such regionalizations bore names such as ‘state’, ‘kingdom’, ‘province’, ‘nation’ and ‘colony’, such that parallels with human groupings became commonly drawn. As Thomas (1994: pp. 79–89) notes, in pointing to the essentialization of the character of animal species in Buffon’s Natural History (1766), a distinct increase can be discerned from the time of that publication in efforts

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to assimilate humans to the botanical and zoological subject matter of colonial accounts of the New World. This was evident, Thomas argues, by the time of the Pacific Voyages of the same decade. Specifically, the objects of people and natural history were integrated in Forster’s Observations made during a Voyage round the World (1778), based on his participation in Cook’s second voyage. From around that time, the idea that a diversity of people over often immense areas had significant features in common increasingly drove searches for what were regarded as the characteristics of Asian, African, American, Australian (and so on) people (Marshall and Williams, 1982). By the mid-1800s, when the practice of regionalization was perhaps to reach its apex, world regions were considered separate creations not only of the nonhuman universe, but of human races. Agassiz’s (1857) ‘The Natural Provinces of the Animal World and Their Relation to the Different Types of Man’ was a stark case in point (see later). By that time, the relatively benign Enlightenment idea of a single though diverse and hierarchical creation had given way to a more rigid and invidious idea of separate areal speciation of both human and nonhuman life-forms. What happened in the intervening decades is the story-line of what follows.

CIVILIZATIONAL DISCOURSE AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT For Enlightenment theorists, Scottish ones in particular such as John Millar, Adam Ferguson and John Locke, ‘the human’ was a unified category. This was thought in two senses: (a) the world’s people were one before God, and (b) they shared an essence that evinced itself as people raised themselves out of a ‘state of nature’. They shared a potential to lift themselves above other life-forms which merely lived. Whilst this specifically humanist ontology stretched back to the ancient anthropology of the human as a unique city-building, city-dwelling animal (Glendinning, 2000), as well as to the biblical

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injunction to subdue nature, it was during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that it received sustained elaboration. According to the idea of a progressive human separation from nature – conceived as either exterior or interior to people – a set of social contract and stadial theorists posited a universal human progression from savagery to civilization. Nature was to be cultivated. And, as the etymology of the word ‘culture’ implies (a word whose original primary meaning lay in ‘husbandry’ and the tending of crops and animals [Williams, 1985]), it was in the labour of cultivation that the cultural rather than natural character of the human was articulated. For the social contract theorists, it was the cultivation of human reason over natural instinct or desire (e.g. Rousseau, 1968: p. 65) and, correlatively, the cultivation of land in the transition to a civil society – itself characterized by property, law and the institutions of government (see Locke, 1960: pp. 290–291) – that defined a distinctively human development. For the stadial theorists too, it was the ‘cultivation’ of nature – both in the form of agriculture and the domestication of animals – that was crucial to human progression: in de Pauw’s words: ‘property and all the arts are … born in the womb of agriculture’ (cited in Meek, 1976: p. 146). Consistent with the Enlightenment view of human unity, all imagined humanity sat on the scale of human variation. Accordingly, savagery was something that could be, and on the continent of America had been, surpassed. Only the circumstances of peoples’ mode of living, adapted to specific environments of soil and climate, held them back. People shared a fundamental unity beneath what were (only) superficial differences of colour and character. For this reason, wrote Locke in his essay on property in 1689, ‘In the beginning all the World was America’ (reprinted in 1960). Out of what Locke called the state of nature – that is, the pre-social state before humans joined in the social contract of land enclosure to sustain group survival beyond a hand to mouth existence – savagery would be transmuted into civilization. Such was

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the optimistic destiny of people for selfrealization as human. Come the end of the eighteenth century, Cook’s oceanic voyages and beyond to the ‘Great South Land’ opened vast new vistas. From a very early moment in Australia’s colonization, there was fascination with what was called its ‘singular’ fauna and flora. White’s (1962) Journal of a Voyage to NSW [1790] ripples with descriptions of the ‘oddity’, even perversity, of that colony’s forms of life. The refusal of the country to settle into conventional zoological and botanical categories and the discomfort at making sense of things in what seemed like this upside-down world are palpable in White’s descriptions. The platypus, in particular, aroused curiosity (Ritvo, 1997). On the point of taxonomic order, the slippery creature couldn’t be ‘fitted in’. These ‘one-holers’, as they were called, had a single opening that functioned as both an excretory and reproductive system; they were amphibian, but also terrestrial. Did they hatch their young, or did they give live births? And what to make of the inhabitants of this ‘state of nature’? This was no small problem. Especially problematic, as numerous scholars have noted (e.g. Head, 2000; Powell, 1972; Whatmore, 2002), was the absence on the surface of the land of any visible traces of cultivation, such that the lack of any fixed and cultivating relationship of Australia’s people to land was particularly perplexing. Even the so-called ‘Hottentot’ of Africa’s Cape, whose savagery was sometimes compared to the Aborigine, was acknowledged as ‘at least’ having some of the arts of civil life, including farming (Hudson, 2004). Take as symptomatic the description of Joseph Banks, when he speculated from his (east) Australian coastal vantage point that because there was no cultivation along that coast, either the inland of the continent must be unpeopled or the coastal Aborigines must be akin to monkeys. In Banks’ (1768–1771) journal of his voyage on The Endeavour he stated: We saw indeed only the sea coast: what the immense tract of inland countrey may produce is

to us totally unknown: we may have liberty to conjecture however that they are totally uninhabited. The Sea has I believe been universally found to be the chief source of supplys to Indians ignorant of the arts of cultivation: the wild produce of the Land alone seems scarce able to support them at all seasons, at least I do not remember to have read of any inland nation who did not cultivate the ground more or less, even the North Americans who were so well vers’d in hunting sow’d their Maize. But should a people live inland, who supported themselves by cultivation, those inhabitants of the sea coast must certainly have learn’d to imitate them in some degree at least, otherwise their reason must be suppos’d to hold a rank little superior to that of monkies’. (cited in Beaglehole, J.C., 1962: pp. 122–123)

In Banks’ Enlightenment view there was bewilderment – not necessarily hostile – around the apparent contradiction in Australia of the presence of people and the absence of cultivation. In the logic of the humanist binary of ‘in nature/out of nature’, the Aborigine sat awkwardly at its intersection, eliciting a confusion for colonists about their own uncertain relation to the natural world. Such was humanism’s tenacious, though also tenuous, hold on colonial opinion. A further point to clarify here from such accounts (as Banks’) is the idea of the Aborigine as akin to monkeys – that is, as sub-human or animal-like. The ‘closer to nature’ stereotype has been the focus of at least two lines of academic critique of the inferiorization of indigenous people in the New World: first, liberal critiques of colonial racism on many frontiers of Empire that have made much of (what are considered) the ‘offensive’ parallels drawn between indigenous people and animals (e.g. Fredrickson, 1981; Jordan, 1968; Kuper, 1988; Reynolds, 1989). But consistent with the post-humanist perspective developed here, the invocation of an animal resemblance does not in itself explain anything, however pernicious the intended slur. Second, more recent postcolonial writings on gender and class have also made much of the point that under conditions of culture-contact, some people – the Irish, women, the poor, New World savages – were considered ‘less human’ than others (e.g. Magubane, 2003). But again the humanist

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tropes of ‘less-than-human’, ‘sub-human’ and ‘closer-to-nature’ demand more sustained historicization within the ‘anthropological machine’ of Western humanism.

THE AREAL DIFFERENTIATION OF HUMANITY AND THE RISE OF ‘RACE’ As many historians have noted, there was a perceived incongruity for colonial observers ofAustralia between the country’s ‘untrodden’ state of nature and an imposed landscape order (Gascoigne, 2002; Smith, 1985). What bears further problematization is the sense in which Australia – its people in place – presented a challenge to the Enlightenment idea that the human’s essential and universal humanness lay in the transcendence of nature. For colonial settlers, this was no easily or seamlessly digested disturbance (see also W. Anderson, 2002). On the uncomfortable ground of terra incognita, the settler was stripped of assurances about modes of livelihood, appearance and conduct appropriate to human ‘being’. Most British commentators of the late eighteenth century, however, held to the Enlightenment faith that Aboriginal people – as human and thus nature-transcending beings – held the capacity to improve, even if they had not yet manifested it. A seed of doubt was in place, however, and all the more so into the early decades of the nineteenth century with the failure of concerted efforts to ‘improve’ Aboriginal people. From Governor Macquarie’s ‘Native Institutions’ to various attempts at enclosing Aborigines, there emerged a perplexing intractability to improvement that grew all the more conspicuous with the development of European farming on the challenging semi-arid continent. Not only did the original inhabitants (appear to) lack cultivation practices – and so separate themselves in this way from nature – they showed little interest in being induced into a state of settled cultivation with all its putative civilizing potentialities. Note the bafflement, even the despairing tone, of the Secretary of the Colonial Office

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in London, Lord Stanley, in writing to the Governor of NSW in 1842: ‘[I]t seems impossible any longer to deny that the efforts which have hitherto been made for the civilization of the aborigines have been unavailing … I cannot conceal from myself that the failure of the system of protectors has been at least as complete as that of the missions … [I]t is … my hope you can suggest some general plan by which we may acquit ourselves of the obligations we owe towards this most helpless race of beings. I should not, without the most extreme reluctance, admit nothing can be done; that with respect to them alone … the advantages of civilization [are] incommunicable. I cannot acquiesce in the theory they are incapable of improvement, and that their extinction before the advance of the white settler is a necessity which it is impossible to control’. (Stanley to Gibbs, 20 December 1842, cited in Colonial Office, 1844: pp. 221–223)

In the spirit of an affective historiography of colonialism, Stanley’s anguish can be read as a form of rupture – a crisis at the existence of people who were apparently not moving progressively out of nature. Indeed I have elsewhere argued that such was the Australian disturbance to Enlightenment optimism, coming off the back of encounters in the Americas, that it precipitated speculation across the 1830s and 1840s that the human category might not be unified at all, that different humans might even constitute different species, or, as the English physician Robert Knox (1850) was to title his book, separate Races of Man. The apparently anomalous human in a strangely inverted land informed ‘extreme’ theorizing in other centres of knowledge production. In the USA, Harvard professor Louis Agassiz drew attention to the ‘condensed picture’ offered by the ‘insular continent’ of New Holland. Building on the kinds of narrations of Australian extremities mentioned earlier,Agassiz claimed exemplary evidence was there to be found of ‘centres of creation’ of human and nonhuman life-forms. In his words, ‘the isolation of zoological types of Australia’ was ‘striking’. And, in a teleological tracing of origins that was now fundamentally territorial, he explicitly linked an original people – as for other forms of

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life – to a point on the earth’s surface. ‘All the animals differ so completely there from those of other parts of our globe, that it may be said to constitute a world in itself … a realm, which is also inhabited by two races of men, the Australian in New Holland, and the Papuans upon the Islands’ (1857: p. lxxiii). The emerging shift in thought about the human ‘family’ is often explained (away) in intellectual histories of race as a rational defence of colonial power. My interest here, without disputing that argument, is in drawing attention to the provocation that Australian encounters presented to the anxious figure of ‘the human’ as a naturetranscending being. Rather than entertain the possibility that people could realize their humanness in ways radically different to the developmental trajectory with which Western civilization and theology had grown up, a thesis of discrete difference was gaining ground around the referentiality of the noncultivating Australian presumed to sit at the limit of the human. Foremost among the indices that would now be used to assert and generalize to other people the thesis of innate difference was the skull. The skull was presumed to house the organ with the potential to discipline interior animal nature and the capricious wildness of nature beyond. Here, variously trained ‘craniologists’ undertook detailed ideological work across the skulls of the world’s ‘races’, as many historiographies of science and empire have already noted (Gould, 1997; Stepan, 1982). But again, the specificity and strained intensity of the obsession with the brain needs theorizing beyond its legitimating function in empire’s projects. Craniology was a peculiarly humanist enterprise, one that diverse traditions of critique of European ethnocentrism, prejudice, colonial power and domination (with their ontological gates tightly closed around ‘the human’) have yet to critically register. And, as we shall see in the next section, anxious colonial encounters with all that could be made to stand as nature entered into formulations of another basic concept – of culture – that variously persist to today.

CULTURE AS ‘AGENCY’ IN VICTORIAN EVOLUTIONISM Few texts have been as central in shaping thought about the place of the human species on earth as those written by Charles Darwin during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s. The Origin of Species (1859) and in particular The Descent of Man (1871) were influential renditions of what Sheehan calls ‘temporalized chains of being’ (Sheehan, 1991: p. 31). The term ‘temporalized’ is important here in that while medieval and post-Renaissance ‘chain-of-being’thought conceived of barriers between vertically arranged species, it did not do so between living species and their ancestors. Modern evolutionism was quite different in accepting continuity of change through time (Bowler, 1992: p. 157). Not that this turn of events saw a diminution of ‘the human’s’ avowedly cardinal place on earth. Paradoxically, even through Darwinism, we shall see persisting the felt sense of categorical distinction between the life-form who could transcend nature and the rest who were presumed to merely live. Indeed what is fascinating about evolutionary accounts of the continuity of descent between human and animal is the struggle embedded within them, and especially in the writings of the evolutionist Alfred Wallace (1864), to maintain the doctrine of human distinction (from nature). To be clear, nineteenth-century human evolutionism explicitly restored the idea of unity among humans on earth. Darwinism put an end to the thesis of separately created races. All humans had a shared species origin, a continuity with other animals. But we shall see that the idea of human unity was restored in so far as the very thesis of human evolutionism maintained, even relied upon, a trace of race as innate difference or type. The significance of this for the emergence of a humanist understanding of culture is my concern here. As the figuration of the universal human’s evolution was now explicitly temporalized, it was also figured as a ‘split’ process such that on the one hand, there was a sphere of cultural evolution identified with

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consciousness, and on the other hand, a sphere of biological evolution associated with an infrastructural bodily base (see Ingold, 1995). And consistent with this chapter’s emphasis on ‘situated theorizing’, we shall see that into that awkward discursive space separating the cultural and biological within ‘the human’was thrust the figure of Australian savagery. This stage of the British colonial venture in Australia was marked by a stronger formulation of that country’s ‘remoteness’, ‘isolation’ and ‘antiquity’ (more so than its apparently ‘unimproved’ state, as for Bank’s era). What sense, after all, was to be made of a people so apparently rude, given that it was no longer reasonable to conceive of them as a separate racial creation? Perhaps they were embodiments of ‘early man [sic]’, ‘living fossils’ still walking a distant corner of the earth? Such was the new sense in which Australia’s savage – and especially the apparently ‘even more’ isolated Tasmanian – became referential to the late nineteenthcentury view of human evolution (see also Butcher, 1994). At a time when it was unpalatable for many Victorians to accept the bodily descent of all people from apes, this figure was to enable evolution’s theorization of ‘the human’ in all its uncomfortably split conception of being. Culture (as learning) propelled the body (as stasis) on a path of cultural development that had begun with the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer, or so went the evolutionary story-line. The argument is sometimes put that Darwinists and ‘Social Darwinists’ assigned New World savages the place of the ‘missing link’ between people and primates. Such was the level of racism of the late nineteenth century that Darwinism is said to have encouraged offensive ‘chain of being’ images of the ‘lower races’ as animal-like (e.g. McConnochie et al., 1988). ‘Offensive’ may well be a reasonable reading of such analogies. To imply the darker races were ape-like was indeed, in intention, a slur on such people. But however pernicious the nineteenth-century view that certain groups of people were ‘beastly’, the anticolonial critique of an animal attribution to

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New World savages fails to confront what it actually reveals about the formulation of human ‘being’ in the strands of philosophical humanism of interest to this chapter.

HUMAN SEPARATENESS IN EVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT Darwin’s all-embracing theory of the diversity of life on earth did not afford exceptional status to ‘the human’. Descent of Man argued the highly controversial claim of an animal origin to humankind. By this time, the discovery around 1860 of stone tools associated with the bones of extinct animals (sloths, mammoths) had firmly established the antiquity of humans on earth (Griffiths, 1996: p. 58). Also by this time, Darwin had a number of key evolutionary works on which to draw, not least those by Wallace, Huxley, Lubbock and Tylor. Some years earlier Huxley’s (1894) Man’s Place in Nature had stressed the physical resemblances between humans and apes. Darwin picked up this thread of anthropoid origins, implying, if not explicitly arguing, that the process of human physical evolution from homo erectus through neanderthal man and onwards to (what today is called) anatomically modern homo sapiens was embedded in the trajectory of a progress of life towards higher levels of organization and consciousness (Ingold, 1995). The hallmarks of the contemporary human were taken to be an upright posture and enlarged brain, the latter of which had evolved, it was asserted, to exploit the tool-making capacities of hands now freed from the task of locomotion. And in this respect, Darwin and many of his evolutionary colleagues took it as given that the steady expansion of the brain continued the progressive thread that ran through the whole evolution of life. In other words, Darwin argued not only for a biological continuity between the ‘lowest man and the highest animal’, but an intellectual and moral continuity as well (McGregor, 1997: p. 28). Indeed Wallace (who is given more attention below) argued that the key story of human evolution got started not with physical

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development, but with the development of mental growth (called ‘culture’). For Wallace, as well as for the cultural evolutionists and evolutionary anthropologists who followed him, it was ‘mental’ growth – correlated with, and calibrated upon, an expansion of the brain – that constituted the essential story of human evolution. Human physical development was seen as having been ‘completed’ some time ago. As Stepan puts it: ‘scientists on the whole interpreted evolution in such a way as to make natural selection no longer operative on physical man’ (Stepan, 1982: p. 85). And it was in the thesis that physical – including racial – development preceded a distinctively human form of mental evolution, that ‘racial types could be thought of as extremely old and fixed’ (Stepan, 1982: p. 85). In its explicit monogenism (belief in human unity), evolutionary theory imported an Enlightenment style of explanation to account for human physical difference. For Wallace, in his influential ‘The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of Natural Selection’ (1864), ‘all the differences that now appear’ among peoples were considered to have been the product of varying ‘climate, food and habits’ (Wallace, 1864: p. clix). But, compromising Wallace’s putative return to a notion of human unity, and to the earlier Enlightenment idea of race as a mere subdivision of the world’s people, ‘raciation’ – as he termed it – had been determined long ago. At some point, he suggested, when humans ‘had the form but hardly the nature of man’ (Wallace, 1864: p. clxvi), natural selection had ceased to operate on the human body. In a statement that bears quoting at length, Wallace notes: there came into existence a being in whom that subtle force we term mind became of greater importance than his mere bodily structure. Though with a naked and unprotected body, this gave him clothing against the varying inclemencies of the seasons. Though unable to compete with the deer in swiftness, or with the wild bull in strength, this gave him weapons with which to capture or overcome both. Though less capable than most other animals of living on the herbs and fruits that unaided nature supplies, this wonderful faculty

taught him to govern and direct nature to his own benefit … From the moment when the first skin was used as a covering, when the first rude spear was formed to assist in the chase, the first seed sown or shoot planted, a grand revolution was effected in nature … for a being had arisen who was no longer necessarily subject to the changing universe – a being who was in some degree superior to nature, inasmuch as he knew how to control and regulate her action … not by change in body, but by advance of mind. Here, then, we see the true grandeur and dignity of man. (Wallace 1864: p. clxviii)

It was, therefore, in the re-articulation of a specifically humanist ontology that Wallace correlated a human/mental form of evolution with an increasing separation from nature. As indicated by the more or less classical idea of savagery that here provides a counterpoint to what Wallace was to term ‘the higher … races’, his ‘lower and more degraded races’ were precisely those who could be characterized as this ‘zero point’ of human evolution (Wallace, 1864: p. clxv; see Bennett 2004, chapter 6, on the endurance and implications of the ‘emptying out’ of any ‘temporal dynamics’ to Aboriginal culture implied by such evolutionary readings). For Wallace, as well as for those who drew upon his account, it was ‘the Australians’ who were considered to be ‘the lowest [race] of our modern epoch’ (Wallace, 1864: p. clxvii). And as we will see now, it was as this evolutionary understanding of race was figured and confirmed with reference to Australia – its intractable peoples and continental remoteness – that a renewed determinism came to inform the evolutionists’ understanding of human differences. Wallace’s argument did not imply, as the Enlightenment stadial theorists had, that all people had the capacity to develop. Rather, it was according to the relative permanence of racial difference that the development of certain races was considered to have been ‘arrested’ – precisely at that point where the mental capacity of others had started to evolve. It was, then, as Australia’s savage came to be regarded as representative of the earliest stage of evolution that the Aborigines occupied a crucial place in Wallace’s argument, and in its further

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elaboration: as paradigmatic figures of an attenuated evolutionary process. Recalling the earliest Enlightenment representations of the peculiarity of Australia’s flora and fauna, and the initial suspicion that the continent may have been an entirely separate creation, it was the thesis of Australia’s isolation that informed the claim not only for its general peculiarity, but now also for its antiquity. Australia was considered an evolutionary backwater, a refuge for forms of life that had become extinct elsewhere, a ‘museum of living antiquities’ (McCabe, 1910). And, just as Australia’s eucalypts and wattles were regarded as primitive types of vegetation, and its monotremes and marsupials the oldest and lowest class of mammals, so it apparently followed that ‘if it be true that the continent of Australia is the oldest portion of the earth’s surface, it can well be understood how it is that its aboriginal inhabitants are the most uncivilized races of mankind’ (1867: p. cv).

TYLOR’S TOOLS It was in the evolutionists’ obsession with the human capacity (or incapacity) to rise above nature that the Aborigine – or more particularly now the Tasmanian – became the pivotal figure in their formulation of culture as ‘agency’. Consistent with Wallace’s emphasis upon human mental evolution, and its correlation with the improvement of nature, it was a comparative analysis of the implements of this improvement that preoccupied cultural evolutionists such as Edward B. Tylor and Lt.-Gen. Pitt-Rivers. On his own collection of implements, Pitt-Rivers, stated in 1870 that: In every instance in which I have attempted to arrange my collection in sequence, so as to trace the higher forms from natural forms, the weapons of the Australians have found their place lowest in the scale, because they assimilate most closely to the natural forms. (cited in Mulvaney, 1981: p. 54)

Tylor’s focus was the onset of the human’s socio-cultural development, which presented for him the task of reconstructing the past

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out of its ‘survivals’ in the present. After Wallace, Tylor referred to this socio-cultural development as ‘Man’s power over Nature’ (Tylor, 1865: p. 190) and, turning his attention to the various ‘stages’ through which humans had evolved, his favoured measures were the ‘quality of stone implements’. The Aborigine provided the reference point for Tylor’s investigations into culture in so far as, he argued, the inhabitants of Australia lived in ‘original Stone Age conditions’ (Tylor, 1865: pp. 204/371). In 1899, Tylor again stated: ‘If there have remained anywhere up to modern times men whose condition has changed little since the early Stone Age, the Tasmanians seem to have been such a people. They stand before us as a branch of the Negroid race illustrating the condition of man near his lowest known level of culture’(Tylor, 1899: p. v, emphasis added). For Tylor, the archaic Tasmanian, cut off from ‘even’Australia’s mainland, was construed as approximating human origins more faithfully than other people on earth. And, noting that ‘[t]he life of these savages proves to be … undeveloped … so much so that the distinction of being the lowest of the normal tribes may be claimed for them’ (Tylor, 1894: p. 152), it was with the Tasmanian as his baseline that Tylor articulated the general thesis of progressive human evolution: ‘few would dispute that the following races are arranged rightly in order of culture: Australian, Tahitian, Aztec, Chinese, the Italian’ (Tylor, 1958: p. 27). This and similar hierarchies articulated by other evolutionists, including John Lubbock and Lewis Henry Morgan, can be distinguished from those proposed by the more benign stadial theorists of universal human development in the eighteenth century. For although Tylor, for example, was – as his comparative method demanded – an avowed monogenist, he nevertheless wrote: There seems to be in mankind inbred temperament and inbred capacity of mind. History points the great lesson that some races have marched on in civilization while others have stood still or fallen back, and we should partly look for an explanation of this in differences of intellectual and moral powers. (cited in Bowler, 1992: p. 727)

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In this respect, and clearly with the Tasmanians and the Australians in mind, Tylor employed an idea of human difference that compromised the thesis of human unity. Other evolutionists, who also invoked race in a way that equated differences in physicality or livelihood with a distinct or deficient ‘inbred’ mental power (for example, Morgan, 1877: pp. 17–18), were less inhibited in taking up the legacy of polygenism (the belief in separate creations). For Wallace, mental capacity developed after ‘raciation’, the latter of which had already occurred. But, it was in this ongoing human development, which took place in the progressive exercise of intellect, that Wallace nevertheless posited further ‘evolution’: in ‘brain size and complexity’ and ‘corresponding changes of form to the cranium’ (Wallace, 1864: clxvii).

CULTURE AND CRANIA For Wallace, and Morgan among others, human cultural evolution was also a cranial evolution. In parallel with Tylor’s culturally materialist attempts to map the Aborigine onto the evolutionary past, Huxley had already claimed that the skulls of Australians – whom he referred to as ‘the lowest and most degraded in rank of any which can claim humanity’ – are ‘wonderfully near the degraded type of the Neanderthal skull’ (Huxley, 1862: p. 166). In this respect it was not only that the size of the skull was measured and understood as a (flawed and pernicious) index of mental superiority/inferiority (Gould, 1997; Stepan, 1982). Rather, in (post)humanist terms, craniology can be understood as a quite specific (and contingent) measure of the organ presumed to index agency over nature. And on this point, theAustralianAborigine once again proved as formative for evolutionary theory as s/he had been for innatism, as accounts and analyses of Australian skull capacity proliferated (Bradley, 1873; Duckworth, 1894; and numerous others, including of Aboriginal female skulls). Darwin himself was to invoke craniology and its derivation of a racial hierarchy of mental (in)capacity: ‘Dr. J. Barnard

Davis has proved that the mean internal capacity of the skull in Europeans is 92.3 cubic inches: in Americans 87.5; in Asiatics 87.1; and in Australians only 81.9 cubic inches’ (cited in Gould, 1997: p. 77). The Aborigines’ lack of improvement – so remarked upon earlier in the century – was now traced to a deficiency in their mental evolution. And, in the craniological elaboration of the Australians’ apparently arrested development, the barely reworked polygenist conclusion followed: that, owing to this cranial deficiency, and in the absence of its correction, ‘no permanent or general change or improvement can be brought about in these lower races’ (Anonymous, 1897: p. 111). Despite the evolutionists’ belief in the unity of humankind, there was, therefore, no return to a hopeful Enlightenment idea of universal improvability among the world’s people. Indeed, for Wallace as well as for many others, it was the Aborigines’ apparent lack of ‘mental power’, and so their inability to evolve culturally, which informed the notorious thesis of the ‘inevitable extinction’ of savage races (1864: p. clxv). ‘If my conclusions are just’, Wallace stated: it must inevitably follow that the higher – the more intellectual and moral – must displace the lower and more degraded races. (Wallace, 1864: p. clxix)

Others, too, invoked the Australian Aborigine and the Tasmanian in order not just to support, but to formulate, the argument that those who had not managed to turn nature to their own ends were destined to give way to those who had. If ‘the human’was alone among lifeforms in realizing a potentiality in a movement out of nature, here on this remote land was the counter-example that, in James Bonwick’s words, had no place within the human ‘family’ (on ‘doomed race’ theory more generally, see Brantlinger, 2003). Observing that ‘the race, as a race, is not rising … [that] Australian aborigines … are descending to the grave’, Bonwick generalized what now appeared to be the only ‘future’ imaginable for Australia’s persistently anomalous inhabitants: ‘Old races everywhere give place to the new’ (Bonwick, 1887: pp. 207, 210).

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CONCLUSION In this chapter I have offered a ‘cultural geographic analysis’ of subject matter that is central to the concerns of scholars of race, culture, modernity and colonialism. In this endeavour, I have used an orientation in cultural geography to inject a ‘situated’ perspective into a story of the shifting ontologies of race, nature and the human. This, it bears emphasizing, is to do something more in methodological terms than introduce a ‘case study’ from a site on imperialism’s globe at ‘location x’. Such a barely reworked positivist notion of the ‘case study’ tends to imply that ‘location x’ is an example of a more generalizable theory. Speculatively, such a framework here might be Enlightenment othering – where the ‘data’ of diverse places and time-periods in Europe’s imperial projects are ‘read off’as instances of unfaltering power and superiority. But Australia is interesting precisely because such a logic did not unfold seamlessly there; indeed the particular time/space conjuncture of that continent – specifically, the emphasis placed by colonial observers on the ‘extremity’ and ‘remoteness’ of the continent – played a key role, I have argued, in structuring some highly influential concepts of human difference. In early twentieth century American geography, ‘culture’ was the name given to the evolutionary force behind the imprints that diverse groups of people left on the face of the earth. For Sauer (1956: p. 52), echoing the cultural evolutionists we encountered late in this chapter, and beyond them to the likes ofAlfred Kroeber’s (1952) ‘superoganic’ notion of culture: ‘Man alone ate of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge … and thereby began to acquire or transmit learning, or Culture’. As such, culture was a universal capacity ‘even of the most primitive people, including the obtuse Tasmanians’, in Sauer’s words, to change the face of the earth. It was an entity whose laws of operation supplemented ‘organic evolution’ with a new method of change to the physical environment (Thomas, 1956). Against the then-dominant perspective of environmental determinism,

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Sauer (1925) argued the case for ‘cultural landscapes’ – conceived as the result of ‘the hand of man [sic]’ or ‘culture’ on the medium of nature. Such was ‘the agency of man’ (1956) discernible across distinctive regional landscapes. Here then, as in Tylor, cultural evolutionism mixed – uneasily – with cultural relativism. Much later in the twentieth century, this view of culture as a reified evolutionary entity underwent the critique mentioned at this chapter’s outset. Criticism tended to focus on the lameness of the ‘black box’ notion of inherited culture for explaining events and landscapes in their historical and political contexts (Duncan, 1980). Culture, in turn, and for a later generation of geographers, was stripped of its causal efficacy. It became understood not as something possessed or possessable and instead, in what Barnett (2004: p. 39) describes as a ‘determined nondefinition’ or ‘deferral’, as a historically variable range of discursive practices. Elsewhere, too, in anthropology, Ortner (1999: p. 9) insisted ‘there is no longer anything we would call “culture” or “cultures”, but that we want cultural interpretation to do different kinds of work’. In the new kind of work expected of cultural analysis in geography, there has been an explosion of research that spatializes the understanding of identity politics, subjectivity, discourse, representation, embodiment, mobility and other stock-in-trade concerns of the cultural turn more generally. The wave of post-structuralist critique of all manner of binary systems of thought has, however, left the totalizing epistemology of humanism largely intact and settled. This is not relevant to, nor does it undermine, most of the work that passes under the banner of the ‘cultural turn’ in geography. But the evolutionary model of culture passed down in anthropology to Sauerian cultural geography can, as implied earlier, be subjected to further lines of ontological critique beyond those already noted by critics of deterministic theorizations of culture. No one, and not post-humanists, questions the species-specificity of people and the rich

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array of their symbolic practices that will always have a place in ‘a science of man [sic] and his deeds’, as anthropology once called itself (Hubinger, 1997: p. 527). Few scholars, and not post-humanists, argue that people are only ‘fully human’ as and when they reconnect with animals and nature. Jettisoning humanist perspectives is not on the cards, even as we try to problematize the reified categories delivered to us by them. But as this chapter has argued, there is scope for a significantly more critical engagement in cultural geography with the ontology of the human as a nature-transcending being. This model of ‘the human’ lies buried, though not dead, in a range of humanities disciplines including anthropology, where critiques of cultural evolutionism in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Geertz, 1973; Keesing, 1974) did not destabilize an ‘always already’ humanism in the subject. Today there would be few scholars invested in the concept of culture handed down by evolutionism. But nor are there many scholars critically pursuing the implications of cultural theory’s persistent humanist notion of ‘the human’ and its disavowal of the nonhuman (though see Muecke, 2004). Until recently this silence applied also in human geography, a subject that has staked much of its defining identity on understanding people/environment relations. And while recent critical reformulations of this relationship as a set of ‘entangled ecologies’ (Murdoch, 2004) tend to hail from scholars seeking to recuperate nature and animals to the subject’s ethical consideration, here I have tried to suggest how a sensibility that is prepared to traffic across human and nonhuman spheres opens up generative lines of enquiry for themes more familiar to humanities scholars. Thinking the humanities beyond humanism entails much more than a simple extension to ‘speciesism’ of the vast amount of critical attention afforded the subjects of racism and sexism. Something more transformative is at stake in a posthumanist sensibility that is prepared to relinquish the felt presumptions that the defining characteristic of people is the potential to

transcend life-forms that merely live. In this chapter, I have not even begun the task of specifying the contours of a post-humanist humanities. But it is likely that revisioning would be radical, and here I hope to have aroused interest in the value and urgency of that challenge by bringing humanism into critical contact with the perniciously resilient category of race.

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Glendinning, S. (1998) On Being with Others: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida. London: Routledge. Glendinning, S. (2000) ‘From animal life to city life’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 5: 19–30. Gossett, T. (1965) Race: The History of an Idea in America. New York: Schocken. Gould, S. (1997) The Mismeasure of Man. London: Penguin. Griffiths, T. (1996) Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, S., Hobson, D., Lowe. A. and Willis, P. (1980) Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79. London: Routledge. Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14(3): 575–599. Harrison, S., Pile, S. and Thrift, N. (eds) (2004) Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion Books. Hayles, K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Head, L. (2000) Second Nature: The History and Implications of Australia as Aboriginal Landscape. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Henderson, G. (1999) California and the Fictions of Capital. London: Oxford University Press. Hiatt, R. (1996) Arguments About Aborigines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hubinger, V. (1997) ‘Anthropology and modernity’, International Social Science Journal, 49(4): 527–536. Hudson, N. (2004) ‘“Hottentots” and the Evolution of European Racism’, Journal of European Studies, 34(4): 308–332. Huxley, T.H. (1894) Man’s Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays. London: Macmillan. Ingold, T. (1995) ‘“People like us”: the concept of the anatomically modern human’, Cultural Dynamics, 7(2): 187–214. Instone, L. (2004) ‘Situating nature: on doing cultural geographies of Australian Nature’, Australian Geographer, 35(2): 131–140. Jackson, P. (1989) Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography. London: Unwin Hyman. Jahoda, G. (1999) Images of Savages. London: Routledge. Jordan, W. (1968) White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Baltimore: Penguin. Keesing, R. (1974) ‘Theories of culture’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 3: 73–97. Knox, R. (1850) The Races of Man: A Fragment. London: Henry Renshaw.

Kroeber, A. (1952) ‘The superorganic’, in A. Kroeber (ed.), The Nature of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 22–51. Kuper, A. (1988) The Invention of Primitive Society. London: Routledge. Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ley, D. and Gregory, D. (1988) ‘Culture’s geographies’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 6: 115–116. Lines, W. (1991) Taming the Great South Land: A History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Livingstone, D. (2003) Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Locke, J. (1960) [1689] Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Magubane, Z. (2003) Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Malik, K. (2000) Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Human Nature. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Marshall, P.J. and Williams, G. (1982) The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment. Melbourne: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd. Massey, D., Allen, P. and Sarre, P. (eds) (2000) Human Geography Today. Cambridge: Polity. McCabe, J. (1910) ‘Australia – a museum of living antiquities’, The Lone Hand, Nov. 1, VIII: 38–46. McConnochie, K., Hollinsworth, D. and Pettman, J. (1988) Race and Racism in Australia. Sydney: Social Science Press. McGregor, R. (1997) Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Meek, R. (1976) Social Science and The Ignoble Savage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, D. (2000) Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Morgan, L.H. (1877) Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery to Barbarism to Civilisation. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. Muecke, S. (2004) Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy. Sydney: UNSW Press. Mulvaney, D. (1981) ‘Gum leaves on the Golden Bough: Australia’s Palaeolithic survivals discovered’, in J.D. Evans, B. Cunliffe and C. Renfrew (eds), Antiquity and Man. London: Thames and Hudson, pp. 52–64.

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Murdoch, J. (2004) ‘Humanising posthumanism’, Environment and Planning A, 36: 1356–1359. Ortner, S. (1999) The Fate of Culture: Geertz and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peach, C. (2002) ‘Social geography: new religions and ethnoburbs: contrasts with cultural geography’, Progress in Human Geography, 26(2): 252–260. Powell, J. (1972) Images of Australia 1788–1914. Melbourne: Monash Publications in Geography. Rendell, J. and Mennell, S. (eds) (1998) Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization. London: Routledge. Reynolds, H. (1989) Dispossession. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Ritvo, H. (1997) The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rousseau, J.J. (1968) [1763] The Social Contract. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. London: Penguin. Said, E. (2002) Power, Politics, Culture. New York: Vintage. Said, E. (2004) Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press. Sauer, C. (1925) ‘The morphology of landscape’, University of California Publications in Geography, 2(2): 19–54. Sauer, C. (1956) ‘The agency of man on earth’, in W. Thomas (ed.), Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Saville-Kent, W. (1897) The Naturalist In Australia. London: Chapman and Hall Ltd. Sayer, A. (1994) ‘Cultural studies and “The economy, stupid”’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 12(6): 635–637. Schor, N., Weed, E. and Rooney, E. (2004) ‘Man and beast’, special issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 15: 1. Sheehan, P. (2003) Becoming Human. Connecticut: Praeger Publishers. Sheehan, J. and Sosna, M. (eds) (1991) The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shurmer-Smith, P. (2002) Doing Cultural Geography. London: Sage. Smith, B. (1985) European Vision and the South Pacific. New Haven: Yale University Press. Spurr, D. (1993) The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham: Duke University Press. Stafford, R. (1980) ‘Annexing the landscapes of the past: British Imperial geography in the nineteenth century’, in J.M. Mackenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 67–89.

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Stepan, N. (1982) The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960. London: Macmillan. Stocking, G. (1968) Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. New York: The Free Press. Stocking, G. (1987) Victorian Anthropology. New York: The Free Press. Suzuki, D. (1992) Wisdom of the Elders: Sacred Native Stories of Nature. New York: Bantam. Thomas, W. (ed.) (1956) Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thomas, N. (1994) Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Turner, G. (ed.) (1993) Nation, Culture, Text: Australian Cultural and Media Studies. London: Routledge. Tylor, E.B. (1865) Researches into the Early History of Mankind. London: John Murray. Tylor, E.B. (1894) ‘On the Tasmanians as representatives of Palaeolithic Man’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 23: 141–152. Tylor, E.B. (1895) ‘On the occurrence of ground stone implements of Australian type in Tasmania’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 24: 335–340. Tylor, E.B. (1899) ‘Preface’, in H. Ling Roth (ed.), The Aborigines of Tasmania. Halifax: F. King and Sons Printers, pp. v–viii. Tylor, E.B. (1924) [1871] Primitive Culture, 2 vols, 7th edn. New York: Brentano’s. Tylor, E.B. (1958) [1871] Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom. New York: Harper and Row. Wallace, A. (1864) ‘The origin of human races and the antiquity of man deduced from the theory of natural selection’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of London, volume 2: clviii–clxxxvii. Whatmore, S. (2002) Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces. London: Sage. White, J. (1962) [1790] Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Williams, R. (1973) The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus. Williams, R. (1985) Keywords. New York: Oxford University Press. Wolch, J. and Emel, J. (eds) (1998) Animal Geographies: Place, Politics and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands. London: Verso. Wolfe C. (ed.) (2003) Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Young, R. (1995) Colonial Desire. London: Routledge.

3 Psychology and Cultural Analysis Valerie Walkerdine and Lisa Blackman

CULTURE AND THE PSYCHE Attempts to link culture to psychology have been in evidence since the birth of the human and social sciences. Wilhelm Wundt, one of the so-called fathers of modern psychology, called for a folk psychology to understand the ‘higher psychological functions’, such as thinking, arguing that they were not amenable to experimental study. Freud saw civilization as putting brakes on what he understood as animal or primitive drives. This was vigorously taken up by early anthropologists looking for universal psychic patterns within kinship structures of cultures. Indeed, Freud’s ideas were put into practice by his nephew Bernays as a way of marketing to and creating desire within the early mass markets of twentieth-century USA. However, Anglo-American psychology in particular moved away from both folk psychology and psychoanalysis, in pursuit of an experimentally derived cognitive universalism. This universalism understood that the science of psychology must generally

map universal psychological processes in which the individual is comprised. This science was largely modelled on nineteenthcentury physics and understood as being about laboratory-based experimentation. As Foucault has shown us, the individual is a specifically historical form of the human subject. Psychology then was deeply connected with the production of a science through which this individual could be studied and known. It was not, perhaps, until the resurgence of Left politics and the counter-cultural movements of the late 1960s within the Anglo-American tradition that those Othered approaches to psychology began to resurface in demands for a different kind of knowledge (see for example, Trevor Pateman’s Counter Course, 1972), spurred on by radical student protest, the culture of opposition to the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights and emerging women’s and gay liberation movements. In magazines such as Red Rat, psychology students and others explored what they began to call radical psychology, in which an oppressive

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psychology was critiqued in terms of the possibility of one which was not ‘ideology posing as science’ but genuinely liberatory. The moment equally spanned anti-psychiatry movements, and it was the time at which Foucault’s critiques of the human sciences also started to become known in the AngloSaxon world. These new radical sensibilities in psychology formed a counter-cultural movement within the discipline, which was much more resistant than other social sciences to radical reworking. For example, it was in the 1970s that Armistead (1974) announced the ‘crisis in social psychology’. This was a crisis understood in relation to the problems of experimentalism and the impossibility of this project. Although alternative approaches within social and developmental psychology hold more sway than they did 30 years ago, the discipline is still dominated by a universalist cognitivism, or more recently neuroscience. All of this is by way of saying that the attention to culture within psychology has followed two paths. The first, within the universalist tradition, is to understand psychology as offering a set of universal psychological processes, for example, of development. In this approach, culture is understood as a secondary process, so that, for example, the so-called primitive cultures might be understood as hampering development and the so-called advanced cultures as aiding it. While many mainstream psychologists may reject this characterization of psychology, its pretension to be a universalist science, founded upon laboratorybased techniques, specifically leads to this conclusion. Experimentalism has dominated a psychology which understood itself as pursuing the study of psychological universals. Wundt’s idea that higher psychological functions should be studied in actual situations was largely ignored within mainstream experimental work. It was not until the 1970s, as we shall see, that some AngloAmerican psychologists took the situated study of cultural processes as a different starting point and one which they understood as offering a critique of the mainstream

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project and of laboratory-based methods. Of course, there are still many issues about what is meant by culture, as we will see, but it is out of the sense of psychology as profoundly cultural that many alternative approaches were shaped. In this chapter, we review some of these, in particular, various attempts to develop discursive, narrative and cultural psychologies. We will also consider the impact of post-structuralism upon psychology and, in this light, consider developments which became known as critical psychology. At the same time as these developments were happening in psychology, social theory was beginning to take on board a cultural address to the psyche through the work of Althusser and Lacan, and then developing into an interest in post-structuralism, so we will also briefly consider these and their impact on psychology. Most of the developments we will discuss begin to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s from the countercultural movements, which opened up the possibility of new ways of working in psychology. What is interesting is that several different critiques and approaches happened at historically similar times, but were related to different traditions of psychology and different debates and tended to be developed in different countries. So cultural, and to some extent narrative, psychology is largely American, while the take-up of psychoanalysis and post-structuralism happened mostly in Britain using French sources, and discursive psychology was also British, informed by developments in social psychology and conversation analysis. Dialogical approaches come as a spin-off from both narrative and discursive psychologies in relation to cultural psychology. Cultural studies is much less known by psychologists, and so its impact is more difficult to discuss. Finally, we will briefly consider the turn away from depth within social psychology and its relation to new work on experience, networks, relationality and affect coming from the intersection of cultural and social theory, which is beginning to be discussed in psychology.

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Because it is difficult to put a date order on these different approaches, the order of this chapter is to some extent governed by the different ways these approaches understand culture. We will begin with cultural and narrative psychology, then move on to discursive, psychoanalytic, psychosocial and post-structuralist approaches and finally go on to discuss relationality and what we may see as the re-turn to affect.1

CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY The term ‘cultural psychology’ is usually associated with developments which began in American psychology as a response to cognitivism, or what is sometimes referred to as the cognitive revolution of the 1960s. That is, psychology sought not only universal cognitive processes through laboratory experimentation, but also through studies of artificial and machine intelligence, to understand human cognitive processes as able to be understood and indeed copied by machines. What was known as crosscultural psychology in this context was about the exploration of those universal processes across cultures. It stands to reason, therefore, that culture would, in this instance, be understood as something which affected – hindered or helped – those processes in some way. Cultural psychology rejected the central premises of cognitive psychology, that there is a central processor common to all humans, which can be mapped and is machinic in style. Rather, it took cultural specificity as its starting point. In this sense, it attempts to remake psychology as a non-experimental approach, though it contains within it a large number of different positions, not all of which adopt a radically anti-Cartesian position. Some writers in cultural psychology refer back to the founding work of the German psychologist Wilhem Wundt. Wundt argued that there were two psychologies: an experimental science for the study of lower mental processes and a cultural science which studied products of the mind rather than the mind itself. In this way, Hiles (1996) argues

that Wundt recognized that higher mental processes could not be studied using an experimental method, but could be studied indirectly by the investigation of the products of these processes: language, narratives, customs, beliefs, traditions and social institutions. Hiles argues that a contemporary of Wundt, the psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, also argued that the development of psychology as a natural science was quite inadequate for the study of consciousness. Only psychology envisaged as a cultural science could engage with the mind as a whole. It is interesting that, at least within Anglo-American psychology, this view more or less disappeared. As we will argue, it was much more prominent within postrevolutionary Soviet psychology and found its way back into American psychology through take-up of this work. Experimental psychology took off in the twentieth century to become the dominant paradigm in Anglo-American psychology, boasting its status as a science. It is not surprising therefore that it was the 1960s, with their radical student unrest and the development of the counter-culture, which saw the emergence of dissenting voices in American psychology. One of these, Michael Cole, developed a body of work which took cultural specificity as its central foundation. Cole had extensively studied the Soviet psychology tradition, particularly the work of Lev Vygotsky, who worked in the 1930s, and his student Alexander Luria. Vygotsky certainly read Wundt and produced a critique in his book Thought and Language (1962), since he took culture as a central constituent of the study of higher psychological functions. In particular, Vygotsky wanted to produce a kind of developmental psychology which was suited to Marxism, though it has been argued recently that he also referred to a much wider Russian psychological tradition (Veresov, 2005). It was language, or more particularly speech, which Vygotsky took as central. Vygotsky understood thought as an internalization of the social, embodied in speech. Therefore, in addition to language, Vygotsky worked on tool use as a sort of

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activity, with an evolutionary view of the development of activity upon objects as a social act, rather different from the way in which his contemporary Piaget understood action on objects. Luria developed Vygotsky’s position by specifically working on higher psychological functions. So, it is by way of Cole’s post-1960s American reading of Vygotsky and Luria that we return to the possibility of a cultural psychology which retains Wundt’s earlier notion by way of Vygotsky’s critique. Cole’s work specifically developed the view that we could not study higher psychological functions, such as thinking, in the laboratory, and that these functions had to be studied by understanding how thinking was accomplished in everyday practices. What Cole set about doing was to work with anthropologists on the specificity of cognition to cultural context. Working with the anthropologist John Gay and others (Cole, Gay, Glick and Sharp, 1971) and with Sylvia Scribner (Cole and Scribner, 1974), he and his colleagues produced what we would describe as key founding texts for cultural psychology as it is understood today. Cole and Scribner set out to take key cognitive tasks, such as the three-term series problem, and examine their cultural specificity. The three-term series problem is a test of logical reasoning, usually applied in a laboratory setting. In this task, the subject is asked a question of the form ‘If John is taller than Mary and Mary is shorter than Fred, who is tallest?’ What this task relies upon is the recognition of the logical and formulaic relations between John, Mary and Fred. The knowledge of who they are does not matter; what matters to do the task successfully is the logical terms of the relationship itself. This task was understood within experimental literature on cognition in the 1960s and 1970s as a key way of understanding how cognition works. In this sense, cognition is an object specified as part of a central processor model and is therefore understood to be a universal feature of human reasoning. Up until Cole and Scribner’s intervention, a classic way of understanding cultural differences in answer to this kind of problem would have been a kind

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of post-Enlightenment view of civilization in which some cultures might be better than others at facilitating the development of cognitive functioning. Following the Soviet reworking of Wundt, Cole and Scribner sought to overturn this view. In their classic book Culture and Thought (1974), they tested syllogistic reasoning (the three-term series) using American undergraduates and Kpelle rice farmers in Liberia. What was striking about the rice farmers’ responses was the refusal of the terms of the problems. They would claim that they knew John, for example, and that he was not tall. For them, reasoning was a practical activity. In order to dispel the idea that the farmers were less developed, Cole and Scribner developed tasks which utilized the farmers’ knowledge about rice but kept the same logical premises. They successfully showed how farmers could manage tasks so long as they made sense within the context of their farming practices and therefore their everyday lives. In that way, they dispelled the idea that the culture of the farmers was lacking. They were able to argue that, instead, it was the practices of American schooling emphasizing the central importance of logical reasoning which schooled students into being able to do these tasks, and that laboratory experimentation did not test a simple universal central processing but was itself a set of practices in which the cultural was communicated and internalized. They argued that thinking was accomplished in practices that were culturally produced and therefore culturally specific. This work was followed by a whole series of collaborations and developments on the part of both cognitive psychologists and anthropologists whom we can describe as cognitive or psychological anthropologists. In particular, it is worth mentioning the later work of Sylvia Scribner (1997) on workers in a milk-processing plant, in which she made an ethnographic study of the practices through which the workers made calculations about the milk deliveries they were to make. Using an ethnographic method, she was able to demonstrate the specificity of the practices of calculation to

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the organization of the work itself. Similarly, developmental psychologists working in Brazil (Nunes, Schliemann and Carraher, 1993) argued that the calculation practices of unschooled children working in market stalls were specific to the practices of trading and therefore culturally specific. Perhaps one of Cole’s most important achievements was to recognize that schooling is itself a specific set of practices and should be analysed as such and that the laboratory is not a non-context. In 1974, he and his co-workers produced an important treatise on what he called ecological validity. In this, he recalled the earlier arguments of Wundt and Vygotsky by arguing that if thinking is accomplished in everyday practices it is quite invalid to remove thinking from these practices and to investigate thinking in a laboratory. He argued that this tells us only about laboratories and nothing about thinking in general because there is no thinking in general. To demonstrate this, he compared children’s reasoning in cooking practices with schooling practices and, in a famous paper on learning from a learning-disabled child (1981), he and his colleagues demonstrated how a child diagnosed as learning-disabled performed when presented an IQ test by a tester and when part of an IQ bee in a classroom setting. In each case, the other participants (tester, teacher, children) managed the interaction so that the child did not fail. It was in the minutiae of the interaction that the tasks were accomplished, rather than the tasks reflecting central cognitive processes which were simply displayed in one context or another. The earlier Scribner study of workplace cognition was further developed by the cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave, in studies of Liberian tailors (Lave and Wenger, 1991), people making best-buy calculations in supermarkets (Lave, 1988) and the idea of legitimate peripheral participation as a way of understanding learning as apprenticeship. While this tradition of work is extremely interesting in its analysis of practices, as Walkerdine (1996) has pointed out elsewhere, it fails to engage with power and regulation

in the Foucauldian sense. The communities of practice described by Lave seem cohesive and unproblematic, and so issues of selfmanagement and the production of power are completely elided. In addition, there are also no dynamics and no contestation over meaning, for example, within the relations which make up the communities. What characterizes all of this work is its attention to cognition. Cole’s work on development and learning worked within a Vygotskian tradition by examining learning as a zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978), by exploring the idea of internalization of the social by understanding learning as internalized interaction. Learners learn by doing a task with help and then later by themselves. Thus, thinking is taken to be an internalization of that which appears first in culture, as communication (cf. Cole, 2000). However, there is a strong tendency within this tradition of work to understand the subject in a rationalist way, despite the cultural approach critiquing what Cole calls ‘central processor models’. Although thinking is characterized by an understanding of the cultural and communicative practices in which thinking work is contained, nevertheless the subject is still characterized by thinking. For an understanding of this position, we need perhaps to digress to the work of Volosinov (who is usually thought of as being the same person as, or closely related to, the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, though there has been considerable debate about this), a contemporary of Vygotsky, who wrote a book titled Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (1976). In that work, Volosinov argues that Freud understands as constitutional, or as part of a pregiven psyche, that which actually originates in communication. In both cases, the turn of the Marxist critique is to understand the social and the place which makes the psychological possible and the social understood as communication and what Marx called ‘sensuous human activity, practice’. A critique of cultural psychology is put forward by the social psychologists Ken and Mary Gergen.

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They argue that much of cultural psychology still assumes the independent existence of a range of particulars (e.g. culture, mind and socialization), the adequacy of empirical or interpretive methodology in assessing and reflecting the character of these particulars, and the possibility of cumulative (or falsifiable) knowledge about the socialization processes in question. While universal psychological processes are eschewed, universal metatheory is not, and in this way cultural psychology remains a child of Western modernism. (Ken and Gergen, 1997: p. 49)

In its place, they offer a multi-vocal methodology of the ways in which cultural constructions work and how they work both for researcher and researched, working towards a theory of relationality. What is interesting about this position is that it is actually very close to some recent work within psychoanalysis which utilizes insights from mother–infant communication (see Bradley, 1989, for an overview). However, in the latter, thinking develops out of the emotional communication within the relationship rather than simply being what communication is about. We shall turn now to the work of another psychologist whose contribution is important for cultural psychology – the developmental psychologist Jerome Bruner.

JEROME BRUNER, COMMUNICATION AND NARRATIVE In the 1970s, Bruner began to utilize developments in mother–infant interaction and proto-communciation to develop an approach to development which was compatible with a largely Vygotskian position. In particular, infancy research was beginning to study ‘intentionality’, that is, the intended and proto-communication between infants and caregivers (usually understood as mothers in this research) (cf. Trevarthen, 1993). In this research, an intention or will to communicate or will to mean was usually assumed, so that communication was taken to develop within the dyad through the development

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of joint attention and thus the generation of shared meaning. For example, a baby points at a doll and the mother says ‘that’s a dolly’, so that joint attention becomes the development and sharing of meaning. This approach has now become taken for granted within infancy research, and perhaps the only critical voice in this debate is Bradley (1989), who argues forcefully that the tradition of work paints an idealized picture of communication as successful, whereas he argues that mothering is marked by anxiety, depression and difficulty. In addition to this over-positive picture, a central issue not discussed at all within this tradition is the relation between the mother tongue and the phallic order. That is, if meaning and therefore language and communication are taken to begin during mother–infant interaction and are produced within a pattern of communication and connection defined as feminine, social meaning is understood as residing in the social world outside the dyad, a world described at least by some (e.g. Lacan, 2001) as patriarchal. That is, Lacan argued that the phallus was the signifier of signifiers and where cultural meaning begins, rather than with meanings made in mother–infant interaction, which he confines to a state of Imaginary unity which must be gone beyond into the patriarchal realm for the subject to exist within the patriarchal law of the father. Here, we then have an important point in the discussion of psychology and culture. Notions of culture derived from social and cultural theory most usually invoke a semiotic understanding of meaning as given in the symbolic, semiotic and discursive. Meaning does not originate with the mother but in the social world, a world defined by a patriarchal order (the cogito) and historically produced (as in the work of Foucault). However, the cultural and social theoretical approach, if it makes any reference to early childhood at all, does so through the work of Lacan, who dismisses all pre-Oedipal experience as presymbolic and as caught within the imaginary. For Lacan, it is then pointless to address meaning as produced anywhere except in the signifier of signifiers and certainly not

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in mother–infant interaction as the basis and possibility of communication. But the relationship between proto-communication within the dyad and the break made in the dyad by the mother’s position in the social world (which we could understand as her positioning within a phallic and therefore semiotic order) does introduce the third term or the paternal metaphor, as Lacan describes it. Thus, we have a complex relation between the maternal meanings and connections and the Cartesian meanings and separations. This is a complex issue for the study of psychology and culture, which has not yet been investigated (Walkerdine, 2006). Bruner positions meaning fairly and squarely within maternal communication. In this sense, communication and culture are understood as being made and remade through the will to meaning which begins in this dyad. If the will to meaning begins in the dyad, it is where the capacity to mean and to communicate meets the stories through which we make sense of our lives, according to Bruner, for whom narrative is a fundamental feature of cognitive processes and therefore a basic property of mind. Narrative, argues Bruner, is the pre-eminent organizing structure of experience (Hiles, 1996). This is the central proposition of narrative psychology (Andrews et al., 2000), that, in effect, we narrate ourselves into being. Narrative psychology then is concerned not with a central processor but with the stories through which cultural meanings make mind possible. However, one of the problems with narrative psychology is that it understands narrative and communication as straightforward messages, rather than a complex semiotic in which there are many layers to a narrative. Of course, we tell stories and stories, and complex discursive constructions inscribe us, but there is no simple correct story about us. For example, narrative methodology often simply assumes that there is a story to be told. But there are many stories and stories beneath the stories. For example, it is common in lifestory narrative work to ask someone to tell a biographic narrative, but the story told

can elide and obscure other stories. In some work which Walkerdine did in the 1980s, she explored her own pleasure as a little girl dressed as a bluebell fairy for a fancy-dress competition, which connected to a nickname, Tinky, short for Tinkerbell, which was her father’s nickname for her. As she recounts, ‘I liked that story about me, but I realized that it obscured another less pleasurable image, a school photograph of me aged 7, in which I was overweight and which I hated. It was much harder to explore the narrative attached to that image as it was a version of myself which I disliked. Much nicer to tell the bluebell and Tinkerbell story’. Yet, the fat girl story was in its way just as important. How then are the different possible stories linked together? How is it that some stories are sayable while others are not? They may be caught inside a bodily feeling, a memory, or they may be pushed away as undesired and undesirable aspects of what feels like a socially acceptable story. Of course, the point that we are making is a psychoanalytic one, which is that if we concentrate on the surface reading of a single story we miss the central complexity of how any number of very difficult narratives exist together. This account would then understand the complex relationality of the formation of those stories and indeed the unsayable (Frosh, 2000), as certainly being produced in relational dynamics but more complex than the simple dyad and proto-communication envisaged by Bruner. And in this account, these relationships and dynamics are not simply at the level of conscious meanings but are produced through unconscious relations and meanings that may be communicated without even being talked about. The most obvious example of this idea is the work on children of survivors of the Shoah, in which parents wanting to protect their children from their own pain never told them anything about the experience, and yet the children picked up the not-said (at its most obvious, the flinching every time a factory chimney was passed, for example). In other words, Walkerdine is saying that meaning and communication are more complex than the rather simple and

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perhaps hopeful view put forward by Bruner and by much of narrative psychology. In relation to this, we can also include the development of what is often referred to as a dialogic approach. As Barcinski and Kalia (2005) argue: The dialogical approach … provides a fascinating alternative to the Cartesian notion of the self. Within this perspective, the identities are fluid and multiple, but in contrast to the saturated postmodern self, plurality does not translate into fragmentation or saturation. … The unique feature of the dialogical self is that it bridges the gap between the modern ideas of discontinuity and continuity. (Barcinski and Kalia, 2005, p. 105)

This, much like discursive psychology, which we review next, establishes the possibility of a subject who is created entirely discursively. Perhaps the basis of this position is the work of Bakhtin (Wertsch, 1991), which further aligns it to the work of Volosinov and Vygotsky, discussed earlier. That is, it is out of dialogue and communication that a non-dualistic notion of self and other is constituted, with dialogue producing the possibility of internalization of dialogue. Bakhtin’s position, that it is the dialogical organization of speech between people which allows for the internalization and thereby constitution of the ‘I’, even if that I is multiple, recalls Vygotsky’s notion that all thinking is internalized speech. This of course reminds us that Volosinov also criticized the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious, preferring also the centrality of dialogue. The social psychologist Michael Billig (1999) has taken this a step further with the development of a concept of a dialogic unconscious. Simply put, Billig reworks Freud’s theory of repression to posit that it relates to dialogue, implying that what is repressed is that which is unsayable in the sense of regulated against being spoken by the cultural mores of the day. While this is a very inventive use of a dialogic approach, it loses all the complexity of the defences by only choosing to work with one defence, repression. In this sense, we lose the dynamic complexity of unconscious processes as fundamentally relational dynamics and equally the central importance of

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emotional relations and unconscious fantasies as a vehicle. Of course, Billig is attempting to socialize Freud, and his attempt to go beyond the conscious engagement with dialogue, discourse and narrative is to be welcomed. However, we find the result disappointing, precisely because what is lost is the complex and central dynamics of psychoanalysis.

THE CRISIS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY At the same time as cultural and narrative psychology was developing in the USA, British social psychologists started to demand that social psychology map meaning and representation and become a ‘human’ science, moving away from an experimental tradition which could not possibly map ‘human sense’ making. This is what Armistead (1974) dubbed ‘the crisis in social psychology’. Parker (1989) argues that the crisis produced a significant disjuncture within at least social psychology in the 1970s. The debates centred on the extent to which experiments could capture the complexities of human behaviour and so, in this sense, echoed Cole’s critique. The positivist framework of experiments was understood as dehumanizing, that is, as reducing human beings to machines or automatons. It was argued that what was more important was the development of a method which engaged with how people made sense of and engaged with the world. This sensemaking was understood as being dependent on language, considered as a human and cultural product. The argument hinged on the insight that subjects could only know their worlds through social action and negotiation and that there was nothing predetermined about sensemaking activity. Again, this has clear echoes of what was happening elsewhere. For this reason, methods were developed which relied on interpretation rather than quantification, and those who used such approaches (e.g. Harré and Secord, 1972) prided themselves on developing work which reflected the diversity and subtlety of human behaviour. The research did not depend on a detached observer but on a relationship between

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researcher and researched, with research understood as a process of co-construction. This kind of work became known as new paradigm research, encompassing a range of interpretive methods such as hermeneutics, participant observation, dialectical methods and feminist methodologies (Reason and Rowan, 1981). The image of human life underpinning those approaches was therefore based on a particular understanding of subjectivity which, rather than viewing subjects as automatons or quasi-information-processing machines, now saw them as having a sense of responsibility for their actions (Shotter, 1974). This was viewed as a much richer conception (ibid.: p. 54), which drew upon microsociology and the philosophy of social action. The underlying principle was that, first, human activity is always social activity, which is, second, bounded by shared cultural resources. Therefore, the knowledge that the human subject develops about him or herself is a product of the social, historical and cultural context (Harré, 1974). Harré argued that the human subject is a competent manager and interpreter of the social world, and the theories that he or she develops should be the object of psychological study. He termed these the plans or rules of human life, arguing that these provide the field of potential open to the subject (ibid.: p. 245). An account of social action should therefore take account of why one particular cultural option rather than another was played out. Harré equated the role of the social scientist to that of a grammarian studying the rules of language that exist within the social world. He argued that this level of analysis should engage with semantics or meaning, and not form or syntax. Experience was seen to be an effect of prewritten cultural plots or narratives that individuals utilize to make sense of themselves and others. This work, however, understood the meanings people give to social activity, but did not explain how meanings come to exist in the first place. The social world is explained through meanings given to it by individuals. A more sophisticated form of subjectivity was introduced without

explaining how individuals come to relate to themselves as if they were selves of a particular type. The social world existed as a function of the way(s) in which individuals represented or made sense of it. What this research did was to make the cultural central, but it did this by still assuming that there was a pregiven, rather than a social, meaningmaker; this still begged the question of how subjectivity was possible without still assuming a presocial subject who made meanings. In this sense, it was quite similar in orientation to the work of Bruner, who we saw places meaning in the mother–child dyad. Morss (1990) has described new-paradigm research as one of the first waves of criticism of orthodox psychology. More recent critiques have evolved from these debates and have come to be known as discursive, critical or postmodern psychologies. Despite their differences, they all share a commitment to the central role of language or discourse in constructing human understanding. As the preface to Texts of Identity (Shotter and Gergen, 1989), a key text in these critiques, highlights, ‘central to the emerging dialogue is a recognition of the critical role played by linguistic constructions in social life’ (p. x). Within these critiques, language is seen as having subjectifying force – it creates and forms individual understanding. Culture is understood as being made up of a series of texts or narratives that are available as resources through which the individual makes sense of the social world. These cultural narratives are studied or accessed through individual talk, which is symptomatic of these wider discourses.

THE TURN TO LANGUAGE In the 1980s, what we might call a second wave of critical social psychological work built on the debates of the 1970s. In particular, the idea of cultural plots or narratives gave way to an understanding of discourse as the organizer of the meanings through which subjectivity was made possible. The key text in this tradition is Jonathan Potter and

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Margie Wetherell’s 1987 volume Discourse and Social Psychology. Language becomes understood as social or cultural meanings organized according to specific discursive repertoires and rhetorical devices. For example, this approach would typically study naturally occurring talk or cultural texts such as newspapers (rather than interviews) and look for the way that people might refer to issues such as race. By analysing the discursive organization of the statements and the rhetorical devices (such as whether people systematically talk in particular ways), the cultural organization of discourse on race would be understood. This approach sought to understand this process as ideological, but would not look to the emergence of the discourses, and we are still left with what some would call an empty subject, in that we understand that certain meanings circulate, but we don’t analyse why or how they relate to other meanings or how discourseusers are themselves constituted, without recourse, again, to a pre- or non-discursive psychological subject. In other words, the central critique levelled at this work is that while it was a very important advance on the experimental tradition, it still understood the discourse-user as a kind of cognitive subject, and therefore left open the backdoor to the very central-processor approach which people such as Cole in the USA and Harré in Britain had been trying to critique. We are still left with a subject who is both primarily conscious and cognitive. Discursive processes are taken to function as an effect or consequence of the particular use to which language is put in specific contexts. It is what Edwards and Potter (1992) term a functionally oriented approach to talk and text. Individuals are understood as developing particular understandings depending on what they are trying to achieve in specific conversational contexts. Language is viewed as being action-oriented and rhetorical, rather than a transparent reflector of communication. Talk embodies a version of the social world that is put to use in specific contexts as a form of situated action. The talk is studied as a rhetorical resource exploring the ways in

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which language can be used to different ends: to blame, excuse, persuade or accomplish other forms of social action (Edwards and Potter, 1992). Some writers adopting these ideas have argued that the very concepts, such as truth and objectivity, that traditional psychology uses to warrant its claims are merely rhetorical devices that it employs to maintain its privileged status, that is, to produce its accounts or versions of the world as factual (Kitzinger, 1987). Thus, truth is seen to function as a form of legitimation, masking claims that are arbitrary and value-laden. Psychological knowledge is not objective, but partial, maintaining and reproducing particular ways of seeing the world that are perspectival, contingent and culturally specific. It maintains its privileged or illusionary position, according to these accounts, through the very terms and strategies it uses to warrant its claims. These discursive psychologies adopt a particular approach to epistemology and social reality that could be termed anti-realist. There is seen to be no knowledge or reality that exists outside the languages we use to describe it. It is through the symbolic realm of human signs, language and discourse that our notions of reality are constructed. Psychological knowledge, according to this anti-realist perspective, is then as much a human construction as a lay discourse, the main difference between the two being the justificatory base that enables psychology to obscure its claims to know within an authoritative discourse. To study psychology is therefore to study the very texts and cultural narratives through which our notions of ourselves and our relations with others are constituted. Questions within the psychological domain that have traditionally been seen as existing within the psyche or interior realm, that is, memory, attitudes, cognition and so on, are located within the languages used to describe them. Potter and Wetherell (1987) discuss the range of self-discourses embedded within psychology that one can use to make sense of oneself and others. Thus, psychological

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discourse becomes a set of textual resources or linguistic repertoires providing a range of possibilities for self-expression. Selfexpression is no longer considered to be the expression of an internal psychological essence, but a form of accounting located within the strategic and functional use of language (Young, in Kvale, 1992). The self is a form of narration – dialogic – constructed through a range of possible models or ways of accounting for subjectivity. As Potter and Wetherell (1987: p. 102) argue, these language-based approaches call for a move from the ‘self-as-entity and focus [it] on the methods of constructing the self’. They give as examples some of the popular theories about the self embedded within psychological discourse, all of which claim to be describing the true nature and form of subjectivity, that is, trait theory, role theory and more humanist conceptions of the self. Like Harré before them, they argue that methods of making sense are the key to any kind of explanation of the self, since people’s sense of themselves is in fact a conglomerate of these methods, produced through talk and theorizing. There is not one self waiting to be discovered or uncovered but a multitude of selves found in the different kinds of linguistic practices articulated now, in the past, historically and cross-culturally (p. 102). One consequence of this analysis is that if the ways in which people talk about phenomena, including their own relation to self, can be changed, new forms of social relation and ways of being can be created (cf. Shotter, 1993). Potter and Wetherell (1987: p. 104) argue that cultural analysis that approaches subjectivity in this way has important ethical and political consequences, that is, that each method of constructing the self positions the self and others in specific ways, producing subjectivities that may be negative, destructive and oppressive, as well as liberating. Other writers also sought to expose the autonomous self as false and to show how this concept was actually seen to function as a way of reproducing particular social arrangements as natural and inevitable.

It is viewed as culturally specific (Gergen, 1985) and bound up with the maintenance of capitalism and Protestantism (Sampson, 1971). Despite its emergence within certain historical events, it has become part and parcel of what Shotter (1990) terms ‘liberal humanist thought’ and is constructed, sustained and managed through commonsense conversational practice (Shotter, 1993). Harré argued that we have inherited this way of speaking about ourselves from the JudaeoChristian civilization, which has become reified through its rootedness in the languagegames we use to account for ourselves and others. To give an example, Paul Stenner (1993) developed some of these constructionist arguments in relation to jealousy. Commonsense practice tells us that jealousy is a property of the individual: there are jealous types who cannot control their feelings in relation to another. Stenner troubles this view in which jealousy is regarded as a property of the mind, approaching it instead as a subject position produced through the deploying of particular cultural stories about jealousy. These stories are examined for their consequences in the relations between a couple, Jim and May. Jealousy can, for example, be used to position somebody as being unaware and unenlightened or as being emotionally weak and insecure. Both of these strategic uses of jealousy have particular implications for the person positioning and being positioned according to these narratives or stories. Thus, Jim positions himself as enlightened and progressive and May as fragile, unstable and weak. Because of this relational positioning, he sees himself as having to walk on eggshells, thus crediting himself with the power to hurt or protect May according to his actions. Stenner argues that this account cannot be viewed as being about the relationship, reflective of emotions or expressive of May’s or Jim’s personality – as if a reality existed independently beneath the discourse – but rather as constructive of the relationship, productive of contradictory and non-essential identities and generative of emotional experience. Stenner views it as a

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jealousy story available as one of the cultural narratives through which people can account for their own and others’ experience. One problem with these kinds of discursive accounts is the refusal to engage with the psychological other than through its locatedness within language. The human subject becomes a discourse-user producing meanings of the social formation in his or her local, specific accounting practices. This focus on the conditions of making sense, which go beyond speaking subjects, has been developed within discursive psychology by a set of approaches that are united under the mantle of critical polytextualism (Curt, 1994). Some British social psychologists were critical of the particular approach to discourse outlined above. In particular, Ian Parker (1989) argued that relativism failed to take account of the materiality of discourse, that is, what is made possible by particular kinds of statements, such as ways of thinking about psychology, for example, and that these are not infinitely malleable or flexible but historically contingent and very powerful. Parker argues that the discourse-user is not infinitely flexible and that we have to look to Marxism to develop what he calls a ‘critical realist’ position. Parker and Spears (1995) distinguish their critical discourse analysis from the approaches already reviewed through their analytic focus on the way in which forms of talk serve social, ideological and political interests. As Parker highlights, certain discourses define certain kinds of experience as abnormal – as madness, for example (Parker et al., 1995) – thereby reproducing certain institutions and societal relations as being natural and inevitable. This work argues that it is important to locate talk historically by identifying the historical conditions that make individual discursive activity possible. Discourse analysts such as Wetherell and Potter (1993) do recognize this dilemma, and in a post-hoc fashion have linked individuals’ use of language with their reproduction or repudiation of wider social structures. In their work on racial discourse, for example, they link a racial account (racist) to changing social, economic

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and political relations.As Wetherell and Potter suggest, we can see history as having, from this perspective, a direction of domination, that direction being intimately linked to the fortunes and interests of a certain group. In this manner, the analysis examines subjects’ ways of talking and how these reinforce and perpetuate dominant discourses, those discourses which are viewed as ideological and linked to the interests of certain dominant groups within society. More recently, Parker has turned to the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, especially in terms of the way he is taken up by the cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek (Parker, 2004), and sees his work as aligned to post-structuralism and the work of Michel Foucault. In order to understand this move, we will return to the 1970s to consider a further British current of work which began with an interest in structuralism and post-structuralism.

IDEOLOGY AND CONSCIOUSNESS At the same time as the developments we have reviewed, another set of psychologists in Britain were looking to French social theory to approach the idea of discourse and subjectivity. We want to begin with the journal Ideology and Consciousness, later ‘I and C’ (Adlam et al., 1977). In that journal, the editors attempted to go beyond a radical psychology which understood mainstream psychology as ideological obfuscation and not a ‘real’ or ‘revolutionary’ science (revolutionary both in the Marxist and Kuhnian senses). In particular, the work characterized in its inception by the journal sought to address the problem which we characterized in relation to discursive psychology, that is, the issue of the empty or pregiven cognitive subject. To approach this issue (which we can only compare to other approaches with hindsight as there was little connection between people working in these different traditions), the editors of the journal turned to a body of work which began with the ideological and worked with an account of a semiotic unconscious

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‘constructed like a language’. This is what was then the new work coming from structuralist Marxism, that is, the work of Louis Althusser and his invocation of the centrality of the theory of the subject using the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. Put in a nutshell, what this new direction meant was the centrality of subjectivity for an understanding of the workings of the social through ideological processes and interpellation. This placed cultural processes right at the heart of an understanding both of subjectivity and of the social, without a separation between the two. As we will detail later in the chapter, the turn from structuralism to post-structuralism also understood the object of psychology as implicated in the workings of power. Althusser’s theory placed ideology at the centre of social life. In his famous ISAs essay, Althusser (1977) argued for a theory of the ideologically produced subject, in opposition to economistic Marxism’s notion of a simple economic causality. For Althusser, the economy determines ‘in the last instance’, but the ‘last instance never comes’. This was a serious break with the French Communist Party; but, in the wake of the student uprisings of May 1968, it was very significant in the development of the cultural Marxism of the New Left across Europe. In this account, as Adlam et al. (1977) make clear, ‘the category of the subject is regarded as constitutive of all ideology, in so far as ideology is defined by the function of constituting concrete individuals as subjects’ (p. 24). In Althusser’s account of ISAs, or ‘ideological state apparatuses’, subjects were produced through the hailing or interpellation of the subject within ideology in sites or practices of interpellation, such as the school. Althusser argued that it was through the ‘hailing’ of students in school as, say, ‘John Smith with a grade A’ or ‘Mary Brown with a special needs statement’, that identities were formed, but those identities were fictions produced for capitalism through the workings of ideology. To support his account of identity production, Althusser utilized concepts from the work of Jacques Lacan; in particular, he saw interpellation as being like Lacan’s idea

of the ‘mirror stage’ in which the Cartesian idea of a fixed, secure and conscious self is rendered illusory. This stage, borrowed and developed from the psychoanalyst Winnicott, takes the metaphor of a young child seeing its reflection in a mirror and argues that the mother provides a kind of mirroring function to the young child, which allows it to recognize (or misrecognize, in Althusser’s terms) itself as whole, unitary. It is this which Althusser understands as the mirroring of interpellations within the ISA, which he does by building upon what Lacan takes to be an illusion to be broken by the child’s entry into the Symbolic order of patriarchal culture. To be a subject, within this account, requires what was usually referred to as a theory of the subject. In this approach, culture is specified in two ways, through Lacan’s use of a theory of signification to understand ‘the unconscious structured like a language’ and his concept of the Law of the Father, or Symbolic Order, through which the subject enters culture. This body of work was critiqued by the turn to post-structuralism and the necessity to understand cultural practices as historically specific. However, what is important for this chapter is that this work moved away from a psychological universalism of a science of the universals of mind and behaviour to a model of culture through which what it means to be a subject is produced. This move was central to the psychologists on the journal Ideology and Consciousness and paved the way for some of the journal editors (Henriques, Venn and Walkerdine) to team up with psychologists Cathy Urwin and Wendy Hollway to write the book Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity (Henriques et al., 1984) which appeared in 1984. In particular, the authors of this book sought to bring together post-structuralism, particularly the work of Foucault, with the psychoanalysis of Lacan. To understand this move, we will consider the contribution of Foucault to psychology and then go on to discuss how and why this work brought Foucault and Lacan

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together (cf. Blackman and Walkerdine, 2001).

CHANGING THE SUBJECT AND THE TURN TO POST-STRUCTURALISM The authors of Changing the Subject used Foucault’s early work (the later work had not yet been published) to engage with the workings of power/knowledge in producing subjects and argued that we needed to understand psychology as a site through which subjects were regulated and managed. We will begin this section by explaining how this approach differs from discursive and narrative psychology and then go on to think about how Changing the Subject understands the relation of culture to psychology. What Foucault did was to produce a historical approach to the human sciences which saw the knowledge they produced as centrally bound up with government, in the sense that, following the rise of science in the seventeenth century, and the subsequent development of post-Enlightenment liberalism and manufacturing capitalism, the masses had to be governed not through a monarch but through an ensemble of practices and techniques designed to produce docile citizens who would accept the moral and political order without coercion and therefore apparently of their own free will. Foucault argued that the human sciences played a central part in this by providing knowledges, or what he called ‘fictions functioning in truth’. By constituting scientific ideas as historically created fictions designed to produce modes of governance, he eroded the distinction between science and ideology. So, there is no ideological state apparatus as productive of subjects and an economy in the last instance that never comes, as in Althusser, but a complex multiple causality which he called ‘conditions of emergence’ or ‘conditions of possibility’. The central idea taken up by the authors of Changing the Subject is that psychology is not a discourse among many and that language or discourse is not the prime cultural

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device for the production of subjectivity. Rather, psychology becomes one of the human sciences through which the science of government, and therefore power, is enacted. This means that this power/knowledge is productive of subject positions – the ways of disciplining a population through producing modes of being a subject. Textual truths created in technologies such as law, social work, medicine, education, create positions for us to enter – such as the child, the delinquent, the schizophrenic. These are regulated in an attempt to produce normal and therefore docile and governable subjects. So, the schizophrenic is created through sets of psychiatric practices that constitute a set of symptoms as a recognizable syndrome which becomes a subject position through which psychiatric practices govern conduct, explain the phenomenon, and create and administer drug regimes and therapy, for example. Thus, our everyday lives are governed through the production of subject positions which are multiple and may be contradictory. A woman, for example, might be expected to be a worker, a wife and a mother, and the demands of each of these positions might be different – say long work hours for the worker, yet be expected to be at home as the mother and so on. The issue then is how these ensembles of positions are lived. In this approach, discourses are not discrete entities that function for certain interests. They are made up of shifting networks of associations, bodies of knowledge, expertise, agencies and problems. Discourses do not merely legitimate and perpetuate particular realities but constitute ways of thinking and acting – inciting and inducing desire – and a subjective commitment to particular ways of understanding and acting upon ourselves and others. Power does not merely repress or marginalize certain modes of existence but comes to structure those very existences and the resistances against them. It produces our desires and subjective commitment to certain discourses by aligning our wishes and fears with the objectives embodied within discursive practices. It acts on and

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through our actions within a discursive field of possible actions and choices (cf. Blackman, 1994; Burchell et al., 1991; Rose, 1999). Truth is not merely a rhetorical device, but is historical and regulative. Every society or epoch has its own regime of truth – those discourses which function in truth and have the status to divide up the social world in particular ways: to divide the good from the bad, the normal from the abnormal, the rational from the irrational. As Foucault puts it: Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regulatory effects of power. Each society has its own regime of truth, its general politics of truth: that is the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true, the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisitions of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault, 1980: p. 131)

In this account, psychology is not merely a story or narrative, but organizes a diverse range of technologies of subjectification that make up our social world. Following this, this approach does not understand the cultural as merely a set of narratives or discourses taken on by a person, but posits that the image of the human subject at the heart of psychological theorizing – the autonomous subject – is not simply one version of ourselves that we can choose to take on or discard at will. Instead, we live and embody this image, through the relations we take up to ourselves, in a complex way, one that cannot be reduced simply to the function of an individual’s talk and accomplished social action. We are tied to this image of subjectivity through its immersion within and across a range of social and cultural practices that continually address us as if we were persons of a particular kind. In this analysis, language is not the only site of subjectification. To understand the role of psychology in the processes of subject formation, we must understand

how what we come to understand as the ‘psyche’ is embedded in a range of social and discursive practices and how this image is lived or embodied by subjects in their own techniques of self-understanding and transformation. As we have argued above, the fact that these sites are multiple this acts as a critique of a unitary or essential psychological subject, and furthermore these subject positions are historically specific. But how does this work for actual people entering those positions? We need to explain how those positions are held together for any embodied subject. This is where Changing the Subject turns to Lacanian psychoanalysis to attempt to bring in a concept of the unconscious which does not involve biological or psychological essentialism. This is done in order to attempt to understand how subject positions were lived in their multiplicity and complexity by embodied subjects. This move was certainly not universally popular. A more mainstream Foucauldian position (e.g. Rose, 1996) would oppose an appeal to depth; and some psychologists saw this as a move back to a concept of psychological interiority from which they had tried to escape. However, we could argue that this is to misread what Changing the Subject is saying, which is to engage with the need to understand the ways in which positions are held together as an affective and not a rational process. While mainstream Foucauldians turned to Foucault’s later work to understand the practices of self formation as practices of self management or a kind of care of the self (Foucault, 1990), this approach still lacked any sense of just how this might work except through an appeal to a concept of enfolding of the social into the subject (Rose, 1999). If we are left with a conscious rational subject who chooses, we are back with the homunculus, the discourse-user who chooses between discourses. However, we also argued that this was not enough to explain the multiple sites and practices through which people are subjected and the ways in which these are held together in contradictory ways to produce what it means to experience subjectivity at any moment. We argued that

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is the ways in which fictions functioning in truth and fantasies work together, which are central to understanding this. We therefore argued that we could not simply leave the terrain of psychoanalysis, since this was one place in which fantasy was talked about, indeed the space in which, as Jacqueline Rose argued, ‘it is not simply assumed that women fit automatically into place’ (Rose, 1983: p. 19). For this reason, we could argue that ‘fitting into place’ requires a great deal of psychic work, the work of the unconscious. Walkerdine (1990, 2001) has argued that, for example, the work of contemporary femininity involves self-management practices which attempt to manage that which is unmanageable or at least in uneasy relation, for example, rational competitiveness and helpful co-operation (Walkerdine, 2007). This means that we need to explore how those difficult relations are lived – how the social fantasies, for example, of a super woman who can be sexy, manage a career, do mothering and look spectacular, inscribe us in ways with which we can only engage through complex meanings and unconscious dynamics. Walkerdine et al. (2001) argued that upward mobility for working-class girls requires a remaking of the self – an uneasy hybridity – that is both enticing and very painful. This is because the shift between cultural practices and locations engages guilt, anxiety, longing and desire, for example. The ways that these get mobilized into both unconscious dynamics and social fantasies for girls and women to enter (Walkerdine, 1997) presents us with a complex psychosocial address to the cultural, which cannot be reduced to a simple relation between psychoanalysis and culture. Psychosocial methods are now being developed mostly within social psychology and, although at present there is a tendency to use different approaches both to the psychic and to the social, there is an attempt to engage with the complexities of the socially inscribed unconscious (e.g. Frosh, Phoenix and Pattman, 2002; Hollway and Jefferson, 2000; Hollway, 2004; Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody, 2001). Additionally, there has also been the

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beginning of acknowledgement of the need to go beyond a discursive/psychoanalytic divide in psychology (Hollway and Jefferson, 2005a and b; Walkerdine, 2006; Wetherell, 2005).

BEYOND PSYCHIC/SOCIAL DUALISM We have surveyed a great deal of work which, in various, very different ways, attempts to understand the relation between culture and psychology, which is sometimes understood as a relationship between exterior and interior. This is most obvious in approaches which stress language as the cultural carrier through which the external is internalized. However, in some approaches, such as discursive psychology, all is understood as in the exterior with no interior at all. Other approaches, such as the psychoanalysis of Lacan, think of the cultural through language as shaping an unconscious as well as conscious meaningmaking. In doing so, it challenges what Cole calls the idea of a central processor. That is, culture is understood as producing what we call psychological processes. In some cases, as we have seen, it is the internalization of the cultural which produces the interior, as in Vygotsky, and in others the interior is dispensed with altogether, as in discursive psychology. In Lacan, the interior is the semiotic chains of the exterior. Is it possible to retain some sense of subjectivity and yet go beyond any division of interior and exterior? In this whole tradition of work, what culture does is remake the story of what the psychological, and so the subject, is. However, this remains a central and vexing question. In concluding, we want simply to gesture to a diverse body of work which has, as yet, hardly made any impression at all on psychology, that is, work from philosophy and social theory which privileges complexity (Urry, 2003), flow (Deleuze, 1990), network (Law and Hassard, 1999), relation (Arendt, 1998; Studdert, 2005) and embodiment (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). What the turn to language and discourse as a carrier of the cultural has done is to eclipse any address to the body and

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to experience (Blackman, 2001; Stephenson and Papadopoulos, 2006). The recent interest in new ways of thinking about how things work together in complex ways and how networks work challenges the central figure of Cartesian psychology. In addition, the use of Deleuze, which stresses the centrality of affective relations on and through bodies, whether they be human, machine or social, allows us to think of culture and subjectivity in ways which do go beyond some of the impasses of the work discussed above – for example, the stress on affectivity goes beyond the centrality of language in the work we have explored in this chapter without collapsing into essentialism and does stress the centrality of affective relations for thinking about how multiplicity is held together. The Deleuzian concept of the assemblage, for example, mixes together what we might have thought of as external and internal. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue, ‘home’ can be an arrangement of artefacts, qualities and affect to express us. They describe a child, alone in the dark, who hums a tune to comfort itself, and in doing so creates a space of home, but this can also be recreated in diverse locations from a space in a car to a walk in a park, etc. Home is thus the continual attempt to create spaces of comfort through the arrangement of objects, practices, feelings and affects (Wise, 2005) . In this sense, then, they do not make a separation between aspects such as objects, places, meanings and affects. The interior/exterior relation is radically displaced. It also profoundly develops, and yet challenges, the social subjectification of earlier continental work in that it stresses movement rather than a static ‘subject position’, so that the sense that affective relations are always flowing and energy always moving challenges the pinning down of meaning into a static sense of what any particular ‘subject’ might be, with a stress on becoming rather than being. However, the interest in the psychoanalysis of Wilhelm Reich does tend to stress energy, force and blockage at the expense of the reworking of psychoanalysis contained within

relational and postmodern approaches (Elliott and Spezzano, 2000; Layton, 1998), with a much more complex working of dynamics than in Deleuze. Some cultural theorists are also beginning to make reference to neuropsychology and consciousness studies as ways to make a link between culture and psychology. However, these approaches miss out the complexity of affective dynamics, and cultural theorists have been slow to engage with the critical and cultural traditions within psychology. We are suggesting that an engagement with this growing body of work can potentially serve to address that which had been elided within discursive and cultural psychological approaches. In particular, the re-engagement with embodiment implied within Deleuzian and other approaches to affectivity takes us beyond the specification of the cultural as semantic and semiotic as implied in all traditions of work discussed so far. However, as Henriques et al. argued in 1984, this work will not be a psychology, nor a sociology, because the limit conditions of what counts as psyche and social will have been, at the very least, radically shifted. What awaits us then is an exciting new address to the cultural production of practices, sites and ways of being, becoming and relating.

NOTES 1 We say re-turn because a concern with affect is central to the work of the first psychologists, in particular Wundt. Freud says explicitly that he took his approach to affect from Wundt. Similarly, these psychologists all worked with some variation of an energetic model.

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Andrews, M. et al. (eds) (2000) Lines of Narrative: Psychosocial Perspectives. London: Routledge. Arendt, H. (1998) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Armistead, N. (ed.) (1974) Reconstructing Social Psychology. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Barcinski, M. and Kalia, V. (2005) ‘Extending the boundaries of the dialogical self: Speaking from within the Feminist Perspective’, Culture and Psychology, 11(1): 101–109. (1st edn, 2002.) Billig, M. (1999) Freudian Repression: Conversation Creating the Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blackman, L. (1994) ‘What is doing history: the use of history to understand the constitution of contemporary psychological objects’, Theory and Psychology, 4(4): 485–504. Blackman, L. (2001) Hearing Voices: Embodiment and Experience. London and New York: Free Association Books. Blackman, L. and Walkerdine, V. (2001) Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies. London: Palgrave. Bradley, B. (1989) Visions of Infancy: A Critical Introduction to Child Psychology. Cambridge: Polity. Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (1991) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Cole, M. (2000) Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cole, M. and Scribner, S. (1974) Culture and Thought: A Psychological Perspective. New York: Wiley. Cole, M. and Traupmann, K. (1981) Comparative Cognitive Research: Learning From a Learning Disabled Child Cole, M., Gay, J., Glick, J. and Sharp, D. (1971) The Cultural Context of Learning and Thinking: An Exploration in Experimental Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Curt, B.C. (1994) Textuality and Tectonic, Troubling Social and Psychological Science. Buckingham: Open University Press. Deleuze, G. (1990) The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dollimore, J. (1991) Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon. Edwards, D. and Potter, J. (1992) Discursive Psychology. London: Sage.

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Elliott, A. and Spezzano, C. (2000) Psychoanalysis at its Limits: Navigating the Postmodern Turn. London: Free Association Books. Foucault, M. (1980) ‘Truth and power’, in C. Gordon (ed.), Power-knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77. Brighton: Harvester. Foucault, M. (1989) Madness and Civilisation. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1990) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of The Self. London: Penguin. Frosh, S. (2000) ‘Things that can’t be said: psychoanalysis and the limits of language’, International Journal of Critical Psychology, 1. Frosh, S., Phoenix, A. and Pattman, R. (2002) Young Masculinities: Understanding Boys in Contemporary Society. London: Palgrave. Gergen, K.J. (1985) ‘Social constructionist inquiry: context and implications’, in K.J. Gergen and K.E. Davis (eds), Social Construction of the Person. New York: Springer Verlag. Gergen, K. and Gergen, M. (1997) ‘Towards a cultural constructionist psychology’, Theory and Psychology, 7: 31–36. Harré, R. (1974) ‘Some remarks on “rule” as a scientific concept’, in P. Collett (ed.), Social Rules and Social Behaviour. Oxford: Blackwell. Harré, R. and Secord, P.F. (1972) The Explanation of Social Behaviour. Oxford: Blackwell. Henriques, J., Hollway, W. Urwin, C. et al. (1984) Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity. London: Methuen. Hiles, D. (1996) Cultural Psychology and the centreground of psychology, paper presented to XXVI International Congress of Psychology, Montreal, Canada, August 16–21. Hollway, W. and Jefferson, T. (2000) Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview Method. London: Sage. Hollway, W. and Jefferson. T. (2005a) ‘Panic and perjury: a psychosocial exploration of agency’, British Journal of Social Psychology, 44(2): 147–163. Hollway, W. and Jefferson, T. (2005b) ‘But why did Vincent get sick? A reply to Spears and Wetherell’, British Journal of Social Psychology, 44(2): 175–180. Kitzinger, J. (1987) Social Construction of Lesbianism. London: Sage. Kvale, S. (1992) Psychology and Postmodernism. London: Sage. Lacan, J. (2001) Ecrits: a Selection. London: Routledge. Lave, J. (1988) Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Law, J. and Hassard, J. (eds) (1999) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell. Layton, L. (1998) Who’s That Girl, Who’s That Boy? Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory. Northvale NJ: J Aronson. Lyotard, J.F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Morss, J. (1990) Growing Critical: Alternatives to Developmental Psychology. London: Routledge. Morley, D. (1992) Television Audiences and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Mort, F. (1996) Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late 20th Century Britain. London: Routledge. Nunes, T., Schliemann, A.D. and Carraher, D.W. (1993) Street Mathematics and School Mathematics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parker, I. (1989) The Crisis in Social Psychology and How to End it. London: Routledge. Parker, I. (2004) Slavoj Zizek: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto. Parker, I. and Spears, R. (eds) (1995) Psychology and Society: Radical Theory and Practice. London: Pluto. Parker, I., Georgaca, E., Harper, D., McLaughlin, T. and Stowell-Smith, M. (1995) Deconstructing Psychopathology. London: Sage. Pateman, T. (1972) Counter Course: A Handbook for Course Criticism. Harmondsworth, Penguin. Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. (1987) Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage. Reason, P. and Rowan, J. (1981) Human Inquiry: A Sourcebook of New Paradigm Research. Chichester: Wiley. Rose, J. (1983) ‘Femininity and its discontents’, Feminist Review, 14: 7–21. Rose, N. (1996) Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, N. (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sampson, E. (1971) Social Psychology and Contemporary Society. New York: Wiley. Scribner, S. (1997) in E. Tobach et al. (eds), Mind and Social Practice: Selected Writings of Sylvia Scribner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shotter, J. (1974) Social Accountability and Selfhood. Oxford: Blackwell.

Shotter, J. (1990) Conversational Realities: Constructing Life Through Language. London: Sage. Shotter, J. and Gergen, K.J. (eds) (1989) Texts of Identity. London: Sage. Shotter, J. (1993) Conversational Realities. London: Sage. Stephenson, N. and Papadopoulos, D. (2006) Analysing everyday experience: social research and political change. London: Palgrave, Macmillan. Studdert, D. (2005) Conceptualising Community: Beyond the State and Individual. London: Palgrave. Stunner, P. (1993) ‘Wittgenstein and the textuality of emotion’, Practice, 9(2): 29–35. Trevarthen, C. (1993) ‘The self born in intersubjectivity: the psychology of an infant communicating’, in U. Neisser (ed.), The Perceived Self. Cambridge University Press. Urry, J. (2003) Global Complexity. Oxford: Polity. Veresov, N. (2005) ‘Marxist and non-Marxist aspects of the cultural-historical psychology of L.S. Vygotsky’, Outlines: Critical Social Studies, 7(1): 31–49. Volosinov, V.N. (1976) Freudianism, a Marxist Critique. New York: Academic Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1962) Thought and Language. E. Hanfmann and G. Vakar (Tr. and eds). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) in M. Cole et al. (eds), Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walkerdine, V. (1990) ‘Femininity as performance’, Oxford Review of Education, 15(3): 267–279. Walkerdine, V. (1996) ‘The subject in situated cognition’, in D. Kirshner and T. Whitson (eds), Situated Cognition: Social, Semiotic and Neurological Perspectives. Erlbaum: New York. Walkerdine, V. (1997) Daddy’s Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Walkerdine, V. (2001) ‘Safety and danger: Childhood sexuality and space at the end of the millennium’, in Hultquist, K. and Dahlberg, G. (eds), Governing the Child in New Millennium. New York: Routledge Falmer. Walkerdine, V. (2006) Thinking subjectivity beyond the psychoanalytic/discursive divide, public lecture. ESRC Identities Programme, University of the West of England, Bristol, 15th March. Walkerdine, V. (2007) Children, Gender, Video Games: Towards a Relational Approach to Multimedia. London: PalgraveMacmillan. Walkerdine, V., Lucey, H. and Melody, J. (2001) Growing Up Girl. Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave.

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Wertsch, J.V. (1991) Voices in the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wetherell, M. (2005) ‘Unconscious conflict or everyday accountability?’, British Journal of Social Psychology, 44(2): 169–173. Wetherell, M. and Potter, J. (1993) Mapping the Language of Racism. Discourse and the Legitimation

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of Exploitation. New York: Columbia University Press. Wise, J.M. (2005) ‘Assemblage’, in C. Stivale (ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts. Chesham: Acumen, pp. 77–87. Young, N. (1992) ‘Postmodern self psychology mirrored in science and the arts’, in S. Kvale (ed.), Psychology and Postmodernity. London: Sage.

4 Sociology and Culture Tony Bennett

Two general questions need to be answered in order to define a manageable way of addressing a topic as forbiddingly large as the relations between sociology and cultural analysis. The first is whether to define these relations as the province of a particular and specialized area of work within sociology, or whether to consider them as pointing to a more general field of problems and issues that have broader implications for the pursuit of sociology more generally. According to the former conception, attention would focus on the sociology of culture as a specialist sub-branch of sociology concerned with the analysis of those practices and institutions which comprise culture as (the terms vary) a distinctive level, field or subsystem of society: literary, musical and artistic institutions, and the media and entertainment complexes comprising the culture industries. In the second conception, attention focuses on the role of cultural factors in organizing social life. How culture is defined in such approaches varies, ranging, for example, from the stress placed on the role of norms, values and beliefs in classical sociology to the formulations of contemporary discourse theory in which culture is interpreted as a set

of institutionalized techniques and practices. What they share, however, is a focus on culture as an organizing force that orders the forms of social action and interaction that make up ‘society’. These are not, however, either/or options. Max Weber, for example, combined the two. His work on the sociology of modern Western musical forms, focused on their development as part of a more general process of rationalization (Weber, 1958), is an example of the first approach, while his concern with the role of religious belief in the organization of social and economic life, most famously in his account of the role of the Protestant ethic in the early formation of Western capitalism (Weber, 1976), exemplifies the second. I shall therefore consider both approaches. This will help to throw light on the relations between sociology and a broader range of other disciplines than would otherwise be the case. For work conducted in accordance with the first conception has been more engaged in debates with the humanistic and aesthetic disciplines (literary studies, art history, and musicology, for example) than has work conducted in accordance with the second conception, where the debates have focused

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more on relations between sociology and other social sciences. The second question concerns the construction to place on the relations between sociology’s primary object of study – let us, for the moment, call it society – and culture. Are these to be understood as relations of the determination of culture by society? As ones in which cultural practices constitute and define society? Or as ones in which culture and society interact in mutually constitutive ways? While I shall review all of these positions, I take the tendency of debates since the 1960s to have led inexorably away from the first position towards some variant of the second or third. I shall therefore address these questions from this perspective, that of the ‘cultural turn’, in which the emphasis is placed on culture’s constitutive role in relation to society or, more accurately, the social. This switch from ‘society’ to ‘the social’ is perhaps one of the most significant recent developments within sociology, one which significantly challenges earlier conceptions of the discipline’s concerns in stressing the fabricated or ‘made-up’nature of ‘the social’as the result of a set of intersecting political, epistemological and methodological procedures rather than, as in traditional sociological conceptions of ‘society’, construing it as an independently existing set of realities and processes that can be invoked to explain other practices or phenomena. I look first at what I have called the ‘sociology of culture’. The main issues considered here will be, first, the history and nature of sociology’s engagement with literary and artistic forms and practices; second, the consequences of the ways in which the relations between such forms are classified and organized into cultural hierarchies; and, third, different sociological accounts of the nature and emergence of distinctive literary and artistic fields or systems, and of the nature and value of aesthetic experience. I then move, in the second section, to review some of the formulations of the relations between culture and the social associated with what has been retrospectively constructed as the ‘classical tradition’ in

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sociology. I shall look in some detail here at Göran Therborn’s (1976) discussion of sociology’s engagement with ‘the ideological community’ and its role in the account he offers of the different explanatory logics of the Marxist and sociological traditions. I shall then consider how this concern with ‘the ideological community’ continues to inform contemporary sociological constructions of ‘social problems’ in the literature focused on the roles of social or civic capital in securing social inclusion or social solidarity. In the third and final section, I consider a range of different accounts of the role of culture in constructing the social that derive from different interpretations of the ‘cultural turn’.

THE SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE A good deal of the work conducted under this heading focuses on the analysis of genres as codified forms of literary and artistic expression which are considered from the perspective of how they are shaped by the social relations in which their production, consumption and circulation are set as well as from that of their operation as forms of ‘symbolic action’ (Frow, 2006: p. 2) that actively shape social practices. The impetus for the development of a sociological approach to genres is conventionally attributed to Georges Simmel’s contention that the structures of mental and social life are homologous. Georg Lukács translated this into a distinctive, if abstractly stated, sociology of genres that aimed to trace correspondences between the formal organization of particular genres and the organization of particular forms of social and economic life. His account of tragedy thus focuses on its metaphysical properties – that is, the depiction of the relationships between the gods and the world of human action as one in which the gods are an opaque or hidden presence, providing an unclear or ambiguous guide to action – and their relationship to the social circumstances of the late-nineteenthcentury German bourgeoisie as a class caught in a set of contradictory relations that made it difficult for the bourgeois to identify what

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ought to be his proper course of action in the world (Lukács, 1974). It is this aspect of the metaphysic of tragedy that Lucien Goldmann (1964) draws on in his more detailed study of the relations between Racine’s tragedies, Jansenism and the position of the noblesse de robe, a bureaucratic cadre whose patents of nobility were awarded by the Crown. Caught in a contradictory set of relationships between the Third Estate, with whom it had interests in common, and the monarchy, which it depended upon and was therefore unable to oppose, the noblesse de robe, Goldmann argues, was as unable to ‘live a valid life in this world’ (Goldmann, 1964: p. 105) as any of Racine’s tragic heroines, both seeking direction from a ‘hidden god’ whose will remained indecipherable. There are similarly detailed accounts of other genres: Walter Benjamin’s account of the origins of German tragic drama, for example (Benjamin, 1977); Jean Duvignaud’s contention that drama flourishes in periods characterized by the anomie arising from the clash of strongly conflicting normative systems (Duvignaud, 1965); the attribution of the conditions of courtly love to the dependent position of landless warriors within the structure of the feudal court (Moller, 1964); and Raymond Williams’s account of the generic shifts associated with changing relations between rural and urban life (Williams, 1973). The literary genre that has attracted the greatest amount of sociological attention, however, is undoubtedly the novel. Lukács is, again, an important figure here. His Theory of the Novel (Lukács, 1971) proposes a homology between the metaphysic of the novel as a world abandoned by god – a world in which the gods are not merely hidden, as in tragedy, but one that has been entirely leeched of transcendental meaning – and the daily experience of economic life in capitalist societies in which use value has been entirely subordinated to exchange value. The quest of the novelistic hero for meaning in a world devoid of meaning is thus construed as similar to the loss of meaning that characterizes everyday life in a society governed by the reified structures

of commodity exchange. Pierre Vilar (1971) draws on this perspective in his account of the relations between the chivalric illusions of Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Europe’s first experience of hyper-inflation resulting from the excess of gold circulating in early modern Spain, as does Goldmann (1969) in his more formalized theory of the relations between the novel and capitalism. The key sociological debates concerning the English novel have focused on its rise, as a distinctive genre of prose fiction, in the context of the development of new literary markets which made possible the development and assertion of the literary values of the middle classes in opposition to those of the aristocracy. This, the central argument of Ian Watt’s largely Weberian account of the rise of the novel (Watt, 1957), has, however, been qualified in recent years by accounts focused more on the relations between novel-reading and the gender dynamics of eighteenth-century society (Armstrong, 1987) as well as by alternative readings of the relations between the middle classes and the aristocracy. This is true of Michael McKeon (1987), whose account of the eighteenthcentury novel, like Paul Hunter’s (1966), also places greater stress on its relationship to the movement for religious reform and, by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s work, interprets the novel less taxonomically, seeing the eighteenth-century form as part of the longer and more fluid culture of the novelistic that Bakhtin’s work identifies (Bakhtin, 1981). The novel has also figured prominently in Franco Moretti’s attempt to shift the focus of literary history from the ‘exceptional events’ constituted by the handful of texts from any period that typically attract critical attention to focus, instead, on ‘the large mass of facts’ represented by the full range of generic titles published within and across different historical periods (Moretti, 2005). A central difficulty with many of the traditions discussed above is that they have been less successful in explaining the power of genres as forms of symbolic action capable of shaping the world than they have been in explaining how genres are related to particular

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social conditions. This has been particularly true of work in the Marxist tradition, where the metaphor of base and superstructure has waylaid analysis into what has proved to be the cul-de-sac of attempts to explain how literary and artistic forms can be said to be both determined by their economic and social bases and yet also react back on those with a distinctive power and effectivity of their own (Williams, 1977). The influence of Foucauldian perspectives on the ‘new historicism’ in literary studies provided a productive alternative to such conceptions. By suggesting that literary practices be viewed as parts of institutional-discursive machineries whose operations shape conduct, they have led to a new conception of genres less as literary kinds than as distinctive technologies of power to be considered in terms of their relations to the apparatuses of, for example, statehood in the case of Foucauldian accounts of Shakespearean tragedies (Tennenhouse, 1986) or practices of self-fashioning among Renaissance courtiers (Greenblatt, 1980). John Bender (1987) has also offered a rereading of the relations between the novel and eighteenth-century English society from this perspective. Sociological approaches to genres have also paid a good deal of attention to popular genres, with significant accounts of the rise and development of detective fiction (Eco and Sebeok, 1983; Ginzburg, 1980; Moretti, 1983), horror (Gelder, 1994), westerns (Cawelti, 1971), and romance fiction (Radway, 1987). Within some traditions of work, literary forms of writing are viewed as qualitatively different from the formulaic properties of popular genres, generating the question of the extent to which sociological accounts of the distinctive circumstances of their production can account for the differences between these two kinds of writing. This has been a particularly important concern in those accounts of literature and the aesthetic produced within what Perry Anderson calls the tradition of ‘Western Marxism’(Anderson, 1976), albeit that the accounts offered within this tradition differed considerably. Lukács, again, is a significant figure here owing to his

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historicist interpretation of the principles of ‘world-view’ analysis in which literary and artistic forms are viewed as the expressions of the world-views of social classes. In his account of the historical novel, for example, Lukács (1969) ranks works in aesthetic importance according to the degree to which the classes whose world-views they represent played leading and progressive roles in the historical period in question. In sharp contrast to this, the Althusserian school of Marxist thought developed a conception of the literary as a distinctive mode of cognition which made prevailing ideologies visible, throwing their fault-lines into sharp relief, through a distinctive work of transformation of the ideological modes of perception embedded in formulaic works. An aspect of Althusser’s own work (Althusser, 1977), this perspective was most fully developed by Pierre Macherey (1978) and, for a period, was significantly developed by Terry Eagleton both theoretically (Eagleton, 1976) and in his account of the Brontes (Eagleton, 1975). In art history, too, this perspective was influential, particularly in T.J. Clark’s account of the respects in which Courbet’s paintings of rural scenes made visible the ideological fantasies implicit in conventionalized depictions of rural life (Clark, 1982). Another way of posing such questions, however, is to reformulate them as ones concerning the institutional and discursive practices through which different kinds of art and literature are classified and ranked relative to one another within different regimes of value (Frow, 1995). The processes through which hitherto subordinate or marginal genres become canonized have been to the forefront of such concerns, although, of course, processes of de-canonization through which previously canonized texts or genres descend aesthetic hierarchies are just as important. Pierre Bourdieu’s work has provided a set of powerful intellectual tools for engaging with both of these processes by showing how the positioning of cultural texts relative to one another within hierarchies of value depends on the place they occupy in relation to the fields of restricted and extended cultural production

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(Bourdieu, 1993a, 1996). Their relations to the consumption practices of different classes as these seek to position themselves in relation to one another within a competitively structured social space through the cultural practices they pursue are also important (Bourdieu, 1984). These aspects of Bourdieu’s work have provided the main points of theoretical reference for an extended literature concerned with the flux of value associated with literary and artistic texts as their connections to institutional processes of canon formation and to class-based forms of cultural consumption change (Collins, 2002: Frow, 1995; Gelder, 2004; Guillory, 1993; Prior, 2002). Lawrence Levine’s work has been important too, particularly in addressing such processes in the context of nineteenth-century America, where the Eurocentric assumptions informing Bourdieu’s accounts did not apply. This is especially true of Levine’s account of the racial origins of the relations between high-, middle- and low-brow cultures as a racialized hierarchy in which the differential value of ‘the brows’derived from anthropometric measurements of the allegedly low-set skulls of Negroes and other ‘primitive’ types (Levine, 1988). There is now, of course, a much larger body of work addressing the operation of racially organized hierarchies of the arts (Bindman, 2002; Pinder, 2002) just as the gendered aspects of regimes of value and the cultural hierarchies they construct are the subject of a now considerable literature (Parker, 1984; Pollock, 1999; Parker and Pollock, 1981; Kasson, 1990; Wolff, 1990) The literature is, however, divided on the question as to whether sociological analysis should seek to distil and account for a basis of ‘true value’ that might subsist beneath, or rise above, such histories of differential evaluation. As I have shown elsewhere, work within the tradition of Western Marxism has sided with claims that see the aesthetic as a universal mode of cognition, distinct from science on the one hand and from myth or ideology on the other, invoking the principles of historical and materialist analysis to account for how particular works of art and literature exceed or transcend the

particular circumstances of their production to achieve universal recognition and value of this kind (Bennett, 1991). This is also, in spite of appearances to the contrary, an aspect of the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, who identified his concern as being to ‘to found a science of aesthetic knowledge’ (Bourdieu, 1993b: p. 267) that would account for the universal value that inhered in particular works of art and literature as a result of their emergence from historical processes of a particular kind. My own work has questioned the logic of such approaches, arguing that they are generated by a historically particular and therefore relative construction of the universal which diverts analysis into unproductive dead ends generated by the attempt to reconcile unfounded universalist claims with particularistic principles of explanation (Bennett, 2005). More interesting questions have been opened up by historical work which relates the emergence of the new discourses and practices associated with eighteenth-century conceptions of taste to the emergence of new practices of social ordering associated with the development of market society (Poovey, 1994). PostFoucauldian analysis has also opened up important questions focused on the role played by the transformation of eighteenth-century conceptions of taste and the broader culture of civic humanism into the philosophical accounts of aesthetics developed by Kant and his successors as part of a historical shift in the practices of liberal government (Caygill, 1989; Poovey, 1998). The recent work of Jacques Rancière also opens up new approaches to the relations between aesthetics and the social in its concern with ‘the distribution of the sensible’ – that is, with the ways in which artistic practices are partitioned across the distribution of persons and their different positions in relation to the practices of citizenship and governance (Rancière, 2004a). Niklas Luhmann’s work represents a further distinctive position in the relations between sociology and aesthetics. As an exponent of systems theory, Luhmann accounts for the emergence of art, understood aesthetically as an end in itself, as a result of the progressive

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differentiation of art from other sub-systems within the total organization of society conceived as a system of systems. He defines the distinguishing properties of this subsystem in terms of a Kantian conception of the production and consumption of art as disinterested activities undertaken as ends in themselves. However, unlike Bourdieu, who sees in Kantian claims to disinterestedness a kind of smokescreen for the role that the consumption of art as an end in itself plays in relation to the organization and maintenance of bourgeois practices of social distinction, Luhmann defines the ‘purposiveness without purpose’ of art as a characteristic of a communications subsystem that works ‘exclusively for the purpose of letting the observer participate in the communication of invented forms’ (Luhmann, 2000: p. 14). Luhmann differs from Bourdieu in another respect too. In his account of the emergence and development of art and literature as distinctive fields of cultural production and consumption that are separable from the fields of economic and political power, Bourdieu stresses the respects in which this results, first, from the competitive struggles between artists, writers and other cultural producers and, second, from their collective struggles to assert their autonomy from the forms of power associated with operation of economic markets and the political power of the state. For Bourdieu, in other words, the emergence of art and literature as autonomous fields in which the distinctive laws of disinterestedness operate is the result of the interested calculations of agents within those fields vis-à-vis other fields. For Luhmann, by contrast, their autonomy is the result of an in-built and ineluctable tendency towards the progressive differentiation of sub-systems from one another that characterizes the development of complex social systems. While, in my view, Bourdieu’s account of the autonomy of the literary and artistic fields is the preferable of the two because it sees this as the contingent outcome of the motivated actions of a complex range of social agents – writers, art galleries, critics, dealers, literary agents, etc. – in particular

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historical conditions, it still suffers from the weakness that it is not adequately contingent or historically specific enough. Bourdieu’s account of the development of the autonomy of the literary and artistic fields in latenineteenth-century France depends on the differentiation of art and literature from not only the state and the market but also from any form of political utility. Yet it is clear from a number of accounts (Levine, 1988; de la Fuente, 2004) that the separation off of art from the market in nineteenth-century America depended on its being connected to religious-cum-political notions of pedagogy and usefulness. It is clear, too, in the British context, that utilitarian conceptions of art’s purpose have provided a significant counterweight to those tendencies – much less strong than in France – that sung the virtues of l’art pour l’art (Taylor, 1999). Recent work focused on Japan also suggests the operation of a cultural system in which aesthetic practices served as a means for overcoming social divisions rather than, as in Bourdieu’s account, organizing them (Ikegami, 2005).

SOCIOLOGY AND THE IMAGINED COMMUNITY My concerns so far have been with the sociology of culture understood as a distinctive realm of social practice that I have exemplified by the institutions of art and literature. I now turn to consider the role that a broader understanding of culture has played in relation to sociology more generally. I shall take, as my point of departure, Göran Therborn’s account of the relations between sociology and Marxism as a means of highlighting a significant point of tension within the concerns and procedures of sociology understood as a ‘science of society’. For a good deal of sociology aims to explain the distribution of particular values, beliefs, forms of conduct, and life chances by invoking a range of social variables – social class, race or ethnicity, gender, and occupation are the most usual ones – to account for them. The explanatory logic that is involved here is one

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in which such variables function as a causal ground in relation to the values, beliefs, and forms of conduct that are construed as their effects. This logic underlies a good deal of the empirical social research that is conducted via the machineries of statistical gathering that now provide the most regular interface between the social sciences and contemporary practices of government. The questionnaires on which these are based and the forms of analysis to which they give rise usually construct a division between, on the one hand, class, income, gender, etc., as independent variables, and, on the other, values, beliefs, and forms of conduct – such as attitudes to social issues such as trade unionism, voting preferences, or tastes. Defining these as dependent variables implies that these shift in accordance with changes in the composition of independent variables which, since these do not themselves register the influence of dependent variables, operate as the ‘unmoved movers’ of sociological explanation. If this is true of much of sociology, so it is also of a good deal of Marxist social analysis: of Marxist class analysis, for example (Wright, 2000). This reflects the considerable intellectual traffic that has taken place between the two traditions and the influence on both of earlier traditions of political economy and the ‘rational choice’ theory that is their most enduring legacy: that is, that the forms of social action in which individuals engage are governed by rational calculations as to how best to maximize their interests or assets in the context of the different markets (labour, capital, consumer) in which they are placed. This is not, I should stress, the position from which Therborn writes. He construes Marxism, after Althusser, as a science of history that operates with a particular construction of its object (societies in history) which, however, exhibits a similar analytical topography in the respect that it sees ‘social arrangements determined in the last instance by a specific combination of forces and relations of production’ (Therborn, 1976: p. 73). In equating type of society with mode of production, Marxist thought, no matter how far it is qualified by the famous notion of

‘determination in the last instance’, prioritizes economic relationships in its account of the factors propelling the actions of both individuals and collectives. For Therborn, by contrast, the strains of thought which most distinguish the sociological tradition are ones that have articulated a different explanatory logic by invoking the role of ‘the ideological community’ – that is, of norms, values and beliefs – to account for the social actions of individuals and collectives. This was not always the case. To the contrary, for the first generation of sociologists – August Comte and Saint-Simon, for example – sociology was modelled on the natural and biological sciences as a positive science of society. But Therborn argues that it rapidly came to see itself as the ‘natural science of an unnatural world’ as, in the context of the developing social antagonisms of nineteenth-century capitalism, society increasingly presented itself as morbidly pathological and without any builtin, or natural, corrective mechanisms. It was in this context, during the late-nineteenthcentury period of ‘classical sociology’, that sociologists ‘discovered’ the role of ‘the ideological community’ in which norms, values and beliefs figure as the sources of social action, with the consequence that they could also be pressed into service as the focal point for corrective action designed to overcome the problems (of class conflict, alienation, loss of identity, social fragmentation) that wracked the social body. While this is true in varying ways of Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies and Georges Simmel, Emile Durkheim is the key figure here. This is partly a matter of his view that social life is made up of nothing but collective representations. ‘The principal social phenomena, religion, ethics, law, economy and aesthetics’, he wrote, ‘are nothing else but systems of values’ (cit. Therborn, 1976: p. 257). The inclusion of the economy in this list indicates the degree of Durkheim’s radicalism in relation to the assumptions of political economy. Far from forms of human behaviour being dictated by the laws of markets, Durkheim saw the operation of markets as being dependent

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on the operation of particular social norms and values. To the degree that this was so, he also argued that the ways in which markets functioned, and their consequences for society, could be subjected to change, modification or amelioration through the influence of normative factors. This is the second axis of Durkheim’s stress on the role of norms and values, for in emphasizing their transformative value he made these the centre of his conception of the role that sociology could play in relation to not just the study of society but its management. Its role in this regard consists in identifying the kinds and points of tension within modern societies that might be eased if the norms and values regulating the conduct of both individual and collective actors could be changed. The details of Durkheim’s suggestions in these regards need not detain us except to say that they focused on curbing the habits of individualism that constituted the pre-reflective response to market divisions by bringing them under the influence of a range of civic and moral codes whose dissemination was to be undertaken by a range of state and civil agencies (Camic, 1986). Both of these axes, the theoretical and the practical, of Durkheim’s construction of the relations between culture and society have continued to influence the subsequent development of sociology. The work of Talcott Parsons (1969), by retrospectively bringing together Durkheim and Weber to construct the canon of ‘classical sociology’ in support of his own account of the role of pattern variables in organizing the structure of social action, played a crucial theoretical role in this regard. At a more empirical level, the work of the Chicago School, particularly in the early development of sub-cultural theory in which the conduct of ‘deviant groups’ was explained in terms of the operation of distinctive sets of values (Whyte, 1955), was also important and played a significant role in the later development of sub-cultural theory in Britain, albeit that this offered important new accounts of the mechanisms through which subcultures operated by reinterpreting

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these through either Althusserian (Hall and Jefferson, 1976) or post-structuralist lenses (Hebdige, 1979). In terms of its practical axis, the Durkheimian legacy has been, and remains, greatly in evidence in the forms in which sociology is enlisted for programmes of social management. Indeed, this is now arguably much truer than at any period since the 1939–1945 war as, under the impact of neoliberalism, the earlier forms of welfare provision, and the class-based sociological analyses of inequalities underlying them, have been partially dismantled and replaced by a stress on concerns centred on notions of moral integration and civic renewal. The relationships between sociology and New Labour in Britain provide a telling example of these developments. At a general level their logic is clearly articulated in Anthony Giddens’s advocacy of the ‘third way’ as a strategy which, rather than aiming to offset the inequalities generated by market mechanisms via redistributive methods, relies on a variety of normative strategies focused on building up communities and fostering a new sense of citizenship. This involves a significant historical shift in policy focus in which the role of the welfare state is considerably diminished as it is replaced by ‘the social investment state’ in which investment is re-routed to a range of normative mechanisms for acting on the troubled fabric of society so as to contain its tensions within manageable limits (Giddens, 1998, 2000). At a more specific level, the recent careers of the concepts of social inclusion and social capital provide telling instances of these kinds of substitutions. Ruth Levitas has traced the routes through which the concept of social inclusion – a Durkheimian-inspired concept generated in the French sociological debates of the 1970s and 1980s – entered into British debates to replace earlier structural accounts of inequalities with a new conception of the socially excluded as a combination of (i) those who are not integrated into the mainstream because they are outside paid employment, and (ii) an underclass whose failure to integrate is attributed to its own

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moral shortcomings. The result, as many commentators have argued, is a combination of strategies that seek to reintegrate the unemployed into the normative mainstream of market society through a range of ‘back to work’ and other programmes and strategies which aim to readjust the cultures of the socially deprived through a range of exhortatory and disciplinary measures (Clark and Newman, 2004; Levitas, 1998, 2004; Mckinnie, 2004). The concept of social capital has enjoyed a similar career. While its history is more complex owing to its relations to a range of capital theories (social capital, human capital, cultural capital) and their relations to rational choice theory (Fine, 2001; Lin, 2001), Robert Putnam’s work – particularly his suggestive imagery of ‘bowling alone’ (Putnam, 2000) – has generated a minor sociological industry focused on the need to repair damaged communities by building up social capital. This involves investing in the kinds of social and civic organizations that will provide a counterweight to the market mechanisms promoting social isolation and self-regarding individualism by providing the contexts in which individuals from different backgrounds, especially racially divided ones, can come to know and trust one another more fully. In Therborn’s analysis, the stress that classical sociology placed on cultural values was part of a more general late-nineteenth-century formation that aimed to confound Marxist predictions that conflicting material interests would lead to the overthrow of capitalism by providing a means of managing the social tensions generated by market mechanisms. The historical parallels between this period and the current shift in the deployment of (some forms of) sociology associated with the shift from welfarism to neoliberalism, while not exact, are easy to see. It is, then, as others have noted (Inglis and Hughson, 2003), difficult to see quite why, in his recent work, Jeffrey Alexander should have so stridently insisted that cultural analysis has received little prior attention in sociology, or why he should see the programme that he proposes

for his own conception of ‘cultural sociology’ as compellingly new. There are other difficulties, too. For Alexander, culture is to be understood as an autonomous form of sense-making activity that shapes social actions and institutions, ‘providing inputs every bit as vital as more material or instrumental forces’ (Alexander, 2003: p. 12). This being so, two methodological imperatives follow for Alexander’s conception of cultural sociology: first, that it should undertake a Geertzian ‘thick description’ of such practices of sensemaking, and second, that rather than relying on abstract formulations of culture’s causality in relation to social life, it should seek to ‘anchor (its) causality in proximate actors and agencies, specifying in detail just how culture interferes with and directs what really happens’ (Alexander, 2003: p. 14). The problem here is that such formulations are haunted by two sets of unproductive oppositions: the sense of a division between culture and ‘what really happens’, and the distinction he draws between culture and ‘material and instrumental forces’. It is dualisms of this kind that work conducted under the heading of the ‘cultural turn’ has sought to overcome by stressing both the material and instrumental nature of culture and its role, not in contributing to shaping ‘society’ as something that exists prior to and independently of culture, but as constituting social relations so that categories such as class, gender and race – and, indeed, the social and the economy – are regarded as being shaped from the inside out, so to speak, through the operation of material cultural practices.

CULTURAL TURNS In its original uses, the ‘cultural turn’ referred to the influence of perspectives derived from linguistics in re-thinking the organization of social relationships (Hunt and Bonnell, 1999). The central contention here is that, to the degree that social relations depend on and operate through relations of meaning, then so the methods developed for analysing

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the mechanisms of meaning-making within language and other language-like cultural forms need to be applied if the role of similar mechanisms in the make-up of social relations is to be adequately understood. The term has since been used in a more extended way as a general umbrella term encompassing a range of quite disparate positions which, however, have in common a commitment to the view that the social has no positivity of its own independently of the way in which it is constituted by cultural or discursive forces. The difficulties here lie in the formulation ‘cultural or discursive’, since this yokes together sharply distinct intellectual traditions which, depending on whether it is ‘culture’ or ‘discourse’ that they are concerned with, and depending on how each of these terms is understood, propose quite different conceptions of the ways in which the social is culturally or discursively shaped. It is for this reason that I speak here of cultural turns, in the plural, in order to foreground the differences between what I take to be the four most important contemporary versions of this general argument. I shall look first at the account of the discursive construction of the social associated with Stuart Hall’s account of class relations and ‘new ethnicities’. I shall then consider the different terms in which discourse figures in Foucauldian traditions, with especial attention to accounts of the emergence and management of the social within the Foucauldian and postFoucauldian literature on governmentality. My third focus is on Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the part played by culture in his concepts of habitus and field as, between them, offering a distinctive account of the social as ‘sociocultural’ in its constitution. Finally, I look at the accounts, still under development, that are emerging from science studies and actor network theory regarding the role played by assemblages of human and non-human actors in the processes through which social worlds are made up and enacted. (i) The use of linguistics as a model for analysing the social was first associated with structuralism, drawing particularly on Ferdinand de Saussure’s diacritical

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conception of language as a system without positive terms in which the units of language derive their meaning entirely from their relations to one another within a selfenclosing system of rules (Saussure, 1960). The notion that society might be thought of as a similarly organized set of rules and exchanges between social units whose relations to one another were diacritically organized was originally developed in anthropology, most notably by Claude LéviStrauss in his account of kinship systems or his revision of earlier Durkheimian theories of totemism (Lévi-Strauss, 1970, 1960). However, this perspective was rather quickly white-anted by post-structuralist accounts of language, particularly those of Jacques Derrida (1976), which destabilized the logic of a definite set of relations between signifiers that had characterized Saussure’s account of the mechanism of meaning production in language. For Derrida, the play of differences in language is much more fluid and mobile, with the result that the meaning of any signifier can never be fixed but is rather forever deferred to the extent that the mutations it undergoes as a result of its inscription within different chains of signifiers can never finally be settled on. Meaning remains forever in suspension in a ceaseless flow of changing permutations of signification. When applied to social analysis, the implication of this perspective is that social relations can no longer be thought of as taking place between units of the social – classes, races, or genders, for example – that are regarded as given, as stable points of reference outside the flux of signification. Rather, they themselves are put into flux as positions – or, in a new term meant to suggest their instability in this regard – ‘positionalities’ that have no fixed points of anchorage in social space independently of their inscription in an endless and mutating play of differences in relation to other similarly constituted positionalities. One route through which these perspectives led to revised conceptions of the relations between culture and the social was in the context of the discursive re-interpretations of

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the role of classes inAntonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony developed by Stuart Hall and others in the 1980s (see especially Laclau and Mouffe, 1985).1 In Gramsci’s own writings, the relations between classes and ideologies are theorized within an expressivist conception of the relations between culture and the social in which ideologies express, in more or less coherent forms, the values, interests and world views arising from the positions that classes occupy within the relations of production (Gramsci, 1971). These are the points of anchorage that fix classes in their place and assign ideologies to them like, as Hall put it drawing on Poulantzas’s earlier formulation (Poulantzas, 1975), so many number plates on their backs (Hall, 1986). It is this fixity of the social associated with Gramscian and, of course, Marxist accounts of class more generally that Hall undoes in his account of the role played by the mechanisms of ideological articulation in the struggle for hegemony. According to this account, in which the relations between classes-instruggle are reconceptualized along poststructuralist lines, ideologies are detached from any permanent assignation to particular classes to be allowed, in some measure, to ‘free-float’ in the relations between classes so that, depending on how the struggle for hegemony is conducted, particular ideologies can be disarticulated from one class position and re-articulated to another through mechanisms of articulation that are discursive. In the process, however, it’s not only ideologies that get moved about; so, too, do the classes to which they get connected. For the conception of classes that is involved here is one in which classes emerge as units of collective action only in the context of the weave of ideological discourses through which, by being articulated to them, they are, in turn, articulated into specific historical conjunctures. To conceive the social as being pierced by discourse in this way entails a denial of the assumption that it can be thought of as a stable structure which generates, in classes, stable points of reference for practices of articulation to latch on to. Instead, the social is envisaged as a constantly shifting network

of discursively constructed positionalities: a kaleidoscopically unstable set of points of subject formation that are forged in relation to each other in the context of complex networks of ideological articulation. A similar conception underlies Hall’s later account of ‘new ethnicities’ (Hall, 1996). Detaching the concept of ethnicity from essentialist conceptions according to which ethnicity is determined by biological or epidermal conceptions of race, or is viewed as being rooted in continuing and unchanging relations to a particular tradition or homeland, Hall views ethnicities as mutable historical constructs that are shaped by the constant mixing of, and interplay between, the ethnically coded cultural values and signifiers through which their changing relations to one another are organized. In place of ethnic groups, seen in relatively homogeneous terms and as stable points to which there can be attributed stable sets of values, Hall thus speaks of ethnicities as mobile and labile positionalities which are subject to transformation as their relations to one another change. (ii) There is, in this first version of the cultural turn, a degree of vagueness about the terms ideology, culture and discourse. These tend to be used as overlapping terms denoting, in a general way, a concern with the role of language-like mechanisms in the organization of social relations whose operation is thus conceived as in some way proceeding through the minds (conscious or unconscious) of subjects. The term discourse has, however, been stretched in other directions as a consequence of its use, particularly in the context of debates within cultural studies, to bring together two different phases and aspects of Foucault’s work in order to provide a more theoretically focused account of culture as a material practice. In his thoughtful account of the history of the concept, Keith Sawyer shows that Foucault’s usage of the term discourse and its various derivatives – episteme, archive, discursive formation – was restricted mainly to The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault, 1972) and The Order of Things (Foucault, 1970) where it conformed largely to its conventional

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interpretation in linguistics, after Benveniste, to refer to the events of language use – letters, documents, archives – larger than the sentence. Foucault is, at this time, also careful to maintain a distinction between discursive formations and non-discursive domains, events and practices: economic practices and processes, institutional mechanisms, political events, etc. In such later texts as Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1977) and the various volumes of The History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1986), Sawyer argues, Foucault’s attention shifts to focus on the operation of power-knowledge apparatuses, technologies of power, or technologies of subjectification, making sparing use of his earlier discursive vocabulary or, when doing so, retaining the distinction between discourse and the non-discursive via the insistence that the operations of discourse are always inscribed in non-discursive practices. While more general interpretations of the Foucauldian category of discourse as a rough synonym for culture or ideology were evident in the late 1970s, in Edward Said’s Orientalism (Said, 1979) for example, Sawyer traces a more interesting two-staged transformation in the British cultural studies debates of the late 1970s and 1980s. In the first of these, Foucault’s work was read through the lenses of Lacanian theory and Michel Pêcheux’s Althusserian interpretation of discourse as a component of the interpellative mechanisms through which individuals are hailed or called up into particular subject positions (Pêcheux, 1982). At this stage, earlier Foucauldian categories of discourse formed part of a mix of different French accounts through which members of the Birmingham school of cultural studies sought to develop ‘a notion of discourse and language in relation to ideology, as a mechanism of social control over the construction of the self’ (Sawyer, 2002: p. 445). The second stage of the concept’s transformation occurred later, and by no means solely among members of the Birmingham school, as this ‘discursive’ notion of discourse, so to speak, got mapped on to the set of concepts associated with Foucault’s later writing to account for

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the operation of institutional apparatuses, semio-techniques, and technologies of power and subjectification, to yield an interpretation of discourse in which discourse is interpreted as being not merely embedded in such apparatuses but as operating through them. It was via this series of transformations that the Foucauldian category of discourse was pressed into service as another version of the cultural turn, one in which discourse displaces more general notions of culture as a realm of ideas, concepts and symbols distinct from material practices and, in their place, installs the notion of discourse as material practice. That this is a concept of discourse whose Foucauldian pedigree is a little stretched does not mean that the purposes for which it has been used have been unproductive. There is, to the contrary, a considerable literature that has drawn on this concept of discourse – sometimes as an alternative to the notion of culture, at other times standing in its place – to account for the processes through which particular systems of knowledge or thought operate through institutional apparatuses or technologies of power to produce a discursive/cultural production or fixing of the objects on which they act. This has been especially true of work that has sought to integrate these perspectives within Foucault’s account of ‘governmentality’ as a distinctively modern form of rule with attention focusing on the ways in which specific knowledges have shaped specific techniques and technologies of intervention into the management of the economy, the social or, in the case of the ‘psy-complex’, the mind (Dean, 1999; Frow, 2004; Rose, 1998; Rose, 1999; Rose and Miller, 1992). Indeed, in more ambitious accounts, the economy and the social as such are regarded as the artefacts of governmental programmes, the historical results of operations that are simultaneously discursive, technical, and institutional through which the varied ‘working surfaces’ that are needed to manage an economy or society are constructed and organized (Mitchell, 2002). Similar perspectives have been applied to study the operation of cultural technologies understood, in a more conventional sense, as comprising the institutions and practices

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comprising the ‘cultural sector’ (see Lury, this volume). The operations of the cultural sciences – anthropology, art history, and archaeology, for example – as part of civic technologies, such as museums, art galleries, or heritage sites, aimed at shaping and directing the conduct of mass citizenries have been examined in this way (Bennett, 2004; Preziosi, 2003). Similar perspectives have been applied to the study of broadcasting systems as ‘technologies of citizenship’ (Born, 2002; Miller, 1993, 1998; Valentine, 2002) as well as to the ways of shaping and regulating the self as parts of liberal techniques of self-government that characterizes governmentality approaches to pornography (Juffer, 1998) and a range of other contemporary cultural forms (Bratich et al., 2003). Recent extensions of Foucault’s approach to the ways in which architecture shapes behaviour in enclosed environments such as prisons and asylums have focused on the ways in which material environments more generally instantiate certain kinds of power and shape forms of social behaviour and modes of social interaction. The work of Chandra Mukerji (1997) on the role of the palace at Versailles in shaping the territorial organization of state power is a case in point, as is Patrick Joyce’s work focused on the promotion of the free circulation and flow of bodies and materials in nineteenth-century cities such as Manchester as a key aspect of the cultural-material technologies of liberal economies and polities (Joyce, 2002, 2003). (iii) Discussing Bourdieu’s work under the heading of ‘cultural turns’, no matter how broadly interpreted, is not a straightforward matter. He has for some time now been the main contemporary sociologist Bruno Latour has had in view in criticizing sociology for its conception of society, or the social, as a distinctive kind of substance or set of invisible underlying relations or structures that the sociologist invokes to account for other phenomena (Latour, 2004, 2005). In thus claiming a privileged insight into the hidden wellsprings of social behaviour that is denied to ‘ordinary’ social actors – and few contemporary sociologists have claimed this so insistently as Bourdieu – sociologists,

Latour contends, indulge in a form of special pleading that seeks to authorize their power to manage and direct the social by being able to speak for it. And it is certainly true that field theory, which Bourdieu translated from the physical sciences into sociology, is noted for its conception of fields as sets of relations between events which are known and made visible only through their effects, relationships whose disentangling is the exclusive preserve of the sociologist (Martin, 2003).And it is true, finally, that, after an initial interest in British cultural studies (Neveu, 2005), Bourdieu ceased to have much to do with its development once it became subject to the influence of post-structuralist conceptions of language and discourse, just as his work has proved impervious to the influence of Foucauldian categories of discourse. Yet, for all this, it remains true that the social that Bourdieu invoked, and which he sought to mobilize as a political actor, is one that includes culture in its constitution. Thus, the concepts of field, cultural capital, and habitus, which are generally agreed to be his three key concepts (Calhoun, 1993; Crossley, 2001; Lahire, 2001), all include a distinctive interpretation of culture in their definition. This is not merely to say, in the case of the concept of field, that Bourdieu’s own concerns have centred mainly on the cultural field and its various subfields – the literary and artistic subfields, for example – in ways that have stressed their varying degrees of autonomy in relation to the economic and political fields. It is also that Bourdieu’s conception of the relations between elements in fields depends in good measure on his use of structuralist principles of analysis in the context of field theory. Bourdieu was attracted to field theory as a part of his critical engagement with the positivism of American sociology – or what he once called ‘the microphenic empiricism of Lazarsfeld and his European epigones’ (Bourdieu, 1990: p. 19) – for the opportunities it opened up for analysing the shifting relations between elements within complex systems without constructing any particular set of elements

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as the causes of others. This was also the basis for Bourdieu’s attraction to the techniques of multivariate correspondence analysis, developed as an alternative to the hierarchized forms of explanation associated with standardized statistical techniques focused on explaining dependent variables in terms of independent variables, owing to its ability to map the interrelations between practices within social space according to their position in relation to multiple intersecting axes of differentiation (Rouanet et al., 2004). It is, however, in his conception of social space as always symbolic space that the influence of structuralist conceptions of language is most readily apparent. Just as this stresses the diacritical structure of the relations between elements in language in which each element derives its meaning from its relations to other elements, so Bourdieu contends that any cultural practice ‘is nothing other than difference, a distinctive feature, in short, a relational property existing in and through its relations with other properties’ (Bourdieu, 1998: p. 6). Bourdieu is most explicit in acknowledging his indebtedness to structuralist conceptions in the use he makes of the Russian Formalists to clarify the respects in which the positioning of individual literary or artistic works relative to one another within such fields is mobile, changing from one historical state of the field to another, just as, in the accounts of the Russian Formalists, the positioning of literary texts relative to one another was a result of the properties of the literary systems in which they were placed rather an effect of their intrinsic properties (Bourdieu, 1996: pp. 200–205). The difference is that whereas the Formalists regarded literary systems as self-propelling, changing and developing entirely as a result of mechanisms internal to them, Bourdieu locates the mechanisms of change in the discordances that arise from the interfaces between different fields, particularly the cultural field and the economic and political field. There are, however, clear limits to the degree of fluidity that Bourdieu is able to assign to the relations between elements

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within fields. These arise from his conception of fields as, in John Martin’s terms, ‘fields of organized striving’ (Martin, 2003: p. 20) in which actors compete antagonistically for the same values or prizes. This means that the relations between cultural practices in Bourdieu’s account of the organization of cultural fields are, compared with the indeterminacy that would result from the application of Derridean categories, always pinned down in their relations to one another through the positions that are assigned them within a space that is structured in dominance by a single set of values that organize the competitive structure of the field. One consequence of this is that Bourdieu’s account, in Distinction (1984), of the relations between working class culture, defined by a taste for the necessary, and the bourgeois aesthetic ethos of a ‘disinterested interest’ in the work of art as an end itself, is one in which the former can never appear in its own right, as a set of values with distinctive qualities of its own, but only as a lack in which the working classes serve as the negative counterfoil for other processes of class self-definition in the context of a competitive struggle they are unable to enter (Rancière, 2004b; Uzel, 2004). Similar questions are posed by Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, which, as these are discussed more fully in this volume by Savage, I shall pass over here except to make two points. The first concerns the crucial role this concept has played in challenging economistic conceptions of class by stressing the role that cultural assets play in the construction of class relationships. The second concerns its role as the ‘political hinge’of Bourdieu’s work, providing the main point, from his engagements in the French cultural policy debates of the 1960s (Ahearne, 2004; Loosely, 1995) through to Weight of the World (Bourdieu et al., 1999), through which he connected his theoretical work to contemporary political debates focused on questions of inequality. It is the concept of habitus, however, that constitutes the ‘theoretical hinge’ of Bourdieu’s work connecting his account of the organization of fields and the positioning of actors within these to his

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account of different forms of capital as aspects of the bundles of dispositions that define and constitute persons. As with all of Bourdieu’s concepts, the notion of habitus has proved difficult to pin down exactly. Derived from Marcel Mauss’s (1979) account of habitus as a form of embodied social practice – sets of routine forms of behaviour and competencies that are instilled in the body as a result of social trainings – Bourdieu, following both Martin Heidegger and Merleau Ponty before him, sought to shed the concept of habitus of its associations with the nineteenth-century concepts of habit that continued to inform Mauss’s work (Crossley, 2001). According to such conceptions, deeply shaped by the biological sciences, habit constituted moreor-less fixed, unchangeable codes of conduct ‘hardwired’ into the individual as a set of unreflexive responses to external stimulae (Camic, 1986). For Bourdieu, by contrast, the concept of habitus is the locus of an attempt to develop an account of embodied social agency in which social change results from the structuring of human actions through the mechanisms of social training and from a reflexive capacity to act upon and modify those mechanisms. Habitus thus acts as a key mediator in the relations between individual and society, operating, in Bourdieu’s restatement of what is ultimately a Durkheimian conception, as both a ‘structured structure’ and a ‘structuring structure’ that is subject to ongoing dynamic restructuring (Bourdieu, 1984: pp. 170–171). It comprises a set of acquired codes and schemas which organize the actions and capacities of individuals, and which are reproduced through those actions, but which are also themselves modified as social agents reflexively modify their own conduct. Assessments of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus vary. Judith Butler (1999), while appreciating the stress it places on culture as a set of embodied performances, sees the relations between the concepts of field and habitus in Bourdieu’s work as reinscribing the familiar sociological dualisms of structure and agency, subject and object, rather than, as her

own approach to ‘performativity’ proposes, closing down the gaps between such polarized terms by construing social relations as nothing but the performances through which they are enacted. Other criticisms have focused on Bourdieu’s interpretation of the habitus as unified, a collation of dispositions that exhibit a common practical logic arising from a shared position in a field. In Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu thus argues that sociology must treat ‘as identical all the biological individuals who, being the product of the same objective conditions, are the supports of the same habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1977: p. 85). Similarly, in Practical Reason, it is the principle of unity that Bourdieu stresses in defining the habitus as a ‘generative and unifying principle which retranslates the intrinsic and relational characteristics of a position into a unitary lifestyle, that is, a unitary set of choices of persons, goods, practices’ (Bourdieu, 1998: p. 8).2 This is the key assumption that Bernard Lahire challenges in his programme for a sociology of individuals which focuses on the pluriform processes through which the dispositions of individuals are formed, and allows for clashes and dissonances between these within the make-up of the individual (Lahire, 2003, 2004). Eiko Ikegami’s work points in a similar direction in its conception of the person as a collection of loosely networked, multiple identities. For this requires a set of exchanges between the components of split persona in order for a sense of self to be forged from the varying repertoires of selfhood that are made available to individuals from the different social networks in which they are formed (Ikegami, 2005: pp. 44–47). There have been controversies regarding the political interpretations of habitus, too, particularly in Bourdieu’s assessment of the degree to which a capacity for reflexive self-shaping via conscious regulation and transformation of the habitus is possible. In view of the important role he assigns to sociology in the acquisition of such a competence, and thus in the development of a capacity for conscious self-shaping at both the individual and collective levels, Bourdieu’s position is

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often seen as a part of the epistemologicalcum-ethical privileging of the sociologist that has found little support outside sociology and good deal of criticism from within it (Adkins, 2005) (iv) This provides a convenient point on which to segue back to Bruno Latour for it relates to the basis for Latour’s criticisms of the ways in which, in Bourdieu’s interpretation, sociology is able to lord it over other disciplines as well as over ordinary social actors by claiming an insight into the organization of society that these do not have. This derives from the multi-planar conception of the social that characterizes Bourdieu’s account as one in which only the sociologist can penetrate to the deeper, hidden structures of fields which explain the organizing principles of habituses and their relations to one another. In the programme for renovating sociology that he proposes, Latour and others associated with the traditions of science studies and actor-network theory (ANT) have taken issue with this conception of the social, insisting that it should be regarded as consisting only of visible surfaces, a single-planed set of wholly observable events, actions and processes with no hidden, deep or invisible structures or levels (Knorr Cetina, 1997; Latour, 2005; Pickering, 2001 and this volume). This entails that any conception of culture and society (or the social) as differentiated levels or realms is called into question as resting on a dualistic ontology of the kind that ANT rebuts in focusing on the complex entanglements of people and things in the intersecting networks through which the social is performed without any prior distinction between what might be allocated to culture, what to society, and what, indeed, to nature. Such divisions, Latour argues, are a result of the ‘modern settlement’ associated with the early development of modern science and political thought which, in dividing nature and society – a division later compounded by the division between culture and society – set the scene for a long-term but fruitless endeavour to decipher the particular logic of dependencies between these separated realms (Latour, 1993). In their

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place, ANT recommends an analysis that traces the process through which ‘actants’ – that is, both human and non-human actors – come to be connected to, and to interact with, one another in the formation of collectives whose constitution is simultaneously natural, social, technical, cultural. This is not to evacuate the concepts of nature, culture and society of all meaning. Rather, it is to suggest that their separation is a historically particular accomplishment, one that results from particular orderings of the relations between different assemblages of human and non-human actors (Bennett, 2007b). It is clear, then, that there is some tension between this position and the logic of the other ‘cultural turns’ discussed so far. For in these cases, when the mutual enmeshing of culture and the social is stressed, there is often an underlying sense that the two are still in some way separate and, indeed, must be so if an account is to be offered of the ways in which culture is implicated in the constitution of the social. Nonetheless, there are aspects of ANT which draw on forms of cultural analysis in ways similar to other ‘cultural turns’. These are evident in the ways in which techniques of analysis drawn from literary studies and semiotics inform its procedures. The concept of actant, for example, is a term drawn from structuralist forms of narrative analysis in order to provide an account of agency that is dependent on an actor doing something, making a difference to some state of affairs by transforming some of its elements into something else, leaving observable traces that analysis can follow. It thus functions as an alternative to the attribution of agency to invisible structures that characterizes what Latour calls ‘sociologies of the social’ in which ‘the social’ is held to constitute a special kind of ‘stuff’ that can account for both itself and other phenomena (Latour, 2005: pp. 52–58). John Law similarly emphasises the similarities between ANT and both structuralist and poststructuralist semiotics to the degree that both see the operation and functioning of elements as being dependent on the relations that

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are established between them in complex systems. There are, however, two differences. In the case of semiotics it is the meanings produced by the relationships between signs within signifying systems that are the object of analysis. ANT, by contrast, comprises a ‘semiotics of materiality’ in which the focus is on the ‘relational materiality’ constituted by different assemblages of human and nonhuman actors, of things and people, in which what matters is the way the elements of such assemblages work together to order and perform the social (Law, 1999: p. 4). Or, in another formulation, Law agues that the practices of social ordering associated with such assemblages are ‘materially heterogeneous’, made up – as in the extended concept of discourse Sawyer discusses – of bits and pieces of talk, architecture, bodies, texts, machines, etc., all of which interact to construct and perform the social: with the important qualification, however, that what results from this is not a single social order but a series of ‘plural processes of socio-technical ordering’ (Law, 1994: p. 2) which co-exist contemporaneously in different degrees of harmony, discordance, competition, or antagonism. This bears on the second difference. For, whereas structuralist and post-structuralist formulations open up a gap between the signifier and the signified – thereby falling into line with those dualistic ontologies in which questions concerning the relations between different realms as well as between the visible and the invisible are generated – the social does not, for Law, exist as anything other than the particular forms of socio-technical ordering through which it is performed. This is the source of ANT’s reservations concerning the language of ‘social constructivism’ which operates with a distinction between the materials out of which the social is constructed and the social itself in order to construe the latter as a special kind of ‘social stuff’. As Latour puts it: In other words, ‘constructivism’ should not be confused with ‘social constructivism’. When we say that a fact is constructed, we simply mean that we account for the solid objective reality by mobilising

various entities whose assemblage could fail; ‘social constructivism’ means, on the other hand, that we replace what this reality is made of with some other stuff, the social in which it is ‘really’ built. (Latour, 2005: p. 91)

These remarks serve as a prelude to Latour’s account of the relations between science studies, as the initial spawning ground of ANT, and the sociology of science as ones in which the former, by studying closely what happens in laboratories (Latour and Woolgar, 1986), has called into question the explanatory logic of the sociology of science in which scientific practices are accounted for as the outcomes of pre-existing social relations. The achievement of ANT, he remarks, has been to extend this argument out beyond the narrow confines of science studies to query that explanatory logic wherever it is deployed in the social sciences. This includes its implications for many of those traditions of work that I have discussed in this chapter under the heading of ‘the sociology of culture’. For these are concerned to offer accounts of the inter-relations of two separate realms – the cultural and the social – in which, in however indirect or mediated a fashion, the ‘stuff’ of the social provides a means of accounting for specific kinds of cultural expression: indeed, the social is precisely what they express, but in a hidden way, which only the sociologist can coax into the open. Latour proposes another way of accounting for culture: Culture does not act surreptitiously behind the actor’s back. This most sublime production is manufactured at specific places and institutions, be it the messy offices of the top floor of Marshal Sahlins’s house on the Chicago campus or the thick Area Files kept in the Pitts River (sic) museum in Oxford. (Latour, 2005: p. 175)

The influence of such conceptions in transforming the concerns of the sociology of culture along the lines in which science studies transformed the sociology of science is now readily apparent in a range of studies focused on the material processes through which distinctive kinds of cultural or aesthetic entities are produced in distinctive cultural settings. Work focused on the practices of

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institutions of collection and exhibition have been very much to the fore in this regard as key sites for making up, acting on and transforming social worlds through the distinctive kinds of assemblages of persons and things that they effect (Bennett, 2005; Hetherington, 1999; Lury, 2005).

NOTES 1 I draw here on an earlier discussion of this tradition: see Bennett (1991). 2 There are other places where Bourdieu opts for a more elastic interpretation of the habitus, I have discussed this more fully elsewhere (Bennett, 2007a).

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Rose, N. and Miller, P. (1992) ‘Political power beyond the state: problematics of government’, British Journal of Sociology, 43(2): 172–205. Rouanet, H., Ackermann, W. and Le Roux, B. (2004) ‘The geometric analysis of questionnaires: the lesson of Bourdieu’s La Distinction’, Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique, 56: 5–18. Said, E. (1979) Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Saussure, F. de (1960) Course in General Linguistics. London: P. Owen. Sawyer, R.K. (2002) ‘A discourse on discourse: an archaeological history of an intellectual concept’, Cultural Studies, 16(3): 433–456. Taylor, B. (1999) Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public, 1747–2001. Manchester University Press. Tennenhouse, L. (1986) Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres. New York and London: Routledge. Therborn, G. (1976) Science, Class and Society: On the Formation of Sociology and Historical Materialism. London: New Left Books. Uzel, J-P. (2004) ‘Kant et la socialite du goût’, Sociologie et Société, 36(1). Valentine, J. (2002) ‘Governance and cultural authority’, Cultural Values, 6(1–2): 49–64. Vilar, P. (1971) ‘The age of Don Quixote’, New Left Review, 68: 59–71. Watt, I. (1957) The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Chatto & Windus. Weber, M. (1958) The Rational and Social and Foundations of Music. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Weber, M. (1976) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Allen and Unwin. Whyte, W.F. (1955) Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. University of Chicago Press. Williams, R. (1973) The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus. Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press. Wolff, J. (1990) Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. Oxford: Polity Press. Wright, E.O. (2000) Class Counts. Cambridge University Press.

5 Cultural History Peter Burke

Cultural history has been practised under this name (in German at least, Kulturgeschichte) for some 200 years, but it is only in the last three decades or so that it has emerged as a major variety of history, especially – though far from exclusively – in the English-speaking world. In the age of the dominance of the history of high politics, more or less 1830 –1930, and even in the age of the dominance of economic and social history, 1930–1980, cultural history was marginal and even subversive (Christiansen, 2000). Such masterpieces as The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) by the Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt and The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919) by the Dutch scholar Johan Huizinga were better received by the general public than in the authors’ academic milieu. An early sign of the ‘cultural turn’ in historical studies, as well as a stimulus to it, was the publication in 1973 of The Interpretation of Cultures, a collection of essays by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz which was received with enthusiasm by many historians, especially in the USA. In particular, Geertz’s essay on the Balinese cockfight, viewed as a drama or a ‘story that the Balinese tell themselves

about themselves’, has been cited innumerable times by historians as well as inspiring similar studies of micro-episodes in the past. One of the best-known of these studies, as well as one of the most controversial, is Robert Darnton’s essay (1984) on what he calls ‘the great cat massacre’. In a printer’s shop in Paris in the 1730s, in which a number of cats were becoming a nuisance, the apprentices were instructed to deal with them and interpreted these instructions as licence to catch the animals, including their mistress’s favourite cat, and to hang them on an improvised gibbet. Darnton, who used to teach a course together with Geertz in Princeton, reads the event as a revolt of the workers against their master that made skilful use of a cultural repertoire of traditional rituals and symbols. Encounters between disciplines resemble encounters between cultures. Each side sees in the other the patterns that in some sense match their own. The appeal of Geertz to cultural historians was a mixture of the exotic with the familiar. Exotic, because Geertz based his account on fieldwork and studied Bali, but familiar because he employed a hermeneutic approach and described culture as a ‘text’, thus justifying research in archives.

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Ten years after The Interpretation of Cultures, three books published in 1983 both illustrated and contributed to the destabilization of the old categories of cultural, political and social history. Gareth Stedman Jones’s Languages of Class treated social class as a discursive construction, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities emphasized the cultural aspect of nationalism and Eric Hobsbawm’s and Terence Ranger’s Invention of Tradition called one of the central categories of cultural historians into question (below 116, 119). Among the indicators of growing interest in this kind of history or approach to history – the ambiguity is significant – both inside and outside the academic world, are the titles and sub-titles of books which use the phrase ‘cultural history’ to describe studies of topics as different as examinations, masturbation and fear – to mention no more than three recent books (Burke, 2004; Elman, 2000; Laqueur, 2003). For virtually the first time in British universities, a number of posts were created in the 1990s with the phrase ‘cultural history’ in the title, a development obviously related to the creation of posts in cultural studies, cultural theory, cultural management and so on. Even political, military and economic topics are being studied from a cultural point of view. In France, where the terms culture and culturelle were relatively unusual till the end of the 1980s, a society for the study of cultural history has been founded (intriguingly enough, on the initiative of historians of the twentieth century, whereas the history of mentalities and the imagination had been pioneered by historians of the Middle Ages such as Marc Bloch, Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff ). Introductions to cultural history have recently appeared in Danish, Portuguese, English, French and Spanish (Burke, 2004; Christiansen, 2000; Falcon, 2002; Ory, 2004; Poirrier, 2004; Pons and Serna, 2005). This boom in writing and publishing in cultural history does not imply the existence of general scholarly agreement about the meaning of the term’culture’. On the contrary,

the approach may well be thriving today thanks to the ambiguities of the concept. Three main concepts of ‘culture’ are currently employed by historians, corresponding to three historiographical phases but now coexisting like strata in an archaeological excavation.

THREE CONCEPTS OF CULTURE The oldest of these three strata is the idea of culture as a synonym for the arts and for intellectual disciplines such as philosophy, sociology and science. Many people use the phrase ‘cultural history’ to refer to a contribution to the history of any one of these arts and disciplines, but there is a tradition of distinguishing between general histories of all the arts and ‘special’ or specialized histories of music, chemistry and so on. Relatively few people are bold enough to write general histories of culture, but the few general cultural histories that have been produced tend to concentrate on links between the arts, whether or not they describe or explain these connections in terms of the Zeitgeist or ‘spirit of the age’, a term more popular a hundred years ago than it is today (an explicit critique is offered in Gombrich, 1969). One problem with the idea of Zeitgeist is that it encourages the view that a given culture (Italian, say, or British) is homogeneous, overlooking regional, social and other variations. The social history of art practised, for example, by the Hungarian Marxist exiles Frederick Antal (1947) and Arnold Hauser (1951) offered an alternative view in which cultures in the plural were linked to social classes. In similar fashion, feminist scholars in the 1970s and 1980s emphasized the social obstacles that women painters, humanists or scientists had to overcome to achieve anything in the male-dominated world of high culture (Greer, 1979; Schiebinger, 1989). Today, studies of a single art or discipline that are presented by their authors as cultural history are likely to be more concerned with the wider cultural context than other works in their field. For example, some historians

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of science have redefined themselves in this way (Shapin, 1994, a study focused on the idea of ‘civility’; Jardine, Secord and Spary, 1996, on ‘cultures of natural history’). Art history departments often include scholars describing themselves as cultural historians of images, while departments of literature include cultural historians of texts. Two influential studies of this kind are those published by Michael Baxandall (as early as 1972) and Stephen Greenblatt (1988). Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy is concerned with what the author calls ‘the period eye’ and would now be described as the history of visual culture (a concept that only emerged in the 1990s). The author discusses the relation between the style of Botticelli and Piero della Francesca, for example, and ‘vernacular visual skills’ such as gauging the content of barrels. In contrast to the earlier Marxist tradition of the social history of art, Baxandall is more concerned with the form of pictures than their content and he deliberately refuses to link style to the social class of either painters or patrons. His book attracted attention outside the domain of cultural history and was discussed in some detail by Pierre Bourdieu and Clifford Geertz. Greenblatt’s Shakespearian Negotiations is a collection of essays, one of which, ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’ (Greenblatt, 1988: pp. 94–128) has been cited almost as often as Geertz’s cockfight. Greenblatt juxtaposes two texts produced in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century, King Lear and Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures. Shakespeare is known to have borrowed a few names and phrases from Harsnett, but the link between the two texts goes much deeper than that. Harsnett is concerned to dismiss demonic possession and exorcism as fraudulent, merely a ‘devil theatre’, while Shakespeare transfers possession and exorcism from the sacred to the secular domain. Just as Baxandall explores the relation between looking at pictures and gauging barrels, Greenblatt situates plays within a much larger category of performances, including the rituals of exorcism.

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Baxandall and Greenblatt place some wellknown works of art and literature in new and illuminating contexts, while remaining focused on high culture. However, this ‘operahouse’ concept of culture, as an American anthropologist once called it, has been criticized as too narrow or elitist. As a recent study puts it, a history of French culture needs to find a place for Marcel Pagnol and Maurice Chevalier as well as for Marcel Proust and Maurice Ravel (Ory, 2004: p. 49). The critics of the old concept have generally preferred to concentrate attention on what they call ‘popular’ culture, in other words the culture of ordinary people, non-elites, the classi subalterni or ‘subordinate classes’ as the Italian critic Antonio Gramsci called them. As for culture, it might be defined in this context as a system of shared meanings, attitudes and values, and the symbolic forms (performances, artefacts) in which they are expressed or embodied (Burke, 1978: prologue). This is the second of the three conceptual strata. The territory of popular culture had been occupied by folklorists in the early nineteenth century, but it was only from the 1960s onwards that it was colonized by academic historians (Burke, 1978; Ginzburg, 1976; Muchembled, 1978; Thompson, 1963). These historians generally studied the West (exceptions to this rule include Fabian, 1978, on Africa; Rawski, 1979, on China; Shively, 1991, on Japan; and Shoshan, 1993, on Egypt). Historical studies appeared that were focused on oral ballads rather than printed poetry (Buchan, 1972), musichalls rather than opera-houses (Bailey, 1978: pp. 154–175), religious paintings commissioned by artisans and peasants rather than those ordered by elites (Cousin, 1983), or unofficial festivals such as Carnival rather than official ones such as royal entries into cities (Bakhtin, 1965 and Caro Baroja, 1965; two pioneering studies). The discovery of the work of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin after its translation into western European languages encouraged cultural historians to work with his concepts of subversive laughter, the

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carnivalesque and the grotesque body and by this means to reveal the participation of ordinary people in cultural movements such as the Reformation as well as the cultural aspect of political movements such as the French Revolution (Hunt, 1984; Scribner, 1981). A major focus of attention has been the conflict between the ‘two cultures’, learned and popular, especially the attempts by leaders of churches and states to reform or suppress popular festivals in Europe and in the New World in the course of the last five hundred years, whether they used religious arguments to condemn popular culture as pagan or immoral or secular arguments against popular ‘disorder’and in favour of ‘rational recreation’ (Bailey, 1978; Muchembled, 1978; Yeo and Yeo, 1981). The concern with popular culture, driven by discontent with narrow conceptions of cultural history, has in its turn been criticized as too narrow, for concentrating on what might be called the popular equivalents of high culture – folksong, folktales, popular images, popular drama and so on – ‘an exercise which leaves many of the definitions and forms intact whilst simply replacing the object of scrutiny’ (Willis, 1990: p. 5). The third and most recent stratum of conceptions of culture developed as a response to this criticism. It follows the theory and the practice of anthropologists and treats ‘culture’ as a synonym for everyday life, or more exactly for meaningful or symbolic aspects of everyday life. Hence the rise of the phrases ‘everyday culture’ (Frykman and Löfgren, 1996) and ‘everyday history’ (most widely current in German, Alltagsgeschichte). It is this wider concept of culture that most clearly distinguishes what is often called the ‘new cultural history’ of the 1980s and 1990s from its predecessors (Hunt, 1989). In this third phase the older concern with the relation between culture and class has been largely replaced by a concern with gender – with male spaces, female readers and so on. One of the best-known and most persuasive characterizations of the new cultural history is that offered by a leading practitioner, Roger Chartier (1987, 1988). Chartier describes his

approach as one constructed in opposition to the idea of popular culture, denying ‘strict correspondences between cultural cleavages and social hierarchies’. Inspired by the French cultural theorist Michel de Certeau, who emphasized the concept of ‘re-employment’, Chartier focuses on ‘the cultural uses of print’, noting that the same texts from the so-called Bibliothèque Bleue, cheap books distributed by pedlars, circulated among very different social groups, ranging from duchesses to peasants. The work of both Chartier and Certeau – who emphasized the creativity of ordinary people and described consumption as a kind of production – illustrates the shift in perspective in the study of culture in the last generation or so from a preoccupation with producers and senders of messages to an equal or greater interest in audiences, viewers and readers, who are now viewed as active participants in the making of the meanings of poems, novels, paintings, songs and so on. Chartier has redefined cultural history, which according to him is essentially concerned with two objects, practices (emphasized by Certeau and also by Bourdieu) and representations (a term derived from the sociologist Emile Durkheim). His own work on books and reading illustrates both aspects of cultural history. In similar fashion the history of ‘the culture of clothes’ by Chartier’s former teacher Daniel Roche (1989) is a study of both material culture and the representation of different selves – rich and poor, male and female, conservative and revolutionary. Looking back, we can now see that earlier scholars such as Baxandall and Greenblatt already contributed to the history of both practices and representations in the course of contextualizing the works of high culture that most interested them. The wide range of ‘practices’ becomes clear if we examine a few studies by the new wave of cultural historians. They include histories of drinking (Brennan, 1988), travel (Duncan and Gregory, 1999; Elsner and Rubiés, 1998; Pratt, 1992), collecting (Elsner and Cardinal, 1994; Pomian, 1987), gestures (Bremmer and Roodenburg, 1991),

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conversation (Burke, 1993), politeness (Bryson, 1998; Klein, 1994), humour (Bremmer and Roodenburg, 1997), visiting exhibitions (Crow, 1985; Penny, 2002) and offering gifts (Davis, 2000; Groebner, 2000). The history of science, once oriented towards ideas, is becoming more and more a history of practices such as experiment, collection and observation (Biagioli, 1993; Findlen, 1994; Shapin, 1994). Two examples, one of viewing and the other of reading, may make the idea of a history of practices more concrete. Thomas Crow (1985) has studied the salons of eighteenth-century Paris in which new paintings were exhibited to a wide public, noting the widening of what he calls ‘the artistic public sphere’, the rise of art criticism and the use of ‘high’ culture by ‘low’ viewers for their own purposes, including opposition to the regime in the years immediately preceding the French Revolution. For his part, James Secord (2000) offers an exceptionally richly contextualized reconstruction of an exceptionally welldocumented example of the reception of a book, the ‘Victorian sensation’ following the publication in 1844 of an anonymous work, a history of the universe entitled Vestiges of the Natural History of Mankind. The book sold 40,000 copies. Its readers included Queen Victoria, handloom weavers, Lord Tennyson, an apprentice surveyor, Mr Gladstone and Florence Nightingale. It was used to advance a courtship, to shine in conversation, to comfort the sick, and both to undermine and to support belief in Christianity. Its reception differed from place to place, encouraging good relations between religion and science in Oxford but starting a ‘holy war’ in Edinburgh. As for representations, their variety may be illustrated by the range of articles in the journal Representations (founded in Berkeley in 1983 by Stephen Greenblatt and his colleagues). The study of representations or images of power, and especially of rulers, has allowed cultural historians to colonize political history, reading republican, royal or imperial rituals as so many political

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statements (Cannadine and Price, 1987; Fujitani, 1996; Muir, 1981). The study of representations is linked to another expanding domain of cultural history, the history of the imagination, or as the French say, l’imaginaire social. It was indeed the French who were the pioneers in this domain, with studies that ranged from the image of purgatory (Le Goff, 1981) to the image of the social structure as divided into ‘three orders’ – the clergy, the knights and the peasants (Duby, 1978). A number of recent works of cultural history include the word ‘imagining’ in the title (Imagining India, Imagining the Balkans, and so on), while Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) continues to be influential. The history of witchcraft was studied a generation ago by social historians using quantitative methods to discover the social groups to which accusers and victims belonged. Today, the topic has been taken over by cultural historians interested in the collective imagination, or as Freud would say, in ‘fantasy’ (Roper, 2004). As in the case of other new developments, in the course of exploring a new domain the historians of the imagination offer new interpretations of traditional episodes. Gladstone, for instance, is viewed by Patrick Joyce (1994: p. 136) less as a democrat than as a creator of ‘a demotic social imaginary’. The idea of representation is also central to one of the most popular subfields of cultural history today, the history of collective memory, whether it is described as social or cultural (A. Assmann, 1999; J. Assmann, 1997; Burke, 1989; Fentress and Wickham, 1992). The multivolume study edited by Pierre Nora about the ‘places’ in which and through which French history is remembered – literal places such as Versailles or town halls, metaphorical places such as the tricolour and the Marseillaise – has been a publishing success in its own country, doubtless because, paraphrasing Geertz, one might say that the Nora volumes present the story that the French tell themselves about themselves. These volumes have also been a stimulus to similar collections focused on the past of other nations (François and

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Schulze, 2001; cf. Isnenghi, 1996–1997; Nora, 1984–1993). In the case of Britain, though, what might be described as the most memorable contribution has come from one individual, Raphael Samuel (1994). One central concept in the study of both practices and representations is that of the ‘poetics’ of culture or everyday life, in the sense of the implicit rules that individuals follow in order to perform their roles – saint, scholar, gentleman, housewife and so on – in a way considered appropriate in a given culture. Just as anthropologists have explained how to ask for a drink in one place or how to enter a house in another, so historians have discussed how to be a medieval king or a Counter-Reformation saint or nun (Burke, 1984; Lowe, 1993). To speak of following rules may give a false impression of rigidity and mindlessness, and so some historians have adopted from Bourdieu the more flexible notion of ‘habitus’, defined as a set of schemata allowing improvisation in order to adapt to changing situations. The insistence on flexibility is linked to the rise of the notion of performance. For example, a historian of science influenced by the new cultural history, Mario Biagioli (1993), notes what he calls ‘the performancelike quality’ of Galileo’s science, presented in such a way as to please his patrons at court and then recorded in his dramatic dialogues. Political history has moved closer to cultural history with the rise of interest in political performance, ranging from royal rituals to the ‘cultural repertoire’ from which rioters draw to make their protests. Even the history of the emotions is now being studied in terms of scenarios, scripts and performances (Gouk and Hills, 2005; Reddy, 2001). The focus on performances, which are never the same, rather than on fixed cultural ‘scripts’ is associated with the idea of cultural construction or invention. Many historians have been introduced to this idea through a famous volume on the ‘invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). The editors had in mind a relatively precise tendency of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the concept quickly escaped

their control. Historical studies with the word ‘invention’ or ‘inventing’ in the title have proliferated, many of them concerned with nations or regions – Africa (Mudimbe, 1988), Europe, Scotland, Spain and so on – and others with the invention of diplomacy, pornography, the people and the intellectual. Most of these studies centre on the ‘West’, or at least with Western perceptions of the world, but it has been shown that the Japanese empire also invented ‘immemorial’ traditions after the Meiji restoration of 1868. In other words, the idea of a continuous imperial tradition lasting thousands of years is a myth (Fujitani, 1996; Gluck, 1985). Other historians have concerned themselves with the cultural construction of class, caste and (more often) gender in particular places and times. Gareth Stedman Jones’s Languages of Class (1983) provoked a debate by treating social class as a linguistic phenomenon, or more exactly as ‘a word embedded in language’ that needed to be ‘analysed in its linguistic context’, raising the elusive question of the relation between social and linguistic interpretations of the Chartist movement. Catherine Hall (1992) discussed both class and gender as forms of culture, with special reference to class formation in nineteenth-century England. Retrospectively – however this might have irritated the author – Edward Thompson’s famous Making of the Working Class (1963) may be viewed as a study of cultural construction. More selfconsciously constructionist, Nicholas Dirks (2001) has demonstrated the role of British civil servants in the development of the Indian caste system, notably by means of the census. The current historiography of gender is a paradoxical one. The idea of the cultural construction of gender comes from feminism, notably from the feminist philosopher Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990). On the other hand, the majority of historical case-studies are concerned with masculinity, discussing, for example, the places (family, school, workshop) where boys learned how to be men; the need for males to demonstrate their virility by their sensitivity to insult and their

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readiness to fight in defence of their honour; or the condemnation of men by other men as effeminate (Carnes and Griffen, 1990; Nye, 1993; Sinha, 1995). It remains all too rare to find a study of the construction of both genders in a given place or time and the ways in which each depended on the other. A few recent studies in cultural history appear to escape Chartier’s twofold classification. One cluster of such studies concerns the history of the senses. The French historian Alain Corbin (1982, 1994) has devoted one book to the history of smell, or, more exactly, to the way in which people thought about or imagined smells, and another book to the history of sound, especially the sound of bells, focusing in both cases on nineteenth-century France, while Robert Jütte (2000) has divided the history of the senses (more exactly, that of attitudes to the senses) into three phases, a traditional regime that lasted from antiquity to the end of the seventeenth century, an age of fragmentation, 1700–1900, and the twentiethcentury ‘rediscovery of the senses’. The rise of interest in this field is revealed by the publication of a reader in ‘Sensual Culture’ (Howes, 2004) and the foundation of a new journal, Senses and Society, in 2006. A clear example of the way in which changes in the present encourage historians to view the past in new ways is the emergence as a major theme in cultural histories of what are variously called cultural encounters or cultural clashes and their consequences. A few studies of this topic go back further (Abu-Lughod, 1963; Freyre, 1933) but it was only in the last decade or two that encounters became a central theme in cultural history, from Hawaii to Mexico (cf. Dening, 1980; Gruzinski, 1988, 1999; Sahlins, 1985; Thomas, 1991). A characteristic feature of the newer studies is the concern of the authors to reconstruct the point of view of both collective participants in the encounter, the dialogue between cultures, the ‘vision of the vanquished’ as well as that of the victors. The changes in religion that an older generation of historians, mainly Christian, perceived as ‘conversion’ have been reinterpreted, as in the cases of nineteenth-century

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Africa or early modern Japan, as some kind of syncretism or hybridization. More exactly, whereas the missionaries believed they had persuaded their new flocks to give up their old religion in return for the gift of a new one, the receivers perceived themselves as appropriating something foreign and employing it for their traditional purposes (Higashibaba, 2001; Prins, 1981). To sum up this section, the concept of culture employed by cultural historians has widened almost immeasurably in the last generation, as their research interests have become more diverse. The old boundaries between culture and society, culture and politics and even culture and the economy have been dissolving, and scholars write about ‘socio-cultural history’, and even about economic history as cultural history.

CULTURAL HISTORY AND ITS NEIGHBOURS Given the variety of approaches grouped under the umbrella ‘cultural history’, it is not surprising to find that this academic discipline (as it is becoming) has many neighbours, among them geography (see Chapter 2), politics, linguistics, psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies. Historical geography has long overlapped with social history, and the cultural turn affected both disciplines at much the same time, although the geographers have consistently taken social and cultural theory more seriously than the majority of their historical colleagues. Similar trends are visible in both disciplines, among them a concern with practices, representations and constructions. Recent historical studies produced by geographers include books on ‘the geographic construction of British India’ (Edney, 1997), the reading of travel writing (Duncan and Gregory, 1999) and ‘cultures of exploration and empire’ (Driver, 2001). From the historical geographers – as well as from theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault – some cultural historians, especially urban historians, have learned to

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concern themselves with spaces and ‘spatial practices’ (Hanawalt and Kobialka, 2000). Squares have been studied as centres of sociability, and porticos as liminal spaces, on the frontier between public and private, while the rise of modernity has been discussed from the perspective of the debate in eighteenthcentury London about the need to pave, light and clean the streets (Ogborn, 1998). Scholars who describe themselves as political ‘scientists’ and believe in rational choice theory generally have little time for culture, but the situation in political studies as a whole seems to be changing. Books as different as The Clash of Civilizations (1996) by Samuel Huntington and Culture Troubles (2005), written by Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz and inspired by Clifford Geertz, indicate that the power of culture is increasingly recognized. Linguistics too has had an influence on cultural history, though less than the common use of phrases like ‘the language of x’ might lead one to think. The influence is partly indirect, via semiotics and linguistic philosophy, encouraging historians to treat texts, from Hobbes’s Leviathan to the many pamphlets written against cardinal Mazarin, as ‘performative utterances’ that make things happen rather than simply expressing what is happening (Jouhaud, 1985; Tully, 1988). However, other cultural historians have been inspired by sociolinguistics, to which they have attempted to give a historical dimension, asking who says what to whom, when, where, with what intentions and with what results, and even studying the importance and the meaning of silence in different places and times (Bauman, 1983; Burke, 1993). The contribution of psychoanalysis to cultural history has been discussed much more often than it has been put into practice. At the height of the interest in ‘psychohistory’, following the publication of Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther (1958), historians focused on individuals such as Lenin or Newton rather than on whole cultures. Indeed, many psycho-biographies may be and have been criticized for lack of attention to the cultural context. Erikson, for example, discussed

the preoccupation with anality in Luther’s polemical pamphlets, apparently unaware of the importance of anal language in sixteenth-century controversies and in the German-speaking world in particular. The real challenge is to offer what might be called a psychoanalysis of a whole culture in the past. The work of Georges Devereux, who was trained both as an anthropologist and as an analyst, may show the way forward. Devereux wrote, for example, about the different forms that mental illness takes in different cultures. He studied ancient Sparta himself and he encouraged some leading French historians, notably Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Alain Besançon, to make use of psychoanalytic concepts in their interpretations of the past. Michel de Certeau, who was active as an anthropologist and an analyst (in the circle of Jacques Lacan) as well as a historian, offered a psychoanalytic reading of possession by the devil in seventeenth-century France (de Certeau, 1970; cf. Lacan, 1966; Roper, 2004). However, the most ambitious attempt to connect the ideas of Freud with cultural history was made as early as the 1930s by the sociologist Norbert Elias, discussed below. Sociology has been influential on the practice of cultural historians, despite some missed opportunities. For example, historians of witchcraft were slow to realize the relevance to their studies of the work of sociologists on labelling and on moral panics. All the same, some sociological case-studies have made a considerable impact on the practice of history, starting with the Marxist tradition of the sociology of culture. The critique of ‘mass culture’ from the 1930s onwards by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer has left its mark on cultural history. The relation between ‘culture’ and ‘society’, whether or not conceptualized in terms of ‘superstructure’ and ‘base’, remained a central concern in the work of both Raymond Williams (1958) and Edward Thompson (1963). Again, Baxandall sub-titled his book on Renaissance Italy ‘a primer in the social history of pictorial style’, thus linking his essay to the social interpretations of the Renaissance that he rejected.

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In the last twenty years, non-Marxist sociologies have been more influential. Despite his own lack of engagement with history, Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life has helped to shape the notions of theatricality and performance discussed above. Still more important have been the books of Jürgen Habermas, Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault and the controversies that they have provoked by publishing studies that invaded the territory of the historian and offered new conceptualizations and interpretations of major historical movements such as the Enlightenment. Habermas’s study of the ‘public sphere’ (the standard English translation of his more abstract term Öffentlichkeit), in which he argued that the eighteenth-century rise of cities, newspapers and meeting-places encouraged engagement with politics and criticism of governments, has inspired a whole shelf of studies (Baker, 1992; Landes, 1988; Melton, 2001; Ogborn, 1998; Zaret, 2000, etc). Some of these studies are concerned, as Habermas himself was, with France and England, criticizing his history – for saying too little about women, for instance, or ignoring the importance of the seventeenth century – but employing his concepts and following up his suggestions, on the place of the coffee-house in political culture, for instance. Other scholars have taken the concept of public sphere to other parts of the globe such as the Islamic world, China, India and Latin America. In so doing they have adapted the concept. It now seems useful to distinguish not the presence or absence of a single public sphere but various spheres in the plural, or more exactly different degrees of participation in public affairs in different places and times and by different groups of people. One might also distinguish the ‘structural’ public sphere of Habermas from what might be called a ‘conjunctural’ or temporary public sphere that emerges at a time of crisis such as the German Reformation of the 1520s or the British Civil War of the 1640s. A few historians have concerned themselves with what they call a cultural public sphere, in other words with

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public discussions of works of art from France to Japan, linking culture to politics (Crow, 1985; Ikegami, 2005). Norbert Elias’s study of the civilizing process, first published in 1939, may be described as an attempt to make a synthesis of Freud (especially the late Freud of Civilization and its Discontents) and Max Weber, modifying their theories in some respects and adding ideas of his own. Elias was centrally concerned with small changes in everyday life in Western Europe, notably in table manners, which he viewed as indicators of the rise and spread of self-control from the court to the rest of society between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. In his second volume, more theoretical (and unsurprisingly, relatively neglected by historians), he gave a political explanation for the rise of self-control, linking it to statebuilding and the taming of the formerly independent nobility. Elias’s book has often been criticized – as Eurocentric, for instance, and as blind to ‘de-civilizing’ processes and to the influence of religion – but it remains an inspiration. Cultural historians have been helped to distance themselves from Elias by the existence of an alternative paradigm, the one offered by Michel Foucault, who, if not technically a sociologist, was a social and cultural theorist. It might be more exact to speak of Foucault as offering two paradigms rather than one. In his study of punishment, prisons and the surveillance state (1975) Foucault inverts Elias (whether he had read him or not) by stressing state control rather than self-control, rejecting the idea of social or cultural evolution, and writing with unconcealed disapproval of the rise of a ‘disciplinary society’. The second paradigm emerges from Foucault’s later studies of the history of sexuality, in which he discussed self-discipline as an ‘art’, emphasizing the aesthetic aspect of the process that Elias had neglected (Foucault, 1984a, 1984b). Both the early and the late Foucault have been influential in the formation of a relatively new branch of cultural history, the history of the body, whether male or female, sick

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or healthy, holy or unholy, occidental or oriental (Kay and Rubin, 1994). Studies in this area have ranged from nutrition via anatomy to medicine and sexuality. One of the leading figures in this rapidly expanding field was the late Roy Porter. A social historian who turned to the history of medicine, he showed how that history might be rewritten by focusing attention on unofficial healers, including ‘quacks’, telling the story from the patient’s rather than the doctor’s point of view, paying attention to the language in which both doctors and patients expressed themselves, and drawing on visual sources, including eighteenth-century caricatures, to supplement the evidence of texts (Porter, 1991, 2001). Foucault’s suggestion that investigators in a sense create the objects they study (insanity, crime, homosexuality and so on) has also inspired a number of cultural historians, from Frank Mort on the role of medical discourse in constructing a sexual regime to Patrick Joyce on society and the self (Joyce, 1994; Mort, 1987). Pierre Bourdieu has also helped to shape cultural history, less through his interpretation of nineteenth-century French culture than by his launching of concepts such as distinction, habitus, cultural capital, cultural reproduction and cultural field. His notion of distinction, in particular, has attracted many historians of cultural consumption, among them Craig Clunas (1991) on Ming China and John Brewer (1997) on eighteenthcentury England. A few historians of education and intellectuals have been attracted by the concepts of field and reproduction (Charle, 1990; Ringer, 1992). Bourdieu’s famous structural analysis of the Berber house has encouraged historians of other cultures to read domestic spaces, studying the traditional Chinese house, for instance, as a text ‘encoding patriarchy’ (Bray, 1997). The frontier between cultural history and social or cultural anthropology has been another site of active interdisciplinary exchange ever since the 1960s, when Keith Thomas advised historians that they could learn from their neighbour. Greenblatt’s essay on Shakespeare and the exorcists, for instance,

makes considerable use of anthropological studies of cults of possession. The study of cultural encounters owes a good deal to the example of anthropologists, who were the first to use the increasingly popular concept of ‘cultural translation’. Again, as we have seen, many historians have found the work of Clifford Geertz inspiring. His presentation of nineteenthcentury Bali as a ‘theatre state’ (Geertz, 1980) encouraged a number of historians to look at theatrical elements in royal rituals in England, France, Spain, Russia and elsewhere. For example, a study of nineteenth-century tsars is built around the concept of ‘scenario’ and distinguishes the scenarios of domesticity, dynasty, enlightenment, friendship, happiness, reform, love and so on, so prompting the question of what does not count as a scenario or performance (Cannadine and Price, 1987; Wortman, 1995–2000). Less influential so far on cultural historians, but full of suggestions that historians of many regions and periods might take up in the future, is the work of Marshall Sahlins on Hawaii and Fiji. Sahlins is particularly concerned with cultural encounters, such as the one between the Hawaiians and the British in the age of Captain Cook, and their cultural consequences. What he calls the local ‘cultural order’ is a flexible order, capable up to a point of absorbing unusual events (in other words, of interpreting them in terms of local tradition). However, a decisive and protracted encounter, such as the one between the Hawaiians and the British after 1779, leads to the disruption and re-ordering of the system (Sahlins, 1985). The implications of this case-study for the writing of history are potentially enormous, since Sahlins offers a new theory about events, linking them more closely than before to changing cultural or social structures. One of the few scholars to engage with these ideas is William Sewell, a historian of France who doubles as a cultural theorist and has studied the taking of the Bastille as another example of an event leading to the transformation of structures (cf. Burke, 1987; Sewell, 2005: pp. 197–270).

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Cultural history’s neighbours also include three interdisciplinary groupings: Material Culture Studies (Chapter 4 above); Postcolonial Studies (see Part II, Chapter 4); and of course Cultural Studies itself. The history of the book, the history of collecting, the history of the body and the history of consumption of food, clothes, houses, furniture and so on are all examples of concern with material culture, and some of the cultural historians working in these areas have learned something from colleagues in archaeology, anthropology and other disciplines grouped under the umbrella of Material Culture Studies. Following the lead of the New Zealander Don McKenzie (1986), a bibliographer turned cultural historian, historians have been paying close attention to the book as an artefact, the differences in its appearance in successive editions, for example, or the way in which it was used by active readers who underlined passages, turned down pages or wrote comments in the margins (Johns, 1998; Secord, 2000). Libraries too are being read, in other words studied as physical places, more or less accessible to readers, whose horizons of expectations were shaped in part by the organization and reorganization of the spaces in which different volumes were to be found. In similar fashion public museums, like the private collections that preceded them, have become an object of study by cultural historians, concerned not only with the acquisition of objects and their conservation as part of the cultural heritage but also with their display, whether they were arranged by the materials from which they were made, in an evolutionary sequence or according to the different cultures in which they were produced (Penny, 2002; Poulot, 1997). Even gardens are being read: the gardens of Versailles, for instance, have been described as a ‘theatre of power’, with the trees lined up as if on parade (Mukerji, 1997). Postcolonial Studies emerged out of the study of literature but it has also attracted some art historians (Phillips and Steiner, 1999) and historians of colonialism, among them Nicholas Dirks, whose study of caste has

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already been mentioned, and the Subaltern Studies group discussed above. The dialogue between history and literary theory may be illustrated by the reaction of Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (1988) to the work of Ranajit Guha and his colleagues or by the case of Edward Said, whose Orientalism has provoked some historians (MacKenzie, 1995) but inspired others, including historians of art and music, whether they work on the Middle East or China, although the contrast between East and West is not viewed the same way in Beijing as in Cairo (Zhang, 1999: pp. 188–196). The postcolonial concerns with cultural hegemony and cultural hybridity (Canclini, 1990), sometimes described as ‘creolization’, are shared by a number of cultural historians, often though not always historians of empires (Buisseret and Reinhardt, 2000; Gruzinski, 1999). Cultural Studies in its British incarnation emerged out of a Marxian social history of literature parallel to the social history of art discussed above, with Georg Lukács (the master of Antal and Hauser) as one of its leading figures. The approach of Marxists such as Gramsci, Goldmann and Lukács was given an empiricist, English form in the work of the literary historian and critic Raymond Williams. In similar fashion the historian Edward Thompson used to describe himself in deliberately contradictory terms as a ‘Marxist empiricist’. He would have described his famous Making of the English Working Class (1963) as essentially a contribution to social history, but its effect on British cultural studies has been pervasive, giving it a historical dimension. In Britain, the historians closest to Cultural Studies have generally been close to Thompson, whether they knew him personally or simply admired his work: Catherine Hall, for instance, and above all the charismatic Raphael Samuel, the founder of the History Workshop movement, who gradually moved from social to cultural history. In other parts of the world, cultural studies has taken different forms, although it has generally emerged out of literature. In Germany, where the tradition of Kulturwissenschaft

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goes back to the 1920s or earlier, there is more interest in history and in high culture within Cultural Studies than there is in Britain. In the USA, the ‘New Historicism’, drawing on social theory and on the history of popular culture to interpret literary classics such as Shakespeare, as Greenblatt does, coexists with an interest in the popular that may be illustrated by contributions to the Journal of Popular Culture. In Russia, what is known locally as ‘Culturology’ draws on the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin (1965) and Juri Lotman (1984) on what the latter called the ‘poetics of the everyday’ and the influence of literature on life.

PROBLEMS In the course of working on the topics described above, a number of conceptual problems have arisen, or at least come into view more sharply than before. They include the problems of the ‘popular’, of sub-cultures, of the other, of the frontier between culture and society, and the problem of the limits of construction. These five problems will be discussed briefly in order. The original advantage of the concept of popular culture was that it called into question generalizations about a whole people such as Geertz’s famous phrase about the ‘story that the Balinese tell themselves about themselves’, replacing such descriptions with more precise ones about elites and ordinary people. However, the concept of ‘popular’ culture has in its turn been called into question. Who are the people? Sometimes the people have been defined positively, as peasants, artisans, the proletariat and so on, and sometimes negatively, as the sum of all those outside the elite. Whatever the definition, the problem of defining the frontiers of popular culture has remained, since ordinary people have often borrowed cultural items from elites, and the reverse process is also visible. One response to this problem has been to replace the term ‘popular culture’ with that of ‘common culture’, a term rich in

ambiguities. ‘Vulgar, sometimes, perhaps. But also “common” in being everywhere, resistant, hardy. Also “common” in being shared, having things “in common” ’ (Willis, 1990: pp. 1–2). There is indeed a danger of viewing the high and low cultures of the past as hermetically sealed. However, there is also an opposite danger, which is to project the cultural fluidity of our own postmodern age onto the past. As a corrective it is a useful exercise to read the important study by Lawrence Levine (1988) on the emergence of cultural hierarchy in the USA in the nineteenth century, the development of a distinction between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’, with Shakespeare, who earlier had been appreciated much more widely, enrolled on the highbrow side. It was only in the 1920s and 1930s that what was described at the time as ‘middlebrow’ culture emerged in the USA, based on book clubs, lecture circuits and cultural supplements in newspapers (Rubin, 1992). An alternative response to the problem of defining the popular is to make more distinctions rather than fewer, according to gender, region, occupation and so on. Following the example of the sociologists, these groupings used to be described as ‘sub-cultures’, but more recently, following the anthropologists, the favoured term is ‘cultures’ – convent culture, democratic culture, oral culture, print culture, visual culture or the cultures of consumption, gambling, politeness, sport, travel and violence, all of which have attracted historians. A similar problem surfaces in the case of cultural encounters such as the one between the British and the Hawaiians, since different groups of Hawaiians in particular did not react to the new situation in the same way. Contact with Europeans ‘submitted the relationship between chiefs and people to unparalleled strains’, as the chiefs adapted the traditional system to secure trading privileges for themselves (Sahlins, 1985). In other words, the metaphor of encounters between whole ‘cultures’ should be abandoned or at least unpacked to allow for a discussion of the agency of groups or even individuals.

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Another major problem that has emerged in the course of studies on cultural encounters concerns their consequences, the relative importance of the imposition of the culture of the conquerors (assimilation or ‘acculturation’, as anthropologists used to say), of resistance to innovation, and in the third place of a kind of compromise, conscious or unconscious, sometimes described as ‘negotiation’ and sometimes as ‘hybridization’. Thus Nicholas Thomas’s Entangled Objects (1991), on the Pacific in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is equally concerned with ‘the indigenous appropriation of European Things’ and ‘The European appropriation of Indigenous Things’, reconstructing the strategies of appropriation and the transformation of the objects as they crossed cultural frontiers. There is surely no definitive solution to the problem of the relative importance of cultural unity and diversity. From inside, cultures look more diverse, while from outside they appear more unified. The important thing is to try to avoid crude stereotypes of the ‘other’. One of the enduring legacies of the long debate over the study of ‘Orientalism’ by Edward Said (1978) has been a greater awareness of Western stereotypes of Arabs as ‘backward’, ‘degenerate’, ‘despotic’, ‘fatalist’, ‘luxurious’, ‘passive’ and ‘sensual’, and indeed a greater sensitivity to stereotypes in general. Many of these stereotypes seem to describe societies at least as well as cultures, drawing attention to the problem of the frontier between the two, which seemed to dissolve when historians adopted the anthropological concept of a whole culture. Today, some scholars speak of the cultural and others of the social history of language, for instance, or of memory. Others speak of ‘sociocultural history’. The problem underlying these differences of label is fundamentally one of explanation. One group of scholars see cultural changes as fundamentally autonomous, another sees them – in the Marxian tradition, however freely interpreted – as consequent on changes in society. One group notes the importance of cultural construction, the

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other is concerned with the limits of such construction. It may be argued that the term ‘construction’ is used too easily by some scholars, who do not explore the cultural or social constraints on the enterprise or indeed the material out of which classes, nations and other cultural artefacts are constructed or better, reconstructed. In the domain of culture it is surely less useful to speak of the ‘Big Bang’ of invention than it is to discuss ‘continuous creation’ (Bonnell and Hunt, 1999; Burke, 2004).

METHODS Most cultural historians would probably describe themselves as essentially interpreters of the meaning of past practices and representations, whether they made reference to the long tradition of hermeneutics or the interpretive anthropology of Geertz (which itself draws on this tradition). Relatively few of them have been tempted either by French structuralism or Russian semiology, though some Russian historians have drawn on Lotman’s ideas and Ranajit Guha (1983) used the work of Lévi-Strauss in his analysis of the ‘code’ of Indian peasant revolt. In this case the turn to structuralism may have been in part the result of the absence of documents written from the point of view of the ‘subaltern classes’, though Guha also tries to read official documents against the grain for this purpose. The enterprise was challenged by Gayatri Spivak (1988), with the question ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ It is in cases where cultural historians have worked with sources other than written texts that they have confronted problems of method most directly. Oral historians, for instance, have analysed the stereotypes and formulae to be found in the testimonies they collected not only negatively, as distortions of the historical record, but also positively, as evidence of the place of myth in everyday life (Samuel and Thompson, 1990). Oral history is merging with the history of memory, and oral historians have brought to light the memories of the losing side in the case of

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the civil wars in twentieth-century Finland for instance, as in that of the dispossession of the Aborigines in Australia, a case that has led to an academic conflict known as the ‘History Wars’ (MacIntyre and Clark, 2003; Peltonen, 1999). In the last few decades, historians of all kinds, like anthropologists (see Chapter 9), have made a visual turn and taken the evidence of images increasingly seriously, from medals and maps to photographs and films. This turn has forced them to think equally seriously about problems of interpretation, or, as the art historians say, of iconography. Should cultural historians adopt the art historian’s way of reading pictures, or should they be attempting to find a method of their own? To make matters more complicated, art historians themselves are now divided over the merits of different ways of reading images, such as the psychoanalytical, the structuralist and the deconstructionist. To these problems must be added that of translating visual perceptions into words, only to be avoided if cultural historians were to follow the example of some anthropologists (and political historians) and present their conclusions in the form of a film rather than a book (Burke, 2001). Even more difficult is the problem of reading material culture. The wave of recent studies of the culture of food, clothes and housing is based to a considerable extent on traditional written documents such as inventories. However, its exponents are sometimes bold enough to employ the methods of archaeology, reading the artefacts themselves (Hodder, 1986). Anthropologists too have made important contributions to the study of material culture, first by emphasizing the local context of the meaning of artefacts, and more recently by replacing that emphasis with a concern with cultural exchange (Phillips and Steiner, 1999; Steiner, 1994). A similar shift in attitude underlies what might be called the rise and fall of ‘microhistory’. Studies of local communities, long dismissed by professional historians as antiquarian, came into their own in the 1970s when leading scholars such as Emmanuel

Le Roy Ladurie (1975) and Carlo Ginzburg (1976) published books concerned with single villages or even with forgotten individuals, mobilizing local material as anthropologists do in order to answer more general questions about material culture, popular culture and so on. Ladurie and Ginzburg changed the way in which rural France in the Middle Ages and the Italian Counter-Reformation had been presented by historians, telling human-interest stories and embodying their generalizations in vivid portraits of forgotten individuals that attracted thousands of readers. However, the micro-historical approach offers more than a new form of presentation. Conventional historical explanations sometimes look less acceptable when they are viewed on a different scale. The focus on small groups has led to an interest in analysing social networks that might be described as a new historical method, offering new insights into the making of class, the organization of political opposition and the encouragement of interest in the arts. A vivid example of the implications of network analysis for cultural history is offered by a study of early modern Japan that notes the importance of local clubs in which ordinary people wrote and recited haiku. The author argues that haiku clubs not only offered a temporary escape from an oppressive social system but also formed part of a ‘network revolution’ in communication that encouraged ordinary people to press for political change at a regional level (Ikegami, 2005). Apart from micro-history, the major change in forms of presentation of cultural history has been the revival or transformation of narrative, which is no longer viewed as necessarily linked to political events. It is now increasingly employed as a means to interpret or at least to present interpretations of cultural change, thus producing what might be called a ‘thick’ narrative on the analogy of Geertz’s famous ‘thick description’ (an example is Spence, 1982; general discussion in Burke, 1991). This shift in presentation follows the increasing awareness of the extent to which

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people ‘live in’ stories (as Elvin, 1997, puts it), the extent to which people tell stories to themselves and others all the time in order to make sense of their experience. The influence of the narratives told in novels, plays, newspapers or films on the ways in which people perceive their own actions or those of their neighbours has also attracted the attention of historians. The rise of history ‘from below’, as well as the shift from an almost exclusive concern with the senders of cultural messages to an interest in audiences or receivers as well, has encouraged interest in narratives told from multiple viewpoints, just as it has heightened awareness that images express different kinds of gaze – male, Western, upper-class, picturesque, colonial, scientific and so on. To allow the ‘varied and opposing voices’ of the dead to be heard again, the historian needs, like the novelist, to practise what Bakhtin called ‘heteroglossia’. For example, in a remarkable study by the American anthropologist-historian Richard Price, the history of eighteenth-century Surinam has been presented in the form of a dialogue between four voices, each of which represents a different culture. There are the black slaves, their point of view being reconstructed from the memories of their descendants, collected by the methods of oral history. There are the Dutch colonial administrators, whose viewpoint informs the official documents. There are the Moravian missionaries who came to convert the Saramaka and left a number of texts behind them. Finally there is the voice of the historian himself, presented not as a final synthesis but simply as another voice, perhaps the voice of America in the late twentieth century. The use of four different type-faces in the same volume makes it easier for the reader to identify the speakers. Retrospectively, it now seems obvious that the rise of cultural history to prominence in the last quarter-century or so is linked to the rise of Cultural Studies, even if the relations between the two groups of practitioner have not always been close. It is also linked to the rise of both postmodernism (the movement) and postmodernity (the trend), even if some

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cultural historians are opposed to both. It is no accident that a history of the imagination has arisen at a time when it can be said that ‘the real is as imagined as the imaginary’, or that scholars who live in a consumer society that is also an information society are studying the history of consumption and information. In a period when social structures, once perceived as hard and rigid, now appear relatively soft and flexible, while many cultural boundaries seem to be dissolving, historians feel able to free themselves from traditional distinctions between high and low, author and reader, mind and body. It is no wonder that terms such as ‘liminality’ or ‘negotiation’ or ‘dialogue’ have come into favour among historians as well as other scholars who study culture. This brief account of the practice and the problems of cultural history today, or at least in the last generation, has concentrated on common features at the expense of both regional and disciplinary variation, as is appropriate in the case of a field which has also functioned as a meetingpoint. With more space, it might have been illuminating to compare and contrast different local traditions, producing a cultural history of cultural history, noting the German tradition of Kulturgeschichte, for instance, the French concern with civilisation (before their recent turn to culture), the methodological individualism of the British, the Russian concern with semiotics and so on. In similar fashion, despite interdisciplinary borrowing, the cultural history written by scholars who were originally trained in art history, literature, history of science, anthropology or sociology often remains distinctive. Whether these distinctions will be equally obvious by (say) 2030 is a difficult question. As in the case of cultural globalization in general, homogenization is one possible scenario. An opposite scenario is that of reaction, a re-assertion of the distinctiveness of local and disciplinary traditions. I place my own bet on a third scenario, the continued importance of hybridization, in the culture of cultural history as in the many other cultures of the world we live in.

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Bryson, A. (1998) From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buchan, D. (1972) The Ballad and the Folk. London: Routledge. Buisseret, D. and Reinhardt, S.G. (eds) (2000) Creolization in the Americas. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Burckhardt, J. (1860) The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. (English Tr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004.) Burke, P. (1978) Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Aldershot: Scolar. (revised edn, 1994.) Burke, P. (1984) ‘How to be a Counter-Reformation Saint’, rpr Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987, pp. 48–62. Burke, P. (1987) ‘Les îles anthropologiques et le territoire de l’historien’, in C. Descamps (ed.), Philosophie et Histoire. Paris: Bordas, pp. 49–66. Burke, P. (1989) ‘History as Social Memory’, in T. Butler (ed.), Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 97–113. Burke, P. (1993) The Art of Conversation. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burke, P. (2001) Eyewitnessing. London: Reaktion Books. Burke, P. (2004) What is Cultural History? Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Canclini, N. (1990) Hybrid Cultures. (English Tr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.) Cannadine, D. and Price, S. (eds) (1987) Rituals of Royalty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carnes, M. and Griffen, C. (eds) (1990) Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Chabal, P. and Daloz, J.P. (2005) Culture Troubles. London: Hurst. Charle, C. (1990) Naissance des ‘intellectuels’, 1880–1900. Paris: Minuit. Chartier, R. (1987) The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chartier, R. (1988) Cultural History between Practices and Representations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Christiansen, P.O. (2000) Kulturhistorie som opposition. Copenhagen: Samleren. Clunas, C. (1991) Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China. Cambridge: Polity Press. Corbin, A. (1982) The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the French Social Imagination. (English Tr. Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986.)

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Corbin, A. (1994) Village Bells. (English Tr. London: Macmillan, 1999.) Cousin, B. (1983) Le miracle et le quotidien: les ex-voto provençaux, images d’une société. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Crow, T. (1985) Painters and Public Life in EighteenthCentury Paris. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Darnton, R. (1984) The Great Cat Massacre. New York: Basic Books. Davis, N.Z. (2000) The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dening, G. (1980) Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas 1774–1880. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii. de Certeau, M. (1970) La possession de Loudun. Paris: Julliard. de Certeau, M. (1980) The Practice of Everyday Life. (English Tr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.) Dirks, N. (2001) Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Driver, F. (2001) Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duby, G. (1978) The Three Orders. (English Tr. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980.) Duncan, J. and Gregory, D. (eds) (1999) Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing. London: Routledge. Edney, M. (1997) Mapping an Empire: The Geographic Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Elias, N. (1939) The Civilizing Process. (English Tr. Oxford: Blackwell, revised edn, 2000.) Elman, B.A. (2000) A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Elsner, J. and Cardinal, R. (eds) (1994) The Cultures of Collecting. London: Reaktion Books. Elsner, J. and Rubiés, J-P. (eds) (1998) Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel. London: Reaktion Books. Elvin, M. (1997) Changing Stories in the Chinese World. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Erikson, E.H. (1958) Young Man Luther. New York: Norton. Fabian, J. (1978) ‘Popular Culture in Africa’, Afric, 48, 315–334. Falcon, F. (2002) História cultural. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar. Fentress, J. and Wickham, C. (1992) Social Memory. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Findlen, P. (1994) Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault, M. (1975) Discipline and Punish. (English Tr. London: Allen Lane, 1977.) Foucault, M. (1984a) The Use of Pleasure. (English Tr. London: Allen Lane, 1986.) Foucault, M. (1984b) Care of the Self. (English Tr. London: Allen Lane, 1988.) François, E. and Schulze, H. (eds) (2001) Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols. Munich: Beck. Freyre, G. (1933) The Masters and the Slaves. (English Tr. New York: Knopf, 1946.) Frykman, J. and Löfgren, O. (eds) (1996) Force of Habit: Exploring Everyday Culture. Lund: Lund University Press. Fujitani, T. (1996) Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, C. (1980) Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ginzburg, C. (1976) Cheese and Worms. (English Tr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.) Gluck, C. (1985) Japan’s Modern Myths. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gombrich, E. H. (1969) In Search of Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gouk, P. and Hills, H. (eds) (2005) Representing Emotions. Aldershot: Ashgate. Greenblatt, S. (1988) Shakespearian Negotiations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greer, G. (1979) The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work. London: Secker and Warburg. Groebner, V. (2000) Liquid Assets, Dangerous Gifts. (English Tr. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.) Gruzinski, S. (1988) The Conquest of Mexico. (English Tr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.) Gruzinski, S. (1999) The Mestizo Mind. (English Tr. London: Routledge, 2002.) Guha, R. (1983) Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Habermas, J. (1962) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. (English Tr. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989.) Hall, C. (1992) White, Male and Middle Class. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hanawalt, B.A. and Kobialka, M. (eds) (2000) Medieval Practices of Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Hauser, A. (1951) A Social History of Art. London: Routledge. Higashibaba, I. (2001) Christianity in Early Modern Japan: Kirishitan Belief and Practice. Leiden: Brill. Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (eds) (1983) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodder, I. (1986) Reading the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howes, D. (ed.) (2004) Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. Huizinga, J. (1919) The Autumn of the Middle Ages. (English Tr. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996.) Hunt, L. (1984) Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hunt, L. (ed.) (1989) The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Huntington, S.P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hutson, L. (ed.) (1999) Feminism and Renaissance Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ikegami, E. (2005) Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Isnenghi, M. (ed.) (1996–7) I luoghi della memoria. Rome and Bari: Laterza. Jackson, H. (2001) Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Jardine, N., Secord, J.A. and Spary, E. (eds) (1996) Cultures of Natural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johns, A. (1998) The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jones, G.S. (1983) Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jouhaud, C. (1985) Mazarinades: la Fronde des mots. Paris: Aubier. Joyce, P. (1994) Democratic Subjects: the Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jütte, R. (2000) The History of the Senses. (English Tr. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.) Kay, S. and Rubin, M. (eds) (1994) Framing Medieval Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Klein, L.E. (1994) Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuper, A. (2000) Culture: The Anthropologist’s Account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lacan, J. (1966) Ecrits. (English Tr. New York: Norton, 2006.)

Landes, J. (1988) Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Laqueur, T. (2003) Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. New York: Zone. Le Goff, J. (1981) The Birth of Purgatory. (English Tr. London: Scolar Press, 1984.) Le Roy Ladurie, E. (1975) Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324. (English Tr. London: Scolar Press, 1978.) Levine, L.W. (1988) Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lotman, J. and Uspenskii, B. (1984) The Semiotics of Russian Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lowe, K. (1993) Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacIntyre, S. and Clark, A. (2003) The History Wars. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. McKenzie, D.F. (1986) Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. (2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.) MacKenzie, J.M. (1995) Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Melton, J. (2001) The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mort, F. (1987) Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830. (2nd edn, London: Routledge, 2000.) Muchembled, R. (1978) Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1750. (English Tr. Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1985.) Mudimbe, V.Y. (1988) The Invention of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Muir, E. (1981) Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mukerji, C. (1997) Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nora, P. (ed.) (1984–93) Realms of Memory. 3 vols. (English Tr. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–1998.) Nye, R.A. (1993) Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ogborn, M. (1998) Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780. New York: Guilford Press. Ory, P. (2004) L’histoire Culturelle. Paris: Seuil. Peltonen, U.-M. (1999) ‘The return of the narrator’, in A. Ollila (ed.), Historical Perspectives on Memory. Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, pp. 115–38.

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Penny, H.G. (2002) Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Phillips, R.B. and Steiner, C.B. (eds) (1999) Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in the Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Poirrier, P. (2004) Les enjeux de l’histoire culturelle. Paris: Seuil. Pomian, K. (1987) Collectors and Curiosities. (English Tr. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.) Pons, A. and Serna, J. (2005) La Historia Cultural: Autores, Obras, Lugares. Madrid: Akal. Porter, R. (1991) ‘History of the body’, in P. Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 233–260. (2nd edn, 2001.) Porter, R. (2001) Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900. London: Reaktion Books. Poulot, D. (1997) Musée, Nation, Patrimoine, 1789–1815. Paris: Gallimard. Pratt, M.L. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Price, R. (1990) Alabi’s World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Prins, G. (1981) The Hidden Hippopotamus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawski, E.S. (1979) Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ing China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Reddy, W.M. (2001) The Navigation of Feeling: Framework for a History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ringer, F. (1992) Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roche, D. (1989) The Culture of Clothes. (English Tr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.) Roper, L. (2004) Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Rubin, J.S. (1992) The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Sahlins, M. (1985) Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. London: Routledge. Samuel, R. (1994) Theatres of Memory. London: Verso. Samuel, R. and Thompson, P. (eds) (1990) The Myths We Live By. London: Routledge.

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Schiebinger, L. (1989) The Mind has no Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scribner, R.W. (1981) For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation. (2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.) Secord, J. (2000) Victorian Sensation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sewell, W. (2005) Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shapin, S. (1994) A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shively, D.H. (1991) ‘Popular culture’, in J.W. Hall (ed.), Early Modern Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 706–769. Shoshan, B. (1993) Popular Culture in Medieval Cairo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sinha, M. (1995) Colonial Masculinity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Spence, J. (1982) The Gate of Heavenly Peace. London: Faber. Spivak, G.C. (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education. Steiner, C. (1994) African Art in Transit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, N. (1991) Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, E. (1963) The Making of the English Working Class. London: Gollancz. Tully, J. (1988) (ed) Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics. Cambridge: Polity. Williams, R. (1958) Culture and Society. London: Chatto and Windus. Willis, P. (1990) Common Culture. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Wortman, R. (1995–2000) Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Yeo, E. and Yeo, S. (eds) (1981) Popular Culture and Class Conflict. Brighton: Harvester Press. Zaret, D. (2000) Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zhang, L. (1999) Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

6 Literary Studies James F. English

Although this is the only chapter of the Handbook that is focused on literary study, a glance through the Contributors Notes will show it to be far from the only one whose author is housed in a literature department. The large number of contributors who either are now or have been at some point in their careers members of English or Comparative Literature faculties is an index of literature’s enduringly powerful position within the disciplinary spaces where cultural theory and analysis are practised. Though departmental divisions and emphases vary significantly from one institution and one country to another, the general rule at most of the world’s colleges and universities is that literature departments are larger than departments of art history or music or film studies, and larger than the ‘cultural’ wings of such departments as communications, sociology, economics or anthropology, even in the wake of recent shifts that have enlarged the disciplinary apertures of the social sciences with respect to traditionally cultural matters. No other form of cultural practice has been as thoroughly subjected to academic scrutiny, as written about by scholars, or as widely promoted and

disseminated by the educational apparatus as literature has. And yet, according to what has lately become a persistent and intensifying complaint, literary study has practically disappeared from many higher-educational institutions, and the true literary scholar is today a largely residual figure. Though the number of literature departments remains large and the number of bachelors degrees they award each year, in the USA and worldwide, has risen over the last quarter century, it is said that what is studied in those departments is no longer literature in any important sense of the term. The literature faculties are viewed as having turned their backs on literature while devoting attention to works of ‘popular culture’ such as movies or comic books; to instances of ‘discourse’ drawn from a predominantly non-literary archive in which novels or poems serve as historical evidence alongside newspaper reports, ships’ logs, and criminological treatises; to sociological ‘data’ such as consumption patterns or production figures; or to the cultural politics of ‘class, race, and gender’, in terms of which literary works hold

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no interest or value beyond their perceived utility or disutility as tools of identity-based social struggles.1 From this standpoint, the Handbook’s list of contributors tells a different story: here, as in the profession at large, there seem to be many literature professors but scarcely any of them writing about literature. How is it that literary study can occupy this radically ambiguous position within the academy, at once thriving and imperiled, expanding and vanishing, envied for its centrality and lamented for its marginality? What, really, is its place on the field of contemporary cultural analysis, and what are likely to be its contributions going forward? To give good answers to these questions, we need to trace the longstanding connection between literary form and institutional form, between scholars’ concern with the formal particulars of ‘literature itself’ and their collective, ongoing struggle for recognition and security in the modern university.2 Form is not just the fulcrum around which the important debates in literary theory have revolved; it is also the point of articulation between those abstract debates of ideology or method and the concrete institutional stakes that have been in play. It was by focusing on the analysis of specifically literary form that English and the other fields of modern literary study first managed to gain and consolidate institutional legitimacy within the initially inhospitable higher-educational apparatus of the early and mid twentieth century, and it has been through tactical modifications (rather than outright abandonment) of the main principles and protocols that took shape in those decades that the discipline has managed to guard some of its advantage, albeit at a certain cost, within the even more hostile academy of the neoliberal era. The impetus behind recent demands for a ‘return’ to form is not merely philosophical, nor is it wholly attributable to the cyclical or generational rhythm of intellectual fashion. It is institutional and strategic, having less to do with any actual disappearance of formal or aesthetic emphases from literary study than with the struggle for resources and status

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in a period of rapid and threatening highereducational rearrangement.

LEGITIMATION: THE FOUNDING FORMALISMS OF LITERARY STUDY Literary study, in the sense of a distinct and widely legitimate academic discipline in which one may pursue higher as well as lower degrees and make a career as a practising scholar, dates back no more than 90 years. Prior to the World War I, it had at best a marginal role in the expanding European and North American system of research universities. This marginality was underscored by the fact that the main groups of students who were at this time receiving sustained education in modern literature (at least in the Anglophone universities) were precisely those marked out as incapable of ‘higher’ study, such as colonial students in Africa and South Asia (Gikandi, 1996; Viswanathan, 1989), or those regarded as needing remedial training in ‘correct, Metropolitan English’, such as the university students in Scotland (Crawford, 1998: p. 8). In the imperial nations themselves, literary study was reserved for students in the women’s and working-men’s colleges (Baldick, 1983; Graff, 1987: pp. 37–38). Among the more privileged students who constituted the undergraduate populations at Cambridge, Humboldt or Johns Hopkins, reading modern English and European literature was something to do outside the compass of one’s academic pursuits. It was essentially a recreational practice, albeit a tacitly required one with whose basic lines of play any member of the ruling classes would be expected to have some familiarity. Thus arriving like an ambitious scholarship boy from the colonies, the upstart discipline of literary study could only gain a place in the university if it managed to meet certain entrance requirements. Achieving disciplinary status in the modern university was after all precisely a matter of demonstrating a commitment to requirements, standards, examinations and credentials. There had to

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be ‘research’, which meant there had to be standardized ‘methods’ that could be taught to degree-seekers and could issue in verifiable or falsifiable ‘results’. Just as important, the systematic methods and testable results of the new discipline had to serve a differentiating function. It would be no good proposing literary study as a mere branch or extension of established practices of historical or linguistic research or of philosophy; its standards and protocols and objects of study needed to be distinct enough to justify an expansion of the existing disciplinary array. By proposing literary form as its proper object, and casting the literary scholar as a rigorous, objective practitioner more closely resembling a research scientist than a learned gentleman, the new discipline was able to meet these institutional demands. The emergence of Russian Formalism towards the end of the World War I is often seen as the decisive first step in these developments. Terry Eagleton, for example, begins his bestselling 1983 primer Literary Theory: An Introduction with the 1917 publication of Victor Shklovsky’s formalist manifesto ‘Art as Device’.3 And without question, the work of Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Roman Jakobson and others of this circle contributed significantly to the modern reconception of literary scholarship, rejecting the mysticism and symbolism that had dominated Russian approaches at the turn of the century in favour of a rigorous linguistic analysis, a ‘concrete poetics’ or ‘hard science’ of the literary. German philology already enjoyed a reputation for scholarly rigour and a place of some consequence within the research universities. But where philologists studied the language of literary works in order to discover the laws of linguistic evolution, the Russian Formalists did so in order to discover the laws of the literary as such. Philology was interested in the words and grammar, all the raw material; formalism was interested in the artistic uses of that material, the uses whose deviance from ordinary language practices might be said to define the ‘art’ or the ‘poetic function’ of a text, its special qualities or properties as literature.

Even as early as 1917, however, there were other, parallel initiatives under way elsewhere, all aimed in their different ways at putting literary study on a new and sounder institutional footing by constructing a more or less systematic theory of literature and a concomitant critical method. The American critic Joel Spingarn published his Creative Criticism that year – calling for ‘a real philosophy of art’ capable of grasping the ‘intrinsic virtues’ of literature (1917: pp. 127, 130), while in London T.S. Eliot inaugurated his own brand of ‘programmatic criticism’ with his influential essay on vers libre; within two years he would publish the essays ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, ‘The Perfect Critic’, and ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, which shifted emphasis away from questions of personality and emotion towards the objective literary fact, and invoked Aristotle (with whom Western poetics begins) as a model of the kind of ‘scientific mind’, rarely possessed by actual scientists, that literary study required (Eliot, 1920: pp. 20–21). These essays were to become canonical for both the Practical Criticism in Britain and the New Criticism in the USA, helping to draw those streams together into a dominant current from the later 1930s through the 1960s. A curriculum in modern literature was all the while being developed in Scotland and in the colonies of Great Britain and of France, and this global emergence has had important effects – not least for the imperial nations themselves. But inasmuch as our concern here is literary study as a legitimate field of university research (rather than simply a curricular option or pedagogical emphasis), the development of Russian Formalism, Practical Criticism and New Criticism in the interwar years was more consequential. Together, these constituted the founding formalisms of literary study. Russian Formalism, the most explicitly scientific of the three in its ambitions and procedures, arose from the radical turn towards structure inaugurated by Ferdinand de Saussure’s lectures on semiology. Starting from Saussure’s rejection of the diachronic study of languages and language use in favour of a synchronic science

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of the abstract language system, the Russian Formalists (and the Prague Circle of linguists that continued their work through the 1930s) proposed an autonomous science of literature that would seek not to trace the historical unfolding of genres or careers, nor to express the higher meanings or transcendent truths of literary works, but to discover the basic units and laws of ‘literariness’ itself (literaturnost): its constitutive devices and the rules or relations of their organization within a given literary system (whether that defined by an individual work, an authorial corpus, or a particular style or genre). This project certainly differed in many respects from that of the Practical Criticism developed at Cambridge University in the 1920s by I.A. Richards. The Richards model offered its own ostensibly scientific ‘apparatus of rules and principles’ (Richards, 1929: p. 11), but with the quite different aim of exploring and refining readers’affective processing and evaluation of literary works, the structure of their subjective responses. Both differed from much American New Criticism, which adhered neither to the semiological roots of the Russian school nor to the affective orientation of the Cambridge school, and was in fact more of a composite approach than a unique doctrine. But these different formalisms did nevertheless constitute a common disciplinary enterprise, as suggested by the professional trajectory of René Wellek. Starting as a specialist in English literature, Wellek became a protégé of Jakobson in the Prague linguistic circle (Jakobson himself having migrated from Moscow); made repeated trips to England and engaged discursively with Richards and others of the Cambridge group in the 1930s; emigrated during the war to the USA, where he allied himself with such New Critics as Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks; joined the faculty at Yale as it was becoming the major hub of New Criticism in the early postwar years; and in 1949 published with Austin Warren the Theory of Literature, which would serve as the bible of literary theory for American graduate students throughout the subsequent period of New Critical hegemony. Indeed, by 1950 or so, the ‘New Criticism’had

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become simply an umbrella term for a range of (not always internally consistent) critical precepts and practices that derived as much from Moscow, Prague and Cambridge as from New Haven or Nashville. This mid-century mixing and matching of the discipline’s founding formalisms was possible because, despite their points of philosophical divergence and their varying levels of commitment to ‘theory’, they shared several broad aims and basic practices. In terms of aims, they all sought to establish and defend the specificity of the literary object, its intrinsic difference from other kinds of verbal or cultural artifact, its autonomy from the conscious intentions of its producer, and its unique and irreducible value as art. Implicitly, if not explicitly, they elevated the object of literary study above the things of ‘ordinary’ life, including merely recreational forms of culture such as dancing or movies, while at the same time isolating it from the other objects of legitimate disciplinary inquiry such as those of history, theology, biography and politics. As a matter of basic practice, they all insisted on what came to be known as close reading, an intensive analysis of a text’s unique formal particulars: not merely the words, as in philology, but the constitutive devices, patterns, or elements of style, including such effects as rhythmic regularity or irregularity, such tropes as irony or apostrophe, such narrative techniques as free indirect style or stream of consciousness, such thematic features as doppelgangers or Manichean binaries, and such structuring devices as foreshadowing, misdirection or flashback. From the formalist vantage, literariness consisted of problems or complications, ‘impediments’, as Shklovsky had called them (1988: p. 29), to a reader’s rapid and virtually automatic comprehension. Close reading was a way of highlighting these textual intersections or roadblocks where the mind is forced to slow down and scout for detours. As Chris Baldick has pointed out, the wide imposition of this new practice can be seen in the fact that, by the 1940s, ‘a typical page in a critical book or essay, especially if concerned with poetry, would … be broken up

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by frequent passages of quotations from texts, its exposition tending to weave in and out of them’ (Baldick, 1983: p. 78). Indeed, such page-by-page evidence of formalist reading, the systematic back-and-forth between the critic’s language and the language of the text in question, remains an easy way to distinguish, across the spectrum of contemporary criticism, the kind of work that is faithful to the discipline’s original impulse (and that still provides the main counterweight to the more ‘distant’, fast-reading practices of History and the social sciences, as well as of journalism). Its strong presence in some of the most influential works of postcolonial criticism, queer theory, cultural studies and the New Historicism shows that, contrary to the more strident rhetoric among contemporary neoformalists, this impulse is very far from having been obliterated. Testimony regarding the fundamental importance of close reading to historical understanding or theoretical advance is commonplace, while the kind of work that has programmatically disavowed close reading remains decidedly on the margins.4 Franco Moretti’s recent declaration that what we need is a new kind of literary scholarship produced ‘without a single direct textual reading’ (‘we know very well how to read texts; now let’s learn how not to read them’) – can only be offered and received as an extravagant provocation, a modest proposal which not even Moretti would ‘expect to be popular’ (Moretti, 2000a: p. 57). And even this is very far from a disavowal of formalist reading as such.5 The success with which close reading was established as the unshiftable cornerstone of the discipline can be accounted for in various ways, but the qualifying phrase in Baldick’s remark above points to a crucial factor. A typical page of criticism from this period would be concerned with poetry. This was not because there was necessarily more deviation from ordinary, non-literary language in poetry than in prose. All scholars working in the development of the ‘new poetics’ recognized that the poetic function could be highly active in prose writing.6 The tendency to focus on lyric, which became more pronounced

as the New Criticism secured its dominant position in the late 1930s, is better explained by the fact that the close reading of a short poem (or a complete stanza detached from a longer poem or play) was an eminently practical pedagogic exercise, a way to teach students how to read literature as literature, and an especially suitable way to examine them on their discipline-specific skills. And, as with the somewhat later structuralistinflected formalisms of genre theory and narratology, which proposed to capture long and unwieldy novels with simple maps or charts or diagrams of their structure, close reading served originally as a means of bracketing out not just (social or political) history but the temporality of the literary work itself, its often inconvenient length and seeming resistance to being apprehended or consumed as a single coherent object for classroom study and discussion. The very structure of Richards’s Practical Criticism is that of a mock-exam – or rather, a teachers’ guide for would-be examiners. As a lecturer at Cambridge when the English tripos was first introduced after the war, Richards had taken to confronting his students, chiefly undergraduates seeking the new degree in English, with unattributed short poems and requiring them to submit written analyses and evaluations of these isolated bits of literary language, plucked out of their historical and biographical contexts and accompanied by no explanatory apparatus. The first main section of Practical Criticism consists of 13 of these test-poems along with some 150 pages of sample student responses (what Richards calls ‘protocols’). The remainder of the book comprises Richards’s own assessment of the students’work, based on an evaluative scheme that systematically checks each protocol against the actual language of the poem while screening for ten kinds of fundamental literary-critical error or misreading, all the while attending carefully (like one who must administer grades) to distinctions of better and worse. Whatever its shortcomings as a scientific contribution to the theory or psychology of literature, Practical Criticism

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was, as Richards had put it, ‘a new and powerful educational instrument’ (Richards, 1948: p. 4). It made brilliantly clear that the ‘new poetics’ could be broken down into a series of tests, that literary study could be used to screen students for, and hopefully inoculate them against, such aesthetic failings as ‘sentimentality’, ‘inhibition’, or distraction by ‘mnemonic irrelevances’. As Ian Hunter argues, practical criticism thus met the discipline’s underlying (and in his account, constitutive) ‘pedagogical imperative’ by repurposing aesthetic education ‘as a technique in the governmental training of sensibility’ (Hunter, 1988: p. 198). This new deployment of formalism, aimed in part at producing ‘a special kind of personage – the teacher-critic’ (Hunter: p. 219), ran straight through the subsequent, textbookdominated decades of the New Criticism, maintaining an advantageous alignment of research methods with teaching practices and thus an unprecedentedly smooth cycle of intellectual reproduction.

RATIONALE: THE COMMUNITARIAN MISSION OF LITERARY STUDIES By constructing itself as a more or less rigorous academic discipline involving a field-specific object of study (literariness; the literary), an overarching science or theory of that object (formalism; the ‘new poetics’), and a practical method capable of producing testable, valid or invalid statements about the object (practical criticism; close reading), literary study thus managed to gain a distinct and secure position in the modern university. But it found its way to this position through the back door, as it were, still lacking the elite pedigree and symbolic prestige of Classical studies or Philology, while at the same time, even with its positivist-sounding commitment to rigour and system, lacking the kind of realworld purposiveness that might recommend it to students aiming for the middle-class professions or the world of business: the very students the new university was designed to serve. It was a discipline that, while meeting

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the basic requirements, seemed destined for a rather marginal future in the academic apparatus. Another way of putting this would be to say that formalism was always something of a dirty word. Recent calls for a return to the literary or to aesthetics have taken it as given that ‘formalism became a term of abuse, connected with various invidious forms of political befuddlement or conservatism’ just lately (Loesberg, 2005: p. 1), but it was already such when it was slapped upon the Moscow critics (who disdained the label). To be called a formalist suggests your commitment to sheer form or mere form, form for the sake of form or for the sake of evading messy and unpleasant, but ultimately more important, social realities. This was always recognized as a potential disciplinary pitfall, and was sidestepped in various ways. By far the most successful and enduring of these was that of suturing a neoArnoldian sense of elite social and cultural mission to the project of specification and formal analysis. Rather than simply accepting its place as one more (essentially technical) discipline in an expanding academy, literary study laid claim to a higher moral seriousness and greater universality of values than all the other disciplines combined. Indeed, Literature was the discipline from which the moral impoverishment of other disciplines, and of the modern society within which they increasingly served as a training ground, could be made visible; it provided a commanding critical vantage on the educational apparatus in which it was lodged and on the society as a whole. This claim to a keystone position as the most central and lofty of academic disciplines – the only specialist field that ultimately concerned itself with the whole of life rather than accepting such fragmentary and compromised knowledge as might be produced by Chemistry or Mathematics or even History – was initially most insistent in Great Britain, and is often considered the legacy of F.R. Leavis. An early student of the English tripos at Cambridge who then became a colleague of Richards’s, Leavis assimilated the methodological insistence on

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practical criticism or close reading as well as the foundational belief in the absolute specificity and uniquely elevated value of ‘the literary’ (for which he, like both Richards and the Russian Formalists, often interchanged the term ‘poetry’ or simply ‘art’). But beyond these basic points of connection, Leavis was not much concerned with science or system: he would not admit to any coherent theory of literature and in fact warned against the eclipsing of deeper, more intuitive, and more individual forms of knowledge by abstract dogma. In this way, he effected a certain relaxation of the insistence on disciplinary rigour, offering reinforcement of the new ‘scientific’ discipline via an earlier, anti-scientific, ‘culturalist’ rationale, which held the attentive reading of literature to be a guarantor of personal integrity and a measured form of resistance to the encroachments of commodified culture and homogenized consciousness. But challenging particular theoretical elaborations of literary study was far less important to Leavis than installing it within a broader project of collective moral improvement and social renovation. Thus, for example, no amount of virtuosic technique or verbal inventiveness could establish a text’s status as literary/art in the absence of a powerful moral and critical engagement with ‘life’. In a great work of literature, there had to be an ‘organic principle informing, determining, and controlling’ the variety of formal devices, making the work’s unique particulars function as a ‘vital whole’ integrally connected to society rather than simply as a brilliant but sterile aesthetic system (Leavis, 1948: p. 36). This insistence that the formal excellence of literary art depended on the moral integrity and intensity of its organic underpinnings – its rootedness in the deeper life of the ‘community’ – was not merely a criterion of evaluation (establishing, for example, that D.H. Lawrence was ‘much more truly creative as a technical inventor, an innovator, a master of language, than James Joyce’ [Leavis, 1948: p. 36]). It was a way of ensuring that literary study would lead to a clearer understanding of a community’s shared moral

stakes and purposes, sharpening the critical vision with respect to society as well as art. Though literary scholars required advanced training, they were more than just academic experts or technicians; they formed the proper leading edge of the community, an elite group with deep and comparatively uncompromised access to its most urgent values and needs, and were therefore capable, as no one else could be, of directing it towards a better future. ‘Upon this minority’, Leavis wrote in a manifesto of 1930, ‘depends our power of profiting by the language, the changing idiom … without which distinction of spirit is thwarted and incoherent. By “culture” I mean the use of such language’ (Leavis, 1930: p. 5). In Leavis, literary study, the study of specifically literary language, having already made the case for its academic legitimacy, found an advocate for its social necessity. What Shklovsky had described as literature’s unique power to de-automatize and reroute habitual lines of perception was seized upon as the means to a more complete and liberating reattunement of the mind. In the wake of this intervention, English – and literary study more generally – managed, without declaring any kind of directly political agenda, to stake a claim of social relevance and urgency that, whatever its other effects, brought students to its door in large numbers and bolstered both its sense of institutional entitlement and its institutional advantage over other fields of cultural study. The strenuous English nationalism at the heart of Leavis’s notion of ‘community’ (and indeed the admittedly too Anglocentric orientation of my discussion) does not at all mean that this was a merely local phase in the construction of the discipline. To varying degrees, the rearticulation of literary scholarship in terms of an elite calling and communitarian mission, a belief that through literature one can resist the false beliefs and desires promoted by modern social arrangements and access the deeper, more legitimate values and aspirations of one’s community, has pervaded literature classrooms down to the present day. In so far as the last decades of the twentieth century may be characterized

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by the challenge posed to established nation states and imperial blocs by a range of new nationalisms and of diasporic and transnational identity formations, this particular way of justifying literary study, and of selecting a canon, has become more rather than less pertinent. As Simon Gikandi has shown, Leavis’s movement, focused in significant measure on education and the task of the educator, left a profound and lasting imprint on the literary professoriate at the colonial universities. There, where literary study had been the linchpin in an educational agenda of imposed heritage, scholars and teachers were poised to make their own nationalist uses of Leavisism as they built a simultaneously global and, in Gikandi’s account, curiously parochial, postcolonial curriculum (Gikandi, 2001: p. 650). In Britain and North America, too, the privileged link between literature and the lived experience of a particular community (‘the consciousness of the race’, as Leavis said) has helped since the 1960s to propel the movements for new ethnic or minority curricula, supporting the value claims that are made for African-American literature, Asian-American literature, gay and lesbian literature, women’s literature, and other important subfields. The effort to canonize Toni Morrison’s novels, for example, has not been justified on the basis merely of their historical or sociological value but on the strength of their artistic distinction in Leavis’s sense: on the moral force of Morrison’s (complex, difficult, ‘truly creative’) language, language whose power is rooted in the collective life of a black community lodged problematically within the larger national community. And by the same token, the rationale for teaching Morrison, and for hiring specialists to do that teaching, is not ‘merely’ formal or aesthetic, a matter of the author’s purely technical innovations and achievements, any more than it is ‘merely’ political, a matter of ratios of representation in the canon and on the faculty – although the capacity of literature departments to make better headway in this respect than other fields, especially those outside the humanities, has been a key institutional advantage as political

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pressure for more diverse faculty hiring has mounted.7 The discipline-specific rationale is that a sustained, rigorous engagement with Morrison’s writing, carried out by scholars of real expertise and authority, is critical to the black community’s and ultimately to the nation’s self-understanding, and that with the capacity genuinely to engage with Morrison as a literary artist comes a capacity for more enlightened critique and leadership. Or, to put this point more generally, while the rise of identity-based subfields of literary study, starting with feminism’s attack on the allmale canon, has of course involved significant extension and adjustment of the received paradigm and a fiercely critical rewriting of Leavis’s ‘great tradition’, it has not in and of itself implied a divestment from ‘the literary’ as repository of community values and compass of community aspiration.

THE THEORY REVOLUTION It should already be clear that my aim in retracing this institutional history is to emphasize, even at the risk of minimizing the stakes of many internal struggles and disputes, a powerful ‘conservatism’ in literary study which is not at all restricted to rightwing or rear-guard fractions and which has undoubtedly helped to stabilize the discipline’s institutional position through a period of rapid change. I want to suggest, contrary to other accounts, that neither the ‘theory revolution’ of the late 1960s and 1970s nor the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1980s – both of these inflected by the new social movements and the concomitant struggles for inclusion and recognition in the academy and beyond – has truly dislodged the framework that was put into place in the discipline’s first half-century. An investment in literariness (stressing the peculiar and problematic qualities of a text: its difficulties, resistances, or irresolvables as opposed to its readily extractable thematic or narrative content), a commitment to close reading (presenting the actual linguistic or structural particulars of a text – including particulars of narrative structure), and an

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adherence to the communitarian rationale for literary study’s privilege within the academy (insisting that literary study advances the interests and values of a community larger and less advantaged than that of literary scholars, and that more resources, symbolic as well as economic, should therefore be directed towards the discipline) remain very much active today, and not as merely residual elements. The current state of literary study is defined not by its abandonment of the mid-century model but by the tensions that have arisen as that model has attempted to accommodate itself to a formidable reshaping of the social, cultural and educational fields and a depreciation of the symbolic value of literature as such. The theory revolution in literary study arrived in the wake of the campus protests of the 1960s, protests expressive of a new and largely admirable antagonism among students and younger intellectuals towards the university, which in policing student dissent seemed frankly to disclose its function as what Louis Althusser called an ‘ideological state apparatus’ (1971). In this context, the standing claim that literary scholars and educators constituted the only real force of integrity, independence and resistance to a barbarous modernity which was advancing itself through (rather than in spite of) the work of the university was not so much rejected as turned reflexively back upon the discipline in a move of theoretical distanciation and critique. The normative model of literary study, which had been founded as a radically new science of a complex object, and had been frequently attacked for its highly specialized methods and technical vocabulary, had, after several academic generations of successful reproduction and reinforcement, and grafted as it was to a ‘soft’ culturalist rationale, become such a deeply entrenched or naturalized set of orthodoxies that it had come to seem singularly uncritical of the status quo and emphatically untheoretical: a pseudo-discipline vulnerable to the very charge it had contended with in the first decades of the century, that it was no more than a glorified, academically sanctioned version

of refined opinion or good taste, with nothing much actually to teach – something closer to rationalized recreation for the cultured classes (or remedial training for the uncouth) than to advanced study. There was a new pressure, intensified by the new social movements of this period, to resist the homogeneity and reproductivity of the literary critical establishment, to challenge the canon as an academic enshrinement and euphemization of established social hierarchies, and, not least, to promote alternative, radically dissenting critical methods which had previously been kept to the margins. By and large, however, the particular appropriations of structuralism, phenomenology, reception aesthetics, psychoanalysis and even Marxism that animated this moment in literary study allowed the discipline’s most stubbornly normative practices to prevail. As had already been clear in the case of Northrop Frye’s widely read Anatomy of Criticism (1957), the structuralist approach was more complementary than antithetical to the doctrine of close reading. Structuralists and narratologists swapped out the molecular optic of the New Criticism for a molar optic that addressed literary form in terms of the shape of the work as a whole and the place of that shape in the larger relational system of genres or types (a system that many structuralists, from Roland Barthes to John Ellis, recognized as socially constructed and historically variable). But a resolution between the two optics – and hence between structuralism and the New Criticism – was already being proposed, under the banner of Aristotle, by the ‘pluralistic’ formalists of the Chicago School (Booth, 1961; Crane, 1998), who postulated a fundamental alignment of molar and molecular such that the specification of local devices via close reading could assist in apprehending a general logic and ideal form, while the specification of that ideal form via a relational theory of genres could assist in discerning and accounting for the local effects of style. Even as this kind of happy resolution (which always refers art to formal stability and to harmony between part and whole) came

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under sustained and devastating challenge from post-structuralist theories, the aim was often to support, by means of an immanent critique of the formal analysis, a more rigorous and nuanced specification of literariness, a more sophisticated ontology of ‘the poetic’, rather than to make a radical break from prevalent reading practices. Deconstruction presented itself as an anti-formalism, but it was such only in a rather restricted sense. The enormously influential pioneer of literary deconstruction Paul de Man was already declaring formalist criticism a ‘dead end’ in the mid-1950s, before the linguistic turn of post-structuralism had been decisively made even in his own work. Distinguishing his project from Richards’s practical criticism, de Man argued that ‘a theory of constituting form is altogether different from a theory of signifying form’ (de Man 1983: p. 232). With respect to an ontology of the literary, this is certainly true, for it replaces the concept of literature as a mimetic or imitative object with that of literature as a creative or generative process, a process that constitutes rather than reflects its worldly ‘material’. But as regards the practice of literary criticism in the 1970s, these different ontological assumptions, even when de Man, Derrida, and other deconstructionists pressed them to the point of radical textual undecidability, did not add up to so very much. Scholars trained on the practical/New Critical method took very readily to deconstruction, which made its institutional home in the formerly New Critical stronghold of Yale and which called upon critics to deploy, more strenuously than ever, their skills as close readers – and even (new social movements be damned) to focus those skills on a restricted set of canonically literary texts, such as the lyrics of English Romantic poets, the texts of the Continental Comparative Literature tradition, or the novels of Joyce.8 The main difference was that instead of directing the analysis towards the discovery of a final ‘poetic’ reconciliation beyond ambiguity, paradox and irony, these critics would now accept the ambiguity and paradox and irony as signs of the irresolvable, of the aporia or gap at

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the heart of the poetic and hence of Being itself. But this, according to de Man, was in fact already evident (available by means of immanent critique) in the work of William Empson or of any really searching practical critic. Deconstructionist literary criticism, it turned out, was synonymous with close reading of the most rigorous and patient kind: the initial reaction against it, the ‘resistance to theory’(de Man, 1986), was at bottom, like the reaction against New Criticism in the 1930s, a resistance to the demand for close reading, which always stands as an affront to those who seek the specification of meaning without complication or deferral. Similarly, the belated arrival of phenomenology and reception aesthetics into the mainstream of literary study, both of which promised to shift attention away from the isolate object onto the generative subject of literature, smashing the dogma of the ‘thing itself’, in fact accomplished relatively minor shifts of register and terminology, leaving the practical operations of close reading largely unchanged. Though phenomenology began with Edmund Husserl at the turn of the twentieth century, its role in literary studies emerges with Sartre’s writings in the 1940s and the work of the Geneva School theorists (Georges Poulet, Jean Starobinski) in the 1950s, and only begins to be adopted in the USA (partly owing to the influence of de Man) in the 1960s and 1970s by such critics as Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller. For the phenomenologists, the governing principle or logic of a literary work is the immanence of the authorial mind or vision. The critic’s concern here is emphatically not, however, with a biographical author, historically situated in the world, but with an authorial being somehow implied by and coextensive with the separate reality of the text, and approachable only through a rigorous close reading of the language that constitutes that reality. Not surprisingly, the phenomenological close reading tended to turn up much the same sorts of recurring patterns, ironies, ambiguities and harmonies that the New Critical reading would have done. Although these were now conceived as implying a particular author’s

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structuring mind, the unique form of the work corresponding to the unique form of the author’s created reality, little had actually changed in terms of critical practice. It was still a matter of largely isolating the work from the material context of its production and consumption, scrutinizing it for formal patterns, devices and cruxes, and proposing a reading that made sense of these diverse formal elements. Much the same can be said of readerresponse criticism, a phenomenological approach to the act of reading which may itself be traced back to Husserl via the early work of his student Roman Ingarden and the intervening hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer, but which did not emerge as a coherent and influential movement until the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of the Konstanz School in Germany (Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser) and the work of Stanley Fish, Norman Holland and others in the USA. In this case, the generative subject of the literary was not author but reader. Yet what Iser called the ‘implied reader’ of a text (Iser, 1974), the reader whose implicit task it is to negotiate the text’s many ‘gaps’ or ‘blanks’ or ‘indeterminacies’ (Iser, 1978: p. 182), is really nothing more than the mid-century formalist critic redoubled or reflected back on himself, tracing his close reading of the text back into the text so that a reified version of his own mental processes appears as textual lack or demand. Just as in Shklovsky’s analysis, literary study figures here as a kind of cognitive problem-solving, and the problems are strictly those that arise between the individual text and the individual reader (even if, as in the essays of Fish [1980: pp. 167–173], that reader is identified with a larger ‘interpretive community’). The most formidable line of thought to make its belated arrival in this period of retheorization was that of Marxism. Certainly, the discipline’s serious engagement with the Marxist theoretical tradition was long overdue, given that the latter’s emergence on the Continent and in Russia dated back to that of the founding formalisms themselves. The same span of years that takes us from the early

work of Shklovsky and Eliot to the publication of Richards’s Practical Criticism and Leavis’s Mass Civilization and Minority Culture saw the appearance of Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel (1916) and History and Class Consciousness (1923), Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution (1924), Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), and several key works of the Bakhtin Circle in Moscow: P.N. Medvedev’s Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), V.N. Volosinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), and M.M. Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929). These works took up the problem of literary form more or less explicitly, recognizing that, as Medvedev expressed it in 1929, ‘Marxist study of literature makes contact with the formal method and comes into conflict with it on the grounds of the paramount and most urgent problem common to both – the problem of specification’ (quoted in Volosinov, 1986: p. 179). Traditional Marxism would of course reject any notion of ‘pure form’ independent of a content and context supplied by history, and thus also any notion of literariness specifiable by formal particulars alone. According to Marx’s own account (in his Preface to the Critique of Political Economy), all ‘definite forms of social consciousness’, including specifically literary forms, are effects of the underlying relations of production, which provide the ‘real foundation’ of art, politics, law and all other elements of the ‘superstructure’ (Marx, 1972: p. 4). But by the 1920s, the strict economic determinism of this base/superstructure paradigm was under pressure within Marxism itself. And Marxist literary theorists could scarcely afford to ignore the stunning success of the formalists in specifying a new disciplinary object and launching a new field of advanced study with impressively elaborated criteria of classification and evaluation. The new line of Marxist literary theory aimed therefore to produce what Medvedev called an ‘intrinsic’ critique of formalism, one that accepted the formal specificity of the literary as a starting point for thinking the logic of form’s historical genesis and determination.

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Such a critique could proceed intrinsically inasmuch as the whole deviationist orientation of Russian Formalism, and the broader concern with innovation and tradition which runs through Eliot, Leavis, the New Critics and modernist literary practices generally, relies on a diachronic model of norms and departures. Already in Shklovsky’s ‘Art as Device’ it is clear that the formal analysis must always be historically situated. A device such as the ‘roughening of language’ through disordered rhythm will, says Shklovsky, cease to be effective as a technique of deautomatization the moment such disordering has itself ‘become a convention’ (Shklovsky, 1988: p. 30). Even at this ‘purely formal’ level of rhythmic regularity and irregularity, literariness is understood to be historically embedded and determined. Needless to say, a Marxist critique could not stop here, with what might remain a perfectly autonomous intertextual history of technical innovations giving way to imitation, becoming stale conventions, and being succeeded or reanimated by further innovations.9 The central problem of literary study for Marxism was that of the dialectics between form and content, a problem hedged in on one side by naïve or ‘vulgar’ reflectionism (art as mirror and map of historical reality) and on the other by ‘bourgeois’ aestheticism and idealism (art as instance and intimation of a separate, higher reality). Trotsky was already seeking to thread this dialectical needle in his Literature and Revolution (Trotsky, 1957: p. 137), but it would take nearly half a century of refinements to establish not just that literature is embedded in historical process as both cause and effect, but also that what we call historical content, the material of history, has itself always already achieved significant form even before it finds expression in literature. Just as there is a historicity to form, so is there a formal structure to history; one must approach reality through its formal mediations and not hope to grasp it as an unmediated ‘content’. Moreover, as Lucien Goldmann and Pierre Macherey would argue, literary criticism (Marxist or otherwise) is itself a formal mediation and

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thus requires more than mere theoretical refinements. A certain critical reflexivity has to be built into it on the level of practice. But while this line of thinking was intellectually powerful, it was institutionally very weak, and even by the late 1970s was only just beginning to suggest its implications for literary study at the institutional level. That is partly because, having developed mostly outside the disciplinary apparatus of literature, Marxist literary theory lacked any particular pedagogical strategy. Even in its more didactic forms, as in the later work of Lukács, it was not a self-sustaining ‘educational instrument’ precisely tailored for the training and accreditation of new teacher-critics. This institutional weakness was compounded by the fact that, prior to the 1970s, very little of the important Marxist work was translated into English, even as, with the passage into a second,American stage of the Anglophone hegemon, English became the dominant language not just of literary study but of the global university system – a system which was itself, of course, both an effect and an index of the overwhelming predominance of capitalist relations. Even in the nations of the Soviet bloc, the institutional space afforded genuinely dialectical theories of literary production was sharply limited by Stalinism, which suppressed and purged much of the best work of the late 1920s and 1930s. As a consequence of these several institutional handicaps, the American literary critic Fredric Jameson could assume, in his landmark overview of 1971, Marxism and Form, that his readers regarded Marxist criticism as no more than ‘an intellectual and historical curiosity’ (Jameson, 1971: p. ix). Similarly, Eagleton could begin his own first book on Marxist aesthetics, Criticism and Ideology (1975), with the observation that, as a Marxist literary critic from England, he felt ‘acutely bereft of a tradition’ (Eagleton, 1975: p. 7). This long obscured and blunted tradition did, however, have the advantage of entering the horizon of mainstream literary study from at least two directions at once. The turn to theory was, in the case of Marxist theory, bolstered by the unsettling arrival

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of cultural studies, which, though rooted in Marxist traditions of cultural critique, brought with it a much clearer range of institutional consequences, and indeed of institutional enticements, than did any school of abstract theory.

THE CULTURAL TURN The first and most obvious of these enticements was simply that of expanding the range of possible objects of scholarly study to include forms of art more likely to satisfy the demands for curricular ‘relevance’ that had been articulated in the 1960s, and more closely associated with the new, younger and somewhat less homogeneous Literature faculties that had emerged during the period of postwar higher-educational expansion. While the root texts of cultural studies had been fiercely critical of popular music such as Jazz and Rock, of movies and television, and indeed of all products of the American-dominated ‘entertainment industry’, the literature faculties of the 1970s included scholars of a generation that not only possessed more intimate knowledge of these forms and their histories but also had embraced them in the 1960s as potentially powerful forms of protest and liberation. As this generation began to engage with the rather fragmented tradition of cultural studies, therefore, it responded less to the Marxist critique of cultural commodification that had impelled the wartime writings of Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer than to the Marxist critique of the bourgeois conception of ‘culture’ that had impelled the work of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart in their revisionist studies of British workingclass life in the late 1950s. To be sure, these latter works shared the former’s fear and loathing of (American) popular culture, but this was not at all the same thing as endorsing literary study’s traditional elevation of literature (or ‘culture’ in Arnold’s and Leavis’s sense) above the welter of everyday practices and amusements. In place of the elitist or evaluative notion of

culture, Williams and Hoggart had deployed a more democratic and strictly analytic concept that takes in the whole range or system of signifying practices through which a social class or group reflects and makes sense of its world. This had always been the normal way of thinking in the social sciences – in anthropology, for example – and when asserted from that quarter it had scarcely discomposed the champions of literature. But cultural studies emerged from a far more ambiguous institutional space, a new conjunctural space between or across the social sciences on the one hand and literary study on the other. Hoggart and Williams were both literary scholars in the left-Leavis tradition, teaching English when they published their breakthrough books – Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Williams’s Culture and Society (1958). This gave their interventions more purchase on the discipline in two senses: more leverage for reshaping it along anthropological lines, yes, but also more attachment to its established norms. As Stuart Hall has observed, Hoggart and Williams ‘set out – much in the spirit of “practical criticism” – to “read” working-class culture’ as if its ‘patterns and arrangements … were certain kinds of texts’ (Hall, 1996: p. 32). As the project they initiated began widely to impact literary study from the late 1970s onwards, it was as much or more a matter of literary study imposing its disciplinary agenda, its poetics, on cultural terrain previously reserved for social scientists than of a sociological optic supplanting a literary one. Many works of cultural studies produced by literary scholars in the 1970s and 1980s can be described as textualist in Hall’s terms, ‘close readings’ of a subcultural fashion system or a television advertising campaign or a popular recreational practice, generally disclosing a certain complexity or challenging strangeness in this text, its need to be read closely – i.e. its literariness, in the broader sense: and generally supporting the view that rigorous study of these texts is indispensable for understanding a particular community (of fans, consumers, practitioners, etc.) with whom the scholar in some way

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identifies (ethnically, sexually, generationally, geographically), and for advancing that community’s distinct interests, or at least gaining some respect for its ‘structures of feeling’, its ‘whole way of life’, in the face of hostile homogenizing forces. Cultural studies as a whole remains true to its interdisciplinary roots, its scholars scattered among a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences. Institutionally speaking, resistance to disciplinarity has been its defining feature. But within this network of practices, the textualist strain that first emerged from left-Leavisite literary studies represents a major and arguably dominant fraction. Eminently teachable – combining a respectable precision of method with a rationale of bold critique and utopian aspiration, all the while focusing on objects already of some familiarity and of particular interest to university-age students (subcultures of the elderly have received notably little attention) – this shift of what Antony Easthope (1991) called ‘literary into cultural studies’ has effectively replicated, at a time when the reading of poetry and fiction is no longer a common extracurricular activity, the discipline’s original winning strategy in the competition for undergraduate enrolments. What seemed to be a threat to literary study’s position in the academy was thus exploited as an opportunity for expansion, especially as the identity-based projects within the discipline seized the opportunity to analyse and legitimize particular ‘ethnic’ or gender-specific cultural practices, from romance fiction to gangsta rap to Barbiedoll collecting. But the obvious trade-off here, whereby a widening of the territory of literary studies is purchased at the price of attenuating the specificity of the literary object, becomes more profound as the antielitism and respect for popular or ‘ordinary’ cultural forms that had characterized cultural studies since Hoggart and Williams (and greatly assisted it in gaining adherents among literary scholars of the 1960s generation) merge into the theoretical streams of the ‘linguistic turn’ to issue in the more general ‘cultural turn’ of postmodern society.

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This latter transformation, as Jameson has described in a well-known passage, represents an opening up or widening but also a kind of shutting down of culture as an object of study: The very sphere of culture itself has expanded, becoming coterminous with market society in such a way that the cultural is no longer limited to its earlier, traditional or experimental forms, but is consumed throughout daily life itself, in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often televisual forms of leisure, in production for the market and in consumption of those market products. . . . The closed space of the aesthetic is thereby also opened up to its henceforth fully culturalized context. . . . Indeed, in a strict philosophical sense, the end of the modern must also spell the end of the aesthetic itself, or of aesthetics in general: for where the latter suffuses everything, where the sphere of culture expands to the point where everything becomes one way or another acculturated, the traditional distinctiveness or ‘specificity’ of the aesthetic (and even of culture as such) is necessarily blurred or lost altogether. (Jameson, 1998: p. 111)

The whole project of articulating culture with society is threatened by this postmodern extension of the cultural into every nook and cranny of lived experience. There is no longer any question of positioning culture, let alone literature narrowly defined, in relation to something else; one must conduct an interminable analysis of a cultural space coextensive with reality itself. This radical opening of the space of the object in literary study might seem to work against the more or less simultaneous effort, following from the belated encounter with Marxism, to reorient the discipline towards history. But the strong emergence of history as a new god-term among literary scholars in the 1980s and 1990s can be viewed as a further permutation of the cultural turn (just as the cultural turn is itself an elaboration of the linguistic turn). The ‘New’ historicism was so branded because it was precisely not a matter of the mere revival or return of the historical modes of scholarship, either bourgeois or Marxist, that had been held in so decidedly subordinate a position through the period of New Critical hegemony and the first decade or so of high theory. The New Historicism

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was largely built on the concepts and methods of French post-structuralist Michel Foucault, in whose writings literature enjoyed no particular privilege among the various kinds of cultural work or ‘discursive practices’, except in the specifically historical sense that certain of these practices were recognized and revered as ‘literary’ by certain people at certain times. The whole system of such practices at any given historical moment – from routine titles and salutations to juridical codes to notations in medical treatises – constituted a ‘discursive regime’, and this regime was responsible among other things for the production of literature as a distinct category. The proper object of study, therefore, for a literary critic as for a historian, has to be the entire field of knowledge and power. In fact, from this New Historicist vantage, there is nothing that is not discourse, nothing that may be bracketed, or leaned upon, as extra-discursive empirical bedrock. It is not just that the literary text emerges within and takes its meanings and value from a socio-historical context, as in the Marxist tradition of cultural studies, but that what we call society or history is, along with literature (or art, sex, justice, or man himself), a discursive construct, a problematic text that needs to be (closely) read. Just as from the postmodernist vantage described by Jameson, everything is culture, so from the Foucauldian vantage, everything is discourse. The crucial difference between these two moments of the cultural turn is that for Foucault, discourse, the regime of knowledge, is indissociable from power. This New Historicist collapse of the cultural into the political represents a more fundamental departure from Marxism than does contemporary cultural studies (with its collapsing of the cultural into the everyday), and as such it raises the stakes of what we have described as a trade-off for literary studies. On the one hand, just as the opening towards more varied and popular cultural forms and practices expanded the field of study and helped the discipline reclaim its relevance and its communitarian rationale in the face of a less politically docile, less culturally, sexually and racially

homogeneous, and ever less reading-inclined post-1960s student population, the opening towards entire systems of knowledge/power not only represented a further expansion of textual terrain requiring the skills of attentive reading and textual analysis (now ‘discourse analysis’), but helped the discipline to reinforce the long-asserted connection between its scholarly practices and truly critical thinking, i.e. the capacity to think through and beyond the particular knowledge regime of the academy as a whole and of the wider society (the orientalist regime, for example). Having jettisoned not just the narrow or elitist cultural canon but the very notion of a cultural elite in Leavis’s sense, the literary professoriate could nonetheless still claim to be a kind of vanguard, conducting a struggle against an ever more thoroughgoing modern system of instrumentalist control by means of informed critical reading of discursive practices. But here again, the opening can be seen as a kind of foreclosure. To quote Jameson once more, ‘The identification of knowledge with power, of the epistemological with the politics of domination, tends to dissolve the political itself as a separate instance or possibility of praxis, and by making all forms of knowledge and measurement over into forms of discipline, control, and domination, in effect evacuates the more narrowly political altogether’ (Jameson, 1998: p. 107). Seen in these terms, the reconnection of literary study with historicism has involved a notion of the political that, being coterminous with the broadest possible conception of culture, is practically undeployable. Notwithstanding the reactionary idiocies of the culture wars – from which vantage only scholars on the left, the so-called ‘tenured radicals’ (Kimball, 1990) are ‘political’ – literary study has in fact become ‘more political’ since the 1970s, more generally concerned to address the logic of culture’s relationship to power and domination, and the discipline’s own place within that relationship, and more explicitly desirous of effecting social change through scholarship and teaching. Yet, as culture, politics and the discipline itself have all become more resistant to specification, the

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political rationale for literary study – the claim that more students, more faculty, more training in this particular disciplinary regime will help to produce a better society, one in which the forms of knowledge/operations of power are somehow more benign or palatable – has all but lost its force. This faltering of its claim to be a discipline of special integrity and resistance is in turn aggravating a problem with regard to the attraction and motivation of undergraduate students, for whom the object of analysis now exceeds the scope of their extracurricular knowledge and interests to the point of alienation. Literary study thus finds itself more ambitiously constituted than ever, with more technical skills to master, more textual material to analyse, and a broader agenda of political concerns and aspirations. Yet it is less able than ever convincingly to justify its place in the academy either on the basis of the urgency of its scholarship or on that of the popular appeal of its teaching.

DIVERSITY AND STRATIFICATION If all this means that literary study has reached a point of ‘crisis’, it is just one such point among many for a discipline that has always had to labour against scepticism regarding its place in the modern university. Its history has been a ceaseless struggle to show that it possesses sufficient disciplinary rigour and specificity on the one hand and sufficient social utility on the other, and to coordinate the two claims convincingly enough to sustain high enrolments and continued investment of resources in the context of an academic apparatus that is forever ratcheting up the demands for testable, repeatable, verifiable results, for increased productivity and measurable valueadded. In this situation, it is difficult to share the excitement of those who locate the discipline’s problems in its ostensible indifference to literariness and hostility to reading, and who propose as its salvation a grand return to the formal analysis of literature narrowly defined. Such challenges and proposals certainly misapprehend the

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problem, treating the supposed collapse and hoped-for recovery of the literary habitus as phenomena independent of the academic field and its institutional agents (Bourdieu, 1984). And the solutions or remediations they offer would seem to have little applicability outside the most protected and privileged institutional locations. In those spaces of special privilege, where private endowments supplement high tuitions, it may be possible to garner support for both the narrow, essentially departmental base of literary study and for the new interdisciplinary programmes and centres with which many literary scholars are now more closely affiliated. In those latter programmes, literary study is very far from having withered or faded away. It has imposed its practices, its politics and its personnel with startling effectiveness. A look at the mastheads of humanities centres, centres for cultural study and cultural history, Africana studies centres, centres for South Asian or Asian American or Latino or generalized ethnic studies or for women’s studies or gay and lesbian studies, for new media studies or transnational or global studies, turns up a disproportionate number of literature professors, as does a survey of the contents pages of interdisciplinary journals in which the work produced in such centres is published. And as I have tried to indicate, the work of these literary scholars, taken as a whole, remains, for all the shifts and adjustments of the past quarter-century, very discernibly literary – ‘all too literary’ if viewed from the normative vantage of history, or sociology, or economics, or geography, or philosophy, or any of the other disciplines that find themselves both collaborating and competing with Literature within these proliferating nodes of interdisciplinarity. Literature, in other words, has managed to maintain its share of resources and to guard its departmental homes (traditionally the most secure base of power within a university) precisely by extending and imposing itself in the growing interdisciplinary quarters of the academy. Its interdisciplinary diffusion during the decades of the cultural turn has been tactically as well as intellectually

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motivated – or rather, to avoid implying some kind of collective craftiness and cynicism, its intellectual and institutional itineraries have been mutually constitutive. Any effort to draw back from that double itinerary towards a sharply narrowed conception of the literary object – to reverse, in effect, the cultural turn – would have to involve downsizing, either of the literature faculty or of the set of tasks the literature faculty performs. The latter would be, for most universities, a prohibitively high-priced option. Already there is some indication that the wealthiest institutions are the ones where the literary is being given its firmest and narrowest respecification (right alongside the expanding interdisciplinary centres and programmes where, at these institutions, there are ample resources for literary studies also to pursue its other paths). In this respect, the diversity of projects that now falls under the rubric of literary studies, from postcolonial analyses of corporate arts sponsorship to readings of queer adoption documentaries to critical biographies of Daniel Defoe to manifestoes of radical pedagogy – is also a stratification, whereby certain projects are suitable and sustainable at the elite level but fail the cost-analysis test at institutions of lesser symbolic and financial endowment. It is tempting to say that the forces of diffusion – not only the intellectual and economic forces driving the humanities and social sciences towards interdisciplinarity, but the broader forces that are spreading literary study to new sites of higher education (witness the massive expansion of literature departments in China) – will be more decisive for the future of the field than the movements that take hold in its most central and privileged locations. But we must bear in mind as well the forces of concentration, which, in higher education as elsewhere, are piling new advantages and privileges upon the already most advantaged and privileged, rapidly widening the gap between the upper and lower strata. It may be that over the coming decades literary study will, by and large, dissolve into the emergent forms of postdisciplinary knowledge production while at

the same time reconstituting itself in a handful of increasingly elevated locations around a renewed investment in the literary object as such.

NOTES 1 For some of the most thoughtful attempts to foreground this collapse of the properly literary-critical habitus and to return disciplinary attention to core questions of literariness and literary form, see Attridge, 2004; Levine, 1994; and Wolfson, 1998, 2000. 2 If the past two decades have witnessed a ‘crisis of form’ in literary study, which is to say a rising anxiety regarding the loss of disciplinary specificity, one effect of this has been a reexamination of the discipline’s institutional history, a history in which the problem of specification and the sense of crisis appear always to have been intertwined. Among the most important of these historical accounts are those of Baldick (1983), Eagleton (1983), Graff (1987), Guillory (1993), Hunter (1988) and Readings (1997). 3 The 1965 Lemon and Reiss translation, which I have otherwise followed here, is titled ‘Art as Technique’. 4 The most distinguished figures within the major schools of literary study since the 1970s, such as Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher among New Historicists, D.A. Miller and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in queer studies, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha in postcolonial studies (to name just a few), are all committed and exemplary close readers, insistent that the discipline’s value and future viability depend on this dimension of its practice. Even at the apex of the New Historicism, in Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt situated his own departures from ‘close-grained formalism’ at the ‘margins’ of the discipline, and observed that ‘close reading of the textual traces and … sustained, scrupulous attention to formal and linguistic design will remain at the center of literary teaching and study’ (Greenblatt, 1988: pp. 3–4). More recently, in Death of a Discipline, Spivak argued that the postcolonial future of comparative literary study lies in its willingness to ‘extend the privilege of close reading to the texts of the global south’ rather than following the lead of Area Studies and Cultural Studies, which she calls ‘monolingual, presentist, narcissistic [disciplines], not practiced enough in close reading even to understand that the mother tongue is actively divided’ (2003: pp. 50, 20). Even more recently, a roundtable discussion among the editors of PMLA revealed general agreement across the lines of theoretical school and historical period that ‘close reading is fundamental to everything we do’ (Hirsch, 2006: p. 262). 5 On the contrary, in eschewing the demand to read texts, Moretti embraces the formalist categories

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of the device and the genre: ‘Devices, and genres. Two formal units. A very small formal unit and a very large one. These are the forces behind … literary history. Not texts. Texts are real objects but not objects of knowledge. If we want to explain the real laws of literary history we must move to a formal plane that lies beyond them: below or above: the device, or the genre’ (Moretti, 2000b: p. 217). 6 The Russian Formalists took particular interest in the poetic dimension of prose, and made a point of demonstrating that the latter could be just as ‘artistic’ as the former. See, for example, Jakobson’s wellknown essay on the prose of Pasternak (Jakobson, 1987). 7 It is also true that, as John Guillory has argued (1993: p. 38), the alternative or counter-canons that have emerged under the aegis of identitybased modes of literary study have involved certain confusions between the project of canon-formation and that of cultural democratization. 8 The interventions of these years did, however, have the effect of instituting a new canon of theory itself (Guillory, 1993: p. 176) – and thereby of provoking objections from cultural conservatives who complained that students were now encouraged to read Derrida instead of Dryden. 9 As Tony Bennett has pointed out in Formalism and Marxism, even the Russian Formalists themselves recognized by the 1920s that the historicity of defamiliarization went beyond intertextuality to involve the history of ordinary language practices and hence the much broader social context (Bennett, 1979: pp. 79–80).

REFERENCES Althusser, L. (1971) ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses: notes towards an investigation’, Tr. B. Brewster. Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays. London: New Left Books, pp. 127–186. (Originally published in 1969.) Attridge, D. (2004) The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge. Bakhtin, M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Tr. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Originally published in 1929). Baldick, C. (1983) The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848–1932. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benjamin, W. (1998) The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Tr. John Osborne. London: Verso. (Originally published in 1928.) Bennett, T. (1979) Formalism and Marxism. London: Methuen. Booth, W.C. (1961) The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Bourdieu, P. (1988) Homo Academicus. Tr. Peter Collier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Originally published in 1984.) Crane, R.S. (1998) ‘Toward a more adequate criticism of poetic structure’, in D.H. Richter (ed.), The Critical Tradition. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, pp. 776–782. Crawford, R. (ed.) (1998) The Scottish Invention of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Man, P. (1983) ‘The Dead-end of formalist criticism’, Tr. W. Godzich. In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 229–245. (Originally published in 1956.) de Man, P. (1986) ‘The resistance to theory’, in The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 3–20. Eagleton, T. (1975) Criticism and Ideology. London: Verso. Eagleton, T. (1983) Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Easthope, A. (1991) Literary Into Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Eliot, T.S. (1920) The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen. Fish, S. (1980) Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gikandi, S. (1996) Maps of Englishness. New York: Columbia University Press. Gikandi, S. (2001) ‘Globalization and the claims of postcoloniality’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 100(3): 627–658. Graff, G. (1987) Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greenblatt, S. (1988) Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press. Guillory, J. (1993) Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hall, S. (1991) ‘Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies’, in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, pp. 277–286. Hall, S. (1996) ‘Cultural studies: two paradigms’, in J. Storey (ed.), What is Cultural Studies? A Reader. London: Arnold, pp. 31–48. Hartman, G. (1970) Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958–1970. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hirsch, M. (2006) ‘Editor’s Column: What Can a Journal Essay Do?’, PMLA, 121(3): 617–626.

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Hoggart, R. (1957) The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life. London: Chatto and Windus. Hunter, I. (1988) Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education. London: Macmillan. Iser, W. (1974) The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Iser, W. (1978) The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jakobson, R. (1987) ‘Marginal notes on the prose of the poet Pasternak’, in K. Pomorska and S. Rudy (eds), Language in Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 301–317. (Originally published in 1935.) Jameson, F. (1971) Marxism and Form: TwentiethCentury Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jameson, F. (1998) ‘Transformations of the image’, in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998. London: Verso. Kimball, R. (1990) Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. New York: Harper and Row. Leavis, F.R. (1930) Mass Civilization and Minority Culture. Minority Pamphlet 1. Cambridge: The Minority Press. Leavis, F.R. (1948) The Great Tradition. London: Chatto and Windus. Levine, G. (1994) ‘Reclaiming the aesthetic’, in G. Levine (ed.), Aesthetics and Ideology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Loesberg, J. (2005) A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference and Postmodernism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lukács, G. (1962) The Theory of the Novel. A HistoricoPhilosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Tr. A. Bostock. London: Merlin Press. (Originally published in 1916.) Lukács, G. (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Tr. R. Livingstone. London: Merlin Press. (Originally published in 1923.) Marx, K. (1972) ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy ’, in R.C. Tucker (ed.), The MarxEngels Reader. New York: Norton, pp. 3–6. (Originally published in 1859.) Medvedev, P.N. (1978) The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. Tr. A.J. Wehrle. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press. (Originally published in 1928.) Moretti, F. (2000a) ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, 1: 54–68. Moretti, F. (2000b) ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, Modern Language Quarterly, 61(1): 207–227. Readings, B. (1997) The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Richards, I.A. (1929) Practical Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Richards, I.A. (1948) Principles of Literary Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Shklovsky, V. (1965) ‘Sterne’s Tristram Shandy’, in L.T. Lemon and M.J. Reiss (eds and Tr.), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 27–44. (Originally published in 1921.) Shklovsky, V. (1988) ‘Art as technique’, Tr. L.T. Lemon and M.J. Reiss. In David Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. London: Longman’s, pp. 15–30. (Originally published in 1917.) Spingarn, J.E. (1917) Creative Criticism: Essays on the Unity of Genius and Taste. New York: Henry Holt. Spivak, G.C. (2003) Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. Storey, J. (ed.) (1996) What is Cultural Studies? A Reader. London: Arnold. Trotsky, L. (1957) Literature and Revolution. Tr. Rose Strunsky. New York: Russell and Russell. (Originally published in 1924.) Viswanathan, G. (1989) Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press. Volosinov, V.N. (1986) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Tr. L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Originally published in 1929.) Wellek, R. and Warren, R.P. (1956) Theory of Literature, 3rd edn. New York: Harcourt, Brace. (Originally published in 1942.) Williams, R. (1958) Culture and Society: 1780–1950. New York: Columbia University Press. Wolfson, S.J. (1998) ‘what good is formalist criticism? Or, “forms” and “stoems” and the critical register of romantic poetry’, Studies in Romanticism, 37(1): pp. 77–94. Wolfson, S.J. (ed.) (2000) Special Issue: ‘Reading for Form’, Modern Language Quarterly, 61(1).

7 Culture and Music1 Tia DeNora

The interdisciplinary basis of socio-musical studies has grown considerably in recent years. Now concerned with much more than music’s social shaping, perspectives from music sociology, the social psychology of music, cultural musicology, ethnomusicology, geography, anthropology, music education and music therapy have addressed the theme of music’s social and psychological powers and effects. This work has helped to illuminate the question of action, its structures and cultural bases, and has highlighted in the process how the, as it were, ‘inside’ of action and experience are formulated. In so doing, socio-musical studies have contributed in great part to the ‘strong’ programme within cultural sociology and its concern with the dynamic, organizing powers of cultural forms – their so-called ‘causal’ properties (Alexander and Smith, 2005; DiMaggio, 1997; Swidler, 2001). In short, music is ‘good to think with’ and thinking with music advances understanding of culture’s often-overlooked and often-tacit organizing features. In this chapter, I survey some of the themes, topics, theories and perspectives devoted to the social study of music of all

styles and genres. I begin with a critique of the ‘high/popular’ distinction, which I do through a focus upon the social origins and organizational basis of that distinction in modern Western societies. With a nod to Bourdieu’s critique of ‘pure’ judgement, I describe how this classification was both arbitrary and forged as music ideology during the nineteenth century. I then turn to sociomusical studies’ key figure in the twentieth century, Theodor Adorno, and consider the strengths and weaknesses of his perspective, in particular his concern with music’s cognitive function, his notion that music and consciousness were dialectically linked, and his conception of music history, which, I suggest, was insufficiently grounded such that his work accepts the discourse of musical greatness as a resource instead of exploring it as a topic. From Adorno, I turn to key exponents in the ‘new’ or ‘cultural’ musicology, and their characteristic focus, especially during the 1990s, on the interpretation of musical texts as social representations. While studies in this vein have been of considerable heuristic value, calling attention to music as a medium of and for discursive strategy, I suggest that they benefit from being grounded in the specific details

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of musical and social practice, including organizational, material and institutional practice in specific social spaces and occasions. This emphasis on music’s location leads in turn to a focus on the everyday use and experience of music and music’s role as a resource for the constitution of emotion, embodiment, knowledge formation, and collective and organizationally sponsored activity.

THE HISTORY OF MUSICAL HIERARCHY In a 1796 Who’s Who of Viennese musical life, the publisher Johann Schönfeld offered a list of key music patrons of the day. One of them, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, was described as follows: Looked upon as a patriarch of music … When he attends a concert our semi-connoisseurs never take their eyes off him, seeking to read in his features, not always intelligible to every one what ought to be their opinion of the music. (Thayer and Forbes, 1967, Vol. I: p. 157)

Baron van Swieten was the son of Empress Maria Theresa’s personal physician, and a prominent diplomat and civil servant. According to one contemporary observer of concert life, the Baron: exerted all his influence in the cause of music, even for so subordinate an end as to enforce silence and attention during musical performances. Whenever a whispered conversation arose among the audience, his excellence would rise from his seat in the first row, draw himself up to his full majestic height, measure the offenders with a long, serious look and then very slowly resume his seat. The proceeding never failed of its effect. (Jahn, 1882, Vol. 2: p. 385)

Swieten was, in DiMaggio’s terms (1982), a cultural entrepreneur, an actor who sought deliberately to manipulate the codes through which music was apprehended and to institute novel practices of musical production, distribution and consumption. Circa 1796, in Vienna and across Europe, the practices and values associated with music’s emergence as a profession later in the century – rapt listening (Johnson, 1995; Weber, 1997), a

hierarchy of musical taste (Bourdieu, 1984; Weber, 1984, 1992) and great works (Goehr, 1992) – were, until these years when they first emerged as cultural innovations, antithetical to musical life. By contrast, and especially before around 1810, the order of the day was musical contemporaneity, as William Weber has described (Weber, 1984) and a programming practice of musical miscellany (Weber, 2001), by no means fully extinguished by 1900. Following this practice, so-called ‘light’ works (folk songs, popular dance tunes, musical curiosities) were jumbled together with more ‘serious’ fare, and excerpts from symphonies paired with arias and occasional pieces – there was no notion that the ‘whole’ work had to be performed in total. Thus, roughly around the time that the newer culture of ‘serious’ music and ‘great’ composers was becoming established, initially in Vienna, later across Europe and in North America during the early nineteenth century, a miscellaneous concert programme (in extreme form) might look like this: 12 March 1808, Herr Mayer: • ‘A grand artistic concert in which he will, without using an instrument, only his mouth, imitate quite naturally the tones of waldhorn, the serpent, the trumpet, with the accompaniment of the entire orchestra’ • Aria, with variations from La Molinara • Horn solo from Nina • Müllet, waltzes • Martin, overture to Una cosa rara • Fränzel, ‘Bird Song Symphony’ (imitation of various bird calls without instruments) (Source: Morrow, 1989: p. 348)

While music was certainly a medium of distinction, tastes, styles and genres did not, in themselves, presume exclusive taste publics. There was, by contrast, an aesthetic of inclusion; if anything, aristocrats would have welcomed their underlings sharing their tastes since, without aristocratic riches, the bourgeois would never have been able to match the grandeur of spending that promoted musical culture and supported music makers. This aesthetic of inclusion was one that held

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on in other ‘art’ forms, at least in America, well into the nineteenth century. In his study of Shakespeare reception, for example, Lawrence Levine has described how, in nineteenth-century America, Shakespeare’s plays were enjoyed by and familiar to people from a wide range of educational backgrounds and socio-economic spheres. Part of this popularity was derived from the ease with which Shakespeare’s works were appropriated and modified according to performance occasion, as when a noted African-American actor recited Hamlet’s soliloquy ending with the following: or tak’ up arms against a sea of trouble and by opossum end ’em.

The word opossum, Levine observes by following a contemporary account, provided a trigger for audience participation, ‘prompting the actor to come forward and sing the popular dialect song Opossum up a Gum Tree’ (Levine, 1988: p. 14). This is not to say that music was not, during the eighteenth century, a means of distinction. It was. But the form of capital that mattered most, up until the 1790s, was the Hauskapellen, or domestic music ensemble, and in this game the size of those ensembles was important. For example, Count von Spork, a minor nobleman, in 1724 wrote to his friend Count Johann Wilhelm von Thurheim to describe how, and why, he, von Spork and a mere count, was able to employ an entire opera company while his neighbour, a prince, employed only a lutenist: I must confess, indeed that I have a special fondness for delightful and agreeable music, but this is not the principal reason why I was induced to engage the [opera] company. Rather, after I learned that Princess Schwarzenberg was to take a cure only a mile from here on her husband’s estate of Wildschutz … I hoped that the illustrious princess would remain in the vicinity for the entire summer. It was decided that the opera singers were to arrive here in the middle of June at the latest in order to entertain her with opera as well as comedies. (Moore, 1987, cited in DeNora, 1995: pp. 41–42)

At the beginning of the eighteenth century and across Europe, secular musical life took one of two forms: folk music, embedded

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in the daily activities of working people (Raynor, 1972), and concert music, privately sponsored and privately performed, typically as an adjunct to other social functions. By the end of the eighteenth century, concert life was undergoing deep-seated organizational change, as aristocrats began to disband their Hauskapellen (house ensembles) and to turn instead to a variety of public and quasi-public forms of musical sponsorship. The occupational implications of this change meant that musicians increasingly had to build careers in a nascent freelance economy (DeNora, 1995; Moore, 1987; Morrow, 1989), and typically this meant compiling an income from a mixed portfolio of teaching and touring, private commissions and concertizing in the salons, and from benefit concerts. These organizational changes were, moreover, conducive to a star system, that is, they tended to focus attention on a select few musicians, who became fashionable (and relatively affluent) at the expense of the majority, who were often forced into an itinerant way of life. As an aside, it is worth noting that this shift in the social structure of musical work and opportunities for musical work overlapped with and participated in more general trends during the nineteenth century, for example, the professionalization of work and the rise of urban culture as culture consumed by relative strangers. The new system meant that reputation took on heightened salience – to live, and to have enough work, a musician had to become known. As Moore has observed, this shift towards a ‘star system’ worked well for some musicians, some of the time (Moore, 1987, 1989). However, it was antithetical to most musicians, most of the time, and even for the ‘stars’, such as Mozart, it was precarious. Mozart’s economic and reputational vicissitudes have been welldocumented in this respect, as someone who straddled two systems of musical patronage to his financial disadvantage (Elias, 1993; DeNora, 2006a). With Beethoven, however, the ideology of ‘serious’ music came into its own. First, Beethoven’s patrons, perhaps having learned from Mozart’s financial decline, illness and

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early death, spoke early on in the 1790s of how Mozart’s Genius was ‘mourning and weeping the death of her pupil’ and how that Genius wished ‘once more to form a union with another …’ (DeNora, 1995: p. 84). It was, to the tightly knit network of aristocratic music supporters who were to become Beethoven’s patrons, clear from the start that Beethoven was to take on the mantle of, as Count Waldstein put it, ‘Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands’ (ibid.). In some ways, Beethoven was just plain lucky. His patrons wanted a new Mozart, they were concerned with the then new ideas of musical greatness, as promulgated by Baron van Swieten (described above), and they wanted to concentrate their attentions and their financial support on one great man. That Beethoven possessed the acumen and technical ability to ride this wave only helps to illustrate the importance, even circa the 1790s, of entrepreneurial skills. By 1810, Beethoven was firmly ensconced in the role of Europe’s Greatest Composer, a role that itself was culturally new. His music had been measured against new criteria that he himself helped prototype, criteria that drew upon notions from philosophy where, increasingly, the bizarre had to be distinguished from the sublime; it demonstrated the heroic individual’s revolutionary capacity to transcend the terrible, and it modelled new forms of extraordinary agency in modern life. Beethoven’s keyboard concertos in particular, which dramatized the musician-as-hero in action as a visible object lesson (DeNora, 2004, 2006b), aided Beethoven’s emergence as composer-hero (Burnham, 1995; Leppert, 1999, 2004) and it is not an accident that they were performed mainly by men, probably due to the demands they made upon the pianoperforming body and the ways that those demands contradicted notions of feminine bodily propriety during these years, roughly 1796–1810 (DeNora, 2004, 2006b). In short, the ideas of great music, rapt attention, and canonic works, and, more insidiously, that these things are associated with white, male musicians, primarily Germanspeaking (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms

and, latterly, Schönberg) were forged during the early nineteenth century and fed directly into musical critical discourse, which in turn provided the basis for musicology’s discourses as it emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, expressed by Donald Francis Tovey as ‘musical truths’ or, as Donald Randel once put it, part of the ‘canon in the musicological toolbox’ (1992). While sociological investigations of music took this point as inspiration for the study of taste and status (Bourdieu, 1984; DiMaggio, 1982; Peterson and Simkus, 1992), musicologists and music scholars turned to musical texts and their deconstruction. For both areas, more or less developed as separate projects during the 1990s, the history of this musical-critical formation was vital in distancing sociomusical study from the ethnocentrism so characteristic of its formative years. It is perhaps all the more interesting, therefore, that the chief figure in critical socio-music studies, Theodor W. Adorno, managed somehow to combine a critical treatment of music with a devotion to the canon, and this combination is at the heart of what is both of value and problematic in Adorno’s work.

ADORNO Adorno’s main music sociological concern focused on music’s formal properties, the role of musical works as exemplars of praxis and as materials that could be formative of consciousness. Music’s impact upon the subject, according to Adorno, was linked to music’s appeal to his further understanding of musical processing, namely to music’s ability to elide consciousness and yet still have some effect upon consciousness and/or action. According to Adorno, music could both heighten and suppress human critical, perceptual and expressive faculties and, to the extent that it could constitute these faculties, it could foster social arrangement (Adorno, 1976, 1981, 2002). As a mode of arrangement, a way of fashioning material into ‘parts’ and

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‘wholes’, musical composition was always and inevitably social: music was, in other words, not merely analogous to social organization but, rather, demonstrated modes of handling, ways of ordering (musical) reality. As such, musical action was also a form of political action, in terms of both the political arrangement of tones (some sonic materials will inevitably be sacrificed to the service of compositional form, while others will be represented) and the politics of human relations (music provides exemplars of such things as the interrelation of different voices and their relative access to the musical foreground for development, harmony and/or discord). Adorno’s sociomusical project and his method of ‘immanent critique’ were devoted to revealing just these political tendencies in musical composition, showing, for example, how musical ‘doing’ was analogous to, and an exemplar for, modes of doing things or reacting cognitively to things in extra-musical realms. To expand this discussion slightly, in Adorno’s view music performed two cognitive functions, both of which operated at a level beneath conscious awareness. The first was to portray the ‘true’ state of the subject, to provide that subject with a mirror of her relation to the social whole. When the totality of social relations took on the guise of repressive administration, for example, and so did violence to the subject-citizen, music could document the discrepancy between (socio-political) subject and object, by illuminating the ‘homelessness’ of the subject, its inability to find a form capable of accommodating it. Music’s first cognitive function was thus to remind the subject of what, in other realms, had been lost. Music’s second cognitive function was to exemplify: in and through the abstract procedures of its composition – the arrangement of material – music offered models of how partwhole relationships could be conceived and configured. In so doing it also showed how the subject (being) or material (nature) could stand in relation to the social and cognitive totality. Musical form thus served a didactic function – it could exemplify how material could be organized so as to do minimal

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violence. The handling of musical material – composition – could thus provide models of how one might conceive of and orient to realities beyond musical ones, how one might ‘handle’ arrangement elsewhere – in science or in social institutions for example – so as to preserve, rather than excise, complexity. It was in this sense that musical compositional praxis provided a simulacrum of praxis more generally. Music’s second cognitive function was thus critique by example; music was a structure against which other things could be articulated. It was, in this sense, a cognitive resource. It is possible, from this example, to imagine how musical relations may come to serve as exemplars of social relations, in particular, as ‘ideal[s] of collectivity’(Adorno, 1974: p. 18). One sees here the deeply intriguing aspect of Adorno’s musical work – his concern with composition, with the handling of musical material, as nothing short of moral praxis. This is one of the greatest strengths of Adorno’s position – his concern was not with what music (as a medium or an object) ‘represented’; it was rather with the actual practice of music – its formal arrangement, both as moral praxis and as exemplar, as a model for praxis in other realms.

Music history according to Adorno – how is it made and who does the making? Adorno understood the composer (subject) in dialectical relationship to his/her musical material (object) in a way that, at first glance, appears to engender contradiction. On the one hand, he emphasized music’s inherent logic (the unfolding or developing of musical material over time). On the other, he emphasizes the composer as a subject in relation to the congealed history (conventional musical practices) placed at her disposal. This contradiction needs to be addressed full-on if Adorno’s work is to be developed, eventually, in an empirical context. It is necessary, in other words, to press Adorno on the question of musical

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stylistic change and, equally importantly, on the question of musical greatness and its origins. On the one hand, Adorno often speaks of how the composer is faced with ‘problems’ posed by music, or the ‘questions directed to him by the material in the form of its own immanent problems’, as in the case of Schönberg (Adorno, 2002: p. 399). Here the implication is that the best composers will find ways of responding to music, ways of solving the problems music poses. And in this case, music’s link to society is conceived as isomorphic: each ‘develops’according to their respective internal logics and both these logics are generated by an underlying structural dynamic (congealed history). Here, Adorno can be read as a structuralist, as implying that music ‘mirrors’ or in some way is structurally related to society. The composer’s task here is conceived as essentially passive; she is configured as a conduit, one who follows the ‘laws’ of development implicit in music’s material. ‘Good’ composers are, within this purview, those who are best able to develop the implications of musical material’s potential. There is more than a little metaphysics here of music’s trajectory, a metaphysics that is often present in the tenor of Adorno’s thought. Such a view skews music history towards musicological determinism and, as such, sits uneasily with more recent work in music sociology as I describe below. On the other hand, Adorno posits a second understanding of the music-society nexus. In this second understanding the composer is a subject within her world, a maker of that world through her compositional praxis and, thus, a maker of music history – a history that does not simply evolve but is the result of agency. (‘The idea that the tonal system is exclusively of natural origin is an illusion rooted in history’ [Adorno, 1973: p. 11].) As Adorno puts it, ‘material’ is itself a crystallization of the creative impulse, an element socially predetermined through the consciousness of man’ (Adorno, 1973: p. 33). Here, Adorno reinserts agency to the compositional equation and thus can be seen to correct the structuralist

tendencies of his work in ways that presage structuration theory, namely, that position creativity within an enabling and constraining matrix of prior creative acts and materials. And it is also here that we can begin to see just how much weight Adorno expected the ‘good’ composer to carry: she needed not only to grapple with material but also to find a way both of addressing history (i.e. of being thoroughly encultured) while simultaneously working through that history to forge historical materials to the here and now of sociomusical (political, psychological) conditions. It was in this sense that the composer was – to use the old-fashioned term – a ‘maker’. This focus on the dual nature of composition – the human-made quality of musical discourse and the ways in which musical material was pre-formed by history – points up Adorno’s dialectical materialism. But – and not intended by Adorno (perhaps a good example of how important reflexivity is for us … in today’s globalized/diasporic world even more so) – it also furthers certain of Adorno’s assumptions that were characteristic of the culture in which he was steeped – the belief in musical-aesthetic hierarchy (‘good’ or ‘true’ music and, by implication, its opposite), an adherence to a romantic and post-romantic conception of the artist and artistic autonomy, the idea of the artist’s marginal position in relation to public life. These were the nineteenth-century emblems of bourgeois humanism that Adorno revered. They led on to the image of the composer as hero, made patently clear in his discussions of Beethoven. Various scholars have suggested that Adorno’s mostly exclusive concern with the analysis of musical texts or structures (works) is a further legacy of his debt to traditional music scholarship, and to his early training, for example, as a student of Alban Berg (DeNora, 2003; Martin, 1995; Middleton, 1990; Witkin, 1998). This focus has both contributed enormously and somewhat hindered socio-musical studies, and in ways that, perhaps appropriately dialectically, make it almost impossible to extract the strengths from the weaknesses.

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The strengths of Adorno’s work are obvious. While the philosophy of music, from Plato and Aristotle through to Rousseau, Saint Simon and Spencer, had been concerned with music’s social powers, twentieth-century sociology of music tended to set this focus aside in favour of formalist projects, ones that were concerned with the structural parallels or homologies between musical and social structures, conceived at the macro level. Sorokin’s bold claims about ideational and sensate art forms (eras of expression) take this mode of structuralism to the extreme (1937). But even Max Weber’s focus, in The Rational and Social Foundations of Music (1958), which was – at least heuristically – more firmly grounded in historical data, was ultimately, and in part due to its music theoretical mode of analysis, ensconced within a ‘music and society’ paradigm and pursued at an abstract level through the dynamic between musical developments and, in this case, historical epochs of thought. Weber’s project dealt with the question of why, viewed in global context, Western music was so peculiarly organized polyphonically and how the emergence of diatonic harmony was linked to (indeed, an artefact of) the emergence of instrumental rationality. Adorno’s project, by contrast, greatly exceeded these structuralist concerns, due in great part to Adorno’s critical concerns. It focused as much upon music’s social powers as it did on homologies between types of societies and musical structures. In this respect, Adorno’s vision for sociomusical analysis was, in cultural-sociological terms, ‘strong’ (Alexander and Smith, 2005); culture was no mere reflection of the social for Adorno, whose epistemological stance embraced the pre-modern concern with the conjunction of art and science, culture, structure and nature, one in which we are conceived as faithful beings who ‘make’ our social worlds. This said, Adorno adhered, throughout his long career, to the focus upon musical texts, and this inevitably elided much of what otherwise served as topics for socio-musical analysis – the reception and use of music (which itself helps to deconstruct many of

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Adorno’s assumptions about musical value and how music works), the production of music and music’s specific connections to extra-musical matters. That said, the form of analysis most closely associated with Adorno is also one that has been adopted by many of the so-called ‘new’or ‘cultural’musicologists, from the 1980s onward and these studies have much to offer, at least heuristically, for sociomusic analysis today, in particular because of its emphasis on music as a medium capable of constituting social difference and social hierarchy, and as a means of configuring particular values and ways of life.

CRITICAL MUSICOLOGIES Since the 1970s, Western music’s once ‘eternal’ musical truths have been recast as assertions of identity, ideologies, interests and technologies for social reproduction. And increasingly through the 1990s came a concern for music and the sense of place and an interrogation of our habitual images of the musicological ‘other’ (Born and Hesmondhalgh, 2000). This focus on musicological discourse and its relegation of identity and status has led to a repositioning, in recent years, of ethnomusicology alongside or even subsuming Western music and musicological discourse (which is then converted into a topic in its own right for anthropological investigation [Kingsbury, 1988, 1991]). It has contributed as well to what Alistair Williams terms musicology’s new ‘epistemological uncertainty’ (Williams, 2001: p. 103). In similar vein, ethnomusicologists have questioned the ‘insider’/‘outsider’ distinction embedded in earlier studies of ‘non-Western’ music and have focused instead upon the practical ways in which actors may come to pass as ‘insiders’ (Rice, 1987). Ethnomusicology has more recently embraced the study of globalization, in particular how local music-making practices interact with distal musical conventions (Regev and Seroussi, 2004). It has also studied the ‘indigenous’ practices of local urban,

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Western music makers (Finnegan, 1989). As an analytical lens, ethnomusicology is attractive because it typically aims to connect musical practices to social practices and, moreover, to view these practice ‘sets’ as one in the same. So, for example, it sidesteps evaluation in favour of thick description and ethnographic understanding and as such inevitably employs a grounded approach. Within current socio-musical studies, often termed the new musicology, cultural musicology or critical musicology, music – and by no means only ‘art’ music (Middleton, 1990; Scott, 2003; Walser, 1993) – is interpreted, deconstructed and unmasked through critical readings and, in this respect, Adorno’s influence on the field, and his focus on musical texts in particular, has been considerable. Work in critical music analysis has described musical structures as they come to be mapped on to or associated with other things, represent or construct images of social reality. One of the areas where critical readings of music have been most successful is in the area of gender studies, where music has been shown to provide often tacit claims about gender relations and gender difference/hierarchy. Opera is a case in point, since it provides an arena for inter-textual play, one in which music, drama, characterization, plot and embodiment are drawn together in mutual reference. So much has changed in musical scholarship that the older, dominant enterprise – musicology – is now itself open to various redefinitions and is increasingly receptive to interdisciplinary, trans-disciplinary perspectives. In recent years ‘musicology’ has yielded some interesting developments. For one, music analysts (Allanbrook, 1983; Ford, 1991; Kramer, 2003; McClary, 1992; Wheelock, 1993) have considered the ways in which musical material is differentially allocated to character in opera, and, more generally, how different types of characters conventionally inhabit differentially allocated musical topoi. In Mozart, for example, the masculine was configured by forwardthrusting, pulsating, unimpeded musical

movement, while the feminine was associated with harmonic, melodic and rhythmic hesitation. In Carmen, Michäela (the nice, sweet girl from Don José’s village) sings in ways that are rhythmically steady and melodically straight, whereas all of Carmen’s arias are dance numbers that invoke the body and blur the sense of harmonic progression. This mode of analysis has greatly enhanced conventional media and film studies where soundtracks are analysed in terms of their often subliminal aesthetics and their tacit elaboration of plot (Brown, 1994; Davidson, 2004; Kassabian, 2001; Mundy, 1999; Tagg, 1991). While the analysis of scores and musical texts (as objects) has without doubt transformed the ways in which musicologists think about music and about the social study of music, it also has its limits. There are, bluntly put, many issues that cannot be addressed by the analysis of musical texts alone. To the contrary, socio-musical studies need to be situated in actual contexts of musicking (Small, 1998), which includes an engagement with music’s physical and occupational culture, its ‘worlds’ (Becker, 1982). In the next section, as a case in point, I consider the music of J.S. Bach.

CASE STUDY: THE SOUL AS ‘NAGGING WIFE’; BACH’S FLÜGEL In her famous essay on J.S. Bach, Susan McClary illustrates well the strengths and weaknesses associated with music semiotics. She deals with two of Bach’s best-known works, Cantata Wachet auf (‘Sleepers Awake’) and Brandenburg Concerto Number 5. In the former, she describes the latent gender representation embedded in Bach’s allocation of musical material; for example, in the duets between the Soul and Jesus, Bach casts ‘the individual believer as female, incomplete and longing for satisfaction and fulfilment from the divine male’ (McClary, 1987: p. 53), and recasts the presumably gender-free soul (as McClary observes, ‘male souls are also supposed to long in this manner…’ [ibid.]) as feminine and in ways that can be construed

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in musical terms as hectoring, ‘a nagging, passive-aggressive wife, insecurely whining for repeated assurances of love and not hearing them when they are proefered’ (ibid.). In offering these words, as I have argued elsewhere (DeNora, 2003: pp. 41–43), McClary frames this music; she shows us how to perceive it in a particular way. As such, however, it elides issues about the performance of musical meaning, in and through the ways that we speak about, interpret and hear that music. Consider next McClary’s discussion of Brandenburg 5. The stylistic strategies Bach appropriated in this work, Susan McClary argues, can be read as embodying social values (‘values … held most dear by the middle class: belief in progress, in expansion, in the ability to attain ultimate goals through rational striving, in the ingenuity of the individual strategist operating both within and in defiance of the norm’ [McClary, 1987: p. 22]) that were associated with a thenemerging form of individualism (‘virtuosity, dissonance and extravagant dynamic motion’ [McClary, ibid., p. 23]). Her method consists of an examination of musical convention and its violation and the meanings associated with such breach. In Brandenburg No. 5, during the course of the first movement, the harpsichord comes to occupy an extreme foreground position in the extended cadenza (‘delivered by a frenzied continuo instrument’ [McClary, ibid., p. 32]), the longest cadenza then known, lasting roughly a quarter of the entire movement’s length. McClary considers this disruption of convention, ‘one of the most outlandish displays in music history’(McClary, ibid., p. 26), and suggests that Bach was using music as a medium in which to express nascent individualism, in particular, the musician’s role and its renegotiation. Elsewhere (DeNora, 2005) I have suggested that the particular pathway navigated by a work along its road to first performance inevitably takes in many factors and these cannot be reduced to the history of ideas and music’s role in conveying ideas and/or images. It is only through an appreciation of

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the myriad conditions of a work’s genesis that it is possible to begin to describe how it is actually linked to society. Looking again at the specific features of Bach and the local musical worlds in which he operated further extends our understanding of music-society connections by helping to explain why, in this case, Bach came to position the harpsichord so prominently in the musical limelight (see DeNora, 2005). In this case, we need to consider matters such as that this concerto was associated with the dedication of a new harpsichord in 1719 (the famous Flügel with two keyboards, by Michael Mietke) and Bach’s deep familiarity with the convention of dedicating a new instrument. On such occasions, flamboyant display was de rigueur, so as to display the instrument’s capacities and, as a by-product of that primary display, inevitably also the capabilities of the performer. Simply put, the name of the game was to show off, to put the instrument through its paces. In this context, and bearing in mind Bach’s intimate knowledge of keyboard instrument technology, the predominant display of the harpsichord no longer seems, in McClary’s terms, ‘deviant’ but rather, within the musical culture of Bach’s world, can be read as an occasion-specific practice, a means of celebrating the new instrument. One can imagine how Bach took advantage, in this case, of an emerging rhetorical strategy (the solo concerto), and gave it a new twist (as a keyboard concerto) that was charged with a frisson (that unruly keyboard!) in a way that was wholly appropriate and meaningful as an occasioning device under the local conditions of musical culture at Cöthen (and that also provided an alibi for the musician to hog the limelight, along with his instrument!). Thus, Bach bequeathed a form that, in later centuries, could be read as historically significant (for example, McClary’s reading) as emblematic of bourgeois values. Bach’s concerto became, in other words, a resource for a particular analytical tale. There is a danger, however, in focusing only on texts so as to divine social meaning (see Finnegan, 2003: p. 189) – we risk providing,

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as Hennion and Fauquet have described (and in relation to Bach’s reception over the centuries), one more reading in ‘a long line of Bach interpretations’ (Hennion and Fauquet, 2001: p. 78). There are, by contrast, three related and, in my view, more interesting analytical moves that can be made. The first deals with the until recently overlooked area of musical performance (Cook, 2003; Pitts, 2005). With notable exceptions (Clarke and Davidson, 1998; Cook, 2003; Davidson, 1993, 2002; Green, 1997; Leppert, 1993, 1999; McCormick, 2006; Pitts, 2005), performance has remained in the shadow of studies of music production and consumption. And yet, much may be accomplished in and through a musical text’s rendition. As such, music performances are themselves exemplars and structures against which extramusical matters may take shape. To make music is, in short, to make meaning and social relation. Much may be at stake, for example, in how we choose to perform the concept of baroque ‘authenticity’ (Hennion, 1997). Within this focus, musical works (scores) are conceptualized as scripts, ‘…in response to which social relationships are enacted such as the performance of social meanings and relations’ (Cook, 2003: p. 213) and sociomusical analysis embraces questions of how music, framed by performance occasions in which its meanings are made manifest as musical display, in turn comes to frame and symbolize social realities. The second analytical move considers all or any interpretations of music in terms of their situated productions. This move turns musicological discourse into a topic of analysis in its own right, as McClary herself has done so effectively when considering the gendered terminology of sonata form (McClary, 1991). The third analytical move fully embraces empirical musicology (Clarke and Cook, 2004) so as to explore music as cultural practice from historical and ethnographic perspectives, considering also organizational, economic and institutional structures and their potential effects on musical style (Born, 1995; Cerulo, 1984; Peterson and Berger, 1975).

Such an approach embraces material culture, networks, discourse strategies and specific socio-musical occasions. While it too is subject to the criticism that it may be using data as a screen behind which it is again doing no more than providing ‘another interpretation’, it is subject to evidence-based critique; its analytic is lodged in that which can be known and grounded in historically situated members’ practices and methods of (musical) meaning-making. In short, the question of how musical meaning is encoded and decoded needs to focus on the complex of situated meaning production as a form of interpretive work, as cultural creation, and this implies strategies that have affinities with the study of the everyday and with ethnography of history and cultural experience.

MUSIC AS A TECHNOLOGY OF ACTION Despite criticisms above of ‘new musicology’, the great strength of critical readings is that they take the music seriously as a dynamic medium in social life. For music is not merely socially shaped, it is constitutive of action and agency, often working in ways that elide consciousness. The question though is how to explore music’s mechanisms of operation, beyond deducing them from readings of musical texts. In recent years, new theoretical and empirical programmes and projects have helped to address this question and in ways that have greatly reinvigorated socio-musical studies, linking the area to core concerns about agency and social structure, anthropologically conceived in the sense that the socio-music is relocated in actual experience and musical activity. In recent years, socio-musical analysis has reconnected with the classic philosophical focus on music as a medium of ordering. It has considered the matter of musical taste as a constitutive ingredient of social identity, and in ways that are informed by but move beyond the focus on music as status marker (Peterson and Simkus, 1992) to consider (following some classic work in British cultural studies [Willis, 1978]) the ways in which music may

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provide resources for identification processes (Bennett, 2000; DeNora, 2003; Hennion, 2001; Macdonald, Hargreaves and Miell, 2002). The notion that music ‘gets into’ social practice has also been characteristic of new studies of music and collective action and interpretation (Eyerman and Jamieson, 1998; Pasler, 2004; Roscigno and Danaher, 2002; Roy, 2002; Stamatov, 2002), music and self-regulation in daily life (Bull, 2000; DeNora, 2000; Sloboda and O’Neill, 2001) and music, health and well-being (Pavlicevic andAnsdell, 2004; Ruud, 1997, 2002). In all of this work, there has been an attempt to sustain a ‘symmetrical’ perspective (Hennion, 1995) that allies the production-of-culture paradigm with a focus on ‘musicking’ (Small, 1998) as social practice. For example, in relation to music and social identity formation, Andy Bennett (2000, 2001) has explored the significance of bhangra and other forms of Asian dance music for young Asian men and women in the UK today. He suggests that the emergence of the so-called ‘bhangra beat’ has offered young Asians a new resource for identity development and for articulating their relationship to place – the UK. Here, music may be seen to lead or foster new expressions of identity (emplacement) and in this respect, Bennett may be seen to build on classic work in British cultural studies focused on the mobilization of music for identity formation, work such as Frith’s early study of young people’s musical tastes (1983) and Paul Willis’s on ‘profane’ culture (1978). Indeed, the case of bhangra is of especial interest since it was typically distributed outside mainstream music distribution structures, sold at corner shops, and so remained effectively unnoticed by mainstream monitors of music sales (Bergh and Banerji, 1987). (Bhangra’s eventual dual success [Asian scenes and ‘mainstream’] can be traced to the efforts of Deepak Khazanchi, who was able to work in both worlds [Bergh and Banerji, 1987].) But what does it mean to say music is a resource for identity formation, beyond saying that it is a referent that may be used as a badge, and a focal point for collective

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action? How does music (as opposed to some other medium) provide dynamic resources for the production of, for example, self-identity? Studies of the processes through which music comes to be invoked as part of identity work have suggested that music offers templates for self-imagining, a kind of magic mirror in which to see self and relation to other. So, when a respondent describes how she ‘finds herself’ in the inner voices of choral harmonies and how this is ‘like the “me” in music’, she is engaging in a dual strategy of constituting the music as meaningful to her (drawing always upon what that music affords for this process) and of constituting herself as in some way or ways ‘like’ that music. That latter constitution is also a prospective casting of identity – of what she can and will be like, and how she can and will imagine herself in future iterations (see DeNora, 2000, chapter 3). The simultaneous constitution of the music’s character and its powers/meanings is an adjacent topic that has been explored with considerable success through studies of situated listening (Gomart and Hennion, 1999) and the various technological ‘set-ups’ associated with that listening (e.g. Maisonneuve, 2001). In this work, music is investigated for its role as a resource for the production and self-production of emotional stances, memory work, styles and states in daily life. This work connects with pioneering work in social psychology (Sloboda, 1992, 2000). From within sociology, it converges with work on how actors produce themselves as identifiable agents and how this production is achieved through ‘aesthetic reflexive’ practices (Lash and Urry, 1994). For example, Gomart and Hennion (1999) refer to this process in terms of its ‘techniques of preparation’, techniques through which dispositions are produced and self-induced. Their interviewees described how they would ready themselves for particular emotional responses by ‘meticulously establish[ing] conditions’of listening (Gomart and Hennion, 1999: p. 277). So too, in his study of the use of personal stereos, Michael Bull has shown how private music listening may

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provide strategies for transcending unwanted environments and for making one’s otherwise often alienating movement through urban environments psycho-culturally habitable. Similarly, in DeNora’s (2000) study of listening practices, respondents described how they used music as a tacit practice for producing themselves as the types of emotional, embodied beings that daily life called upon them to be within specific occasions and this being included the embodied features characteristic of ‘emotional work’ (Hochschild, 1983). Respondents catalogued rich arrays of music listening practices and situations where, carefully crafting the music listening situation, they were able to cajole themselves into doing what they did not want or felt too tired to do, or otherwise wished they could get out of doing (e.g. playing up-tempo music to get psyched for going to a den mothers’ meeting), to relax or to set the scene for social and even intimate occasions. For these respondents, music provided often sub-liminal ‘cues’ for action and styles of embodied conduct. In all three of these studies, respondents made, in other words, articulations between music and desired modes of agency. They used music as a reference point, model or reminder of some emotional correlate and they thought about what music might, under different circumstances, ‘work’ for them. This practice was shaped by a range of proximal and distal factors, biographical associations and events associated with musical pieces or styles, conventional associations (e.g. ‘romantic’ or ‘sad’ music), music’s physical properties (e.g. rhythms, pace, volume) and previous patterns of use (e.g. knowledge of what would ‘work’ on a particular occasion). In short, these ostensibly ‘micro’ studies show how music is linked to psycho-cultural modes of being and to psychic energy, to the ‘inside’, as it were, of being and becoming the social states and categories associated with institutions, organizations and occasions. These modes of being are in turn intrinsic, as other scholars have shown, to collective action, collective identity and memory, and social movements.

In their study of music’s link to collective movements, Eyerman and Jamieson (1998) describe social movement theory as overly cognitive and as failing to account for the non-cognitive dimensions of collective action. They suggest by contrast an aesthetic dimension to collective action and deal specifically with music as a paradigmatic resource. Music is conceived, in other words, as a medium that can be used for the constitution of exemplary action: the various ways in which songs and singers can serve a function akin to the exemplary works that Thomas Kuhn characterized as being central to scientific revolutions: the paradigm-constituting entities that serve to realign scientific thinking and that represent ideal examples of fundamentally innovative scientific work… the exemplary action of music and art is lived as well as thought: it is cognitive, but it also draws on more emotive aspects of human consciousness. (Eyerman and Jamieson, 1998: p. 23)

At the level of situated experience what does this mean? How does music ‘get into’ or inform knowledge formation and how can we observe this process, as it were, in action? Among other things, it highlights how actors orient to music as an aide for knowledge formation (DeNora, 2000, 2003) and for action repertoires (Feld, 1990). Music may become, in other words, a referent for identification work (identification of self, other, situation, event, thing), its structures read by situated actors as a map or model of who one is or wishes to be, of the type of world one wishes to inhabit or as a metaphor for modelling some feature of social reality. Indeed, this theme was Adorno’s central concern in Philosophy of Modern Music, where his adventurous exemplar, Schönberg, served as a template for Adorno’s critique of generic and categorical modes of reasoning, as if social realities were isomorphic with the categories used to describe them. The difference between Adorno and post-Adornoian music sociologies is that the latter seek to explore Adorno’s project in grounded ways, focused on situated socio-musical practices and meaning making.

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As Eyerman and Jamieson’s work has suggested, social theory is often characterized by an overly cognitive bias. The work within music sociology on emotions and on the musical basis of knowledge production has gone some way towards remedying this bias. So, too, it has helped to illuminate social action as embodied action. This focus highlights the nexus of music, bodily praxis and bodily phenomena. This work develops, and establishes a sociological footing for, earlier work in marketing, social psychology and music therapy. There, and typically via experimental investigations in and outside the laboratory, music has been described as an ‘influence’ on bodily phenomena – blood pressure, heart rate, and pain perception and other embodied/social matters such as the speed with which food or drink is ingested. Too often, though, within these literatures, music’s ‘effects’ on the body are identified and measured, accompanied by little investigation of their mechanisms of operation. Often, they are posited as stimuli or their ‘power’ is fudged by vague language, such as the term ‘conditioning’. To understand (and properly theorize) these issues, situated studies of how bodies interact with and respond to music in real time are useful. For example, in aerobic exercise classes (DeNora, 2000: pp. 88–102), music can be seen to structure both physical activity (e.g. movement style, speed, duration) and the subjective dimension of that activity (e.g. the desire to move in particular ways, the selfperception of fatigue). Beyond this, music can provide a means for establishing different exercise-attitudes during the course of a fortyfive minute session. Embodiment is critical to virtually all real-time, spatially located forms of action, as recently – and chillingly – illustrated in the Australian Broadcasting Company documentary Soundtrack to War (Gittoes, 2004), in which artist and documentary film-maker George Gittoes videotaped interviews with American soldiers in Iraq as they described their music preferences for ‘kick-ass rock’ [sic] when rolling their tanks out into a mission (e.g. AC/DC, Drowning Pool’s ‘Let the bodies hit the floor’) because,

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as one soldier put it, ‘it gets you real fired up’. (Recall Paul Willis’ bikeboys, described in Profane Culture, one of whom said, ‘if you hear a fast record you’ve got to get up and do something… if the dance is over, you’ve just got to go for a burn-up [motorcycle ride] [Willis, 1978: p. 73].) Here, music’s ability to interesse (Callon, 1986) or prime subjects for a mode of agency leads on to the translation, more precisely, traduction (ibid.) of those subject/bodies into a different conduct register. The aim of interessement is central to research that has focused on the strategic use of music for organizational and/or therapeutic ends. Various studies have described music’s use in retail outlets as a medium with which to structure consumer conduct and, at times, purchase decisions. Stores employ music so as to structure temporal and scenic parameters of the setting, to filter consumers and target preferred types of consumers, to help consumers ‘tune in’ to the store’s ‘scenic specificity’ – its locational style – and to project emotional styles (‘cool’, ‘romantic’, etc.) in keeping with brand image (DeNora, 2000, 2003). So too, studies have suggested that consumers tune in bodily to musical parameters in ways that are linked to consumption patterns – how fast or slow one eats or drinks, for example (McElrea and Standing, 1992; Roballey et al., 1985). And, equally insidiously, shoppers may make purchase ‘decisions’ in ways that fit in-store ambience, showing music’s role as a subliminal cue for conduct, such that, when classical music plays in a wine shop, consumers are more likely to purchase up-market bottles and, when one style of music is played as opposed to another, consumers are more likely to shape up purchase decisions in ways that are aligned with that style (North, Hargreaves and McKendrick, 1997). These studies also help to illustrate the rich variation in listening styles that may be found in the realm of everyday musical experience and musical listening (Dibben, 2001, 2003), in particular the role of quasi-conscious, unfocused listening (Stockfelt, 1997) and, as Brian Eno called it, ‘discrete music’ (Eno, 1975).

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I have described in this section how music offers non-verbal resources for action stances and styles, and cues to actors about types of social setting. Actors use music both to modify and enhance mood and they may unconsciously shift mood under musical conditions. In observing these processes, it is possible to see cultural repertoires ‘in action’, by which I mean that actors can be seen to orient to musical conditions in ways that set the keynote for patterns of action and bodily conduct such as style, tension and emotional stance, all of which are made known to and experienced by self and others, and often in mutually referential ways. In this respect, the study of musically composed action deepens ideas and concepts currently being discussed in cultural sociology, in particular, the question of how culture ‘creates a situation of action’ (Swidler, 2001: p. 83). Work in the often-overlooked area of music therapy further highlights music’s role as a provider of resources and opportunities for expressive and embodied action in real time and over time as stylistic habits and as opportunities for coordination and mutual entrainment and in often highly controlled applications. Music therapy also helps to highlight how even the body’s so-called ‘natural’ features – physiology, strength, arousal, coordination, energy, skills – are more accurately understood as socially, culturally and technically constructed and environmentally distributed as categories of perception and bodily experience such that even pain and the certainty of death associated with grave illness may be transcended, reconstructed in relation to music and in relation to the social relations that musicking and the informal learning processes associated with ‘health-musicking’ (Ruud, 1997, 2002) facilitate (Aldridge, 2003; Batt-Rawden and DeNora, 2005; Batt-Rawden, DeNora and Ruud, 2005; Pavlicevic and Ansdell, 2004; Stige, 2002). This work returns us to fundamental concerns with music’s origins (Wallin et al. 2000) and music’s convergence with and interaction with bodily states and rhythms (Blacking, 1973; Shepherd and Wick, 1997).

MUSICKING AS SOCIAL PRACTICE The classic philosophers conceived of music as a means of inculcating modes of character, citizenship and general attunement with the world. Investigating music in situated settings, as it is drawn into the vortex of performed action in real time, highlights music’s role as a dynamic medium of agency and its formulation. In so doing, music is repositioned in relation to social theory and social analysis, not as an object waiting to be read, but as a medium with which things are accomplished in social life, and a medium that itself takes shape in relation to other materials, conventions, resources and constraints. In short, socio-musical analysis, at least in its current configurations, draws attention to the aesthetic dimension in social life and social ordering, the non-cognitive, emotional and sensate bases of action as produced in relation to, in this case, musical materials. By examining situated examples of music as it ‘gets into’ social experience it is possible to illuminate the real-time and spatially located formation of sociology’s generic concern with order and action – including the social and technological relations of that formation. As a sonic medium happening over time, and also configuring time (Hanrahan, 2000), music is a material of social ordering and social imagination. As such, understanding how music operates and what it does illuminates the otherwise too-often tacit bases of action, consciousness, and subjectivity.

NOTE 1 I am grateful to Arild Bergh for his advice on this chapter, and for sharing his published work on bhangra and his experiences in the world of popular music distribution.

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Tagg, P. (2000) Kojak: 50 Seconds of Television Music: Towards the Analysis of Affect in Popular Music. New York: Mass Media Scholar’s Press. (1st edn, 1979.) Thayer, W.A. and Forbes, E. (1967) Thayer’s Life of Beethoven. 2 volumes. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wallin, N., Merker, B. and Brown, S. (eds) (2000) The Origins of Music. Cambridge: MIT Press. Walser, R. (1993) Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Weber, M. (1958) The Rational and Social Foundations of Music. Tr. D. Martinadale, J. Riedel and G. Neuwirth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Weber, W. (1984) ‘The contemporaneity of eighteenth century musical taste’, Musical Quarterly, 70: 175–194.

Weber, W. (1992) The Rise of the Musical Classics in Eighteenth Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual and Ideology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, W. (1997) ‘Did people listen in the 18th century?’, Early Music, 25: 678–691. Weber, W. (2001) ‘From Miscellany to Homogeneity in Concert Programming’, Poetics, 29: 125–134. Wheelock, G. (1993) ‘Schwarze Gredel and the engendered minor mode in Mozart’s Operas’, in R. Solie (ed.), Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, pp. 201–224. Williams, A. (2001) Constructing Musicology. Aldershot: Ashgate. Willis, P. (1978) Profane Culture. London: Routledge. Witkin, R.W. (1998) Adorno on Music. London: Routledge.

8 Visual Analysis Mieke Bal

INTRODUCTION1 Rembrandt’s drawing later titled Judith Beheading Holophernes is a sketchy affair (Figure 8.1). If we didn’t have the help offered by art-historical research that identified the theme, dated the sheet, and placed it in conjunction with other works by the artist as well as his contemporaries – to name a few of that discipline’s major preoccupations – we could as well consider it the depiction of a mother putting to bed a child sick with a cold. The mother appears to be towering over the child, the child’s nose red, his arm flung aside. In addition to this mother–child constellation, a secondary detail of the sheet helps identify the image’s subject. The helmeted head, at the extreme right side of the sheet, turned away from the primary scene, allows the deed to be done unseen by the victim’s bodyguard. But this head need not be a related representation. No one guarantees us that the sheet was composed to be a whole, a narrative depiction of a mythical story. Yet, once we are being told that ‘Judith’ is the meaning of the sketch, the head on the right becomes a soldier standing guard but failing, at the crucial moment, to pay attention to what is happening inside what we

now see as the tent. Then, the hand tugging the child in becomes the one holding the lethal weapon; the child is a grown man, a bad guy who deserved to die, and the loose bust on the right is a soldier standing watch.2 Identifying this drawing as a Judith is a typical art-historical gesture. Quite obviously, this is an act of interpretation, one of the innumerable ones that shape our everyday life. A drawing is just another object, and fleshing out details from what we (think we) know to be the Judith theme is one of the many acts of ‘micro-pirating’ within what Nicolas Bourriaud (2005) has termed, with a concept from the film industry, ‘post-production’. Suspending this pre-programmed reading and looking at the details ‘as if’ they were not necessarily conforming to the Judith myth is no less an act of micro-pirating, albeit a fundamentally different one. Instead of abducting the image for alleged historical reconstruction of art-making, now one abducts it to serve as interlocutor or even projection screen in the present, where it is ‘just’ an image among many, many others that surround us. In such an alternative reading the sheet might consist of two disconnected figurations, the one of care, the other of indifference.

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Figure 8.1 Rembrandt van Rijn, Judith Beheading Holophernes, ca. 1652, Benesch 897. Drawing, 182 × 150 cm. Naples, Museo di Capodimonte

Or, the soldier looking away, as well as the shadowy figure above him doing the same, represents the public domain and the futile attempt performed there to ‘serve and protect’.3 Readings such as these entertain a peculiar relation to narrative. The Judith reading considers the drawing a re-presentation of an older text it purportedly illustrates. This

reading is doubtlessly historically correct. However, such myth-based interpretations facilitate a projection of the known on the new that it then over-writes. While being most probably closer to the artist’s intentions, this interpretation also, and strangely, discourages looking. In contrast, a reading that severs the helmeted figures from the scene indoors declines the invitation to ‘narrativize’.

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Instead, it projects two distinct acts on the image. Of course, to see in the woman a caring mother is no less a projection of the known on the new. The reading that sees in the soldiers failures of public officers, and in the drawing as a whole an indictment of contemporary measures of security, does follow the mode of narrative but considers the sketch a primary image – not an illustration – perhaps even a work of political propaganda. The latter reading is also wilfully anachronistic, appropriating the image for a contemporary reflection, rather than the ageold one concerning the danger women pose to men. Importantly for our discussion here, this reading can be claimed to be more ‘visual’: it requires an active act of looking. Moreover, it requires the viewer to be aware of her own contribution to the meaning production. Hence, it requires an acceptance that the historically and socially specific act of looking is part and parcel of what has been called ‘visual culture’. This act is no less an act of ‘pirating’ than the other two readings. But it raises questions regarding the place of looking in society. And it endorses the idea that images exist for viewers, who can do with them what they please, and will do so within frames of reference that society has set up for them. In sum, connecting the image to pre-occupations of today’s social world is only a more overt, self-conscious act of projection, whereas the Judith reading only pretends to be legitimized by historical evidence. For visual analysis, whether or not a reading is the right one is not the issue. Instead, visual analysis is interested in the act of interpretive recycling of visible objects such as this sheet, and ponders how every act of using an object is necessarily an interpretation of it. Such interpretations, the motivations (groups of ) subjects have to make them, get excited by them, and defend them – sometimes at great cost – are of interest to the visual analyst who is, also, a philosopher of (visual) culture. The classical art historian, as the discipline’s name intimates, has her research questions laid out. She seeks to reconstruct the

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historical – read: original – meaning. Hence, she has no doubts that the original, historical meaning, to be derived from similar images in the seventeenth century, textual sources, and biographical data of artist or possibly patron, is the right one. She also considers the sheet as a work of art, and treats it as such. From the perspective of visual analysis, one can wonder how we ‘see’ that the scene takes place ‘inside’: in a tent, or a house. The fine line that distinguishes the primary scene from the soldiers outside is the producer of interiority. This connection between line and interiority is a fundamental one. In a philosophical-visual inquiry into Derrida’s deployment of the metaphor of the house, Mark Wigley writes: The house is always first understood as the most primitive drawing of a line that produces an inside opposed to an outside, a line that acts as a mechanism of domestication. (Wigley, 1994: p. 213)

From this perspective, then, the thin line that cuts from about one inch at the top to the bottom right-hand corner of the sheet, where it curves back to indicate the flexible material of its creation, is the key, the most profoundly relevant element that guides all readings of the image, producing its conditions of visibility, and puts it up for philosophical examination. Now, the sick-child reading becomes a metaphorical vision of what seeing actually is. This reflection on line, interiority and visibility stands here for visual analysis. What is it that makes this reflection different from, say, the more traditional art-historical discourse?4 First, this reflection is interdisciplinary, engaging philosophy. Second, it is nevertheless primarily visual, engaging ideas in an insistently visual understanding of the image. Third, it takes stock of the viewer’s tools and methods of making sense of what is there to see; the conditions of visibility as they are bound up with meaning production. Fourth, it unabashedly places the image in a wilfully anachronistic purview, starting from the present and only considering the image’s past-ness in relation to that present. Finally, the point of all these transgressions

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of disciplinary boundaries is to take into account the social meanings for viewers in the present, social beings steeped in what we call a ‘culture’ as a site where negotiation can take place; a site, that is, where the familiar and the strange, the interior and the exterior, constantly interact. In this sense, our fine line is an emblem of what, in the perspective of visual analysis, is the meaning of ‘culture’. In the analytical study of culture, why does visuality matter at all? Not because the sense of vision deserves the primacy it has traditionally been given. Rather, this primacy and the consequences thereof are the first area visual analysis will critically investigate. But there are more reasons to study ‘the visual’ of culture. Visual practices of surveillance, of ‘othering’, and of hierarchization, also make a critical examination of this area of cultural practice a meaningful endeavour. More generally, much of social life is influenced by what we see – or think we see. And that includes seeing others, pre-programmed to be seen in their otherness that is presented as natural but is nothing if not cultural. Visual images are sometimes able to subvert these cultural, socially damaging powers or circumvent censorship, but are also tools to manipulate, specifically because they are harder to pin down for unambiguous meaning. For all these reasons together, no unified origin can be assumed for any one image; antecedents always mingle with novelty to structure understanding if an image – or an academic field, for that matter – is to be legible at all. After this brief sketch of what is most characteristic for visual analysis, I will indicate even more succinctly how visual analysis developed as an academic field of study.

ORIGINS? The field of study variously called ‘visual culture’, ‘visual studies’ or, as I prefer to call it, visual analysis to which this chapter is devoted has no clear-cut origin, nor is it confined to groupings so named. Many art historians today do exactly what I will

here impute to visual analysis. What I am distinguishing is not disciplines or scholars, but sets of interests and questions, unequally held and raised by people working in different fields, one of which can well be art history. To begin with, the idea of visual culture and its study, here called visual analysis, has emerged from three different developments. One is a critique of art history from within that discipline, a self-critique leading to a field that is either a discipline encompassing art history or a sub-discipline of the latter. This strand would be unhappy with the banality of the Judith interpretation, have no interest in the dating of the sheet, and would rather wonder about the misogyny involved in reiterating such ancient myths of dangerous women. An art historian turning to visual analysis might also be desirous to include the activity of the viewer in the analysis, thus entering the domain of historical change, not origin. The other development is an increasing interest in interdisciplinary collaboration, based on dissatisfaction with traditionally grown boundaries between academic disciplines, a desire to re-map fields of interest, and, last but not least, the need of universities to accommodate increasing scarcity of means. Here, visual analysis has carved itself a niche through the awareness that so much of cultural life involves vision. This strand of thinking would necessarily consider visual analysis an inter-discipline. Proponents of this brand of visual analysis might come, for example, from visual anthropology, sociology or psychology, and film and media studies. They might find hints in the Rembrandt drawing of social situations not easily articulated in writing, or psychological mechanisms such as fear, domination or inattention as aspects of the ideologically coloured assumption that motherhood is synonymous with loving care. A third background is the development of cultural studies, a general movement within, primarily, the humanities, questioning the elitist assumptions underlying the canons of what is deemed worth studying. Cultural studies is overtly interested in the political consequences of cultural expressions. And this aspect is studied preferably in objects

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such as propaganda, advertisements, design of everyday objects, rather than the art housed in museums. Cultural studies also questions the obsessive focus on the past, as if things that co-exist in present-day culture could not be isolated and studied. In so far as cultural studies proponents did wish to persist in historical research, they invested effort in rethinking such historical staple notions as origin, causality, context and intention. As a result of that rethinking, the sick-child interpretation would gain right of way, if only to challenge the all-but-naturalized Judith topos. In this movement, visual analysis is a branch of cultural studies.5 In order to avoid categorical confusion, I will use the term ‘visual analysis’ as short for ‘visual culture studies’ to indicate the field of study that examines ‘visual culture’. This field, perhaps discipline, perhaps interdiscipline, has developed over the past decades, but took on its different names as rallying cries only in the 1990s. Then, journals such as the Journal of Visual Culture began to appear along with books and collections proposed as readers for classes on the subject, and academic programmes (re)defined their goals in terms of visual studies or analysis. In my view, cultural analysis distinguishes itself from cultural studies by a sustained analytical attention to the object, a starting point in the present, and the parallel development of theoretical and analytical arguments. The term, or would-be concept, visual culture is problematic, and, as is the case with the term art history, both elements of the term are causing trouble. If taken at face value, the qualifier ‘visual’ describes the nature of present-day culture as primarily visual. This somewhat over-the-top response to the recent awareness that our text-based disciplines have ignored the everyday environment tends to universalize Western culture’s investment in advertisement as part of street life. Alternatively, the term ‘visual culture’ describes the segment of (a particular) culture that is visual, as if it could be isolated (for study, at least) from the rest of that culture. Either way, the term is predicated upon a kind of visual essentialism that either proclaims the

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visual ‘difference’ – read ‘purity’ – of images, or expresses a desire to stake out the turf of visuality against other media or semiotic systems. This isolation of the visual from other domains of culture would, for example, resist any attempt to read the Rembrandt sketch as narrative, considering narrative (wrongly) a linguistic mode.6 The development of visual studies as a discipline came out of the limitation of standard art-historical practice on two counts. Due to the dogmatic position of ‘history’, art history tends to under-illuminate the visuality of its objects; and, due to the established meaning of ‘art’, it has tended to limit its interests to the acknowledged collection of those objects. To take visual culture as art history with a cultural studies perspective, as some of its proponents do, is an attempt to remedy the latter problem – of elitist aesthetics, a closed canon – but remains locked into the former – a somewhat deterministic view of history. Such a conception, therefore, is to condemn it to repeating the same double limitation. While not ignoring art history altogether, visual analysis draws upon several other disciplines that have deployed the resources of visuality: well-established ones such as anthropology, psychology and sociology, or ones that are themselves relatively new, such as film and media studies. The former three disciplines focus primarily on visual forms of knowledge production, whereas visual analysis is also interested in affective and ideological consequences of acts of looking and of recurring imagery in society. The latter disciplines – film and media studies – have successfully integrated such questions and also been able to either ignore or problematize aesthetic value judgements, but are limited by the object domain of particular media. Visual analysis derives its definition from an object domain too, but this is delimited through a sense domain, not a medium. It is the question of that object domain that interests me here. For, although visual analysis is grounded in the specificity of its object domain, what that object domain is remains to be clarified. Through this search for the object,

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I will discuss a few, but by no means all, of the main questions that present themselves once the object domain is taken as a field of study and, especially, analysis. For this reason, I will express a preference for the term ‘visual analysis’ and consider it a – porously distinguished – branch of ‘cultural analysis’, the broader category to which this Handbook is devoted. I will conclude by touching on some methodological consequences.

THE OBJECT Caught as it is in academic dialectic, visual analysis takes on what other, more established disciplines, have neglected: non-canonical artworks, street scenes, private snapshots, children’s drawings; or small rituals no anthropologist would deem worthy of the name, odd behaviours no psychologist would notice, visual set-ups in the streets of a city one takes for granted. Other possible under-illuminated objects are advertisements that solicit outcries of indignation for their blatant racism if noticed, but that frequently remain unseen for being too familiar; or odd juxtapositions in museum displays, which naturalize colonial relations of subordination; or homosocial set-ups out of date in the twenty-first century. But the point is not in this choice of objects, useful as it may be as an indictment of the exclusions we have so long taken for granted. It is in the questions we ask those objects: questions of use, of affect, of pirating; of power, matter and framing; of exploitation, abuse or empowerment. In the practice of analysing visual manifestations in and of a culture, practitioners of visual analysis are keen to account for the affectladen relationship between the thing seen and the subject doing the seeing. Let me give three examples of perhaps unlikely objects for visual analysis. First, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), Erving Goffman convincingly argues that what we consider the ‘self’ is the product, not the cause, of social role-playing. Everyday life as a stage: this view implies, among other changes in the classical psychologically bent

conception of subjectivity, a visualization of ordinary behaviour. As a first example of an object of visual analysis not liable to arthistorical study, Goffman’s description of a person entering the ‘stage’ of social encounter is as vivid in its anxiety-raising production of stage fright. Second, a young child who, yet again, noticed his mother’s camera pointed at him and almost automatically straightening his back, putting his hands at his hips, ready to shoot, takes on his favourite, televisioninspired role of cowboy, for this is how he wishes – or has been trained to wish – to be captured on camera. Finally, psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas (1987) conceptualizes dreams as a stage on which the dreamer plays a part, subject as she is to the director of the play she definitely is not. None of these examples consists of material images one can make, present and sell. Yet they are starkly visual. These three conceptions of the subject share a concern with appearance and exteriority. The visibility of behaviour – whether seen in social reality, the television-informed world of the child, or in dreams – turns the everyday appearance of people into a potential object for visual analysis. This is not to suggest that people only exist (socially) as far as they can be seen, but to emphasize that the visuality of social life is a meaningful entrance into questions of what subjectivity is, how it can be perceived, and what this visibility tells us about human existence on the apparently shallow, yet so profoundly formative ‘stage’ of interaction. Visual representations and interactions, sense-based presentations and absorptions shape the world as we see it. Images of desirable postures and faces, bodies and clothes, flickering colours of light, smiling and unsmiling faces fill our fantasies before we can even have any. Some of these images captivate us for a little bit longer than most; others fleetingly pass but do not fail to leave their mark. These are some of the objects of visual analysis. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s Museums and the Interpretation of Culture (2000) is an instance of ‘museum studies’, a field that clearly has an affiliation with visual analysis,

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and intersects between the latter and material culture studies. In the first chapter, on the imbrications of museum studies with visual and material culture study, the author makes the case for what each participating discipline can contribute. Her point is not that the disciplines she invokes constitute a comprehensive list, but that her object requires analysis within the conglomerate of these disciplines. Within this conglomerate each discipline contributes limited, indispensable and productive methodological elements, which together offer a coherent model for analysis, not a list of overlapping questions. This concatenation may shift, expand or shrink according to the individual case, but it is never a ‘bundle’ of disciplines (multi-disciplinarity), nor a supradisciplinary ‘umbrella’.7 At the very least, the object domain of visual analysis consists of things we can see or whose existence is motivated by their visibility; things that have a particular visuality or visual quality that addresses the social constituencies interacting with them. One can think of family snapshots that so poignantly display family ideologies along with affective bonding, gender role-playing and a peculiarly intimate relationship between subject and maker. But one can as well think of the appearances in particular social settings of subjects of sexual, age-based or professional milieux. The ‘social life of visible things’, to recycle Arjun Appadurai’s phrase for a segment of material culture, would be one way of putting it.8 On the one hand, then, photographs; on the other, people, whose appearance is as fleeting as it is socially framed and prescripted. A house, street scenes, posters, ads – enumerating the possible objects seems futile. This raises the question, then, whether the object domain of visual analysis can consist of objects at all? Hooper-Greenhill draws attention to the ambiguity of the word ‘object’ itself. According to the Chambers Dictionary, an object is a material thing, but also an aim or purpose, a person or thing to which action, feelings or thoughts are directed: thing, intention and target (Hooper-Greenhill,

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2000: p. 104). The conflation of thing with aim does not imply attributing intentions to objects, although to some extent such a case could be made. The conflation, instead, casts the shadow of intention of the subject over the object. In this guise, the ambiguity of the word ‘object’ harks back to the goals of nineteenth-century object-teaching and its roots in pedagogical positivism. ‘The first education should be of the perceptions, then of memory, then of the understanding, then of the judgement.’9 This temporal order is clearly meant as a recipe for progressive education, in which the child is empowered to form its own judgements based on perception. This was a much-needed emancipation of the young subject at the time. However, it is also precisely the reversal of what visual culture studies ought to disentangle and reorder. For, in the then-welcome attempt to counter the newly ‘invented’ ideological brain-washings produced by the primacy of opinion, the sequence established proclaims the supremacy of a rationality that represses subjectivity, emotions and beliefs. It is an attempt to objectify experience. However, the idea of the ‘real’ thing suppresses the constructed nature of ‘reality’. If we consider the kinds of objects visual analysis has been focusing on, there is a suggestion of anti-elitism. The first year of the Journal of Visual Culture contains articles on, for example, Medical imaging (Cartwright), Globalization (Buck-Morss), Distraction (Rutsky). But there are also articles on art, modern as well as classical, and on exhibitions. Clearly, in spite of a tendency to question the narrow definitions of visual images, excluding the study of artistic production is not a primary goal. Rather than policing the boundaries between disciplines that are inevitably affiliated – such as visual studies and art history, or visual studies and visual anthropology, for example – I see the division of labour more in terms of the kinds of question we ask of the objects that possess the potential to produce events of seeing. This, if any, is the object of visual analysis. Where visual

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anthropology might be primarily interested in vision as a tool to achieve a knowledge of otherwise unknowable nuances of a culture, and art history in the production and reception of those visible things cherished by a given culture, visual analysis can take on the images these neighbouring disciplines study, and ask of them questions that pertain to the social act of seeing itself. Visual analysis emphatically seeks to incorporate affect and ideology. For, between affect and the ideology that exerts power over subjects when they perform acts of looking, images can be seen at their most ‘active’, not only having a social life but also impacting on that of the people who interact with them. The object of visual analysis, then, is not a collection of things, but first of all an aspect of things, people and moments: their visibility, and in the wake of that visibility, the aspects that flesh out their visuality, of which I will limit myself to three: synaesthesia, affect and power.10

VISIBILITY Visibility is not synonymous with materiality. Just as there is a rhetoric that produces an effect of the real, there is one that produces the effect of materiality. Authenticating an interpretation because it is grounded in acts of seeing or, more strongly, in perceptible material properties is a rhetorical use of materiality. On the one hand, meeting the material object can be a breathtaking experience: for students of objects, such experiences are still indispensable to counter the effects of endless classes where slide shows instil the notion that all objects are of equal size and texture. But there can be no direct link between matter and interpretation. The belief that there is, which underlies the objectbased pedagogy, resorts to the authority of materiality, which Davey (1999) sees as the thrust of such rhetoric: ‘The “thinginess” of objects, the concrete “reality”, gives weight, literally, to the interpretation. It “proves” that this is “how it is”, “what it means” ’ (Davey, 1999: p. 14).11

This rhetoric can, of course, be countered or – to the extent that it is not entirely useless in the face of still-rampant idealism – revised and supplemented in various ways. One of these ways is to give attention to the various framings that affect visibility, not only of the object framed but also of the act of looking at it and the ways in which that act is framed. Such a description of the object entails not only the much-advocated social perspective on things. If these things address people, the analysis also includes the visual practices that are possible in a particular culture or subculture. Hence, scopic or visual regimes are subject to analysis as well. In short, visual analysis examines all forms and aspects, conditions and consequences of visuality. The regime in which the rhetoric of materiality was possible and often effective is just one such regime that is liable to be analysed critically.12 Thus formulated, visual analysis can be distinguished from object-defined disciplines such as art history and film studies, through the centrality of conditions of visibility, also summarized in the term ‘visuality’. The question of visuality is simple: what happens when people look, and what emerges from that act? The verb ‘happens’ suggests that the visual event is under scrutiny, and the verb ‘emerges’ tells us that the visual image is considered as a fleeting, fugitive, subjective image accrued to the subject, rather than the material thing we can collect. These two results – the event and the experienced image – are joined at the hip in the act of looking and its aftermath. At the hip, hence, in the body. The act of looking is anchored in the body and thus, profoundly ‘impure’, limited neither to one sense organ, nor even to the senses. First, sense-directed as it may be, the act of looking is inherently framed, framing, interpreting, affect-laden, cognitive, as well as intellectual in kind. Second, this impure quality is also likely to be applicable to other sensebased activities: listening, reading, tasting, smelling. This impurity makes such activities mutually permeable, so that listening and reading can also have visuality to them, while looking is ‘contaminated’ by these other acts.

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Hence, literature, sound and music are not excluded from the domain of visual analysis. Contemporary art practice makes this clear. Sound installations are a staple of exhibitions of contemporary art, as are text-based works. Film and television, in this sense, are more likely to attract visual analysis than, say, a painting, precisely because they are far from exclusively visual. As Ernst Van Alphen has demonstrated, acts of seeing can be the primary motor of entire literary texts that are structured by images, even if not a single ‘illustration’ is called for to drive the point home (Van Alphen, 2005, ch. 11). Visuality’s ‘impurity’ is not, as Walker and Chaplin suggest, a simple matter of mixed media. Nor is the possibility of combining the senses my point here. But this does not mean that visuality is interchangeable with the other sense perceptions. More fundamentally, vision is itself inherently synaesthetic. It involves bodily sensations that cannot be reduced to perception through the eye. Many artists, such as Irish artist James Coleman, have been ‘arguing’ this through their work. That Coleman is acclaimed as a visual artist of great achievement is not surprising; nothing in his slide installations questions its status as visual art. Yet, on the other hand, his installations are just as absorbing because of their sound – the quality of the voice, including its bodily nature as evidenced in sighs – and because of the profoundly literary and philosophical nature of the texts spoken. Among the many things these works accomplish, they challenge any reduction to hierarchy of the sense domains involved (Walker and Chaplin, 1997: pp. 24–25). Kaja Silverman has provided a brilliant analysis of Coleman’s work. Like Coleman’s work itself, her four essays are examples of an ideal visual analysis, because of their close attention to the visuality, including its synaesthetic qualities, and because of the social-philosophical perspective on visuality that she brings to bear on the works (Silverman, 2002). But, importantly, this can also be reversed: Silverman provides a reading of what Coleman’s works propose as a social

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philosophy of culture. That philosophy is based in but not reduced to visuality.13 Far from the photographs illustrating the text or the words ‘explicating’ the images, the simultaneity between the photographs and their appeal to the viewer’s entire body operates by means of the enigmatic discrepancies between these two main registers. Hence, any definition attempting to distinguish visuality from, for example, language entirely misses the point of visual analysis. For, with the isolation of vision comes the hierarchy of the senses, which is one of the traditional drawbacks of the disciplinary division of the Humanities. ‘To hypostasize the visual risks reinstalling the hegemony of the “noble” sense of sight … over hearing and the more “vulgar” senses of smell and taste’, wrote Shohat and Stam (1998: p. 45). Not to mention touch. Visuality is not limited to things primarily visual. Characteristically, visual analysis frequently focuses on the Internet. Yet, the Internet is not primarily visual at all. Although it gives access to virtually unlimited quantities of images, the primary feature of this new medium is of a different order. Its use is based on discrete rather than dense signification (Goodman, 1976). Its hypertextual organization presents it primarily as a textual form. It is qua text that it is fundamentally innovative. In his very useful account of Lyotard’s ‘Fiscourse Digure’ (1983), David Rodowick writes: The digital arts further confound the concepts of the aesthetic, since they are without substance and therefore not easily identified as objects. No medium-specific ontology can fix them in place. For this reason, it is misleading to attribute a rise in the currency of the visual to the apparent power and pervasiveness of digital imaging in contemporary culture. (Rodowick, 2001: p. 35)

Rodowick’s context is a discussion of art. Others have discussed this problematic of the ontology of digital media in more general terms, closer to visual analysis’s preoccupations. Mark Hansen’s (2005) study can be situated in between the two fields. He develops a Deleuzian-inspired aesthetic of the digital. Lev Manovich (2000) insists on the similarities between the ‘new’ media and the

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‘old’, and explains the nature and operation of the former in terms of the latter. These three studies have in common an approach to visual analysis that refuses to be locked up in a medium, a material thing or an aesthetic. Of course, it is rather senseless to establish a rivalry between textuality and visuality in this respect but, if anything characterizes the Internet, it is the impossibility of positing its visuality as ‘pure’ or even primary. If the digital media stand out as typical in the mode of thinking that requires visual analysis as a new (inter)discipline, it is precisely because they cannot be considered visual, but not just discursive either. In Rodowick’s words, ‘the figural defines a semiotic regime where the ontological distinction between linguistic and plastic representations breaks down’ (Rodowick, 2001: p. 2). Therefore, if the Internet is liable to inspire new categorizations of cultural artefacts, it would more adequately be described as ‘screen culture’, with its particular fugitivity, in contradistinction from, for example, ‘print culture’, in which objects, including images, have a more durable form of existence. If visual analysis focuses on visuality not images, then it is the possibility of performing acts of seeing in relation to the object seen, not the materiality of it, that decides whether an artefact or process can usefully be considered from the perspective of visual analysis. Let me put this in even starker terms. Even ‘purely’ linguistic objects such as literary texts can be analysed meaningfully and productively in this way qua visuality; indeed, some ‘purely’ literary texts only make sense visually. The latter not only include an untamable mixture of the senses involved, but also the inextricable knot of affect and cognition that every perceptual act constitutes.14 In a wonderful discussion of imagery related to historical trauma, Jill Bennett makes a powerful case for the affective quality of relating to visual artefacts within a context rife with political violence. Regardless of the status of the images – artistic, journalistic, propagandistic – Bennett theorizes an ‘aesthetics of relations’ as the most productive response of viewers to images that, in whatever way – representational,

but also anti-representational – address that violence. That address, not the predominance of visuality, is what makes visual culture important (Bennett, 2005: p. 21). At the end of her introductory chapter, she writes: What I seek to show, then, is how, by realizing a way of seeing and feeling, . . . certain conjunctions of affect and critical operations might constitute the basis for something we can call empathic vision. (Bennett, 2005: p. 21; emphasis in text)

In order to be able to articulate such a political form of looking, Bennett’s argument refuses to separate the affective nature of seeing from the thought processes involved. In addition to the synaesthetic quality of visuality itself, which remains a matter of sense perception, I also wish to foreground with Bennett the intellectual tenor of visuality, briefly phrased as ‘art thinks’. This view is the starting point of all the work of the philosopher and art historian Hubert Damisch (e.g. 1994, 2002). In the wake of Damisch, scholars of visual art today are more and more interested in the way in which art ‘thinks’: art proposes, by the visual means that are its own, novel thought not yet thinkable. The inquiry into this domain would bring the study of art in the orbit of visual analysis. In a recent book, Ernst Van Alphen proposes such analyses of visual thought in works of art. Thinking images do not all belong to the domain of ‘high art’. Images can come and go, they need not be subject to the kind of precious preservation that museums pursue. Hence, even the most banal ‘alimentary image’ – or ‘foodscape’ – can be, as the phrase has it, food for visual thought.15 The simple notion that ‘art thinks’ has far-reaching consequences for the way it can be analysed, consequences highly relevant for the methodology-in-the-making of visual analysis. But in the context of the cognitive-affective status of our situatedness in the political world, the cognitive aspect of visuality is necessarily bound up with power relations. Hence, the knot of ‘power/knowledge’ is never absent from visuality. What Foucault called ‘the look of the knowing subject’, Hooper-Greenhill notes,

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‘questions the distinction between the visible and the invisible, the said and the unsaid’. These distinctions are themselves practices that change over time and according to social variables. Hence, if visual analysis is, also, a historical discipline, it is this aspect of the power exercised by means of vision as well as of the belief in vision’s primacy that needs to be historicized. This insight makes the contribution of philosophy to visual analysis indispensable.16 Knowledge, itself not limited to cognition even if it prides itself on such a limitation, is constituted, or rather, performed, in the same acts of looking that it describes, analyses and critiques. For, in the simplest formulation, as Foucault has argued, knowledge directs and colours the gaze, thereby making visible those aspects of objects that otherwise remain invisible (Foucault, 1975: p. 15). But visibility also works the other way around: far from being a feature of the object seen, visibility is also a practice, even a strategy, of selection that determines what other aspects or even objects remain invisible. In a culture where experts have high status and influence, expert knowledge, for example practised in connoisseurship – the attribution of art to particular artists – thus not only enhances and preserves its objects, it also censors them. This is the reason why a collection of things, however encompassing, cannot be the object of visual analysis. The point I am trying to make is that visual analysis, if defined in terms of kinds of objects, would be subject to the same regime of truth that it attempts to leave behind or, at least, challenge. This is the primary reason why I prefer the term I am using here, ‘visual analysis’.17 Each society, along with all of its institutions, has its regimes of truth, its discourses that are accepted as rational, and its methods for ensuring that the production, conception and maintenance of ‘truth’ are policed. Studying these regimes of truth is an integral part of the task of visual analysis. For example, anticipating what visual culture analysis ought to see as its primary object, Louis Marin analysed in 1981 the strategic use of the portrait of Louis XIV in seventeenth-century France, in a visual regime of propaganda.

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Comparably, Richard Leppert’s analysis of paintings as if they were advertisements demonstrates that visual analysis is best not defined in terms of things included (his objects are the traditional ones of art history) but in terms of what they do. Visuality is under examination, not a collection of visible things.18 In view of this conception of visuality, vision should be aligned with interpretation rather than perception (Bryson, 1983). This view merges images with textuality in ways that require neither the presence of actual texts, nor unwarranted analogies and conflations. Of course, given the location of its organs in the body, perception cannot be purified either; any attempt to separate perception and its senses from sensuality is invested in preserving the tenacious ideology of the mind-body split. Hence, it seems fair to say that all visual essentialism is at least in collusion with that endeavour. Rather, looking, as an act, is already invested in what has since been called reading.19

SITUATING VISION Vision as a social practice, as I have suggested, is best characterized by three aspects of sociality or relation: synaesthesia, affect and power-embedded cognition or knowledge. Therefore, as the composition of this volume itself intimates, visual analysis is bound up with the other fields of cultural analysis. Even if it is primarily situated in the humanities, it must at least partly disrespect the boundary that separates the human from the social sciences, a boundary it should critically examine instead. And in line with its closest relative among the social sciences, visual anthropology, it cannot take visuality for granted as a universal concept. The place and conception of visuality is a cultural, historical phenomenon whose transformations implicate sight itself. The visual, as the superior, most reliable of the five senses, is a cultural phenomenon worth critical analysis. Buddhism considers the mind as a sixth sense. As a consequence, for Buddhists, ideas are not intangible. Thus, they, too, if subject to

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the questions of their social life, can become illuminated through visual analysis.20 The three features of visuality – synaesthesia, affect and power/knowledge – join forces in many areas of social life, of which I will only mention two examples here. One is gender, the other history, conceived as chronology. The Hauser of Nigeria recognize sight as one sense, all the rest as the other sense. Distance from the body may well be the reason for this distinction. In Western culture, the primacy of sight emerged only after the invention of printing, to become gendered, specifically, masculinized. Feminist criticism, especially film theory, has amply examined the implications of this gendering. If the Hauser’s division into two senses is any indication, this gendering may well be a result of the distance from the body that sight allows. In line with this, I speculate that the unexamined isolation of ‘the visual’ as an object of study is connected to a gendered body-phobia. For visual analysis, these two examples of culturally diverse conceptions of the senses demonstrate the intricacies of the senses, the way they affect their users, and the politics of knowledge involved. As a result, they also demonstrate the inherent bond between visual analysis and visual anthropology.21 The second example concerns academic work itself. As a predominant structuring principle of history-writing, chronology is itself Eurocentric. The imposition of European chronologies can be seen as one of the techniques of colonization, along with the map, the census and the museum. Visual analysis’s first mission, therefore, is to critically analyse such socially and culturally specific institutions that contribute to a power-based naturalization of visuality. Here, knowledge takes the lead, using affect and the senses to subordinate and self-alienate subjects compelled to believe in these imposed structures.22 If visuality is no longer a quality or feature of things, nor just a physiological phenomenon (what the eye can perceive), then analysing visuality entails questioning modes of looking and the privileging of looking itself, as well as the idea that looking is based

on one sense only. A similar fate awaits the notion of ‘culture’, as will become apparent in other chapters of this book. To state my own view briefly, confronted with visuality’s many tentacles, ‘culture’ is no longer simply locally specific, as in ethnography, nor universal, as in philosophy, global, as in economically driven recent clichés, or a judgement of value, as in art history. Instead, culture must be situated, polemically, between global and local, retaining the specificity of each, as between ‘art’ and ‘everyday’, and using that specificity in order to examine the ‘patterns determining the etiology of cultural misunderstanding’.23 As a result, the negativities of our two key terms – visual culture – can be articulated as tensions, and tensions, while not allowing clear-cut distinctions, help specify domains even if none can be delimited. As HooperGreenhill phrases it: Visual culture works towards a social theory of visuality, focusing on questions of what is made visible, who sees what, how seeing, knowing and power are interrelated. It examines the act of seeing as a product of the tensions between external images or objects, and internal thought processes. (Hooper-Greenhill, 2001: p. 14)24

This bond between visual analysis and anthropology is prominent in the conception of knowledge underlying both. These reflections situate vision. Vision is not a mere instrument of knowledge; instead, its relation to knowledge is subject to questioning. The privileging of vision as an instrument of knowledge is problematic as long as the power relations involved remain obscure. For the seen has a complex relation to the unseen. The seen is considered as evidence, as truth and fact, in the same way as sight establishes a particular subject-relation to reality in which the visual aspect of an object is considered to be a property of the object itself. But knowledge is not based on properties of the object but on the relationship between object and body. This quality of offering apparent autonomy of distance and separateness to the spectator is an important feature of vision and, by extension, of visual culture, and it has contributed to the evolution of a structure of subjectivity, with specific

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consequences for the cultural representation of, for example, sexual difference.

IMAGES THINKING HISTORY The history and politics of ‘visual literacy’ – an important focus of visual analysis – foreground vision’s ‘impurity’ in the bond between the senses, affect and power. This concept suggests an analogy, not between essences, but between situations in the field of power/knowledge. Hence, what is worth studying of, specifically, visuality, is precisely that which makes vision much like language. This is necessary, not to reduce the former to the latter but, on the contrary, to make its specifics stand out on the same terms, so that the two can be productively compared and responsible methodological exchanges can lead to true interdisciplinarity.25 History comes in when we realize that the most obvious and relevant factor of visual ‘impurity’ is the assumption that objects mean different things in different discursive settings. Yet objects possess resilience to projected meanings. Visual analysis examines both this selective resilience and the meanings it protects and perpetuates, and puts such an analysis to the advantage of repressed meanings. Objects are not evidential tools of truth but sites at which discursive formation intersects with material properties.26 The materiality of objects has a certain influence on meaning: they ‘constrain the meaning that it is possible to construct’ even if this does not guarantee that a ‘right’ meaning can be found. Hooper-Greenhill writes: if the meaning so constructed is a secondary or later meaning earlier meanings still remain as traces . . . . Earlier meanings or events may even be marked on the object itself in the form of erosions, surface patina, or evidence of damage. Earlier meanings may, therefore, still be dug up, evoked, made visible. (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000: p. 50)

An obvious case of meaning’s fugitivity and resilience combined has been said to be the knocking off of heads in iconoclasm. But what you make visible, then, is the iconoclasm – important enough as an issue

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of visual culture – not the lost head. You can only retrieve the oppositional meaning, and thereby, indirectly, the meaning underlying the object damaged: the individualized (?) portrait. But a privileging of materiality undermines what can be learned from it. Changes leave scars, legible as inscriptions of the way social relationships and dominations establish marks of their power and engrave memories on things.27 In this respect, it is as impossible to firmly distinguish the concerns of art history from those of visual analysis as it is to demarcate philosophy and literature. The objects of art history, for example, are replete with scars. And typically, many contemporary artists demonstrate a fascination with these marks. They probe, analyse and endorse the scars of change, instead of nostalgically searching for the object as it ‘originally’ was. Artists help us think history. Louise Bourgeois’s Spider in the Cell series (1997) contains fragments of tapestry that she took from her parents’ tapestry restoration workshop. In one such fragment, representing a putto, the figure’s genitals had been cut out by an overzealous mother eager to spare the delicacies of her clients (Figure 8.2). This castrated putto is a scar of a multilayered past, of which the fragmented state of the entire piece of tapestry is the overwhelming metaphor. Between the antiquity imitated, the eighteenth-century culture beckoning that past, the early twentieth-century French bourgeois culture recycling these material remnants but cutting out what disturbs the period’s sensibilities, and the late twentiethcentury artist infusing the fabric with her personal memories, this absence, the hole itself, qua non-object or has-been-object is the artefact in this artwork that matters most. Hence, while being an integral element of an artwork, this hole – absent, hence, invisible – is also a prime object of visual analysis. Although Bourgeois’s installation belongs to the category of ‘art’ and, hence, is subject to art-historical reflection, for visual analysis the hole qua scar and what it tells us about history is what matters.28

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Figure 8.2

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Louise Bourgeois, Spider, installation 1997 (detail: putto)

This hole is both material and void; it is visible and visually engaging, yet there is nothing at all to be seen. Every act of looking fills in the hole. Thus it seems a nice metaphor, or allegory, for visuality – impure, (im)material, eventful. Norwegian artist Jeannette Christensen’s play with decay, with the longer duration of ideas over matter, makes another point about the fugitive nature of visuality. Here, the temporality is paradoxical: while the sculpture rots and disappears in a few weeks’ time, the act of viewing captures that temporality mid-way. Always more fugitive than the sculpture, the instant of looking is also more durable in its effect.29 The works of these artists, both socially embedded in the art world and the subject of art-historical study, comment on that discipline. They exceed that discipline’s hold to the extent that they are deeply engaged with visually ‘thinking through’the implications of the limitation to a conception of history as the search for origin. Their attempts to complicate temporality critique standard notions. For example, they question the assumption that

the provenance of an object determines its meaning. The assumption naturalizes a variety of social processes. Within the art world, it naturalizes, for example, processes of collecting, ownership and museums’ acquisition and documentation, as well as historically specific and politically problematic conceptions of artistic ‘mastery’.30 Beyond the limitation to the art world, such works as ‘thinkers’ suggest ideas concerning time that further flesh out the idea, mentioned above, that chronology is a tool of power/knowledge, not a neutral, objective measure. Moreover, that such a view has no patience with the distinction between high and mass culture (Jenks, 1995: p. 16) goes without saying. If I have chosen artworks as examples of thinking images, this is motivated by the conviction that simply ignoring, denying or wishing that distinction away is also ignoring an important tool of the technology of power. Rather, then, both ‘high art’ – the notion and the products it defines – and the distinction that grounds it are among the primary concerns of visual analysis.

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Within such a view, a final distinctive feature of visual analysis’s interdisciplinary makeup cannot remain unmentioned. This is the desire to intervene, not only in the academic fields with which it is affiliated, but also in the cultural practices one studies. Because seeing is an act of interpreting, interpretation can influence ways of seeing, hence, of imagining possibilities of change. One way of a potentially intervening act of visual analysis is suggested by Homi Bhabha when he proposes to analyse what he calls ‘seriating’ (Bhabha, 1994: p. 22). Objects brought together in specific ways thus make new series, and this facilitates their making and reiterating statements. But not only the series themselves are subject to analysis. Seriating is a spin-off from ostensibly objective technologies for observation and classification in the same way as the typically modern phenomena of census, map and museum also act as technologies for value and power. These phenomena lend themselves par excellence to visual analysis, but on the condition that their grounding in modernity, their basis in positivism, and their history of discovery, order and ownership are also taken into consideration. Only then can analyses be both convincing and suggestive of alternative orderings.31 The interventions Bhabha proposes raise an issue of visual analysis in a sense that is quite different from what I have so far proposed. Here, visuality is a tool of analysis, not an object. Although there is no space, here, to develop this, I wish to note that this perspective can bridge the gap between cultural analysis and cultural practice, and thus do justice to the confrontational definition of ‘culture’ also in the more limited framework of ‘academic culture’.

ANALYSIS But what is analysis, what can it do, in the face of this undermining of the object as artefact? Five principles underlie the interpretive practice I call analysis. A first consideration concerns the relationship to

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objects. Second, visual analysis performs a particular interpretive practice. Third, the continuity between analysis and pedagogy is at stake. A fourth principle concerns the historical-analytical examination of visual regimes. Finally, through all these principles runs a questioning of the prioritization of realism. Together, these principles can be seen as a methodological programme for visual analysis. They share a concern for detailed ‘reading’ as critical practice. In light of the above, the relationship to objects is bound to be problematic. This raises the problem of ‘application’. Jenks proposed a considered relation between the analytic and the concrete: a methodic application of theory to empirical aspects of culture (Jenks, 1995: p. 16). His phrasing implies a separation of theory from empirical reality and an instrumentalist conception of theory. The paradox of such a conception is that, under the guise of putting the theory at the service of the object, it tends to promote the subordination of the object as instance, illustration or case of the theoretical point of departure. As Fabian has argued, the so-called empirical object does not exist ‘out there’ but is brought into existence in the encounter between object and analyst, mediated by the theoretical baggage that each brings to that encounter (Fabian, 1990). This transforms the analysis from an instrumentalist ‘application’ into a performative interaction between object (including those of its aspects that remained invisible before the encounter), theory and analyst. In this view, processes of interpretation are part of the object and are, in turn, questioned. Objects are active participants in the performance of analysis in that they enable reflection and speculation, and they can contradict projections and wrong-headed interpretations (if the analyst lets them!) and thus constitute a theoretical object with philosophical relevance. The second, related principle qualifies the nature of interpretive practices. In a visual analysis that endorses the critical task of analysis, such practices are also both method and object of questioning. This element of self-reflection is indispensable, although it

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is always at risk of self-indulgence and narcissism. Moreover, the hermeneutics of the visual transforms the hermeneutical circle. Traditionally, that circle of whole-detailwhole takes the autonomy and wholeness of the object as a given. This autonomist assumption is no longer acceptable, especially in light of the social intricacies of the ‘life’ of objects. Instead, visual analysis considers the object as a detail in itself, of a whole that is, by definition, only provisionally and strategically delimited. For example, an object can be a detail of either the whole set or series (in Bhabha’s critical sense of seriating) or of the social world in which it functions.32 Moreover, interpretive practices in visual analysis endorse the notion that meaning is dialogic. It comes about in, rather than existing prior to the interpretation. Meaning is a dialogue between viewer and object as well as between viewers. This situation is further complicated by the fact that the concept of meaning itself is also dialogic, since it is differently conceived according to regimes of rationality and semiotic styles. In addition, dialogue does not imply harmonious coexistence. Rather, dialogue is a process in which power struggles take place. This requires a serious consideration of strategies of empowerment. Hence, the third principle of method is the continuity between analysis and pedagogy that results from the performative view of the former. Any activity in visual analysis is simultaneously a moment of visual literacy education, a training in receptiveness to the object without positivistic veneration for its inherent ‘truth’. Human desire for meaning works on the basis of pattern recognition, so that learning happens when new information can be made to fit into the already known patterns of what we ‘simply’ know already, our so-called tacit knowledge. Because new information is always processed on the basis of frames or structures in which it can fit, no perception is possible without memory.33 This does not mean that information is entirely streamlined, for a complete overlap between the known and the offered information precludes learning altogether. A kind of

‘insubordination’ to pre-established schemata is also an important element in learning. Visual analysis is especially attentive to the multi-sensory aspect of learning, its active nature, and its inextricable mixture of affective, bodily and cognitive components. ‘Objects are interpreted through a “reading” using the gaze which is combined with a broader sensory experience involving tacit knowledge and embodied responses. Both cognitive and emotive responses may result, some of which may remain unspoken’, writes Hooper-Greenhill (2000: p. 119).34 A fourth methodological principle is the historical-analytical examination of visualcultural regimes such as they are embodied by the key institutions and their still-operating features – school, church, museum, but also advertising agencies that plaster their messages all over the public space. This form of historical analysis does not reify one historical state in the past but looks at the present situation as a starting point and searchlight. The modernist museum, still predominant, is a paradigmatic object for such analyses. Its encyclopaedic ambition, taxonomic organization, rhetoric of transparency and nationalistic premises have been reiterated to the point of being almost completely naturalized. A historical analysis of the kind I have in mind does not stop at describing these principles. It will first of all show their remnants in contemporary culture, the hybrid forms these take, and analyse the implications of how postmodern museums try to transform the modernist museum. In short, visual analysis critically analyses visible objects and events of seeing. These are considered in detail within the junctures and articulations of visual culture, as well as undermined in the naturalized persistence of the ways these events are framed. It focuses on those sites where the objects of an often primarily but never exclusively visual nature intersect with the processes and practices that streamline a given culture, including relations of power and sources of inequity that contribute to that streamlining.35 Visual analysis as a specific approach to visible practices and things within or without

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the frameworks of those disciplines tends to focus on those alternative approaches to objects less thoroughly studied in them. With a perspective that stands at a distance from art history and its traditional methods, visual analysis critically analyses the master narratives that frame events of seeing and their objects, and that are presented as natural, universal, true and inevitable. It attempts to dislodge them so that alternative narratives can become visible. It explores and explains the bond between visual culture and nationalism, as evidenced in museums, schools and the histories presented there, and the participating discourses of imperialism and racism.36 A privileged but by no means exclusive site where these practices can be analysed is, again, the museum, but now the nonart museums of history, science and other specific practices. Here as elsewhere visual analysis should analyse the bond between class and the elitist element in visual culture’s educational thrust, including the tasks traditionally assigned to the museum. It should also understand some of the motivations of the prioritization of history in what I have elsewhere called ‘anteriority narratives’ (Bal, 2001). The picturing of the power-relations of the present under the rubric of ‘the history of the nation’ can be understood as one of the strategies of disciplining performed by museums. Thus they enmesh their visitors in systems of visibility and normalization.37 A fifth principle of visual analysis is to understand some of the strategies of the prioritization of realism. This is necessary because the goal of the promotion of realism is to stimulate mimetic behaviour. The dominant classes set themselves and their heroes up as examples to recognize and follow, and it is barely an exaggeration to say that this interest is visible in the cult of portraiture. This shows the real political interests – in the Habermassian sense – underlying the preference for realism. It promotes the taste for (pseudo-)transparency. The authenticity required has an additional investment in indexicality. Unpacking these preferences and showing them for what they are might help in

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diminishing the hold of realism over Western visual culture.38

CONCLUSION The implication of these five methodological principles together should be clear. Neither the boundary between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture can be maintained, nor that between visual production and its study. If, as I have argued, the object co-performs the analysis, then creating and policing boundaries of any sort seems the most futile of all futilities that academic work can engage in. The usages of objects change meaning as the environment changes; for example, objects from ‘home’ become more important for people in diaspora as a means of enabling cultural memory (Bhabha, 1994: p. 7). Similarly, the function of visual characteristics in relation to social processes – scale, for instance – can be the purveyor of a specific relationship to the body, as in Jenny Saville’s paintings. It can instil emotional comfort or distancing, confinement, intimacy or threat, but also, as a cognitive mode of understanding, even a ‘scientific’ method for grasping the complexities of the world (baroque). Finally, the interdiscursive and intertextual relationships between objects, series, tacit knowledges, texts, discourses and the different participating senses require analysis.39 Analysis, I have said it before, must be detailed enough to allow the ‘object’ to coperform the analysis. At the same time, visual analysts cannot become a new kind of formalists, for they set out to account for the interaction, not the object in and of itself. This may well be the most characteristic element of visual analysis if we seek to distinguish it from the longer-standing disciplines that study visual objects. For this analysis focuses on what is singular about the practice under scrutiny as an entrance into the larger picture that, although never universal, has more general bearings. In line with Michel de Certeau, whose Practice of Everyday life (first published in 1984) remains a precious antecedent for visual analysis as much as for

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visual anthropology, material culture studies and other fields presented in this volume, visual analysis is committed to understand the everyday practices of a ‘tactics’ of seeing – a ‘making do’ that plays tricks on the established powers. These practices include, but are not limited to, the art we find in art museums and galleries. But of that art, the social conditions of visibility in their singularity, not the single authorship or thematic centre, is the object of analysis. Much work based on these five principles goes towards a critical analysis of the use of visual culture for the reinforcement of gender and racial stereotypes. I began with a classical example, Rembrandt’s drawing of Judith, or care, or threat, or inattention, inside and outside, private and public. Let me end with one that is also a classic of sorts, this time of ‘popular culture’. Steve McCurry’s famous photograph of a girl, called Afghan girl (Sharbat Gula) is a case of visual exploitation. Of the many different ways this image has been exploited, the most recent one I came upon was its use in an exhibition called Beautiful Suffering. The exhibition, held in Williamstown, MA, in the Spring of 2006 critically framed the different uses and abuses of the photograph. This was an attempt to question such exploitations, hence, to practise a critical visual analysis. One can consider, however, adding to that visual list the one in which, precisely, the framings were exposed. For, whatever the photo as such says, out of context, this image is infused, in many of its earlier uses as well as in this exhibition, with the idea of ‘suffering’ that nothing in it specifically ‘expresses’ or ‘represents’. Hence, the suffering can only come from the simple combination with the title: being Afghan, in Western eyes, equals suffering.40 But with the tool of a critical visual analysis, this need not be so. Let’s face it, or her: the piercing, unsmiling, surprisingly light eyes so harmonious with the colour of the greenishblue background as well as the small patch of the same colour, from her dress, in the left-bottom corner; the set mouth coloured to match the colour of her dress, and the

shape of the headscarf, so elegantly leaving her hair visible. For those who have been preprogrammed by Western traditions in visual culture, images of the Madonna can start up a dialogue about the culture of suffering, while Manet’s Olympia has something to add about the insolent look so contemptuous and dismissive of the viewer, his preconceptions and his voyeurism. Olympia, in 2006, still goes around as the quintessential image of a prostitute, while nothing in the image shows that she is. The mother of Jesus is venerated for her role, her images admired, not questioned for promoting suffering. Similarly, Sharbat Gula will live her visual life as Afghan, hence, suffering, if we fail to see both the contrived and prettified colour scheme of the image and the lack of interest in being stereotyped in her eyes. Visual analysis, I like to think, is about facing.

NOTES 1 The kind of articles to which the present one belongs necessarily mines my earlier work. Many of the thoughts expressed here have been published in my somewhat controversial article on visual essentialism (2002), and some in an earlier study on an interdisciplinary approach to the Hebrew Bible (1988). I also rely on ideas I developed in a study of visual discursivity (1991) and a counterpart on linguistic visuality (1997). The more general semiotic views underlying this article are extensively discussed in a volume from 1994, and the museum studies remarks are developed in a book on that subject (1996a). Finally, methodological remarks on concepts and analysis stem from a recent study (2002). 2 Rembrandt van Rijn, Judith Beheading Holophernes, ca. 1652, Benesch 897 (vol. V). Drawing, 182 × 150 cm. Naples, Museo di Capodimonte. A rather representative art-historical analysis on the Judith theme is Graeme (1984). An iconographic analysis specialized on one artist that includes excellent readings of Judith paintings is offered by Garrard (1989). 3 For the use of ‘micro-pirating’ within ‘postproduction’ see Bourriaud (2005). 4 This characterization is presented here as starker – for the sake of clarity – than the reality of art-historical practice and of visual analysis warrant. 5 On the importance of anachronism in historical study, see Didi-Huberman (2000) and Bal et al. (1999). The term ‘visual studies’ points to the background in cultural studies. It was first used at the intersections

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between cultural history and art history (Baxandall, 1971). The term began to be noticed later (e.g. in Alpers, 1983). For an overview of the term’s development, see Cherry (2005). 6 Some scholars (e.g. Fabian, 2001: p. 17) refer to this tendency to reify the visual as ‘visualism’, a concept that also means a visual positivism. For more on this, see the chapter on Visual Anthropology in this volume. 7 For issues of inter-, multi- and transdisciplinarity, see Bal (1988). 8 The phrase ‘the social life of things’ constitutes the title of Appadurai (1986). For a good example of the kind of analysis that ensues from this definition of the object of visual analysis, see Appadurai and Breckenridge (1992). In this paper, the authors consider museums as interpretive communities. On family snapshots, see Hirsch (1999: pp. 223–247), and Van Alphen (2005) on Hendeles and Forgacs. 9 She cites Calkins (1980: p. 166). On the conflation of thing with aim, see Silverman’s philosophical study of vision, World Spectators (2000, esp ch. 6). 10 For a brilliant study on affect as crucial for acts of looking, see Jill Bennett (2005). On the history of the concept of ideology, see Vadée (1973); on textual manifestations and their analysis, Hamon (1984). 11 Davey (1999) rendered in Hooper-Greenhill (2000: p. 115). For our discussion, this rhetoric also beckons in anthropology, as well it should. Fabian (1996) has demonstrated what an anthropologically based visual analysis looks like. See also his critical glosses to contemporary academic trends (2001, esp. Part I), many of which can benefit visual analysis quite substantially. The concept of the effect of the real is so frequently used that it has lost all specificity. For the purpose of recycling it within visual analysis, I recommend a return to Barthes’ initial formulations (1968). See also the chapter on Material Culture Studies in this volume. 12 The most succinct yet comprehensive argument for the use of the concept of framing in cultural analysis remains Jonathan Culler’s ‘Author’s Preface’ to his volume Framing the Sign (1988). A succinct exposition of the kindred but more limited phrase ‘scopic regimes’ can be found in Jay (1988). 13 For example, Background (1991–1994), Lapsus Exposure (1992–1994), INITIALS (1993–1994), and Photograph (1998–1999), to name only the works brilliantly analysed by Kaja Silverman in Coleman (2002). Silverman does not mention visual analysis in these four essays, but she practises it no less. 14 See Van Alphen’s theorization of the image through texts by Charlotte Delbo, mentioned earlier (2005). A somewhat less exclusive, albeit notoriously relevant, case is Proust’s ‘visual poetics’ (Bal, 1997). 15 See Van Alphen (2005), a book that opens with an explanation of Damisch’s ideas. Fabian (2001: p. 96) makes this point for popular culture. See, also, (Rodowick 2001: p. 24). The terms alimentary images and foodscape come from Dolphijn (2004). For an

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example of an analysis of alimentary images, see Bal (2005). 16 Foucault (1975: p. ix); Hooper-Greenhill (2000: p. 49). For a commentary on the Foucauldian notion of power/knowledge, see Spivak (1993). 17 Johannes Fabian (1990) made a strong case for the performative conception of knowledge. On knowledge and visibility, see Foucault (1975: p. 15). For the term ‘regime of truth’, see Foucault (1977: p. 13). See Bal (2003) for a critique of one of the most prestigious projects of connoisseurship, the case of Rembrandt. 18 For the baroque regime of visual power/knowledge, see Marin (1981). On painting as advertisement, see Leppert (1996). Bennett (2005) also uses the distinction between what images are and what they do. 19 On the term ‘reading’ for the act of looking, see Bal (1996b). 20 Classen (1993). This important study was brought to my attention by Hooper-Greenhill (2000). 21 Classen (1993: pp. 2, 5, 9). For a genderbased analysis of vision in relation to knowledge, see Pajaczkowska in Carlson and Pajaczkowska (2000). 22 Hooper-Greenhill (2000: p. 164 n 47); Anderson (1991, added final chapter). 23 Pajaczkowska, in Carson and Pajaczkowska (2000: p. 3). 24 Based on Burnett (1995: p. 41); emphasis added. 25 The term ‘visual literacy’, as controversial as it is productive – it highlights the teachability of visuality – was the subject of a symposium held in Rotterdam in 1997. 26 Davis (1997); Crary (1990: p. 31). 27 Foucault (1977: p.160). On iconoclasm, see Dario Gamboni (1997). 28 See Bal (2001: pp. 80–85) for an extensive analysis of this hole, and the image in which it features. 29 For an extensive analysis of Christensen’s work with time, see Bal (1998). 30 On the problem of artistic intention – a primary instance of ‘origin’ – see Bal (2002, ch. 7). 31 Anderson (1991: p. 163). 32 The phrase ‘hermeneutics of the visual’ comes from Heywood and Sandywell (1999). 33 Davey (1999: p. 12). See also the many recent works on cultural memory, e.g. Bal et al. (1999). In relation to images, cultural memory is analysed in Bennett (2005). On tactit knowledge, see Sotto (1994: pp. 36, 42–44). 34 For a review of the conception of education tacitly endorsed in visual literacy education, see her ch. 6. On insubordination, see Bruner (1992 esp. ch. 3 ‘Entrance into meaning’). 35 ‘Critically’ is meant here in the strong sense inherited from the Frankfurt School of social theory, in particular the early work of Jürgen Habermas (1972) and what Theodor Adorno called ‘negative dialectic’.

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Since visuality encompasses the social life of things and the social construction of visibility, its analyses are as inherently social, political and ethical, as they are aesthetic, literary, discursive and visual. 36 Hobsbawm (1990). For specifically visual analysis of the grand narratives of empire, see Mitchell (1994). Boer (2004) offers an excellent example of in-depth visual analyses that lay bare, subvert and replace grand narratives. 37 On this, see also Hooper-Greenhill (1989). Bennett (1996) offers the most useful as well as profound structural framework to begin such an analysis. See also Duncan (1995). 38 On the cult of portraiture, see Woodall (1996); Van Alphen (2005). The hermeneutics of suspicion, a feminist intervention that has been crucial in denaturalizing privileged modes of reading, is currently under critical scrutiny. See, for example, Sedgwick (1997) who proposes the alternative – or following step – of ‘reparative reading’. 39 For the function of scale in baroque-inspired contemporary art, see Bal (1999). 40 Although this image is widely known, both the author and the editors would have liked to have been able to include the image here. However, permission to do so was denied by the photographer.

REFERENCES Adorno, T.W. (1973) Negative Dialectics. Tr. E.B. Ashton. New York: Continuum. Alpers, S. (1983) The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Alphen, E. Van (2005) Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities. London: Verso (revised and expanded edition). Appadurai, A. (ed.) (1986) The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Appadurai, A. and Breckenridge, C. (1992) ‘Museums are good to think: heritage on view in India’, in I. Karp, C. Mullen Kraemer and S.D. Lavine (eds), Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 34–55. Bal, M. (1988) Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre and Scholarship on Sisera’s Death. Tr. M. Gumpert. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bal, M. (1991) Reading ‘Rembrandt’: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bal, M. (1994) On Meaning-Making: Essays in Semiotics. Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press.

Bal, M. (1996a) Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis. Routledge. Bal, M. (1996b) ‘Reading art?’, in G. Pollock (ed.), Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Reading. London: Routledge, pp. 25–41. Bal, M. (1997) The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually. Tr. A. Milne. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bal, M. (1999) Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bal, M. (2001) Louise Bourgeois’ Spider : The Architecture of Art-Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bal, M. (2002) Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bal, M. (2003) ‘Her Majesty’s Masters’, in M. F. Zimmermann (ed.), The Art Historian: National Traditions and Institutional Practices. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, pp. 81–109. Bal, M. (2005) ‘Food, form, and visibility: GLUB and the aesthetic of everyday life’, Postcolonial Studies, 8(1): 51–73. Bal, M., Crewe, J. and Spitzer, L. (eds) (1999) Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover (NH)/London: University Press of New England. Barthes, R. (1968) ‘L’effet du réel’, Communications, 4: 84–89. (English: (1986) ‘The Reality Effect’, in R. Barthes (ed.), The Rustle of Language. Tr. R. Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 141–154.) Baxandall, M. (1971) Giotto and the Orators. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benesch, O. (1973) The Drawing of Rembrandt. London: Phaidon. Complete edn. six vols. Enlarged and edited by E. Benesch. Bennett, J. (2005) Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bennett, T. (1996) ‘The exhibitionary complex’, in R. Greenberg, B.W. Ferguson, and S. Nairne (eds), Thinking About Exhibitions. London: Routledge, pp. 82–109. Bennett, T. (1998) Culture: A Reformer’s Science. London: Sage. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Boer, I.E. (2004) Dis-Orienting Vision: Rereading Stereotypes in French Orientalist Texts and Images. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Bollas, C. (1987) The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Bourriaud, N. (2005) Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Programs the World. New York: Lukas and Sternberg. Bruner, J. (1992) Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bryson, N. (1983) Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. London: Macmillan. Burnett, R. (1995) Cultures of Vision: Images, Media and the Imaginary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. Calkins, N.A. (1980) ‘Object-teaching: its purpose and province’, Education, 1: 165–172. Carson, F. and Pajaczkowska, C. (eds) (2000) Feminist Visual Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Certeau, M. de (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Tr. S. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cherry, D. (2005) Art : History : Visual : Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Classen, C. (1993) Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures. London and New York: Routledge. Coleman, J. (2002) James Coleman (exhibition catalogue). Munich: Hatje Cantz. Crary, J. (1990) Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Culler, J. (1988) Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press. Damisch, H. (1994) The Origin of Perspective. Tr. J. Goodman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Orig. (1987) L’origine de la perspective. Paris: Flammarion.) Damisch, H. (2002) A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting. Tr. J. Lloyd. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Orig. (1972) Théorie du nuage: pour une histoire de la peinture. Paris: Editions du Seuil.) Davey, N. (1999) ‘The hermeneutics of seeing’, in I. Heywood and B. Sandwell (eds), Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 3–29. Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology. Tr. and introduction G. Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Didi-Huberman, G. (2000) Devant le temps. Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Dolphijn, R. (2004) Foodscapes: Towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption. Delft: Eburon. Duncan, C. (1995) Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 48–70.

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Dyer, R. (1997) White. London and New York: Routledge. Fabian, J. (1990) Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations Through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Fabian, J. (1996) Remembering the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fabian, J. (2001) Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Foucault, M. (1975) The Birth of the Clinic. Tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1977) ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in D.F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memories, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 139–164. Gamboni, D. (1997) Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press. Garrard, M. (1989) Artemesia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Giroux, H. (1992) Border Crossings. London: Routledge. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. (1st edn,1956.) Goodman, N. (1976) Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Hackett. Habermas, J. (1972) Knowledge and Human Interests. Tr. J.J. Shapiro. London: Heinemann Educational Books. (1st edn, 1968.) Hamon, P. (1984) Texte et idéologie. Paris: P.U.F. Hansen, M.B.N (2005) ‘Affect as medium, or the digital-facial-image’, Journal of Visual Culture, 2(2): 205–228. Heywood, I. and Sandywell, B. (eds) (1999) Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual. London: Routledge. Hirsch, M. (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hirsch, M. (ed.) (1999) The Familial Gaze. Dartmouth, NH: University Press of New England, pp. 223–247. Hobsbawm, E.J. (1990) Nations and Nationalism Since 1870: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1989) ‘The museum in the disciplinary society’, in S. Pearce (ed.) Museum Studies in Material Culture. London: Leicester University Press, pp. 61–72. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2000) Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Jay, M. (1988) ‘Scopic regimes of modernity’, in H. Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality. Dia Art Foundation,

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Discussions in Contemporary Culture. Seattle: Bay Press. Vol. 2: pp. 3–38. Jenks, C. (ed.) (1995) Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Jordan, G. and Weedon, C. (1995) Cultural Politics: Class, Gender, Race and the Postmodern World. Oxford: Blackwell. Keller, E.F. and Grontkowski, C.R. (1983) ‘The mind’s eye’, in S. Harding and M.B. Hintikka (eds), Discovering Reality. London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, pp. 207–224. Leppert, R. (1996) Art and the Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions of Imagery. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Lyotard, J.F. (1983) ‘Fiscourse digure’ Tr. M. Lydon. Theater Journal, 35(3): 333–357. Manovich, L. (2000) The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marin, L. (1981) Le portrait du roi. Paris: Editions de Minuit. McGuigan, J. (1996) Culture and the Public Sphere. London: Routledge. McNeill, D. and Bennett, J. (2002) African Marketplace (exhibition catalogue). Sydney: The University of New South Wales, Ivan Dougherty Gallery. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994) Landscape and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. O’Sullivan, T. et al. (1994) Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge. Rodowick, D.N. (2001) ‘Presenting the figural’, in D.N. Rodowick (ed.), Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media. Durham/London: Duke University Press, pp. 1–44. Sedgwick, E.K. (1997) ‘Paranoid reading and reparative reading; or, you’re so paranoid, you probably think this introduction is about you,’ in E.K. Sedgwick (ed.)

Queer Readings in Fiction. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 1–37. Shohat, E. and Stam, R. (1998) ‘Narrativizing visual culture: towards a polycentric aesthetic’, in N. Mirzoeff (ed.), Visual Culture Reader. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 27–49. Silverman, K. (1988) The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Silverman, K. (2000) World Spectators. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Silverman, K. (2002) James Coleman. S. Gaensheimer (ed.). Munich: Hatje Cantz. Monograph on James Coleman filling the catalogue for a major exhibition. Sotto, E. (1994) When Teaching Becomes Learning: A Theory and Practice of Teaching. London: Cassell. Spivak, G.C. (1993) ‘More on power/knowledge’, in Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, pp. 25–51. Sturken, M. and Cartwright, L. (2001) Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, G.J. (1984) ‘Judith and the infant Hercules: its iconography’, American Imago, 41(2): 101–115. Vadée, M. (1973) L’idéologie. Paris: P.U.F. Walker, J.A. and Chaplin, S. (1997) Visual Culture: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wigley, M. (1994) ‘The domestication of the house’, in P. Brunette and D. Wills (eds), Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 203–227. Williams, R. (1976) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press. Woodall, J. (ed.) (1996) Portraiture: Facing the Subject. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

9 Film Studies Tom Gunning

WHAT IS FILM STUDIES? Film studies is one of the most recent disciplines to have found an academic berth. When I entered one of the first graduate programmes in cinema studies in 1970, studying film seemed a daring choice, almost a provocation to traditional academic study, the wave of the future. However, in recent years film studies may have suffered from the fate suffered by many novelties of premature aging. Has the era of film studies come to an end? Should the study of film simply be absorbed, if not replaced, by the larger discipline of media studies or even visual studies?1 Has a scholarly preoccupation with film or cinema studies become a limited paradigm, appearing a bit out-moded, even a bit embarrassing, like an outfit once considered trendy? The future, to coin a phrase, is not what it used to be. A medium that spent most of the twentieth century trying to establish cultural credentials and often apologizing for its cultural youthfulness (or even immaturity) now has to defend itself from charges of incipient Alzheimer’s syndrome. Could it be the fate of cultural studies that embrace modernity and its products that they pass

too quickly from youthfulness to senility, displaced by the latest academic fashion? If this scenario holds true, dismally, we confront the possibility of an unending cycle of the démodé, with the study of modernity miming, rather than grasping, the taste for novelty that has defined the modern era. As I will explain later in this essay, I welcome the broadening of the reference of film studies to other – and not exclusively visual – media. But such a broadening must also involve a deepening of our investigations, or we risk a rudderless pursuit of novelty. The questions raised by media study, including film studies as its most developed and well-founded exemplar, remain not only essential in our current cultural and political environment, but progressively more critical, in both senses. Millennial proclamations that visual media would displace verbal languages as the major mode of communication not only drew on discredited utopian models, but also misunderstood the diverse purposes of different sign systems. But if the dichotomy between visual and verbal media is a false one, this does not mean that visual media can be shelved as a failed paradigm. The way visual media, especially those relying on

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movement, have transformed our sensibilities and our pictures of the world remains, I think, largely unexplored. This neglect is not only shortsighted, it could be perilous. As I hope to show in this essay, the study of film provides the best paradigm for a broader investigation of visual media, not only as a form of archaeology for other visual media, but as a model of the way that we must rigorously research the very specificity of each visual medium, both of its formal aspects and its individual histories of use and reception. While I do not want to return to the claims of purity that characterized some early film theory, I feel that the tendency to assume one medium displaces another, or the search for a generalized media theory that dissolves specificity, risks losing precisely the aesthetic and historical insight that the focused study of film offers. Film as a medium owes its aesthetic, social and technological power to its porous and protean nature, its ability to swallow up and integrate a number of other media, and its basic ecology of existing only in relation to the diverse media that surround it. But, while this interrelation among media will form a central theme of my description of both the history and the future of film studies, I will also defend the value gained by focusing on film as a separate discipline whose specificity can only be diluted, if not dissolved, by dumping it into an under-theorized sea of ‘media studies’. A key word of modern culture, the term ‘media’ threatens to resemble Hegel’s description of the system of his rival Schelling as a night in which all cows appear black, an attractive but unbounded and ill-defined rubric threatening to absorb everything and abolish all differences. Media, a plural noun that often gets misused as singular, need to be understood in a differentiated plurality. I will try in this essay to sketch my view of film studies as a dynamic and evolving part of contemporary cultural analysis. My focus in this essay lies precisely in seeing film as a cultural product in both an active and a passive manner; that is, viewed both as a result of, and as an agent in, social and cultural processes. I want to avoid a simple division of

film studies in a neat compartmentalization of the study of film texts (the aesthetic, formal and ideological aspects – often understood as the study of ‘Films’) and the study of the social and cultural contexts that surround them (the industrial and technological organization of film production, distribution and exhibition and the social and cultural aspects of the reception of films – often understood as the study of ‘Cinema’). While this distinction may well be methodologically necessary in certain contexts, such a separation can have a pernicious effect, precisely because it can seem so useful. When such a methodological separation is carried out it must be supplemented by an understanding which sees – not a true division between texts and context, between the aesthetic and the social, the ideological and the cultural – but rather a continuous process of exchange and interaction which explains the power of film (or cinema) as a cultural force. I will introduce the term ‘film practices’ both to capture the dynamic activity implied in all these modes (activities rather than entities) and to demonstrate the actual interaction of a variety of forces within cinema (or film). I will tend therefore to go against established practice in media studies and use the terms ‘film’ and ‘cinema’ somewhat interchangeably (a decision I will discuss in more detail later). While emphasizing the specificity gained by a focus on film studies, this focus can only be effective if combined with a vital sense of film’s inherent diversity. From inertia, film studies has developed a default mode in which ‘film’ means what we might term ‘movies’ – feature-length commercial entertainment fictional films. While ignoring the economic and cultural dominance of movies over other forms of film could condemn film studies to a hermetic irrelevance, restricting our horizons to this most popular form impoverishes not only our conception of the nature of film form, but even our understanding of how the movies themselves operate. Hollywood will always remain the elephant in the screening room of film studies, and if we ignore it, it is likely to squash us while our backs are turned. Yet this does not mean that the elephant should

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occupy the whole of our horizon. Further, the myth of a monolithic Hollywood needs to be questioned, and the elephant may prove as diverse in its forms as the one the blind men argued over. Diversity remains at least partly in the eyes of the beholder, and the definition brought to all cinematic products by the people who watch and make sense of them remains one of the most dynamic and elusive aspects of film studies. A consideration of film in relation to other media, therefore, does not provide an alternative to film study. Rather, it defines a major aspect of what film study must be (or become). The unstable identity of film as a medium and as a cultural force has actually been an issue since its invention at the end of the nineteenth century. Probing the myths of film’s invention reveals the historical process of endowing a medium with an identity. Most Americans assign the invention of film to Thomas Edison and almost all French scholars claim the Lumière brothers (with Marey, Demenÿ and Reynaud as occasional alternatives), while a number of other countries promote their own pioneers (e.g. Germany’s Anschutz or Skladinowsky brothers, England’s Friese-Greene or Le Prince). Numerous patents, prototypes and then commercial models of motion picture apparatuses appeared in many countries between 1889 and 1896.2 But rather than picking our way through this legal and technological thicket, I want to follow the Canadian film historian André Gaudréault’s insight that cinema did not possess a clear separate identity until around 1905 (Gaudréault, 1997). For the first decade of what we (retrospectively) term ‘film history’ most of the people involved in cinema thought they were either improving or extending another, older medium. As an invention, Edison understood his kinetoscope to be an extension of his phonograph (‘doing for the eye, what the phonograph does for the ear’).3 The Lumière Company, France’s largest producer of photographic goods, saw their Cinématographe as an extension specifically of instantaneous photography.4 The British pioneers

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of the Brighton School (Williamson, Smith, Hepworth) understood the projection of motion pictures as an improvement of the magic lantern projections they had been involved with for decades (indeed, the light source for the first film projections initially came from magic lanterns, the change lying only in what was projected, moving images on celluloid, rather than glass slides).5 The great trick film producer Georges Méliès approached cinema as an extension of the visual illusions of disappearance and transformation he had managed in his magic theatre in Paris.6 The Anglo-American Mutoscope and Biograph Company promoted its actualitydominated film programmes as ‘Visual Newspapers’, while its main American competition, The Edison Company, initially specialized in filming vaudeville acts.7 As Rick Altman has put it in his recent study of the sound of silent cinema, rather than having a univocal, unequivocal identity in its first decade, cinema was subject to multiple definitions, based on practices from other existing media (to those I mentioned above Altman adds legitimate theatre and the travel lecture). Although Gaudréault (and Altman) correctly argue that film forged a separate identity out of this welter of disparate media, taking elements from each of them, film’s cannibalization and absorption of other media does not end with the supposed immaturity of its earliest decade. The history of cinema is the history of its ecological struggle and interaction with other media. The great transformation of cinema from silent to sound resulted from film’s adoption of technology developed within the sound-recording and telephone industries, dominated initially by a desire simply to record orchestra scores for films, and to produce short films of ‘canned’ vaudeville acts. The subsequent (and somewhat unexpected) rise of the ‘Talkies’ into a position of dominance brought an even closer relation to the theatrical institutions of the spoken drama and the musical (Crafton, 1997). The last decades have seen another revolution in the technological relation between film and other media. Although attempts were made in the 1960s to find essential differences

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between film and video and to derive aesthetic principles from their opposition, for the last decade most films have been edited on video, sometimes shot wholly or partly on video, had special effects that were achieved through digital means, and frequently reached their largest audiences on video and television. Beyond the simple recording of sound, film studios have long been involved in the marketing of music, an aspect of film history only recently explored and which has taken on increasing importance in the last decades.8 At the present time we might envision film being cannibalized by a variety of digital media, one of the motivations, undoubtedly, for some to think that film studies has had its day. I have little doubt, however, that if celluloid disappears this transformation too can be approached as a development in film history (or perhaps a better term, if the material film base is actually in peril of disappearing, the history of ‘motion pictures’), given the historically hybrid nature of film. Film and the film industry have rarely had clearly circumscribed borders. Rather, we might view the cinema as a braid, a cable combining strands of diverse media, and frequently adding new strands from new media or alternatively seeing individual strands branch off and evolve separately. Working through this hybrid and historically shifting identity constitutes a centre of film studies – or it should. But, a purist might ask, while film may have a hybrid history, aren’t these accidents of history corrected by the tradition of film theory that attempts to define precisely what makes film a unique medium, its core essence which needs to be isolated and fostered against accretions from other media? Defining this cinematic essence would seem to have constituted the central task of classical film theory.9 But, viewed historically, this search for a cinematic essence appears as a more complex project than simply an idealist essentialism. Classical film theory’s attempts to define the medium’s unique properties and affinities, rather than enforcing cinema’s splendid isolation, actually reflect its ecological struggle with other

media. Rather than establishing a stable, coherent essence, classical film theory’s attempt to differentiate film from theatre, literature or journalism revealed its insecurity as a new form in a cultural and aesthetic environment generally hostile to novelty and technology. The key texts of classical film theory represent forays in a battle for the social acceptance of film that ultimately triggered redefinitions of modern aesthetic experience. These battles included: questions about film’s aesthetic possibilities (especially assumptions coming from the nineteenth century that, as a mechanical technology, film could never aspire to the realm of art); its social address (the suspicion, which grew in cinema’s second decade, that film was inordinately associated with the working class and had detoured around the official guardians of culture, pandering to the audience’s basest interests); and its ability to participate in social discourse (the US Supreme Court, for instance, deciding in 1915 that constitutional protection of freedom of speech did not apply to the film medium).10 As a means of attaining social leverage, the desire to establish film’s social and aesthetic status of necessity involved claims that would stress the medium’s unique contribution to these realms. Rather than establishing a tradition and setting up canonical models, classical film theory’s attempt to establish a unique definition of film became agonistic, as cinema itself transformed in response to technical and social forces. Thus one sees the confusion of some early film theorists when confronted by the coming of sound or colour in the 1930s (both innovations were denounced, for instance, by pioneer film theorist Rudolph Arnheim [1966]). On the other hand, the transformations in film style that the coming of sound and depth-of-field cinematography triggered in the 1940s also allowed the new theoretical paradigms introduced by André Bazin in the 1950s (Bazin, 2005). Except as an excuse for lavish parties, media blitzes and the rewarding of commercial success, no Academy of Motion Pictures ever truly existed to police the acceptability of film language.

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Ranging from silent to sound and black and white to colour; framed in small screen ratios and wide ones; projected in theatres or viewed on television; film’s own protean historical and technical development has consistently frustrated essentialist definitions. My purpose here is not to point out the limitations of classical film theory, but rather to redefine its apparent essentialism in a dynamic relation to film’s technological and cultural history. The definitions of cinematic essences these theorists offered may be less valuable as philosophical positions than as articulations of how film related to other media. Film studies must always foreground precisely this question, as a way of capturing film in its protean relation to modern culture. Far from discounting the achievements of film theory, this understanding allows us to trace its transformations as more than a series of logical contradictions and provides future theory with an expansive agenda. The discussion that follows will draw most of its examples from American (although not necessarily Hollywood) filmmaking. Since this national cinema has constituted the bulk of my research, it supplied a natural source for examples. Hopefully however, examples (and indeed counterexamples) from other cinemas will suggest themselves to the reader.

A HISTORY OF FILM PRACTICES The historian’s task, as Carol Marvin indicated some time ago, lies partly in describing the moment when ‘old technologies were new’ (Marvin, 1988). Film shares with the new digital and computer-based media not simply a place in a succession of novel technologies, but an initial aura of nearly utopian expectations (some fulfilled, others rendered risible) of transformations in the ways people live, think and communicate. The history of modern media must rediscover these utopian moments when each medium seemed to carry this promise of transformation. This means not simply evaluating which promises were actually achieved, but also sensing the implications of tasks left

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unfulfilled. History avoids becoming simple historicism, as Walter Benjamin claimed, by keeping faith with the dead and their hopes and aspirations, taking them seriously as human possibilities, not simply inert and passé illusions (Benjamin, 1969). In other words, while acknowledging film’s debt to other older media, we should not read this debt as cancelling out the promise of future transformations the new medium also entailed. Like the excesses of media pundits today, such promises of unique possibilities amounted to more than a theoretical discourse; early theorists of the uniqueness of cinema tried to shape the future through a dramatic vision of film’s possibilities. Theory therefore acts as something more than a timeless discourse. The first theorists waged a polemical struggle against film’s lack of a cultural pedigree and against academic prejudice concerning modern technology’s aesthetic possibilities. What is now called film theory emerged in the twenties primarily as a discourse coming from filmmakers (Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, Lev Kuleshov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Sergei Eisenstein) trying to solve problems within their craft, including defining film’s formal nature and its social role.11 This tradition of what we could call ‘applied film theory’ certainly did not disappear, but film theory in the present era more often sees itself as a philosophical discourse (whether based in the arguments of analytical philosophy or Deleuzean speculations). The extraordinary theoretical writings coming from filmmakers in recent decades (such as Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, Peter Kubelka, Pier Paolo Pasolini,Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard, Raul Ruiz) remain marginalized in contemporary theoretical discussions.12 (Likewise the fact that Laura Mulvey presented her widely influential theoretical article on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ primarily as a challenge to contemporary filmmaking has been consistently ignored: Mulvey, 1989.) Film theory and filmmaking, far from being distinct, originally developed in tandem. To rediscover this original energy, I propose that film studies adopt a new, more dynamic,

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term that expresses these interrelations: film practices. Film practices include both theories and filmmaking, but also the many other discourses and actions that surround films, understanding these as social actions having effects, and influencing the cultural role of film. This understanding of practice as interrelating both the making of films and the discourses that surround them also avoids the division I spoke of between ‘Film’ and ‘Cinema’. I am not opposed to approaching specialized foci within film studies: analysing film theory as a philosophical issue; viewing film production primarily in terms of global economics; or doing strictly formal analyses of film style are essential tasks within the discipline.13 The danger remains, however, that the object dissolves under the diversity of approaches and, like Humpty Dumpty, never gets put back together again. I believe that film practices provides a model flexible and historical enough to unite various aspects of film studies, working against the isolation that inevitably develops in serious analysis, tracing the effects and processes of these practices and their interaction. As an academic discipline, film studies grew primarily out of literature programmes and developed an early focus on film texts, whether analysing stylistic devices or sociological or philosophical significance (e.g. such topics as the development of film language from the montage of Griffith and Eisenstein; the existential vision of Bergman or Antonioni; or the auteur signature of John Ford). The historical turn in film studies over the last two decades (whether focused on industry organization, technological development, social reception of the medium, or the development of national film styles) entailed more attention to the historian’s traditional tools, the exploration of archives, trade journals and other primary sources. This exploration of the discourses surrounding films has also threatened to create a fissure between film scholars who look at films and those who read documents. Historical approaches to aesthetic texts often introduce the binary of text and context.

Conceiving of film practices as dynamic forces that interact and shape each other allows us to avoid this separation. A schematic account of some of these intersections can give this concept some specificity. Film begins with shadows cast on the screen. One could claim film studies must begin by concentrating on these shadows and the forms and images they convey, raising issues, on the one hand, about the modes of representation and reference carried by these images, and, on the other hand, about their formal properties, their visual arrangement and the sounds accompanying them. Formal analysis of films and phenomenological treatment of the film experience must always provide a cornerstone for our field.14 But another necessary method moves backwards in time from these projected films and their sound accompaniment, flashing back to the process by which they got onto the screen: their modes of production and distribution; the system of craft and industrial organization that underlies them, the technology that produced them, and their circuits of distribution.15 Rather than this flashback, one could also perform a reverse-angle cut and move outward from the screen to consider, first, the situation in which the films are exhibited, the projection system, the theatre with its auditorium, lobbies and foyer stretching out to the marquee and its signage beckoning ticket buyers off the street (remembering, of course, that other situations of exhibition than the classical movie theatre exist as well: streamlined art cinemas in the 1950s with espresso at their concession stands instead of popcorn; urban lofts with old couches or uncomfortable folding chairs screening 16 mm prints of avant-garde films; the screening and discussion of political documentaries in union halls or student organizations, and more recently, video screenings in home living rooms, etc.).16 We must also attend to the folks who fill these places of exhibition. These exhibited images directly target audiences, whose reception seems to be the most fugitive of film practices, often producing limited verbal discourse, but also triggering a series of behaviours, beginning with physical

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modes of watching and interacting with the images (from the hushed, reverential attention of viewers in cinematheques, to the vocal interactive participation in ghetto theatres), to ways of prolonging their relation to screen images through fan clubs, or by weaving gestures, phrases and fashions taken from the screen into the daily lives of film viewers.17 Professional modes of reception produced by film reviewers, entertainment journalists and academics generate explicit verbal texts that circulate more or less widely. This sketch of film practices corresponds to areas that provide the basic topics within film studies: the films themselves, their production and their reception. But if this inventory helps articulate the field of film studies, my sketch hopes to indicate the way in which these practices imply and interlock with each other. A few more specific examples can show this interaction better. Take a topic of long standing in film studies: genre.18 Simply stated, genres consist of a series of conventions that shape the story and characters as well as the visual and aural patterns of a number of films, creating a grouping of films recognized by audiences. While genres occupy a major place in the criticism and analysis of films, as practices their effects involve more than audience response. For example, conventions such as the use of landscapes or the need for action in a Western guide decisions about film production (scouting shooting locations, or constructing sets of the archetypal Western town) or pre-production (such as casting an action star believable as a Westerner). During the Hollywood studio era, genres helped determine a studio’s schedule of productions. Publicity for a film frequently highlights its genre in the design of posters, or the construction of preview trailers. Although genres are generally quite flexible figures guiding, rather than determining, style and narrative, they shape many decisions about the formal properties that end up on the screen, ranging from decisions on frame ratio to costume design. Other well-established topics of investigation in film studies, such as the star system,

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film censorship (or industry regulation), film music, sound design or narrative construction, exert a similar across-the-board effect. Even topics of representation such as the portrayal of race, class and gender, while frequently restricted to a discussion of the plots and dialogue of selected films, could be most revealingly explored in terms of production policies, exhibition strategies and publicity discourses. In the last decade important work on race and gender has opened up the area of reception (e.g. women’s relation to cinema in the silent era,19 African-American film culture during the Great Migration,20 gay reception21 ), describing patterns of theatre behaviour and the way cinema entered into the daily life of viewers of specific classes, genders or ethnicity. Such studies make clear that vital social issues should not be restricted to more traditional thematic readings of film stories, but involve a variety of film practices. Dividing film studies into the analysis of the film text, the process of production and the process of reception helps us articulate the complexity of film as a social and aesthetic object, providing that the division remains provisional and acknowledges the ultimate interdependence of these various aspects. Stated more strongly, no aspect of this division can be conceived without the others. The whole process of production, from industrial organization or technical development to the actual planning of specific films, culminates in new film texts, as the modes of industrial organization and the range of technical tools shape the most intimate formal aspects of film style. Further, as aesthetic texts, films assume not only that people are going to see them, but that people will talk about and react to them. Reception does not simply add a dimension to a film – it is the reason the film is made. Newspaper reviews, fan discourse, political protests and even academic articles are all ways of making sense out of films, and therefore form an integral part of a process that begins in production (or preproduction). As I mentioned earlier, in the 1970s Christian Metz, in an early and important

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attempt to think past the limited (but, to my mind, certainly not dismissible) horizon of semiological analysis of the film text, made a distinction between ‘film’ and ‘cinema’, ‘film’ referring to the text, the film on-the-screen, and ‘cinema’ referring to everything surrounding the film (Metz, 1974). Although a useful beginning in conceiving of cinema as social practice, this dichotomy now strikes me as misleading. Film studies hardly bifurcates so simply, and Metz’s term ‘cinema’ seems to stand in for too many unanalysed forces. The concept of film practices resists Metz’s dichotomy, and the general tendency to isolate stylistic or thematic readings of films from their relation to other film practices. The film that appears on the screen does not derive simply from the talent or expression or even intentions of any of its collaborators (whether directors, scriptwriters, producers, cinematographers or actors), but is also shaped by less personalized discourses of genre, star texts, technology, industry attention to pressure from would-be censors, as well as broader social discourses about gender or race. But as I close this section another problem looms. Making even a provisional inventory of the range of issues that impinge on the phenomenon of cinema and the need for interrelating them may appear as a hubristic (or worse, reductive) claim that a totalizing view of film study with every aspect covered is an achievable goal. Taken too simply, this goal of total surveillance of cinema ultimately undermines the very dynamism I want to promote. Film studies should not envisage a holistic, totalized knowledge in which all forces become accounted for and all methods converge on a single film text. Film practices interrelate and transform each other. To provide the necessary dynamics to our method of analysis, not only the partial but the competing nature of film practices needs to be acknowledged. Far from being an isolated safe place, illuminated by an analysis that stresses textual unity and harmony, yielding an inventory of inert elements, a film becomes a palimpsest, bearing the traces of multiple practices in the production process and then

undergoing a complex process of reception, equally diverse and even contradictory in its results. The study of film reception makes this particularly clear. While making sense of the film is a process envisaged from the beginning of a film’s production, it remains unpredictable and by definition unfinished. Although Hollywood studios attempt to shape the reception of a film (through publicity, as well as production decisions), they can never guarantee a film’s success, let alone its interpretation. Rather than being simply an efficient and systematic interrelation of component parts, a film mobilizes a series of disjunctures and contests of power between various factions – even as it employs planned management to regulate production processes or takes narrative coherence as a model for script construction. Film studies needs to devise models that can account for the tensions and power plays within our object of study as well as the systematic interaction of rational production and coherent storytelling. ‘Film is a battleground’, proclaims Hollywood maverick director Samuel Fuller in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film Pierrot le fou, when asked by Jean Paul Belmondo to define the cinema. Film studies demands methods and concepts that are dynamic enough to follow such an explosive medium.

THE RANGE OF MOVING IMAGES While its attempt to define a cinematic essence may now seem doomed to ideological stagnation, classical film theory’s attempt to define the unique aspect of cinema yielded a subtle and detailed description of film’s formal properties, such as Epstein’s description of the power of slow motion, Kuleshov’s demonstration of the possibilities of continuity editing, Eisenstein’s exploration of dynamic montage, or Bazin’s analysis of composition using extensive depth of field. Curiously, contemporary film theory from Metz to Deleuze has not frequently involved the same close attention to filmic forms. I find this unfortunate, because the centre

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of film studies necessarily involves a rich description of films and their effects. While film study cannot restrict itself to the surface of the film screen, it would seem we do need to linger there. The screen provides the pivot of film’s complex phenomenon, the act of looking at moving images and hearing sound accompaniment. While classical film theory provided great insights into what we could metaphorically call ‘film language’, technological change, new production modes and individual stylists continue to evolve new approaches to the film image, sound and editing. The formal analysis of recent cinema (with the exception of some important work, such as recent analyses by David Bordwell) (Bordwell, 2005) has, unfortunately, languished. All too often the analysis of the film image has been assumed by many practitioners of film studies to be a somewhat passé pastime, a nostalgic, formalist preoccupation. I maintain the contrary. While I am far from claiming that moving images or any aesthetic object can be understood without mediating knowledge of the cultural and historical discourses that surround and penetrate them, the texts themselves provide the place where such cultural contexts are actualized and become addressed to viewers and readers. The formal properties of art works are neither insulated from cultural pressures, nor provide an escape from them (although they do involve an aesthetic transformation). As Roland Barthes once claimed, a little formalism takes us out of history, but a lot brings us back. And, we could add, vice versa. Properly understood, the film text is like a Möbius strip in which the opposition between inside and outside cannot be maintained: the film text offers access to its historical context, and the context becomes part of the text itself. As filmmaker and theorist Peter Kubelka reminds us, in the twentieth century film offered the technology with the most advanced command over the temporal presentation of both sight and sound.22 As optical and aural machinery designed to address the human sensorium rapidly and precisely, film

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remained unsurpassed (absorbing a variety of technologies of sound recording and playback). But if new digital technologies seem poised to abolish the physical support from which film takes its name, will they therefore constitute an entirely new medium? Or does the fact that the visual look of film remains the dominant aspiration and model for new technologies indicate that the digital revolution merely represents a new technological vehicle for the older medium? In either case, the ways in which film or new digital media address the viewer/hearer through their formal devices must provide a basis for further analysis. Treating film (and this may apply to the new media closely related to film as well) as technologies devised to affect the human senses foregrounds the necessity of dealing seriously with film as an aesthetic medium. Unless one deals with the sensual address and formal properties of a work one remains divorced from a serious engagement with any art form. Certain traditional aesthetic assumptions – such as establishing hierarchies of art forms or genres; enshrining ultimate aesthetic values, whether formal harmony or coherence, or psychological realism; or declaring that the aesthetic has absolute independence from the social or the political – no longer provide useful principles, but none of these constitutes necessary aspects of aesthetic analysis. Media address us in specific ways through our senses, using formal devices of sound and vision (and tactility by extension of these) to create responses that deviate from the more narrowly pragmatic tasks of communication. Aesthetic works cannot be reduced to messages that could be transcribed into another medium without substantial loss or transformation. One way of renewing the aesthetic analysis of film lies in broadening our sense of which films actually merit careful analysis. Since auteurism and cultural studies have already demolished the hierarchy of genres (if it ever existed in film studies), I am not referring simply to allowing close analysis of cheap horror films, weepies, pornography or exploitation films, which have been (to my

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mind fortunately) welcomed into the ‘canons’ of film criticism for decades. But, within this carnival of genres, the role of featurelength film as the centre of film studies has remained unexamined. Given the feature film’s centrality in the economics of the film industry, in patterns of distribution and exhibition, this focus cannot simply be abolished, but giving more attention to other modes not only opens new territories for investigation, but directs our attention to film forms less dependent on culturally privileged modes such as the novel or full-length play. Though increasingly promoted by a group of dedicated scholars, forms such as animated cartoons, short comedy films, multi-episode serials, avant-garde films, newsreels, travelogues and home movies still need further research.23 Such neglected film forms offer alternative approaches to spectator address, modes of illusion, narrative structure (or lack thereof), editing strategies and use of imagery, as well as thematic and social discourses, often differing from the dominant forms found in the feature-length fictional film. This relative neglect of shorter (or occasionally longer, as in the case of serials or certain avant-garde works) formats seems especially glaring in the history of the non-fiction film. Strongly dominated by feature-length documentaries, histories of the non-fiction film have paid only passing attention to newsreels, the educational film or the ‘films of interest’ turned out by the thousands during the studio period. Most puzzling is the neglect of the thousands of actuality films produced during the early period of film production (up to 1907) when non-fictional genres dominated the production output of most film companies. Combined with the numerous amateur films or home movies recording everyday or special events, these films are often seen as irredeemably unaesthetic, and hence worthy only of treatment as social or historical documents, without need of close analysis. But the formal devices found even in simple actuality or amateur film cannot be dismissed simply because they do not aspire to the formal unity or expressive form found in

canonical fictional or avant-garde films. Such films contain invaluable records of events, customs, gestures and ways of life (all of which, being captured on film, become aspects as well of the cinematic). It is hardly irrelevant that the aficionados of such supposedly subaesthetic material as home movies, newsreels and advertising films include avant-garde filmmakers, supposedly the most aesthetically focused of all filmmakers. Given the avantgarde practice of upsetting hierarchies of taste, this should not surprise us. But avantgarde filmmakers also claim to uncover new dimensions of the aesthetic in such material neglected by other viewers. I propose that film studies should learn from such against-thegrain viewings. While I have focused this brief discussion of the aesthetic analysis of film on the projected image and sound accompaniment, it would be a mistake to assume there can’t be aesthetic dimensions to other film practices. Film exhibition especially opens up a range of sensual situations that shape the experience of the films. The elaborate architecture and decor of the Picture Palace of the 1920s, with its ornate decorative schemes, red velvet curtains, lighting systems (such as the invocation of colourful sunsets, and then star-studded night skies with scudding clouds projected on the ceilings in the atmospheric theatre designed by John Edelson), ornate fountains and orchestra accompaniment often competed for audience attention with the film on the screen, as Siegfried Kracauer claimed in his essay ‘The Cult of Distraction’ (Kracauer, 1995). On the other hand, the entirely black ‘Invisible Cinema’ with its dark velvet hooded seats, designed by Peter Kubelka in the 1970s in the Anthology Film Archives in New York City for the exhibition of films selected for their formal and artistic achievements, focused viewers’ visual field exclusively on the screen, the only bright spot in the theatre. Although film studies has inherited from the analysis of literary texts a tendency to approach film as bounded texts, during most of the history of commercial film programmes until the 1960s feature films made up only

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the ‘featured’ part of a larger film programme (hence the term). The effect of this film practice, the manner in which the total programme relied on the cumulative reception of its component films, remains generally neglected. Arranging a film programme needs to be considered as a film practice, one that cuts across modes of filmmaking and was typical of the commercial theatre (with its selected shorts including cartoons, newsreels, travelogues and short comedies along with the feature) as well as the programmes of avant-garde films in alternative theatres (with certain contemporary programmers of experimental film considered ‘auteurs’ in this practice). In what way does a series of films dealing with various types of sound/image relations sensitize the audience to notice these differences and does it affect the reception of the individual films? Could watching a Warner’s Brothers cartoon parodying the stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (‘Bacall to Arms’) affect one’s viewing of the feature To Have and to Have Not on the same bill? The aesthetic, sensual aspects of different viewing situations may not only shape the aesthetic experience of specific films, but also shape other film practices, such as the pragmatics of behaviour during and after the screening. I remember that an audience that would sit reverently through an Ingmar Bergman film shown in Greenwich Village in the 1960s would yell back comments to the newsreel shown on the same programme, booing politicians, or contradicting the narrator’s coverage of the Vietnam War. Screenings of political films have often been accompanied by discussions afterwards of the issues raised by the film, and such films were not infrequently shown as moralebuilders during student strikes or classroom boycotts in the 1960s and 1970s. The cineclub movement begun in France in the early 1920s encouraged combining screenings with intellectual discussion and debate.24 While these examples may seem to have strayed from my focus on the aesthetic, I would affirm again that the term includes the range of effects film practices have on us, effects that

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can ultimately exceed the sensual, but always begin there.

THE DYNAMICS OF FILM PRACTICES In the 1970s film studies was dominated by a concern with a theoretical discourse that, while somewhat different from the search for the essential nature of cinema that characterized classical film theory, still tried to describe, in a nearly universal manner, the relations between film and spectator, whether ruled by semiotic principles, psychoanalytic concepts or a political critique of ideology.25 In the 1980s, however, many commentators on the field noted a turn towards film history (an approach nearly excluded by the more ahistorical model of theory that had previously dominated film studies).26 I feel that a separation of theory and history has tragic consequences for film studies. But I also feel that the historical turn moved film studies away from the straightjacket of universal models of spectatorship and descriptions of the effects of film, models based implicitly and unreflectively on the film practices of featurefilm viewing in contemporary situations. The discovery of early cinema prompted a dramatic example of the way a turn to history could call into question certain ‘universal’ assumptions of film theory. Close examination of early cinema revealed that in this period film practices such as spectatorship, the way films address an audience, or film’s dependence on narrative, differed from the practices familiar from the classical period.27 This diachronic dimension of differences in film practice supplemented a transformation emerging around the same time (and a bit earlier) within the theory of film spectatorship, where theorists questioned the postulate of an abstract and universal cinematic spectator stripped of gender, class or ethnicity. This synchronic dimension of film spectator difference raised questions about the monolithic nature of film practices, even during the classical era. One of the great historiographic achievements of film studies in the 1980s lay

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in the detailed and systematic presentation of the classical Hollywood cinema by David Bordwell, Kristen Thompson and Janet Staiger (1985). This work placed American cinema from 1917 to 1960 within modern systems of rationalization and efficiency. The drive towards homogenization of the filmic product and the rationalization of modes of production in this era remains a dominant ideal and frequently expressed philosophy of industry spokesmen that certainly drives and attempts to regulate the Hollywood studio system. But this discourse of rationality must be understood as operating in opposition to an also common perception of the carnivalesque chaos of Hollywood as ‘show business’. As Richard Maltby has shown, the actual business and production processes of Hollywood could be truly indecisive, reflecting the uncertainty of commercial success (Maltby, 1995). In other words, the drive towards stabilization must be seen at least partly as a response to the uncertainty of the needs for Hollywood’s product by regularization practices that nonetheless remained inherently unpredictable, based on the mercurial nature of audience appeal and popularity. Thus the account of classical Hollywood cinema, with its emphasis on systematic rationalization of modes of production and the coherence of modes of representation, needs to be supplemented (not replaced!) by studies that explore the other aspects of the Hollywood system, especially its awareness of the risk inherent in courting a mass audience. The area of film history that Classical Hollywood Cinema acknowledged it did not deal with – reception – supplies the clearest area of uncertainty in the industrial complex of Hollywood films. Beyond the issue of box office appeal (so essential to Hollywood as a business), we need to pay attention to the dynamic cultural encounters of audiences with films.28 Reception needs to be understood as a film practice in its own right. Instead of a homogeneous mass measured by volume of ticket purchase, the audience for films comprises a variety of separate film cultures that consume and process films in a variety of ways. Although

fan culture can be fostered by studio publicity, the film industry neither generated it initially (in the early teens the star system in the USA actually emerged in opposition to film company policy), nor were studios ever able to manufacture stars with predictable results (once the studio decided to exploit, rather than repress, audience involvement with stars, fans consistently redefined film executives’ understandings of what a star needed to be and who was one). Fan culture remains a rich area for the investigation of the protean and diverse nature of reception through creation of a variety of film cultures, from those related by ethnic or gender identity to film ‘cults’ that provide a means of defining one’s identity (cultures of cinephilia, devotees of martial art films, star cults).29 But everyday reception of movies also allowed for a range of receptions, frequently cued by ambiguities intentionally worked into the script and production process. If processes of production may indeed valorize processes of rationalization and coherence, this has limited effect on processes of reception. Indeed, Maltby (1996) has shown that rather than aiming at a univocal interpretation of films, Hollywood practices aimed at allowing a range of multiple interpretations of what happened in a film and what it means, most obviously in the sensitive area of sexuality (and, I would add, politics). Maltby describes the central scene in Casablanca where Rick and Elsa finally meet alone, recall their past love and … the film cuts away to a beacon turning at Casablanca airport, then cuts back to the couple, fully dressed, with an obvious ellipsis in time. In view of the advice given by the Breen commission (which administered the Production Code aimed at avoiding overt portrayals of sex), these images and their content were designed to be open to multiple interpretations. Some audience members would conclude the couple had sex (why else cut away?). But if this interpretation were offensive to an audience member, not only could the studio deny it, the viewer could as well. Presumably the industry censor hoped that children would just be confused.

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(Although the likelihood that children learned to read the salacious meaning of this coded system is referred to in the delightful Warner Brothers cartoon I mentioned earlier, Bacall to Arms, which shows a cartoon child watching a Humphrey Bogart movie. When the cartoon Bogart follows a passionate kiss by a cartoon Lauren Bacall with the question ‘Why did you do that?’, the child in the audience nudges his father and says repeatedly ‘I know why, Daddy, I know why!’) Hollywood films mostly also avoid taking specific political positions, yet invoke politics frequently. An analysis of Hollywood political films shows a blurring of political stance with an often canny mixture of left and right political positions, with messages also seeded into unexpected places. Amazing examples include: the appearance of a rather positive caricature of Stalin kicking a cartoon Hitler in the backside in a wartime Warners Brothers cartoon; or the notorious example of leftist actor Lionel Stander whistling the Internationale while waiting for the elevator in a romantic comedy. I asked an older colleague who had seen this film when it premiered in the forties at New York City’s Radio Musical Hall about audience reaction, and she reported that a tremendous whoop of recognition went up from a large segment of the audience. In all these cases we see not only the ambiguity worked into the Hollywood product at strategic potentially controversial points, but also a knowing reliance on ‘inside jokes’ that would be recognized by certain segments of the population, while unnoticed by others (audiences in New York City were more likely to be familiar with the significance of the Internationale than those in more conservative middle America). Given the highly technical and highly capitalized nature of film production during the studio era, the making of feature films became concentrated in an oligarchy of a few studios. However, as marginal as they may be in terms of economic power and audience share, at least since the early teens, various sub-cultures within the USA have wanted to use motion pictures to promote viewpoints or causes they did not feel were represented

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(or were actually distorted) by mainstream films. African-American reaction to the racist version of American history promoted by D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation included not only political organizations determined to suppress the film, manifestos issued against its distortions, but plans to produce alternative films with a different view of African-American history.30 Other groups, including the Mormon Church, Labor Unions, and Suffragettes entered into film production during the silent era with varying degrees of success. While these polemical film projects hoped to use motion pictures to promote their viewpoints to a mass audience, other modes of production recognized that specific subcultures could provide an (often just barely) profitable audience base for film production, provided films were made cheaply and could offer such audiences images of their own lifestyle, which had been either excluded or subject to mockery in Hollywood films. This includes the always financially marginal (but often stylistically brilliant) African-American film productions of Oscar Michaux and Spencer Williams and the Yiddish language films directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and Joseph Green.31 Alternative modes of film production shadow the Hollywood industry for the course of the Classical era, often possessing their own modes of distribution, exhibition and reception. Non-fiction films capturing the street life of small towns throughout the 1930s and 1940s were shot by itinerant filmmakers and shown for a night in local movie houses, providing an instant in which audiences could see themselves, their neighbours and neighbourhood on the screen, rather than glamorous movie stars in highly synthetic sets and situations. From at least the late 1920s, amateur filmmaking was not restricted to the screening of summer vacations in living rooms, but included a national network of film clubs, distribution, festivals that awarded prizes, and journals that discussed both technical and aesthetic issues. As the home movie edged into the more public realm of the amateur film, amateur production blurs into the realm

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of ‘experimental’ filmmaking, which initially included both politically progressive films (aided by such leftist organizations as the Film and Photo League) and formally inventive films (such as the Expressionist-influenced films with homoerotic overtones privately produced in Rochester, New York, by Weber and Watson). The history of experimental film inAmerica not only has an extensive duration (starting in the 1920s) and a growing influence on film discourses, within both the culture of avant-garde filmmakers and their devotees (again a nationwide system of distribution and exhibition and the generation of a variety of journals, some of them quite longlived, and, in recent years, a strong use of the Internet for posting information and articles). The attention paid to avant-garde cinema by certain academics (although still marginal compared to academic attention to the Hollywood product) has gained it cultural prestige based on the commitment of this mode to exploring film aesthetics and taking an experimental approach to film form and topics (especially issues of sexuality and politics).32 Non-fictional filmmaking remains one of the other major lacunae of film studies. Non-fiction cinema encompasses nearly all formats (feature-length documentaries; shortformat newsreels and travelogues exhibited commercially; instructional and industrial films shown outside commercial cinema; the variety of education films designed for schools and universities; films used in scientific and sociological research – even the home movie and certain experimental films). Considering the full scope of this variety of films offers real challenges to the cultural treatment of film practices, moving the clichéd question of nonfiction film’s relation to reality or objectivity into more specific questions about practices of production, distribution and reception (which could indeed approach theoretical issues from a fresh perspective). My focus on film practices emphasizes the dynamic nature of films, their protean nature as components of a process that is social, technological, industrial, as well as aesthetic

and subject to a range of uses that can redefine, or at least re-interpret, their meanings. I have therefore advocated rooting the study of films in specific contexts. This approach argues for a new focus on previously marginalized cinemas (in terms of both production and reception) and on the local dimension of film history. However, cinema remains a potent force in the ‘disembedding’ function of modernity, the tendency to offer standardized products not only across the nation but around the globe, and thus remove experience from immediate localized situations, in favour of social contexts with a large degree of abstraction and a broad horizon of forces. Thus film practices involve a local transformation through reception of Hollywood studio product, while Hollywood films can also transform local ideologies into national (and international) contexts. For instance, Thomas Dixon, author of the racist works that served as the basis for D.W. Griffith’s 1915 epic film The Birth of a Nation, hoped the film would introduce Southern racist attitudes to the North, and especially that it would inculcate in Northern women a sexual abhorrence for Black men, and discourage the possibility of interracial marriage occasioned by the Great Migration of southern Blacks to Northern cities. Of course, the release of Griffith’s film also resulted in a galvanization of African-Americans and Northern liberals into political action, and created a new awareness of film as a tool of public discourse. Thus the recent emphasis on cinema as an expression of (or a tool of) national identity needs to understand this process as one continually in contest or redefinition. Academically, in the last few decades film studies has become an important element of programmes specializing in geographical and cultural area studies. This situation offers an important opportunity for film scholarship to achieve a new rigour in its treatment of international cinema, which would no longer simply be limited to films that were imported by American (or European) distributors or gathered by film archives. Scholars versed in the languages, cultures and histories of

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cinema-producing countries will hopefully revolutionize the field of film studies. Rather obviously, however, these scholars must also know the ‘language’ of cinema and embrace the interconnected investigation of production and reception. But it is also important that investigation of national cinemas does not assume that films serve as a natural expression of traditional cultures. Recent treatments of Asian cinema have frequently assumed that films immediately serve as expressions of a millennia-old culture exemplified by their pictorial composition, narrative form or character psychology. While relating films to such cultural histories could make a profound impact on film studies, a simple assumption that films of a particular nation or culture ‘express’a supposed national identity can only be seen as naïve, if not reactionary. National identities are always cultural products, not ideal forms or biological instincts. Further, identities change over time, and are generally processes of aggregation and/or exclusions of subcultures. Film practice provides one of the richest areas for the investigation of the processes of constructing a national identity. The danger lies in sifting films for their correspondence with a series of cultural traits already canonized as essential to a specific culture (e.g. a concern for nature in Japanese cinema; a tendency to achieve narrative in terms of individual happiness in Hollywood films; an inherent concern with everyday reality in Italian cinema). This is not to deny the significance of these traits in specific films. Indeed cultural traits are often inserted in films quite consciously as part of a national policy. Film industries directly under government control, such as the Soviet cinema or the German or Japanese cinema during World War II, used films as a means of shaping or redefining national identity and character. A dynamic understanding of this relation, however, notes not only resistance to such images, but also the complex effect of films on audiences. National identity must be seen as an avowed process of certain types of cinema, rather than a natural form of cinematic expression.

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THE POWER OF FILM: UNIQUE OR UNIVERSAL? My discussion of film practices argues for probing their dynamism as well as their variety. Such an approach might seem to be antipodal to one of the founding myths of cinema, film’s role as a universal language. Clearly, claiming cinema as an art form that transcends national and cultural differences and stands outside history contradicts the most basic assumptions of both the study of culture and of history. However, once again I do not want to dismiss this myth entirely without interrogating it for the insights myths often bear when delivered up for interpretation. At least two insights seem to me to be implicit in the idea of cinema as a universal language, worthy of both historical and theoretical explication. Although partially obscured by the dominance of Hollywood, cinema, as a product of an era of complex industrial modernity, defined itself as a global commodity almost from its origins at the end of the nineteenth century, both in the sense of being a product exported and consumed around the world, and as a commodity that defined part of its appeal by rendering the world present (a number of early film companies took as their motto some variation on the phrase ‘the world within your reach’). The Lumière Company, soon after premiering their Cinématographe as a commercial theatrical attraction, outfitted a team of peripatetic cameramen who projected films in major urban centres in Europe, North and South America and Asia, while simultaneously filming views of these farflung locations. Although film’s penetration outside urban (and colonial) centres often took decades to be fully accomplished, before 1900 films had been projected on screens around the world.33 During most of cinema’s first two decades, films crossed borders with an ease that would become increasingly restricted. Until around 1908, French film productions dominated the screens of the world, including the USA (indeed the organization of the US film industry in the teens took as one goal reaching dominance in US

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exhibition, something they had achieved by 1913).34 The unquestioned role of film industries in constructing national identities, either consciously through government direction or more complexly through establishment of genres, narrative schemata, acting styles and the creation of stars, only emerged gradually on a market that was initially defined as international. As the Japanese cinema historian Michael Raine has nicely put it, cinema was international before it is national. Even the American hegemony of film distribution that emerged after World War I was by definition an international phenomenon (Thompson, 1985). American films generally clear their cost during domestic exhibition due to the size of the domestic box office. Then American studios offer films with large budgets and production values to exhibitors in other countries at prices so low they are difficult for local filmmakers to match. Such dominance can certainly be seen as a form of economic imperialism. But a history that values reception (including exhibition and audience responses) as well as production cannot ignore the local aspects of international consumption of the American product, including its cultural consequences.35 The cultural history of the international influence of American cinema must be viewed as more than a passive subjection of indigenous cultures to the might of American technology and money. When JeanLuc Godard, interviewed decades ago on a television talk show, was asked about the world-wide popularity of Hollywood films, he attributed it to their ability to tell powerful stories, adding that the United States could invade any country in the world, precisely because it could provide such a good story about why it was necessary. 1970s film theory endeavoured to analyse the ideological aspects of Hollywood cinema and the power it seemed to assert over spectators as a tool of political control. While the value of this critique cannot be doubted, its condemnation of popular cinema seems to express an elitist despair over the stupidity of the mass audience and a disdain for cinema’s effects

(and self-congratulation on the theorist’s own escape from such traps). The despairing position of this critique contrasts sharply with the utopian reception of cinema in the 1920s by both avant-garde artists and leftist politics. One must recall the millennial aspect of the embrace of cinema as a universal language, originating in the often contradictory ideology of Protestant Progressivism, exemplified by such figures as the poet and critic Vachel Lindsay and the filmmaker D.W. Griffith. The theme was available for a range of political and ideological uses, including British imperialist projects or the revolutionary aspirations of the Soviet filmmakers. While the theme of universality no longer carries conviction, the powerful effect of the novelty of cinema in the early twentieth century needs to be taken seriously and its energy rediscovered. Film embodied the energies of modernity. As the first fully technological art form, its relation to the machine sparked disdain from conservative traditionalists and excitement among avant-garde artists. If the camera became the emblem of cinema as a machine art, film’s nature as a product of mechanical reproduction allowed it to become the first truly mass art, its popularity and portability not only attracting an audience of workingclass patrons unable to afford other forms of commercial entertainment, but allowing it to spill across borders and create a new international audience. Miriam Hansen has introduced the concept of cinema as a form of ‘vernacular modernism’, a concept that avoids a scenario of complete subjection to economic hegemony, or a simple celebration of the Hollywood imagination (Hansen, 2000). Hollywood films, Hansen argues, were a means by which the experience of modernity, with its technological transformation and social revolutions, penetrated into traditional societies across the globe. As a harbinger of changes unevenly distributed across the world, emerging from the most industrially advanced (and, as Hansen stresses, ethnically diverse) nation, Hollywood films offered new models of behaviour and lifestyles.

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The popularity and consequent effects of Hollywood films constitute for Hansen a ‘global vernacular’. As opposed to a universal and therefore in some sense ‘natural’language beyond the reach of culture, ‘vernacular’ here implies a popular ‘lingua franca’ that crosses borders, but retains a local dimension. As Hansen emphasizes, the global and systematic distribution of Hollywood films managed by Hollywood’s studio offices must be balanced by an active understanding of the reception of those films within local cultures. Reception involves not simply passive consumption, but a process of making sense of and reworking a film’s images and sound. As reception is diverse within a culture, it exhibits diversity across the globe. Film’s de facto universality must be explored as intrinsic to the making of a modern world. Movie-going may be as essential to the formulation of modern mass culture as Habermas (1991) has argued the emergence of the novel and its reading public was to the development of a bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth century. I would claim that the utopian reception of cinema among certain intellectuals and artists in the twenties deserves as much serious consideration as the embrace of the new habit of reading novels in the eighteenth century. The claim of film’s universality could be reformulated to direct our attention to the intensity and apparent immediacy of the moving image, its powerful address to the senses, and the processes of cognition and perception. Our processing and experience of cinema’s arrangement of moving images differs from the decoding of conventional signs involved in reading texts in a specific language. This intense film experience seemed to short-circuit the differences between languages based on conventional signs and to offer instead a more direct experience of recognition and attention. As Hansen has claimed, the impact of Hollywood film operated on at least two levels. Certainly on the one hand there is the narrative economy and legibility of classical Hollywood cinema, explored by cognitivists and decried by political modernists such

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as Godard. But there is also (as Godard’s writing and appreciation of American films makes clear) the sensual power of film, its deployment of the moving image, of shape and action, of colour and sound, of shadow and light. The mechanical precision of cinema allows an effect on the senses unparalleled by previous media. Far from being insulated from the realms of culture, social action or politics, aesthetics belongs at the centre of film’s cultural analysis. A close phenomenological study of the sensual effect of cinema on embodied and historically situated spectators needs to supplement the previously dominant semiotic and cognitive approaches that emphasize the communicating of information. The utopian view of cinema as a new art form especially appropriate to the modern world often took the form of proclaiming film as the ‘art form of the twentieth century’. As cinema enters the twenty-first century, the modernity and innovation this phrase once implied now becomes a historical marker, perhaps dating the aspiration as both unfulfilled and outmoded. To what extent should film simply be understood as a form that provided a particular mode of representation and experience for the century that saw its broadest expansion? Is the modernity of cinema by definition a historical and, therefore, passé aspect? We could ask this question in another way. Does film history maintain a continuity with new moving-image technologies, or will it survive primarily as an ancestral form, a reference point, doomed to become steadily more retrospective? In my account of the constantly transforming nature of film history in the past century, I am arguing for such a continuity, whether we call it ‘film’ history or use another phrase. As the question of what cinema is shifts from comparisons and contrasts with older traditional art forms (such as theatre or literature) to a relation to newer media (whether video or Internet forms), we face again the protean nature of the moving image technology and of its forms of reception. Engaging with the specificity of these relations, their conflicts and convergences,

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their promises and perils remains the only way I feel we can get a handle on the complexity of a global society in which moving images continue to circulate as information, commodity, modes of fantasy, attempts at transformation and powerful sensual affects.

NOTES 1 One summary /discussion of the current state of visual culture is Dikovitskaya (2004). 2 The best accounts of the technological pedigree of the motion picture are Mannoni (2000) and Rossell (1998). 3 This phrase was central to Thomas Edison’s initial caveat for his patent for his motion picture device. See Altman (2004), p. 18. 4 See Gunning (2001). 5 The history of the magic lantern culture originating in the seventeenth century has provided a compelling area for new research. The most thorough study of the imbrication of the magic lantern and related technologies to the invention of the cinema is Mannoni (2000). 6 The material on Méliès has become vast. An excellent treatment of his relation to stage magic can be found in Hammond (1974). 7 See, Brown (1999); on Edison, Musser (1997). 8 A major recent collection dealing with this issue is Wojick and Knight (2001). 9 The agenda of classical film theory in this regard is discussed in Carroll (1988). 10 I discuss this decision in Gunning (2004). 11 See these exemplary texts: Jean Epstein and Germaine Dulac essays included in Abel (ed.) (1988); Kuleshov (1974); Pudovkin (1976); Eisenstein (1949). 12 Brakhage (2001); Frampton (1983); Kubelka (1987); Pasolini (1988); Tarkovsky (1989); Godard (1986); Ruiz (1995). 13 Extremely insightful studies of this sort would include the essays collected in Allen and Smith (eds) (1997); Brown (2005) or Bordwell (2005), whose masterful formal analysis always includes at least the immediate social context of craft and technical conventions. 14 In addition to the works of film directors undertaken by David Bordwell, careful formal analysis of films would include Thompson (1988). 15 Production histories of films have become numerous, ranging from journalist ‘The making of…’ books to a careful consideration of the role of various levels of control such as Baxter (1993). 16 Two very different but exemplary works of the treatment of film exhibition and reception are Tsivian (1994) and Waller (1995). 17 An extremely interesting approach to audiences founded in social analysis can be found in Jancovich

and Faire with Stubbings (2003), while a much more text-based analysis is found in Hansen (1991). 18 The study of film genres is massive. I feel the most interesting treatment of the issue of genre can be found in Altman (1999). 19 Stamp (2000). 20 Stewart (2005). 21 Dyer (1986), Weiss (1994). 22 This has been a theme of many of Kubelka’s lectures from which I have profited over the years, but I don’t think he has said it in print. 23 Animated cartoons have perhaps garnered the lion’s share of attention from the pioneering work of Crafton (1993); a classic essay describing the difference between silent comedy short films and features is Kramer (1995). Although still in need of a thorough study, the serial form received an important treatment in Singer (2001), and Bean (2002). Besides Sitney (1979) and Horak (1995), a fine survey of recent American avant-garde film is Arthur (2005). Newsreels remain a neglected topic, but travelogues have spawned a recent anthology, Ruoff (ed.) (2006). An innovative approach to home movies by an experimental filmmaker is Citron (1999). 24 On French cine-clubs, see Gautier (1999). 25 The best representative anthology of the work of this era is Rosen (ed.) (1986). 26 The past and future of this ‘Historical turn’ is discussed by a number of scholars in the ‘In Focus’ section of Cinema Journal, 44, no. 1, Winter 2004, pp. 94–143. 27 The bibliography on early cinema is enormous, but the anthology that defined the area is Elsaesser with Barker (eds) (1990). 28 The classic account of American movie audiences and the exhibition is Gomery (1992); Melvyn Stokes’s books and anthologies have opened up new perspectives: Stokes (1999) and Stokes and Maltby (eds) (2001). 29 Studies of fan culture have become a major area in Film Studies. A primary text is Jenkins (1992). 30 There are many accounts of the reaction to The Birth of a Nation by African-Americans. The classic account is Cripps (1977). 31 The history of African-American filmmaking has also become voluminous. The key account of Oscar Michaux is Bowser, Gaines and Musser (eds) (2001). Yiddish filmmaking has been described by Hoberman (1991). 32 The essential history of avant-garde cinema in America remains Sitney (1979), worth supplementing by Horak (1995) for the earlier phases of the movement. 33 See, for instance, the correspondence of one such globetrotting Lumière cameraman in Jacquier and Pranal (eds) (1996). 34 This transformation is chronicled in Abel (1999). 35 See, Vasey (1997); Stokes and Maltby (eds) (2004).

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REFERENCES Abel, R. (ed.) (1988) French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, Vol. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Abel, R. (1999) The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910. Berkeley: University of California Press. Allen, R. and Smith, M. (1997) Film Theory and Philosophy. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press. Altman, R. (1999) Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute. Altman, R. (2004) Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press. Arnheim, R. (1966) Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California Press. Arthur, P. (2005) A Line of Sight: American Avant-garde Film since 1965. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press. Baxter, P. (1993) Just Watch!: Sternberg, Paramount and America. London: British Film Institute. Bazin, A. (2005) What is Cinema? Foreword by Jean Renoir; new Foreword by Dudley Andrew; essays selected and Tr. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bean, J. (2002) ‘Technologies of early stardom and the extraordinary body’, in J. Bean and D. Negra (eds), A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 404–443. Benjamin, W. (1969) ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 253–264. Bordwell, D. (2005) Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bordwell, D., Thompson, K. and Staiger, J. (1985) The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press. Bowser, P., Gaines, J. and Musser, C. (eds) (2001) Oscar Micheaux and his Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Brakhage, S. (2001) Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking, S. Brakhage (ed.), with a foreword by Bruce R. McPherson. Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co. Brown, R. (1999) A Victorian Film Enterprise: The History of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1897–1915, with a foreword by Charles Musser. Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England: Flicks Books. Brown, R. (2005) A Victorian Film Enterprise. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carroll, N. (1988) Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Cinema Journal 44, no. 1, Winter 2004.

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Citron, M. (1999) Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Crafton, D. (1997) The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931. New York: Scribner. Crafton, D. (1993) Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898–1928. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cripps, T. (1977) Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film 1900–1943. New York: Oxford University Press. Dikovitskaya, M. (ed.) (2004) Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Douglas, G. (1992) Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States, foreword by David Bordwell. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Dyer, R. (1986) ‘Judy Garland and Gay Men’, in Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Eisenstein, S. (1949) Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and Tr. Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Elsaesser, T. and Barker, A. (eds) (1990) Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. London: British Film Institute. Frampton, H. (1983) Circles of Confusion: Film Photography Video Text 1968–1980. Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press. Gaudréault, A. (1997) ‘Les vues cinématographiques selon Georges Méliès, ou: Comment Mitry et Sadoul avaient peut-être raison d’avoir tort (même si c’est surtout Deslandes qu’il faut lire et relire)’, Georges Méliès, l’illusionniste fin de siècle?, J. Malthête and M. Marie (eds), Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle/Colloque de Cérisy, pp. 111–131. Gautier, C. (1999) La Passion du Cinéma: Cinéphiles, ciné-clubs et salles de specialisée à Paris de 1920 à 1929. Paris: École des Chartes. Gomery, D. (1992) Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States, Foreword by David Bordwell. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Godard, J.-L. (1986) Godard on Godard: Critical Writings by Jean-Luc Godard, J. Narboni and T. Milne (eds), with an introduction by Richard Roud; new foreword by Annette Michelson. New York: Da Capo Press. Gunning, T. (2001) ‘New thresholds of vision: instantaneous photography and the early cinema of the Lumière Company’, in T. Smith (ed.), Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogénie Era. Sidney: Powers Publications, pp. 71–100. Gunning, T. (2004) ‘Flickers: on cinema’s power for evil’, in M. Pomerance (ed.), Bad: Infamy, Darkness,

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Evil and Slime on the Screen. Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 21–37. Habermas, J. (1991) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hammond, P. (1974) Marvelous Méliès. London: Gordon Fraser Gallery. Hansen, M. (1991) Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hansen, M. (2000) ‘The mass production of the senses: classical cinema as vernacular modernism’, in Reinventing Film Studies. London: Arnold. Hoberman, J. (1991) Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds. New York: Schocken Books. Horak, J.-C. (ed.) (1995) Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-garde, 1919–1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Jacquier, P. and Pranba, M. (eds) (1996) Gabriel Veyre, Operateur Lumière autour du monde avec le cinématographe: Correspondence 1896–1900. Lyon: Institut Lumière. Jancovich, M. and Faire, L., with Stubbings, S. (2003) The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption. London: British Film Institute. Jenkins, H. (1992) Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. Kracauer, S. (1995) ‘The cult of distraction’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 323–330. Kramer, P. (1995) ‘The making of a comic star: Buster Keaton and The Saphead’, in K.B. Karnick and H. Jenkins (eds), Classical Hollywood Comedy. New York: Routledge. Kubelka, P. (1987) ‘Theory of the metric film’ in P. Adams Sitney (ed.), The Avant-garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. New York: Anthology Film Archives, pp. 139–159. Kuleshov, L. (1974) Kuleshov on Film, selected, translated and edited, with an intro. by Ronald Levaco. Berkeley: University of California Press. Maltby, R. (1995) Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Maltby, R. (1996) ‘ “A brief romantic interlude”: Dick and Jane go to 31/2 seconds of the Classical Hollywood Cinema’, in D. Bordwell and N Carroll (eds), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Mannoni, L. (2000) The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Marvin, C. (1988) When Old Media Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press.

Metz, C. (1974) Language and Cinema, Tr. Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok. The Hague: Mouton. Mulvey, L. (1989) ‘Narrative and visual pleasure’, in Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 17–26. Musser, C. (1997) Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900: An Annotated Filmography. Gemona (UD), Italy: Giornate del cinema muto; Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Pasolini, P.P. (1988) Heretical Empiricism, ed. L.K. Barnett; Tr. B. Lawton and L.K. Barnett. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pudovkin, V. (1976) Film Technique, and Film Acting. Tr. and ed. I. Montagu. New York: Grove Press. Rosen, P. (ed.) (1986) Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Rossell, D. (1998) Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies. Albany: SUNY Press. Ruiz, R. (1995) Poetics of Cinema. Paris: Editions Dis Voir. Ruoff, J.K. (ed.) (2006) Virtual Travel: Cinema and Travel. Durham: Duke University Press. Singer, B. (2001) Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press. Sitney, P.A. (1979) Visionary Cinema: The American Avant-garde. New York: Oxford University Press. Stamp, S. (2000) Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stewart, J.N. (2005) Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity,. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stokes, M. (1999) Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies. London: British Film Institute. Stokes, M. and Maltby, R. (eds) (2001) Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences. London: British Film Institute. Stokes, M. and Maltby, R. (eds) (2004) Hollywood Abroad: Audiences and Cultural Exchange. London: British Film Institute. Tarkovsky, A. (1989) Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, Tr. K. Hunter-Blair. Austin: University of Texas Press. Thompson, K. (1985) Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market 1907–1934. London: British Film Institute. Thompson, K. (1988) Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tsivian, Y. (1994) Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception, Tr. A. Bodger; with a foreword by Tom

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Gunning; ed. R. Taylor. London and New York: Routledge. Vasey, R. (1997) The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Waller, G.A. (1995) Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

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Weiss, A. (1994) ‘ “A queer feeling when I look at you”: Hollywood stars and lesbian spectatorship in the 1930s’, in D. Carson, L. Dittmar and J.R. Welsch (eds), Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 330–342. Wojick, P.R. and Knight, A. (eds) (2001) Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music. Durham: Duke University Press.

10 Broadcasting Toby Miller

In keeping with its stature as one of the major social institutions of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, broadcasting has stimulated a vast amount of study. Cultural analysis has been an important sub-section of this work, via critical speculations about broadcasting’s impact on societies and cultures; state policies of ownership, control and content; and the nature of production, content and reception. This chapter looks at the disciplines that analyse broadcasting, the study of radio and television, key debates about audiences and industrial uses of cultural analysis. The word ‘broadcasting’ has agricultural roots. It originally described spreading seeds in a field. ‘Broadcasting’ transmogrified in the 1920s to signify a central node, whether public or private, governmental or commercial, that sent out audio material to audiences within circumscribed political, physical and demographic terrain. It was not person-to-person, nor was it available only by subscription. Since that time, the state has participated in broadcasting via two intersecting models: indirect control, through the regulation of ownership and textuality; and direct and indirect production, through governmentrun media, as per the state-socialist model,

or arms-length quasi-independence, as per the public-broadcast model. Business has participated in broadcasting through a desire to profit by selling advertising time on air and support its specific and classbased political-economic interests by populist programming in favour of nationalism and capitalism. This gradual development beyond the term’s linguistic origins has seen numerous transformations of broadcasting technologies, texts and audiences. The history unfurls from centralist concentration to diffuse delivery, via embedded and explicit policies, interests and knowledges. Radio, for example, developed genres and themes for stations to organize listeners, increased its capacity for transmission and reproduction and mobilized new spaces of reception, such as the beach and workplace. It displaced the newspaper’s monopoly over time – but limited spatial reach – by a mix of temporal continuity and a less measurable and contained dominion over space. In today’s era of digital technology, consumer sovereignty and anti-governmental deregulation, when niche programming and channels proliferate, broadcasting appears to have changed its meaning once more. But

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much of its essence remains – information is sent out from a central point and takes root elsewhere. Just as farmers sought to develop and profit from the seeds they dropped, so have broadcasters. This chapter works with a simultaneously textual and social understanding of culture. Like broadcasting, the term ‘culture’ has earthy connotations. It derives from the Latin ‘colare’, which implied tending and developing agriculture as part of subsistence. With the emergence of capitalism’s division of labour, culture came both to embody instrumentalism and to abjure it, via the industrialization of farming, on the one hand, and the cultivation of individual taste, on the other. In keeping with this distinction, culture has usually been understood in two registers, via the social sciences and the humanities – truth versus beauty. This was a heuristic distinction in the sixteenth century, but it became substantive over time. Eighteenthcentury German, French and Spanish dictionaries bear witness to a metaphorical shift into spiritual cultivation. As the spread of literacy and printing saw customs and laws passed on, governed and adjudicated through the written word, cultural texts supplemented and supplanted physical force as guarantors of authority. With the Industrial Revolution, populations became urban dwellers. Food was imported, cultures developed textual forms that could be exchanged and consumer society emerged through horse-racing, opera, art exhibits, masquerades and balls. The impact of this shift was indexed in cultural labour: poligrafi in fifteenth-century Venice and hacks in eighteenth-century London wrote popular and influential conduct books, works of instruction on everyday life that marked the textualization of custom and the appearance of new occupational identities. Anxieties about ‘cultural invasion’ also date from this period, via Islamic debates over Western domination (Benhabib, 2002: p. 2; Briggs and Burke, 2003: pp. 10, 38, 60, 57; de Pedro, 1999: pp. 61–62, 78 n. 1; Mowlana, 2000: p. 107; Williams, 1983: p. 38). Today, culture is a marker of differences and similarities in taste and status, explored

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interpretatively and methodically. In the humanities, broadcasting is judged by criteria of quality and meaning, as practised critically and historically. In the social sciences, the focus is on the socio-political norms of broadcasting, as explored psychologically or statistically. So whereas the humanities articulate population differences through symbolic means (e.g. which class has the cultural capital to appreciate high culture and which does not) the social sciences articulate population differences through social ones (e.g. which people are affected by TV messages and which are not) (Wallerstein, 1989). Both approaches have been influential in the study of broadcasting, because it is simultaneously imaginative and documentary, public and private, free and costly, collective and individual. Broadcasting binds and divides through custom and aesthetics; it is abundantly cultural: La radio y la TV tienen la función social de contribuir al fortalecimiento de la integración y el mejoramiento de las formas de convivencia humana – Ley Federal de Radio y TV de México [Radio and television have the task of contributing to social integration and harmony – Federal Radio and TV Law of Mexico].

From its early days, broadcasting was more frightening and promising, more contagious and withering, than the essentially private life of reading and talking. By the 1920s, the spread of the car and the radio throughout the USA were thought to have produced a technical and moral deskilling of the workforce, with ease and automation displacing thrift and responsibility and emotions experienced through simulation. The evidence lay in women’s taste for cosmetics and men’s for action films. In the USA and several other countries, that decade witnessed struggles between the armed forces and commerce over radio. The navy and the police asserted the need for exclusive use of the spectrum, while businesses wanted it for themselves. Governments ultimately stepped in to umpire. Meanwhile, Germany and Australia saw union-owned stations pioneering choral response via two-way radio, a dream of worker-actor collaboration across the ether. This mystical substance was anointed with

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bizarre properties by early practitioners, such as contact with the dead and a cure for cancer. Then the system became comprehensively corporatized. Two-way dreams were dispatched to the margins, as the radio set was sealed and the airwaves zoned. Brechtians, theosophists and oncologists found other sites to ply their trades. Not surprisingly, the excitement about broadcasting increased many times when images were added to sounds. Prior to the emergence of broadcast appliances and services, people had fantasized about the transmission of images and sounds across space. Richard Whittaker Hubbell made the point by publishing a book in 1942 entitled 4000 Years of Television. Television even has its own patron saint, Clare of Assisi, a teen runaway from the thirteenth century who became the first Franciscan nun and was canonized in 1958 for her bed-ridden vision of images from a midnight mass cast upon a wall, which Pius XII decreed to be the first broadcast. As TV came close to realization, it attracted intense critical speculation. In the Daily Worker of 1930, Samuel Brody drew this divide in political–economic terms. Broadcasting was one moment in the multiplicity of war-directed capitalist inventions. US television’s political uses would involve campaigning for elections and pacifying audiences, through ‘the same authentic lies’ as documentary cinema and the fiction film. Conversely, the Soviet Union would deploy television to ‘build socialism and a better world for the laboring masses’ (Brody, 1988: p. 106). Rudolf Arnheim’s 1935 ‘Forecast of Television’ predicted it would offer viewers simultaneous global experiences, transmitting railway disasters, professorial addresses, town meetings, boxing title-fights, dance bands, carnivals and aerial mountain views – a spectacular montage of Broadway and Vesuvius. A common vision would surpass the limitations of linguistic competence and interpretation. Broadcasting might even bring global peace, showing spectators that ‘we are located as one among many’. But Arnheim (1969) also warned that it was ‘a new, hard test of our wisdom’.

The emergent medium’s easy access to ‘broadly cast’ knowledge would either enrich or impoverish its viewers, manufacturing an informed public, vibrant and active – or an indolent audience, domesticated and passive. Not long after these predictions, World War II halted experimental television broadcasts. But once the War ended, television’s uptake was spectacular. Over the next ten years, it spread across the USA and Europe, then into the Third World, as newly free peoples emerged from colonialism and claimed TV as a rite of passage and a right to communication. By and large, the growth of television mirrored the emergence of radio. Countries with sizeable commercial radio networks developed similar TV systems (Australia and the USA stood out) and countries with large public-service radio structures brokered them into television (India and Britain, for example). The USA was unusual in eschewing national public television until its system had matured, while Australia was unusual in its spread of private and public from the very beginning. Across the 1980s, the decline of state socialism in Europe and dictatorship in Latin America coincided with a deregulatory fervour that gripped policy-making in capitalist democracies and international organizations, exerting a major impact on communication infrastructures. States that had once regarded broadcasting as too influential to be left to commerce were persuaded by this new cult to sever their allegiance to public ownership and control, in the name of efficiency, effectiveness and freedom. Countries that already had extensive commercial networks diminished regulatory controls on privatesector broadcasting, while those with publicsector systems opened up the airwaves to profit-making. At the same time, new technologies made the media less easily controlled by national governments, as audiences were able to draw signals from beyond political boundaries via satellite and the Internet. Today, a world-wide system of broadcasting mixes public and private on an unequal basis. The former is increasingly scrambling

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for funding and legitimacy, while the latter is rampant. Through all these shifts, the binary oppositions that haunted premonitory critics such as Brody and Arnheim have been a recurring theme, as we shall see in evaluating the disciplines that have engaged the broadcast media.

• economics theorizes and polices doctrines of scarcity and manages over-production through overseas expansion • Marxism points to the impact of ownership and control and cultural imperialism on broadcasting and consciousness; and • cultural criticism evaluates representation, justifies protectionism and calls for content provision.

DISCIPLINES

In the twentieth century, with the standardization of social-science method and its uptake and export by US military, commercial and governmental interests, broadcast audiences came to be conceived as empirical entities that could be known via research instruments derived from communication, sociology, demography, the psy-complexes (psychoanalysis, psychology and psychiatry) and marketing. Such concerns were coupled with a secondary concentration on content. Texts, too, were conceived as empirical entities that could be known via research instruments derived from sociology, communication and literary criticism. Major critiques of the media have come from within discourses of the social derived from the psy-complexes, the social sciences (sociology, economics, communication studies and anthropology) and the humanities (literature, cinema studies, media studies and cultural studies). The six principal forms of inquiry:

Broadcasting has given rise to three major topics of scholarly inquiry: • technology, ownership and control – its political economy • textuality – its content; and • audiences – its public

Within these categories lie three further divisions: • approaches to technology, ownership and control vary between neoliberal endorsements of limited regulation by the state, in the interests of protecting property and guaranteeing market entry for new competitors, and Marxist critiques of the bourgeois media for controlling the sociopolitical agenda • approaches to textuality vary between hermeneutics, which unearths the meaning of individual programmes and links them to broader social formations and problems, and content analysis, which establishes patterns across significant numbers of similar texts, rather than close readings of individual ones; and • approaches to audiences vary between socialpsychological attempts to validate correlations between broadcasting and social conduct, and culturalist critiques of imported texts threatening national culture.

These tasks articulate to particular disciplines: • engineering, computing and public policy create and run broadcasting production and reception via business, the military, the community and the public service • communication studies focuses on social projects, such as propaganda, marketing and citizenship

• borrow ethnography from sociology and anthropology to investigate the experiences of audiences • use experimentation and testing methods from psychology to establish cause-and-effect relations between media consumption and subsequent conduct • adapt content analysis from sociology and communication to evaluate programming in terms of generic patterns • adopt textual analysis from literary theory and linguistics to identify the ideological tenor of content • apply textual and audience interpretation from psychoanalysis to speculate on psychic processes; and • deploy political economy to examine ownership, control, regulation and international exchange

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Topics

Objects

Methods

Disciplines

Regulation, industry development, new technology

State, capital, labour

Political economy, neoliberalism

Genre Genre

Text Text

Content analysis Textual analysis

Uses

Audience

Uses

Audience

Uses and gratifications Ethnography

Effects

Audience

Engineering, computer science, economics, political science, law, communication Communication, sociology Literary/cultural/media studies Communication, psychology, marketing Anthropology, cultural/media studies, communication Psychology, marketing, communication

Experimentation, questionnaire

RADIO AND TELEVISION Certain cultural-research traditions are specific to particular media. As an object of behavioural research panics, radio was quickly overtaken by sound cinema and television. As an object of textual analysis, it was less easily recuperated archivally than the visual media. As a casual part of everyday life, it was held to occupy less real attention than, for example, the newspaper. But radio training manuals, audiological research and governmental policy documents are now being supplemented by critical academic study. And as the everyday has become a site of contestation and valorization in cultural theory, Umberto Eco’s notion of the ‘radio that is turned on but not tuned’ offers new life to a site that had seemed insignificant, as a model of phatic communication (1987: p. 164). At the same time, the medium is expanding: there are over eleven thousand radio stations in the USA, using forty different formats. The Journal of Radio Studies offers an array of approaches, while the key cultural historian Susan Douglas’s standard work (1987) has been a model for others. In that vein, Lesley Johnson (1988) gives a detailed account of Australian radio between the 1920s and 1940s, in which she poses a number of policy and everyday queries: how are we to conceptualize

the relationship of stations and listeners, whether at the hearth or in the kitchen; what is the appropriate division of public and private in broadcasting; how can ownership be regulated; and what has changed from the days when merely setting a receiver up that worked was a true sign of consumer mastery, to the sealed-set efficiencies and deskilling of the war years? The mostly male operators of the 1920s battled technological difficulties on a daily basis, exemplifying selfreliance and innovation. As one of these selfstyled ‘radio maniacs’ put it, the search for perfect reception was a struggle against ‘the endless perversity of the elements’ (quoted in Douglas, 1987: p. 308). That ‘proper’ life of initiative was replaced in the 1930s by the supposedly lazy, dependent listenership of women, because the proliferation of broadcast towers and loudspeakers made radio an effortless listening medium. A device of consumption rather than mastery, it had been feminized, with the will to buy advertised goods its defining quality. Noting this trend in a more positive vein, the Television Broadcasters Association in 1944 stressed its desire to avoid ‘any repetition of the errors that marked radio’s beginnings’ (Stavitsky, 1995: p. 81; Association quoted in Boddy, 1994: p. 114): those errors had situated the audience as a participant, not just a recipient.

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The same commercial broadcasters who translated radio into a site of listening-toprompt-purchasing also viewed it as a nationbinding medium that would, as NBC President Merlin Aylesworth put it in 1930, ‘preserve our now vast population from disintegrating into classes’ by producing equivalent, sometimes identical, cultural experiences (Potts, 1989: p. 172; Aylesworth quoted in Boddy, 1994: p. 109). When John Reith became the first head of the BBC, he promised that the Corporation would be a bulwark against rampant commercialism (i.e. the United States and its successful cinema exports) and political extremism (i.e. the Soviet Union and Italy and their successful ideological exports) (McGuigan, 1996: p. 56). In 1936, the League of Nations created an International Convention Concerning the Use of Broadcasting in the Cause of Peace. It was designed to prohibit messages moving from one national radio system into another, lest they foment social struggle or operate ‘in a manner prejudicial to good international understanding’. During World War II, the US government established a Division of Radio to counter the Nazis, who supplied seven hours of broadcasts to Latin America per week. The Division eventually doubled that output, via a Pan-American broadcasting station that transmitted speeches, news and educational programmes, in concert with commercial concerns such as opera (Gellman, 1979: p. 152). Critics argue that radio has become one more ‘slick format’ in response to commercial pressures. But for others it is ‘the last bastion of free speech for plain, ordinary citizens’ (Higgins and Moss, 1982: pp. 1, 29; Liddicoat et al., 1994; Munson, 1993: p. 1). Radio is seen as a ‘mediator of the attentions of the state and of capital at the hearth’ (Lewis and Booth, 1989: p. 187), or an ‘alternative to the whole problem of thinking what to do … defusing the moral atmosphere’ through lowestcommon-denominator appeals to ‘the “law of optimum inoffensiveness” ’ (Abrams, 1973: pp. 119, 103, 107–108). For Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, radio represents a

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turn away from the precious artistic and social traces of authentic intersubjectivity, because it is dedicated to the ‘control of the individual consciousness’ through the absence of any ‘machinery of rejoinder’ (1977: pp. 349–350). C. Wright Mills laments ‘the simple democratic society of primary publics’ that once interacted via face-toface communication, supposedly superseded by enlarged and centralized institutions of government and culture (Mills, 1970: p. 581). For college footballer Taft Robinson in Don DeLillo’s novel End Zone (1987), turning the radio off and on is ‘almost a spiritual exercise. Silence, words, silence, silence, silence’ – a practice for disciplining the body, controlling the ‘nervous information system’, as Marshall McLuhan termed it. DeLillo’s White Noise (1986) narrator Jack Gladney, stuck in a family driving ordeal characterized by his son’s obsessive privileging of weather forecasts over personal observation, says that ‘[j]ust because it’s on the radio doesn’t mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses’. Jack is wrong. Our senses include listening to the radio, as he later realizes, sensing his family may be developing symptoms of illness after hearing about them on-air (DeLillo, 1986: pp. 22–23, 125–126; DeLillo, 1987: pp. 239–240; McLuhan, 1974: p. 318). Some argue that talk is radio’s phenomenological mode, a record of sensemaking as much as empirical information that brings outsiders (such as audiences) ‘into’ the station. Philip Bell and Theo van Leeuwen allot four histories to the genre. The first finds the interview a segment for the ‘ordinary’ listener keen to hear personalities talk about themselves, transformed into the presenter as a source of access for these listeners, using vox populi. The second history sees a movement of the interview away from its original location in entertainment programmes towards offering light, shade and humanity to current affairs. The third history is linguistic. A speech genre emerges, mixing orchestrated, monologic, authoritative pronouncements with the spontaneous, dialogic provisionality of everyday talk. Finally, this mixture is brought within manageable

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norms of length, topic and enunciation (1994: pp. 37–38). Because it was the first technology to bring streaming images and sounds into domestic as well as public space, television has received the greatest attention (mostly demonization) of any broadcast medium, as we shall see in the section on audiences. But in addition to the dominant discourse on media effects, there has been a vigorous, pluralist quality to cultural work on the topic, derived from emergent social movements and analytic tendencies of the 1960s–1980s: feminist agitations over representation; critics’ desires to reach beyond bourgeoisindividualistic accounts of creativity in favour of generic analysis; the left’s evaluation of post-imperial social control via domestic and global media dominance; Marxist aesthetics reading story against ideology; new disciplines chronicling national histories and producing textbooks; and voices from below, heard through the participant observation of workers and audiences. Some categories have shifted since then. Generalized cultural imperialism critique and national television history have been transformed into more specific analyses, represented by national, regional, global, diasporic, First Peoples and activist television. Ideology critique has been subsumed by Gramscianism, racialization analysis and policy critique. As the field has become academically institutionalized, media criticism has fallen away, but anthology readers and textbooks have proliferated. Genre study and ethnography have remained significant and new areas have emerged, such as cultural and institutional history. This is in keeping with intellectual developments and political trends, such as social-movement activism, the globalization and privatization of television in the wake of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberalism. Foundational categories and texts since 1990 also now see political economy, cultural studies, leftist, queer, disabled, feminist, multicultural and post-colonialist interest groups and plenary sessions at many annual conferences of professional bodies dedicated to studying broadcasting.

Similar tendencies are evident amongst journals.1 In addition to debates over social groups and television, cultural analysis has also inquired into the nature of the televisual text, asking whether individual programmes can be studied as discrete entities, given the different contexts in which they circulate – from commercial-free, to commercial-driven, to video, to DVD, to dubbed and subtitled versions, to the Internet, to classrooms, to electronic games and so on. Genre-based study has often been seen as crucial, given the serial, repetitious nature of much television, especially with channels dedicated to one topic, from shopping to Manchester United. Because of the dominance of the commercial world, the flow between programmes and advertising has been another key node, with much intertextual slippage between them. For other analysts, the nation has been deemed crucial, since most TV-watching has traditionally taken place within specific political territories, though these claims have diminished as neoliberalism and neotechnology have changed the media landscape (for debates on these questions, see Miller, 2002).

AUDIENCE – DOMESTIC EFFECTS MODEL/GLOBAL EFFECTS MODEL Aside from these medium-specific cultural analyses, most broadcast research uses cultural assumptions and methods. Academic, commercial and regulatory approaches focus most expansively and extensively on audiences as citizens and consumers, because audiences to broadcasting tend to characterize the media, far more than do its technology, law, or even content. Pierre Bourdieu (1998) refers to citizen-consumer ways of knowing TV audiences as a ‘paternalistic-pedagogic’ address versus ‘populist spontaneism and demagogic capitulation to popular tastes’. The idea that broadcasting impresses ‘the same stamp on everything’ derives from Adorno and Horkheimer (1977). Their account of production-line culture argues that because demand is dispersed and supply

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centralized, broadcasting operates via an administrative logic. Far from reflecting already established and revealed preferences of consumers in reaction to their tastes and desires, it manipulates them from the economic apex of production. Coercion is mistaken for free will and culture becomes one more industrial process subordinated to dominant economic forces within society seeking standardization. The only element that might stand against this levelling sameness is ‘individual consciousness’. But that consciousness has itself been customized to the requirements of the economy and media production. Broadcasting is part of the culture industries, ‘which employ the characteristic modes of production and organization of industrial corporations to produce and disseminate symbols in the form of cultural goods and services, generally, although not exclusively, as commodities’ (Garnham, 1987: p. 25). Borrowing from canonical notions of art to malign popular tastes, cultural critics have routinely derided broadcasting, finding it responsible for deficits in knowledge, concentration and responsibility among populations. Aesthetically, it is seen as appealing to base instincts and lowest common denominators. Politically, it is seen as instilling either quietude or hysteria. The opulence of media technology is supposedly matched by a barrenness of civilization. Criticisms come from both left and right that a surfeit of signage and a deficit of understanding cheapen public culture, as Kitsch overruns quality (Martín-Barbero and Rey, 1999: pp. 15–16, 22, 24). Here is an everyday-life exemplum of such anxieties, detailing television’s advent in Australia: In September 1956 many Sydney residents had their first opportunity to experience first-hand contact with the new mechanical ‘monster’ – TV – that had for the last seven or eight years been dominating the lounges of English and American homes. Speculation on its effects had run high. On the one hand it was claimed: it would eventually destroy the human race since young couples would prefer viewing to good honest courting; children would arrive at school and either go to sleep or disgorge half-baked concepts about the Wild West and the ’gals’ who inspired or confused the upholders of

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law; it would breed a generation of youngsters with curved spines, defective eyesight, American vocabulary but no initiative; it would result in a fragmentation of life whereby contact among and even within families would be reduced to the barest minimum. On the other hand, supporters claimed that it would initiate a moral regeneration of the nation by enticing straying husbands home to see ‘Wagon Train’ and ’The Perry Como Show’; it would encourage dead-end kids to explore the richness of books and of life in general; and it would unite the family by offering common goals and common interests. (Campbell assisted by Keogh, 1962: p. 9)

Television and the Australian Adolescent (the 1962 source of this quotation) finds its authors worried about ‘habits of passivity’ that television might induce and the power of particular genres to ‘instil certain emotions, attitudes and values’. The upshot of all this, they feared, might be ‘a generation of people who are content to be fed by others’(Campbell and Keogh, 1962: p. 23). Decades on, via an older technology, such panics recur. On New Year’s Eve of 1991–1992, a woman was listening to 2KY, a Sydney commercial radio station set up by the New South Wales Labor Council. (The station had favoured two-way relays between central transmission and the people’s voice in the 1920s.) The 1991–1992 listener rang on the request line and asked to hear Stand By Your Man. The station played the song. She called back, complaining that instead of the Tammy Wynette version, 2KY had provided a parody by the Chipmunks. The woman threatened to kill herself: result unknown. A moral panic emerged in the newspapers about the maudlin nature of country music. University tests were cited that held country music’s sombre tales of grief, solitude and liverish excess liable for driving people ‘at-risk’ to a stage beyond. Competing studies were cited, attributing suicide to social factors rather than aethereal ones. 2KY’s rival 2SM, then owned by the Roman Catholic Church, announced it would not play depressing music. Shortly afterwards, the Catholic management of the station experienced legal trouble and the Church dispensed with the business after decades of ownership. Country music continued, as did suicide.

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With the Australian Adolescent on her way to retirement and the 2KY listener now a fragment in the archive of moral panics, today’s version would be accusations that the hip-hop generation and Internet users process trivia exquisitely, but lack the capacity to separate important knowledge from dross; fears that niche cable-TV stations focus viewers ‘on our own little segment of reality’ to the point where ‘we lose all touch with the larger reality that matters to us’ (Andersen, 2005: p. 14); and Hillary Clinton announcing that electronic games are ‘stealing the innocence of our children’ (quoted in Chasing the Dream, 2005: p. 53). In each case, an allegedly active public is contrasted with a putatively passive audience. Consider the discourse of communitarianism: we are not happy when we are watching television, even though most of us spend many hours a week doing so, because we feel we are ‘on hold’ rather than really living during that time. We are happiest when we are successfully meeting challenges at work, in our private lives and in our communities. (Bellah et al., 1992: p. 49)

When newspapers start noting that more Britons vote in Big Brother than in the European elections, this discourse is in full flight (Lewis et al., 2005: p. 2). Broadcasting continues to provide both measures of and stimuli to social change, in its dual function as index and incarnation. Worries over this indexical and incarnate power underpin a wealth of empirical research, which is primarily concerned with questioning, testing and measuring the number and conduct of people seated before media texts. Why? Because broadcast audiences participate in the most global (but local), communal (yet individual) and timeconsuming practice of making meaning in the history of the world. The concept and the occasion of being an audience are links between society and person, at the same time as viewing and listening involve solitary interpretation as well as collective behaviour. Production executives invoke the audience to measure success and claim knowledge of what people want, regulators to organize administration, psychologists to produce

proofs and lobby-groups to change content. Hence the link to panics about education, violence and apathy supposedly engendered by the media and routinely investigated by the state, psychology, Marxism, conservatism, the church, liberal feminism and others. The audience as consumer, student, felon, voter and idiot engages such groups. This is Harold Garfinkel’s notion of the ‘cultural dope’, a mythic figure ‘who produces the stable features of the society by acting in compliance with preestablished and legitimate alternatives of action that the common culture provides’. The ‘common sense rationalities … of here and now situations’ actually used by people can be obscured by this categorization (Garfinkel, 1992: p. 68). When the audience is invoked by the industry or its critics and regulators, it frequently becomes such a ‘dope’, for example via the assumption that ‘[c]hildren are sitting victims; television bites them’ (Schramm et al., 1961: p. 1). Two accounts of the broadcast audience are dominant in academia, public policy and social activism. In their different ways, each is an effects model, in that they assume the media do things to people, with the citizen understood as an audience member at risk of becoming a ‘dope’, abjuring either interpersonal responsibility or national culture. The first model is the domestic effects model, or DEM. Dominant in the USA and exported around the world, it is typically applied without consideration of place or time and is psychological (see Comstock and Scharrer, 1999; Cooper, 1996; Surgeon General’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior, 1971). The DEM offers analysis and critique of education and civic order. It views the media as forces that can either direct or pervert the citizen-consumer. Entering young minds hypodermically, broadcasting both enables and imperils learning. It may even drive the citizen to violence through aggressive and misogynistic images and narratives. The DEM is found at a variety of sites, including laboratories, clinics, prisons, schools, newspapers, psy-complex journals, media organizations’

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research and publicity departments, everyday talk, programme-classification regulations, conference papers, parliamentary debates, advertising agencies and state-of-our-youth or state-of-our-civil-society moral panics. The DEM is spectacularly embodied in the nationwide US media theatrics that ensue after mass school shootings, questioning the role of violent images (not hyper-Protestantism, straight white masculinity, a risk society, or easy access to firearms) in creating violent people; and routinely embodied in the claims made by marketers about the efficacy of their work. As Bob Dylan puts it, recalling the 1960s in Greenwich Village, ‘sociologists were saying that TV had deadly intentions and was destroying the minds and imaginations of the young – that their attention span was being dragged down’. The other dominant site of knowledge was the ‘psychology professor, a good performer, but originality not his long suit’ (Dylan, 2004: pp. 55, 67). They still cast a shadow across that village and many others. Consider Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer’s febrile twenty-first-century call for centring media effects within the study of child development: For the first 60 years of the twentieth century, conceptions such as Freud’s … theory of a fundamental aggressive drive or instinct predominated. … [C]ritical analyses and careful research on social learning … and literally scores of psychophysiological and behavioral empirical studies beginning in the 1960s have pointed much more to aggression as a learned response. … [C]an we ignore the impact on children of their exposure through television and films or, more recently, to computer games and arcade video games that involve vast amounts of violent actions? (Singer and Singer, 2001: p. xv)

The second means of constituting ‘dopes’ is a global effects model, or GEM. The GEM, primarily utilized in non-US discourse, is spatial and historical rather than psychological. Whereas the DEM focuses on the cognition and emotion of individual human subjects via observation and experimentation, the GEM looks to custom and patriotic feeling exhibited by collective human subjects, the grout of national culture. In place of psychology, it is concerned with politics.

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Broadcasting does not make you a well- or ill-educated person, a wild or self-controlled one. Rather, it makes you a knowledgeable and loyal national subject, or a naïf who is ignorant of local tradition and history. Cultural belonging, not psychic wholeness, is the touchstone of the global effects model. Instead of measuring responses electronically or behaviourally, as its domestic counterpart does, the GEM interrogates the geopolitical origin of media texts and the themes and styles they embody, with particular attention to the putatively nation-building genres of drama, news, sport and current affairs. GEM adherents hold that local citizens should control broadcasting, because their loyalty can be counted on in the event of war. This model is found in the discourses of cultural imperialism, everyday talk, broadcast and telecommunications policy, unions, international organizations, newspapers, heritage, cultural diplomacy and post-industrial service-sector planning (see Beltrán and Fox, 1980; Dorfman and Mattelart, 2000; Schiller, 1976). Néstor García Canclini notes in this context that: ‘We Latin Americans presumably learned to be citizens through our relationship to Europe; our relationship to the United States will, however, reduce us to consumers’ (2001: p. 1). The GEM favours ‘creativity, not consumerism’, in the words of UNESCO’s ‘Screens Without Frontiers’ initiative (Tricot, 2000). It is exemplified in Armand Mattelart’s stinging denunciation of First-World broadcasting’s influence on the Third World: In order to camouflage the counter-revolutionary function which it has assigned to communications technology and, in the final analysis, to all the messages of mass culture, imperialism has elevated the mass media to the status of revolutionary agents and the modern phenomenon of communications to that of revolution itself[,] … … an element in a total system answering to the imperialist metropolis’s conception of the role of the superstructure in the counter-revolutionary struggle in Third World countries, i.e. that of smuggling in its models of development and social relations. (Mattelart, 1980: pp. 9, 17)

How should we evaluate these models? The DEM suffers from all the disadvantages of

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ideal-typical psychological reasoning. It relies on methodological individualism, thereby failing to account for cultural norms and politics, let alone the arcs of history that establish patterns of text and response inside politics, war, ideology and discourse. Each massively costly laboratory test of media effects, based on, as the refrain goes, ‘a large university in the mid-West’, is countered by a similar experiment, with conflicting results. As politicians, grant-givers and jeremiadwielding pundits call for more and more research to prove that broadcasting makes you stupid, violent and apathetic – or the opposite – academics line up at the trough to indulge their contempt for popular culture and ordinary life and their rent-seeking urge for public money. The DEM never interrogates its own conditions of existence – namely, that governments, religious groups and the media themselves use it to account for social problems and that broadcasting’s capacity for private viewing troubles those authorities who desire surveillance of popular culture. As for the GEM, its concentration on national culture denies the potentially liberatory and pleasurable nature of varying takes on the popular, forgets the internal differentiation of publics, valorizes frequently oppressive and/or unrepresentative local bourgeoisies in the name of maintaining and developing national culture and ignores the demographic realities of its ‘own’ terrain. The DEM/GEM both operate in contradistinction to more populist, qualitative theories, which argue for intense differentiation within broadcasting. McLuhan said radio was a ‘hot medium’, because it contained a vast array of data that led the audience in a definite direction. TV was ‘cool’, as it left so much up to the viewer to sort out (McLuhan, 1974: p. 31). The latter perspective has offered a way-in to research via two other model broadcast audiences: the all-powerful consumer (invented and loved by policy-makers, desired and feared by corporations) and the all-powerful interpreter (invented and loved by utopic cultural critics, tolerated and used by corporations). These models have a common origin.

In lieu of citizen-building, their logic is the construction and control of consumers. Picking up on Garfinkel’s cultural-dope insight to adopt the reverse position from rat-catching psy-doomsayers, they claim that the audience, like neoclassical economics’ consumers, is so clever and able that it makes its own meanings, outwitting institutions of the state, academia and capitalism that seek to measure and control it. In the case of children and broadcasting – perhaps the most contentious and loaded area of audience study – anxieties from the effects tradition about turning Edenic innocents into rabid monsters have been challenged by a new culturalist perspective. This formation has animated research into how children distinguish between fact and fiction; the particular generic features and intertexts of children’s news, drama, actionadventure, education, cartooning and play; and how talking about broadcasting makes for social interaction (Buckingham, 2005: pp. 474–475). Sometimes faith in the active audience reaches cosmic proportions. It has been a donnée of much US cultural and television studies that broadcasting is not responsible for – well, anything. This position is a virtual nostrum in some research into, for instance, fans of TV drama, who are thought to construct connections with celebrities and actants in ways that mimic friendship, make sense of human interaction and ignite cultural politics. The critique commonly attacks opponents of television for failing to allot the people’s machine its due as a populist apparatus that subverts patriarchy, capitalism and other forms of oppression. Commercial TV is held to have progressive effects, because its programmes are decoded by viewers in keeping with their social situations. The active audience is said to be weak at the level of cultural production, but strong as an interpretative community. All this is supposedly evident to scholars from their perusal of audience conventions, web pages, discussion groups, quizzes and rankings, or by watching television with their children (Fiske, 1987). Very droll. But can fans be said to resist labour exploitation, patriarchy,

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racism and US neo-imperialism, or in some specifiable way make a difference to politics beyond their own selves, when they interpret texts unusually, dress up in public as men from outer space, or chat about their romantic frustrations?

CULTURAL ANALYSIS WITHIN BROADCASTING Apart from this scholarly work, a great deal of cultural analysis takes place within the industry, often picking up academic methods from policy, commercial and archival perspectives. Many public debates touch on cultural critics’ disdain for broadcasting. When veteran US newsman Edward R. Murrow addressed the country’s Radio-Television News Directors Association in 1958, he used the description/metaphor that broadcasting needed to ‘illuminate’ and ‘inspire’, or it would be ‘merely wires and light in a box’. In a famous speech to the National Association of Broadcasters three years later, John F. Kennedy’s chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Newton Minow, called US TV a ‘vast wasteland’ (1971). He was urging broadcasters to embark on enlightened Cold-War leadership, to prove that the USA was not the mindless consumer world that the Soviets claimed. The networks must live up to their legislative responsibilities and act in the public interest by informing and entertaining, transcending what he later recognized as ‘white suburbia’s Dick-andJane world’ (Minow, 2001). They responded by doubling the time devoted to news each evening and quickly became the dominant means of Yanquis learning about current affairs (Schudson and Tifft, 2005: p. 32). Twenty years later, however, Ronald Reagan’s FCC head, Mark Fowler, celebrated the reduction of the ‘box’ to ‘transistors and tubes’. He argued in an interview with Reason magazine that ‘television is just another appliance – it’s a toaster with pictures’ and hence in no need of regulation, beyond ensuring its physical safety as a commodity.2

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Minow’s and Fowler’s expressions gave their vocalists instant and undimmed celebrity (Murrow already had it as the most heralded audiovisual journalist in US history). Minow was named ‘top newsmaker’ of 1961 in an Associated Press survey and he was on television and radio more than any other Kennedy official. The phrase ‘vast wasteland’ has even, irony of ironies, provided raw material for the wasteland’s parthenogenesis: it has been the answer to questions posed on numerous TV game shows, from Jeopardy! to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (Minow and Cate, 2003: p. 408). The ‘toaster with pictures’ is less-celebrated, but has been more efficacious as a slogan for deregulation across successive Administrations. It remains in Reason’s pantheon of famous libertarian quotations, alongside Reagan and others of his ilk. Where Minow stands for public culture’s restraining (and ultimately conserving) function for capitalism, Fowler represents capitalism’s brooding arrogance, its neoliberal lust to redefine use value via exchange value. Minow decries Fowler’s vision, arguing that broadcasting ‘is not an ordinary business’ because of its ‘public responsibilities’ (Minow and Cate, 2003: p. 415). But Fowler’s phrase has won the day, at least to this point. Minow’s lives on as a recalcitrant moral irritant, rather than a central policy technology. The DEM was put on the defensive on its home turf, as neoliberal discourse rode roughshod over the land. Marketing and religion are probably the most important sites of sophisticated cultural analysis from within the commercial sector. Marketing likes nothing better than active audiences full of knowledge about programmes, nothing better than diverse groups with easily identified cultural politics and practices, nothing better than finegrained ethnographic and focus-group work in addition to large-scale surveys that provide broad-based demographic data. Marketers avow their powerlessness over audiences when challenged in the public sphere, but boast omnipotence over them in the private world: the essay that won the oleaginous ‘Best New Thinking Award at the 2003 Market

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Research Society Conference’ acknowledged that successful marketing does not ‘view … the consumer as an individual’ but as ‘part of the herd’ (Earls, 2003). As for religion, vigorous critiques of broadcast dominance have come from Islamists, with religious leaders and researchers leading the way, exerting great influence on Arab states and diasporas. They have focused on secular, pro-Western elites dominating the airwaves to the exclusion of faith-based broadcasting and governance. Spirituality and ethics have displaced technological transfer and capitalism as sites of struggle (Mowlana, 2000: pp. 112–114). Similarly, AM talk radio became a key site of cultural analysis and activism by far-right Christians in US politics during the 1990s, targeting white men from the working and lower-middle class. Around 70 per cent of talk-show hosts declare themselves conservative, which led Bill Clinton to characterize the genre as ‘just a constant, unremitting drumbeat of negativism and cynicism’, and former FCC chair Reed Hundt to question its distorted account of politics. Talk hosts were crucial players in organized attempts to claim a White-House conspiracy in the death of Clinton aide Vincent Foster (Brudnoy et al., 1994; Egan, 1995b, p. 22 n. 1; Gopnik, 1994: p. 98; Munson, 1993: p. 4; Nye, 1994: p. 10; T. Lewis, 1995: p. 60; Walsh, 1994). Syndicated talk-show host Rush Limbaugh opposes what he (bizarrely) claims to be excluded from – ‘the mainstream media’ – maintaining that the ‘explosion of talk radio’ presents a distinctive ‘cultural challenge’ to the country’s dominant institutions (Limbaugh, 1994: pp. 4–5, 10). He proudly cites the following endorsement from Reagan: ‘Now that I’ve retired from active politics, I don’t mind that you’ve become the numberone voice for conservatism in our country’. Limbaugh refers to criticisms from Time and USA Today as proof that ‘every corner of liberalism’ is against him. He characterizes the talk-radio audience as believers in ‘God, American ideals, morality, individual excellence and personal responsibility’. His listeners ‘subscribe to conservative periodicals and

read classic conservative books, teach their children at home, write letters to the editor, run for school boards and volunteer to work on local political campaigns or with a local charity’. Paradoxically, these people, who ‘do the right thing’ with their lives, are under attack from liberals for selfishness and greed. In place of such assaults, he offers ‘intelligent, enraged citizens’ a mix of ‘information and inspiration’. The New York Times argued during the 1990s that talk radio was banally oppositional, that it reflexively reached out against institutional power and would change under a Republican Presidency. This was disproved during the early part of the new century. Racism, xenophobia and antifeminism remained the lodestones of the genre. Whilst Limbaugh may have ceased his previous mockery of African-American speech on-air, that remains a staple for many of his colleagues and he continues to refer to ‘feminazis’, ‘environmental wackos’, ‘long-haired maggot-infested dope-smoking pansies’, and ‘the spaced-out Hollywood left’ (Egan, 1995a; Page and Tannenbaum, 1996). This may not be very nice, but it is applied cultural analysis! He even has a means of membershipping his audience, calling them ‘ditto-heads’ because of their loyalty. On a more benign cultural level, Mexican telenovelas, now seen in more than one hundred countries, are researched and revised by TV Azteca via a blend of genre study and análisis semántico basado en imagines (semantic analysis based on the imaginary) which uses viewer interviews about cultural responses to stories as they unfold. Data and analysis from this method determine plots (Clifford, 2005; Slade and Beckenham, 2005: p. 341 n. 1). And just as TV became a repertory site for archiving old cinema for new viewers in the 1950s, so television now treats its own history as an archive for commercial exploitation, via dedicated genre networks and DVD releases. To do so, it engages in cultural analysis. I have sat down with TV executives eager to learn how cultural studies might aid their marketing techniques for selling The Avengers, a programme from the

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1960s I have studied – and like others, I have advised law firms on how to claim cultural signs on behalf of broadcasters in disputes over copyright. These same marketers and lawyers write ‘cease-and-desist’ letters to fans who produce web pages about TV programmes – but then acknowledge that the sites are of value to rights holders, because they provide free publicity! And there is now of course a huge public archive of broadcasting. What was regarded as ephemeral has become art, perforce its collection and cataloguing within institutions zoned as archival. When leading museums such as New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (the creature of the Rockefeller family, but regarded as one of the major art centres in the world) touch on broadcasting, they tend to do so on a high-cultural basis. In the 1950s, MOMA looked to US TV as an avantgarde device that would speak to the masses even as it generated museologically worthy art, but the Museum ultimately despaired of broadcast commercialism, making the usual banal decision to subordinate it to film. Two decades later, New York’s Museum of Broadcasting opened, with a clearer mission, one that analysed broadcasting in the way that most US cultural policy works – as propaganda for capitalism and the industry, as a site of canon formation and as a tourist attraction. And in the ten years prior to his death, Andy Warhol taped a large amount of television, which is now held at Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum. The archive offers two kinds of cultural analysis. First, because Warhol represents the pop-art tradition, his tastes become hermeneutic clues to that world and his own oeuvre. Second, the Museum is a body of broadcast history, regardless of its conditions of collection and cataloguing (Spigel, 2005: pp. 74–75, 82, 86, 67).

CONCLUSION For all the policy debate and critical vitality surrounding it, some argue that ‘broadcasting’ is now virtually a vestigial term. Major League Baseball requires commentators to note that

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it owns the rights to their ‘broadcast’, and a few venerable TV news anchors still refer to ‘this broadcast’. But the BBC, the CBC, CBS, the SBS and NBC are known by their acronyms, not their titles (which include the ‘B-word’). The term has lost its currency, overtaken by technological and regulatory changes, as digital art and commerce and neoliberal ideology transform the audiovisual landscape. What are we to make of virtual actors (synthespians), desktop computers that produce and distribute expensive-looking images, the New International Division of Cultural Labour’s simultaneous production work on TV programmes across the world, broadband and visual cell-phone applications (Miller et al., 2005)? The rhetoric of the new media is inflected with the phenomenological awe of a precocious child set to heal the wounds of the modern by magically reconciling public and private, labour and leisure, commerce and culture, citizenship and consumption. The alleged upshot? ‘Television is dead’ (De Silva, 2000) and the interactive web is the future. That may be. But it is worth remembering that television stations continue to multiply around the world, that radio is adapting to the use of Internet portals and that the digital divide separating the poor from high technology is not changing – 90 per cent of Internet users live in the global North. The US population watched more TV in 2005 than in 1995 – an average of over 8 hours a day per person, an hour more than in the pre-web era. Children between the ages of 6 and 14 were tuned to television at rates unprecedented for twenty years and 69 per cent of them had sets in their bedrooms, versus 18 per cent with Internet access and 49 per cent with videogames. Thinking back to the poligrafi and hacks of Western Europe, perhaps the principal change associated with the new technology is in labour terms. Journalists and others who once simply ‘did’ radio, newspapers or TV have been transformed into multiply-skilled but unitarily paid workers, who must write scripts that can be read, heard and seen – and all on various networks aimed at particular

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demographics. This dispersion is allegedly a form of diversity, but it devalues reportage (‘Knowledge Divide’, 2005; Atkinson, 2005; Becker, 2005; Pew Research Center, 2005). The questions asked of broadcasting today illustrate its continued relevance. For example, leading bourgeois economist Jagdish Bhagwati (2002) is convinced that TV is partly to ‘blame’ for global grass-roots activism against globalization. Bhagwati implies that broadcasting makes people identify with those suffering from capitalism. He thinks the outcome has been counter-productive, because it has not led to rational action (i.e. support for the neoclassical economic policies he supports, which many would say caused the problem). Just a few pages further on in Bhagwati’s essay, however, broadcasting is suddenly a saviour. There is no need to litigate against companies that pollute the environment, or impose sanctions on states that enslave children to become competitive in the global economy, because ‘in today’s world of CNN … multinationals and their host governments cannot afford to alienate their constituencies’ (Bhagwati, 2002: pp. 4, 6). Clearly, the tie between broadcasting as a heaven and hell remains as powerful as it was in Arnheim’s (1969) forecast seven decades earlier. I suspect that we are witnessing a transformation of broadcasting, rather than its demise. For example, television started in most countries as a broadcast, national medium dominated by the state. It is being transformed into a cable, satellite and Internet, international medium dominated by commerce – but still called ‘television’. A TV-like screen, located in domestic and public spaces and transmitting signs from other places, will probably be the future. As media forms proliferate and change, their intermingling with social change ensures an ongoing link between cultural analysis and broadcasting. And there are some excellent examples of productive work that engages, but is not beholden to, the tired old binaries about audiences (vulnerability/power) and aesthetics (quality/banality). Vincent Mosco starts from cultural myths and ‘builds a

bridge to political economy’ in his excoriation of neoliberal phantasies about empowerment, insisting on ‘the mutually constitutive relationship between political economy and cultural studies’ as each mounts ‘a critique of the other’ (2004: pp. 6–7). Richard Maxwell (2002) links ‘a critique of neoliberalism and a cultural studies approach to consumption … not by issuing nostrums against the pleasures of shopping[,] but by paying attention to the politics of resource allocation that brings a consumption infrastructure into the built environment’. This is standard practice in much cultural analysis beyond Britain, the USA and their whitesettler academic satellites (Israel, Australia, Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand). Arvind Rajagopal (2002) notes that because television, the telephone, the Internet and the neoliberal are all new to India, ‘markets and media generate new kinds of rights and new kinds of imagination … novel ways of exercising citizenship rights and conceiving politics’. We see the evidence in civil-society research and activist organizations such as . For Rosalía Winocur, talk radio in Latin America since the fall of USbacked dictatorships has offered a simultaneously individual and social forum for new expressions of citizenship, in the context of decentred politics, emergent identities, minority rights and gender issues – a public space that transcends old ideas subordinating difference and privileging elite experience (2002: pp. 15, 91–93). There is intellectual and political value in utilizing the knowledge gained from cultural analysis to assess this transformation and intervene in it – especially if we borrow from the right traditions. Consider three basic questions often posed by students of the media: • ‘will this get me a job?’ • ‘is TV bad for you?’; and • ‘how do we get that show back on?’

These sensible queries have direct links to the relationships between text and audience, as understood through political economy, textual

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analysis and ethnography. The respective answers are: • ‘if you know who owns and regulates broadcasting, you’ll know how to apply’ • ‘the answer depends on who is asking the question and why’; and • ‘if you know how audiences are defined and genre functions, you can support your favourite programmes’

Think of weather on TV news and dedicated networks. Cultural analysts have noted that the requirement to give pleasure in delivering the weather determines its narrative form. In 1963, US NBC nightly news executive producer Reuven Frank instructed his staff that with the expansion of their programme from fifteen minutes to half an hour, each story must ‘display the attributes of fiction, of drama. It should have structure and conflict, problem and denouement, rising action and falling action. . . . These are not only the essentials of drama; they are the essentials of narrative’ (quoted in Graber, 1994: p. 483). John Langer (1998: pp. 104–133) deploys narratology to understand broadcast coverage of disasters, arguing that coverage mimics fiction. A state of equilibrium is assumed, where life is ordinary and manageable; a problem occurs, which sets disequilibrium in play; then normalcy is restored. But Justin Lewis (1994) doubts the relevance of narrative analyses to understanding news on television. He argues that the genre is not organized via narrative codes: no equilibrium is established, disrupted and restored. Rather, viewers are greeted in medias res. A wild and woolly programme provides only restricted information about the backdrop to stories and the structure is fundamentally disjointed. Lewis notes that empirical audience research suggests recollection of the news is minimal in comparison with other genres that are driven by aetiological narrativity. The news lacks historicity, which reduces spectatorial recall by contrast with soap opera or situation comedy. The absence of historical context and the chaotic interpretations this induces are not celebrated by Lewis as forms of resistance,

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however. He identifies a repetition of various orientations that are all about sustaining the status quo of politics. In this sense, broadcast weather is a nation-binding technique that acknowledges difference, but ultimately contains it within averaged norms, reassurances of predictable change and consumer utility. As the news segment that became a genre and then a network, the weather’s lack of a full narrative arc – the storms begin and end, but the climates never do – addresses viewers as perfectly knowledgeable and empowered consumers, able to switch on and off as their immediate needs are met. Like readers of the classic realist text, they are addressed as competent customers. Whilst the weather can form the basis of headline stories about chaos, it equally demarcates the news from the next programme or break, reassuring viewers through the rhythms of climate and the materiality of topography. In this sense, it redresses the impact of the potentially inchoate news genre – there’s always the weather to bring things to a conclusion and describe tomorrow. The forecast also represents a crucial part of broadcasting’s star system – the scientific aura of weather presenters is matched by a humanizing one. Unlike experts who are interviewed on air, forecasters can represent themselves, opening and closing segments and directly addressing cameras. The combination makes meteorology accessible, for broadcast weather is characterized by an essential stability in its order and reach. The same population centres are mentioned each night, located in the same spatial relation to one another. This helps to fix the otherwise asymptotic quandary of the weather as a component of time and space – infinitely knowable, via the expansive reach and measurement of technology; but infinitely wilful, frustrating all efforts to control it and sucking up the detritus of industrialization, generating unintended tomorrows. Working with the brave new climate of deregulated television in the USA, the weather got its own national network in 1982.

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The Weather Channel followed a successful revenue formula of running commercials from car manufacturers, the grail of the national advertiser, localized through satellite downloading and articulated with regional dealerships. The station also conducted promotional campaigns designed to attract and retain future viewers. For example, in 1998 it held a ‘Look Up! Challenge Sky Contest’ for school pupils and teachers, who were invited to express themselves on the topic of the sky via poems, pictures or photographs, with the winning schools receiving television sets. This tactic combined an address of future adults with an insertion into their daily lives and associated the network with more than the mundane. As the only national cable station offering local information, it gave cable companies the ability to segment advertising geographically and climatically. Today, the Channel’s audience extends to 87 million, over 90 per cent of cabled households. This rate of growth easily outstrips the average for cable networks and delivers numbers to advertisers that are far beyond MTV’s performance. Cable operators themselves prefer it to all other stations apart from CNN. The station’s early research divided its viewers between the ‘deeply serious’ and the ‘weather-involved’ (who watched anything and numbered 20 per cent), ‘busy planners’ and ‘instant users’ (pragmatists in search of immediate information), the ‘weatherconcerned’ (cosmopolitans who looked to see where they used to live or where they had relatives and friends) and ‘weather enjoyers’ (who liked the network’s apolitical style of ‘television wallpaper’). It referred to the profoundly committed viewer as a ‘weather weenie’, addicted to the ‘weatherporn’ habit of voyeurism – enjoying the sorrow of others. Now the Channel distinguishes between the ‘weather-engaged’ (41 per cent), ‘weather planners’ (28 per cent) and ‘commodity users’ (31 per cent) among its spectators (Miller, 2007). The time-discipline inscribed by weather organizes key social institutions and their personnel. So The Weather Channel has a programming schedule with central weather

news every half hour, storm watches through the hour and shows on planning lifestyle, travel, the week and the weekend. The message reads: get to work on time by allowing for nature, so that the sale of your labour-power is not interrupted; dress your children appropriately, so that they can turn up and obey the dictates of school as preparation for work; and plan your renovation to allow for climatic variations and safety costs. To understand broadcast meteorology, we need to situate it in this blend of text and political economy. As per that project, perhaps the most significant innovation in recent cultural analyses of broadcasting has been a radical historicization of context that acknowledges the shifts and shocks that characterize the existence of cultural commodities, their ongoing renewal as the temporary property of productive workers and publics and their stasis as the abiding property of unproductive businesspeople. Cultural analysis needs to combine political economy, ethnography and textual analysis. Roger Chartier proposes a tripartite approach to texts, viz. reconstruction of ‘the diversity of older readings from their sparse and multiple traces’; a focus on ‘the text itself, the object that conveys it and the act that grasps it’; and an identification of ‘the strategies by which authors and publishers tried to impose an orthodoxy or a prescribed reading on the text’ (1989: pp. 157, 161–163, 166). This grid turns away from reflectionism, which argues that a text’s key meaning lies in its overt or covert capacity to capture the Zeitgeist. It also rejects formalism’s claim that a close reading of sound and image can secure a definitive meaning, because texts accrete and attenuate meanings on their travels, as they rub up against, trope and are troped by other fictional and social texts. Broadcast texts are part of a multi-form network of entertainment, via CD-ROMs, the Web, DVDs, electronic games, TV, telephones, radio, the Internet and multiplexes. Engagements with audiences and texts must now be supplemented by an account that details the conditions under which the media are made, circulated, received, interpreted and

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criticized. The life of any broadcast text is a passage across space and time, a life remade again and again by institutions, discourses and practices of distribution and reception – in short, all the shifts and shocks of commodities.

NOTES 1 This rich literature can be found extracted in Miller 2003 and exemplified in Baehr and Gray, 1996; Bennett et al., 1981; Boddy, 1990; Bodroghkozy, 2001; Browne, 1996; Brunsdon et al., 1997; Buscombe, 1975; Butler, 2002; Coleman, 2002; Cunningham and Sinclair, 2001; Fiske, 1987; Fiske and Hartley, 1978; Ma, 1999; Mazziotti, 1996; Newcomb, 1974; Williams, 1978. 2 Not surprisingly, Alfred Hitchcock said it earlier and better: ‘Television is like the American toaster, you push the button and the same thing pops up every time’ (quoted in Wasko, 2005: p. 10).

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Clifford, R. (2005) ‘Engaging the audience: the social imaginary of the Novela’, Television & New Media, 6(4): 360–369. Coleman, R.M. (ed.) (2002) Say it Loud! AfricanAmerican Audiences, Media and Identity. New York: Routledge. Comstock, G. and Scharrer, E. (1999) Television: What’s On, Who’s Watching and What it Means. San Diego: Academic Press. Cooper, C.A. (1996) Violence on Television: Congressional Inquiry, Public Criticism and Industry Response – A Policy Analysis. Lanham: University Press of America. Cunningham, S. and Sinclair, J. (eds) (2001) Floating Lives: The Media and Asian Diasporas. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. DeLillo, D. (1986) White Noise. London: Picador. DeLillo, D. (1987) End Zone. Harmondsworth: Penguin. de Pedro, J.P. (1999) ‘Democracy and cultural difference in the Spanish Constitution of 1978’, in C.J. Greenhouse with R. Kheshti (eds), Democracy and Ethnography: Constructing Identities in Multicultural Liberal States. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 61–80. De Silva, J.P. (2000) La televisión ha muerto: La nueva producción audiovisual en la era de Internet: La tercera revolución industrial. Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa. Dorfman, A. and Mattelart, A. (2000) Para leer al pato Donald: Comunicación de masa y colonialismo. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Douglas, S.J. (1987) Inventing American Broadcasting 1899–1922. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Dylan, B. (2004) Chronicles: Volume One. New York: Simon & Schuster. Earls, M. (2003) ‘Advertising to the herd: how understanding our true nature challenges the ways we think about advertising and market research’, International Journal of Market Research, 45(3): 311–337. Eco, U. (1987) Travels in Hyperreality: Essays. Tr. W. Weaver. London: Picador. Egan, T. (1995a) ‘Talk Radio or Hate Radio? Critics Assail Some Hosts’, New York Times, 1 January, p. 22. Egan, T. (1995b) ‘Triumph leaves Talk Radio pondering its next targets’, New York Times, 1 January, p. 22. Fiske, J. (1987) Television Culture. London: Routledge. Fiske, J. and Hartley, J. (1978) Reading Television. London: Methuen. Fowler, M. (1981) Reason Interview: Mark S. Fowler. Retrieved from .

García Canclini, N. (2001) Consumers and Citizens: Multicultural Conflicts in the Process of Globalization. Tr. G. Yúdice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Garfinkel, H. (1992) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Garnham, N. (1987) ‘Concepts of culture: public policy and the cultural industries’, Cultural Studies, 1(1): 23–37. Gellman, E.F. (1979) Good Neighbor Policy: United States Policies in Latin America, 1933–1945. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Gopnik, A. (1994) ‘Read all about it’, New Yorker, 70(41): 84–102. Graber, D.A. (1994) ‘The infotainment quotient in routine television news: a director’s perspective’, Discourse & Society, 5(4): 483–508. Higgins, C.S. and Moss, P.D. (1982) Sounds Real: Radio in Everyday Life. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Hubbell, R.W. (1942) 4000 Years of Television: The Story of Seeing at a Distance. New York: GP Putnam’s Sons. Johnson, L. (1988) The Unseen Voice: A Cultural Study of Early Australian Radio. London: Routledge. (2005) ‘ “Knowledge divide” must be narrowed through education – UNESCO‘, UN News Service, 3 November. Langer, J. (1998) Tabloid Television: Popular Journalism and the ‘Other News’. London: Routledge. Lewis, J. (1994) ‘The absence of narrative: boredom and the residual power of television news’, Journal of Narrative and Life History, 4(1–2): 25–40. Lewis, J., Inthorn, S. and Wahl-Jorgensen K. (2005) Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us About Political Participation. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Lewis, P.M. and Booth, J. (1989) The Invisible Medium: Public, Commercial and Community Radio. London: Macmillan. Lewis, T. (1995) ‘Triumph of the idol – Rush Limbaugh and a hot medium’, in E.C. Pease and E.E. Dennis (eds), Radio – The Forgotten Medium. New Brunswick: Transaction, pp. 59–68. Liddicoat, A., Döpke, S., Love, K. and Brown, A. (1994) ‘Presenting a point of view: callers’ contributions to Talkback Radio in Australia’, Journal of Pragmatics, 22(2): 139–56. Limbaugh, R. (1994) ‘Voice of America: why Liberals fear me’, Policy Review, 70: 4–10. Ma, E.K. (1999) Culture, Politics and Television in Hong Kong. London: Routledge. Martín-Barbero, J. (2003) ‘Proyectos de Modernidad en América Latina’, Metapolítica, 29: 35–51.

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Martín-Barbero, J. and Rey, G. (1999) Los ejercicios del ver: Hegemonía audiovisual y ficcíon televisiva. Barcelona: Gedisa Editorial. Mattelart, A. (1980) Mass Media, Ideologies and the Revolutionary Movement. Tr. M. Joad. Brighton: Harvester Press/Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. Maxwell, R. (2002) ‘Citizens, you are what you buy’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 20 December. Mazziotti, N. (1996) La industria de la telenovela: La producción de ficción en América latina. Buenos Aires: Paidós. McDonald, K.M. (1999) ‘How would you like your television: with or without borders and with or without culture – a new approach to media regulation in the European Union’, Fordham International Law Journal, 22: 1991–2023. McGuigan, J. (1996) Culture and the Public Sphere. London: Routledge. McLuhan, M. (1974) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Aylesbury: Abacus. Miller, T. (ed.) (2002) Television Studies. London: British Film Institute. Miller, T. (ed) (2003) Television: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (5 vols.). London: Routledge. Miller, T. (2007) Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Miller, T., Govil, N., McMurria, J. and Wang, T. (2005) Global Hollywood 2. London: British Film Institute. Mills, C.W. (1970) in I.L. Horowitz (ed.), Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. Minow, N. (1971) ‘The broadcasters are public trustees’, in A. Kirschener and L. Kirschener (eds), Radio & Television: Readings in the Mass Media. New York: Odyssey Press, pp. 207–217. Minow, N.N. (2001). ‘Television, more vast than ever, turns toxic’, USA Today, 15A, 9 May. Minow, N.N. and Cate, F.H. (2003) ‘Revisiting the vast wasteland’, Federal Communications Law Journal, 55: 407–440. Mosco, V. (2004) The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power and Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mowlana, H. (2000) ‘The renewal of the global media debate: implications for the relationship between the West and the Islamic World’, in K. Hafez (ed.), Islam and the West in the Mass Media: Fragmenting Images in a Globalizing World. Cresskill: Hampton Press, pp. 105–118.

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Munson, W. (1993) All Talk: The Talkshow in Media Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Murrow, E.R. (1958) Speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association, Chicago. 15 October. Newcomb, H. (1974) TV: The Most Popular Art. Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Nye, P. (1994) ‘Talk radio – electronic democracy or just noisy harrumphing?’, Public Citizen, 14(5): 10–14. Page, B.I. and Tannenbaum, J. (1996) ‘Populistic deliberation and talk radio’, Journal of Communication, 46(2): 33–54. Pew Research Center (2005) Trends 2005. Potts, J. (1989) Radio in Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Rajagopal, A. (2002) ‘Violence of commodity aesthetics’, Economic and Political Weekly, 5 January. Schiller, H.I. (1976) Communication and Cultural Domination. New York: International Arts and Sciences Press. Schramm, W., Lyle, J. and Parker, E.B. (1961) Television in the Lives of Our Children. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Schudson, M. and Tifft, S.E. (2005) ‘American journalism in historical perspective’, in G. Overholser and K. Hall Jamieson (eds), The Press. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 17–47. Singer, D.G. and Singer, J.L. (2001) ‘Introduction: why a handbook on children and the media?’, in D.G. Singer and J.L. Singer (eds), Handbook of Children and the Media. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, pp. xi–xvii. Slade, C. and Beckenham, A. (2005) ‘Introduction: telenovelas and soap operas: negotiating reality’, Television & New Media, 6(4): 337–341. Spigel, L. (2005) ‘Our TV heritage: television, the archive and the reasons for preservation’, in J. Wasko (ed.), A Companion to Television. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 67–99. Stavitsky, A. (1995) ‘Ear on America’, in E.C. Pease and E.E. Dennis (eds), Radio – The Forgotten Medium. New Brunswick: Transaction, pp. 81–93. Surgeon General’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior (1971) Television and Growing Up: The Impact of Televised Violence. Report to the Surgeon General, U.S. Public Health Service. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Service. Tricot, A. (2000) ‘Screens Without Frontiers’: Project to Establish a Database for Television Programs for Use of the Public Television Channels of Developing Countries. UNESCO/ URTI.

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Wallerstein, I. (1989) ‘Culture as the ideological battleground of the modern world-system’, Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, 21(1): 5–22. Walsh, T. (1994) ‘Hundt blasts Talk Radio at N.Y. Feed’, Variety, 44, 24–30 October. Wasko, J. (2005) ‘Introduction’ in J. Wasko (ed.), A Companion to Television. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 1–12.

Williams, R. (1978) Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins. Williams, R. (1983) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised edn. New York: Oxford University Press. Winocur, R. (2002) Ciudadanos Mediáticos: La construcción de lo publico en la radio. Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa.

11 Cultural Studies Ien Ang

‘Cultural studies’ is a familiar presence in intellectual discourse today, but there is little agreement about what it stands for. As John Hartley recently observed, the field is riven by fundamental disagreements about what cultural studies is for, in whose interests it is done, what theories, methods and objects of study are proper to it, and where to set its limits (Hartley, 2003: p. 1). Such admissions of dissensus and uncertainty are typical of cultural studies. Indeed, boundary disputes (including disputes about its own boundaries) are intrinsic to cultural studies. One could pithily sum up the overarching cultural studies ‘method’ as the contestation of socially constructed boundaries: cultural studies analysis often begins with a thorough questioning of the apparent naturalness of categories (of class, gender, race and so on) that frame and regulate social life. At the same time, boundary contestation has also been a raison d’être for cultural studies as an academic endeavour. Since the 1970s it has taken academe by storm, helping to propel the so-called ‘cultural turn’ (e.g. Hunt, 1989; Long, 1997; Marcus, 2001; Ray and Sayer, 1999). This Handbook is a reflection of the implications of this

‘cultural turn’, and signals the role that ‘culture’ – and cultural studies – has played in unsettling established disciplinary boundaries (e.g. of history, sociology or literature). Cultural studies has functioned as both agent and symptom in the reconfiguration of the disciplinary structure of the Humanities and the Social Sciences – an unresolved process still under way today. Meanwhile, the academic status of cultural studies remains decidedly uncertain. Cultural studies practitioners come from a broad (and not always mutually compatible) range of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds, and have been attracted to the field for different intellectual and political reasons. But in a more fundamental sense cultural studies’ predicament as necessarily ‘unfinished business’ can be linked to the particular mode of analysis – its research strategies, methods and approaches – that distinguishes cultural studies in part from other modes of cultural analysis. Succinctly, the distinctive analytical orientation of cultural studies is a serious engagement with cultural complexity. Whatever theme is addressed, the cultural studies analyst’s penchant is to emphasize the context-specific, multidimensional, and

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contingent, in short, complex nature of the subject matter, and a corresponding effort to represent and do justice to that complexity. Moreover, the endeavour is not just epistemological but also political: cultural studies grapples with cultural complexity to advance more effective ways of seeing and intervening in the world, usually in the context of broadly defined principles of cultural democracy. Stuart Hall, who entered cultural studies from the British New Left in the 1960s, insists that this ‘political’ aspect is a crucial component of what is at stake in cultural studies. It sees itself as ‘a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect’ (Hall, 1992: p. 286).1 So cultural studies is an irrevocably engaged mode of cultural analysis, merging academic and civic (or scholarly and activist, theoretical and political) stakes and concerns. How this double engagement is articulated, however, can take on many forms (Gregg, 2006). Not only can the precise political target vary, depending on context and location; there are also many styles of engagement. For some, doing cultural studies is a form of cultural politics that must always resist academic institutionalization; for others, elaborating cultural studies as a legitimate academic pursuit is itself a political objective. Even in academic research, engagement can be articulated in different ways. The ‘political’ can remain largely implicit, for example in a research paper that critiques dominant discourses using objectivist social science methods and modes of representation, or it can be overtly flaunted, as in deconstructive writing presented as ‘performative acts’ inspired by the iconoclastic intellectual moves of queer theory. Needless to say, there is no agreed-upon standard for the ideal form of cultural studies; this, too, is subject to ongoing dispute.

ORIGINS AND TRAJECTORIES The dominant narrative about cultural studies’ origins locates it in late 1950s Britain, from

where it spread to other parts of the world. But this narrative is hotly contested. Robert Stam (2001) posits a more international lineage for the movement in the work of figures such as Roland Barthes and Henri Lefebure in France, Leslie Fiedler in the United States, Franz Fanon in Martinique, France and North Africa, and C.L.R. James in the Caribbean. George Yudice (2001) notes that while the term ‘cultural studies’ is rarely used in Latin America, there are longstanding traditions of Latin American cultural analysis for which other terms are used such as communications, intellectual history, discourse analysis or interdisciplinary studies. Johan Fornas (2006) speaks for many Europeans when he describes how cultural studies in Sweden developed primarily through an engagement with Marxist theories from the German and central European left (e.g. Oskar Negt, Alfred Lorenzer and Thomas Ziehe). John Frow and Meaghan Morris (1993) have observed that cultural studies in Australia did not begin by reading British work but through the summer schools at the Workers’ Educational Association in Sydney in the 1960s. In a bold exercise of revisionist historiography Handel Kashope Wright (1996) has stated that cultural studies did not start in Britain but in Africa in the 1970s, referring to the work of the Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Centre in Limuru, Kenya, where Ngugi wa Thiong’o set up a theatre production company where peasants could critically examine local politics and culture. Wright argues for the recognition of a multiplicity of beginnings for cultural studies in a wide variety of locations (see also Stratton and Ang, 1996). This argument has considerable merit, but it doesn’t automatically negate the validity of the dominant narrative. On the one hand, cultural studies stands for an alwaysalready transnational but dispersed intellectual practice of drawing together theory, culture and politics, emerging in different parts of the world in different configurations roughly from the 1960s onwards. On the other hand, ‘cultural studies’ is a more circumscribed, (imperfectly) institutionalized

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academic denomination in a limited (but growing) number of countries, starting with Britain. As Wright (1996) himself admits, while Africans such as Ngugi may do ‘heuristic cultural studies’, they do not label themselves as cultural studies workers and lend at most tacit references to Western cultural studies discourses. In this regard, they may not consider themselves part of the global intellectual community of cultural studies today, even though their work would fit in perfectly well. Whether we like it or not, then, British cultural studies has played a dominant role in the academic emergence of cultural studies. It was with the establishment of the Centre for Contemporary cultural studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964 that ‘the quantum leap of cultural studies took it from the nameless to the named, from nothingness to institutional existence’ (Barker, 2002: p. 4). The early institutional space created by the CCCS provided both a haven and a laboratory for the paradigmatic development of cultural studies. As a consequence, wherever selfdeclared cultural studies practitioners are located, they commonly have had to refer to the ‘Birmingham School’ as a pivot for self-description and inspiration. Thus, British cultural studies has played a central symbolic role in the international convergence of multiple and heterogeneous local forms of intellectual practice under the rubric of cultural studies. In this convergence, multiplicities and heterogeneities, however divergent, are pulled together by a minimal but generalized intellectual affinity – a kind of family resemblance – which affirms, however provisionally and contentiously, the boundaries of cultural studies as a distinct field. The CCCS was established as a postgraduate research centre by a Professor of Modern English Literature, Richard Hoggart, but its zenith of influential activity took place under the leadership of his successor, Stuart Hall, in the 1970s and into the 1980s. In that period the CCCS was a vibrant environment for the production of innovative and experimental intellectual work that has

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long served as a key model for cultural studies: collaborative, interdisciplinary and grounded in the issues of the day.2 It was in this period that field-shaping collective book projects such as Resistance Through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson, 1975), Women Take Issue (Women’s Studies Group, 1978), Culture, Media, Language (Hall et al., 1980) and The Empire Strikes Back (CCCS, 1982) were published. The empirical range of these books – working-class youth subcultures, women and feminism, racial and ethnic minorities, the cultural politics of language and media, all in the context of profound changes in British culture and society as a consequence of the emergence of new voices from the margins – reveals the breath of intellectual and political concerns that was represented at the CCCS. In the early days, cultural studies was an experimental mode of analysis – focusing broadly on ‘the cultural aspects of society’ (Hall et al., 1980: p. 7) – for which there were no roadmaps. Lawrence Grossberg, who was a visiting student at the CCCS in the late 1960s, describes the theory seminars he attended ‘as a collective effort to define the project of cultural studies and to find an adequate theoretical basis for its researchers’ (Grossberg, 1997: p. 24).3 An important motivation was the development of a theory which would conceptualize ‘culture’ not as a separate practice that was secondary to other, presumably more fundamental (e.g. economic, political) practices but as ‘threaded through all social practices, and is the sum of their interrelationships’ (Hall, 1980b: p. 59). Throughout the 1970s, CCCS reading groups focused increasingly on a critical engagement with French (post)structuralism, including the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the social semiotics of Roland Barthes, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and the structural Marxism of LouisAlthusser. Hall himself later became mostly wedded to a Gramscian theoretical framework, which merged ‘culturalist’ and ‘structuralist’ paradigms (see e.g. Hall, 1980b; 1992; 1996). In all these theoretical engagements the aim was to ‘to define and occupy a space’ for

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‘intellectual interventions’ with an interest in ‘advancing critical research in the field’ (Hall, 1980a: pp. 15–16). In the words of John Clarke, a CCCS graduate student in the 1970s, ‘the practice of critique’ was at the heart of the Centre’s intellectual project: ‘the subjection of existing knowledge to critical interrogation to generate new insights’ (Clarke, 1991: p. 7). What happened at the CCCS in the 1970s was by no means unique: similar initiatives, under different labels, in different institutional contexts and with differently formulated but similar focal concerns, took place all over the Western world and with equal passion. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the field’s intellectual formation could not have happened without the leading role of the Birmingham Centre. What made the Centre’s work so compelling? There were substantive, methodological and political reasons. In substantive terms, CCCS work – and by extension cultural studies more generally – was appealing because it addressed issues and questions that were embedded in the social experience of everyday life in the increasingly complex, contradictory and fractious modern societies of the second half of the twentieth century. In so doing, cultural studies validated serious intellectual engagement with topics – whether it was popular media, youth subcultures or racial identities – that were traditionally dismissed as too ‘trivial’ for academic scholarship, but which resonated strongly with students’ own experiences and interests. In short, cultural studies was attractive because it raised relevant, ‘hot to handle’ questions about ‘the contemporary’ (the second C of CCCS) (Hall et al., 1980: p. 7). This ties in with the methodological dimension of cultural studies work, which is integrative rather than compartmentalized, bringing together a variety of perspectives to draw out the multifaceted complexity of a particular issue or problem rather than working towards a singular, definitive explanation. This refers to more than just interdisciplinarity – a characteristic intimately attached to cultural studies analysis; it refers also to an awareness of the fundamentally provisional and partial nature of knowledge

(complexity, after all, can never be fully grasped). This implicit or explicit rejection of ‘objectivity’ reflects cultural studies’ political dimension: while it shares with other critical intellectual traditions the objective of analysing structures of domination and power relations in (capitalist) society, cultural studies does this through concrete studies that locate the workings of power within the actual processes of everyday life, making its politics much more tangible and practical than more abstract philosophical strands of critical theory. My own introduction to cultural studies began when I stumbled on a small book, Raymond Williams’ Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), in an Amsterdam bookstore in the late 1970s. For a student in communication studies, this book was extremely helpful in thinking beyond the reductionist models of American mass communication research, where television was conceived simply as a container of ‘messages’ that might have more or less ‘effects’ on the behaviour and attitudes of viewers. Williams, by contrast, approached television not only as both a ‘technology’ and a ‘cultural form’ but also as a social artefact whose historical development is determined profoundly by a range of specific (economic, political, institutional) interests and pressures. I found this emphasis on the complexity of television enormously appealing and enabling.4 My eventual identification as a cultural studies academic coincided with my relocation to Australia in 1991, where cultural studies proved to be a more viable academic trajectory than in the Netherlands.There was sufficient critical mass for cultural studies in Australia to become an institutional presence at a number of universities, mostly associated with either media and communication studies programmes or with departments of English (for an account, see Frow, 2005). This illuminates the complex interchange between institutional conditions and intellectual and professional self-identification: without sustainable institutional frameworks, an organized intellectual practice is not likely to survive. Indeed, throughout the 1980s

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and 1990s the institutionalization of cultural studies – through the establishment of academic programmes and departments, research centres, journals, professional organizations and so on – accelerated in many parts of the world. Significant examples are Hong Kong (Ma, 2001), where the first full-blown cultural studies department in Asia was established at Lingnan University in the late 1990s, and Turkey (Pultar and Kirtunç, 2004), where cultural studies postgraduate programmes have emerged throughout the country. At the same time, the field’s institutionalization has not always been a smooth process. In the UK, the Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology (into which the CCCS was morphed) was closed down by the University of Birmingham in 2002 after poor results in the British ResearchAssessment Exercise (see Webster, 2004), while the field has found a more solid academic home at a number of other, mostly newer universities. And in the USA, where debate about cultural studies’ place in the academic landscape has been particularly fierce, the field still occupies an uncertain institutional space, with only very few dedicated graduate programmes or departments. A final point to be made here concerns the disciplinary status of cultural studies. Tony Bennett once characterized cultural studies as ‘less a specific theoretical and political tradition or discipline than a gravitational field in which a number of intellectual traditions have found a provisional rendezvous’ (Bennett, 1992: p. 33). Indeed, people come into cultural studies from a broad variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including literary studies, sociology, history, anthropology, communications, geography, film studies, psychology, education and philosophy, with less input to date from economics, international relations or law. What has resulted in this cross-disciplinary mixing is not a smooth melting pot or synthesis, but a sometimes grating interdisciplinarity, where discrepant theoretical, methodological or stylistic predilections, associated with different regimes of disciplinary training, may find expression in conflicting priorities or

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directions envisaged for the field. The most conspicuous difference of opinion in this respect relates to that between more ‘textual’ and more ‘sociological’ approaches or, more broadly, between more humanities- and more social-science-oriented ways of conceptualizing cultural studies, although it is precisely at the point of convergence of these two tendencies that cultural studies has made its most innovative and valuable contribution to cultural analysis (see e.g. Couldry, 2000; Johnson et al., 2004). By the early twenty-first century, the position of the ‘Birmingham School’ has been thoroughly provincialized (Chakrabarty, 1992), reduced to being just one, albeit important, line of influence within a much more global, heterogeneous and decentred imagined community of cultural studies practitioners (see http://www.cultstud.org). Today, cultural studies is on the brink of either expansion – encompassing ever larger constituencies around the world – or implosion – a kind of melting away through the sheer dispersal of what it stands for. A retrospective look at how we got here may give us a greater grasp of what ‘cultural studies’ represents as a mode of cultural analysis.

CULTURE AND SOCIETY In a minimal sense, cultural studies can be described as the study of the relations between culture and society. This is a more complicated and problematic proposition than it sounds. As Gable and Handler (in this volume) recount, in the 1950sAmerican social science was preoccupied with the conceptual separation of ‘culture’ and ‘society’, culminating in a mandate, formulated in a 1958 joint manifesto by the sociologist Talcott Parsons and the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, for the scientific division of labour between anthropology (the study of culture) and sociology (the study of society). This mandate was motivated by a positivist desire to eliminate the confusion between the two terms and the substantive solidification of the two disciplines. In cultural studies, by

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contrast, the focus on relations between culture and society not only stresses the inextricable linkages between the two; more importantly, it also works to blur the boundaries between them. In this way, cultural studies is characterized by a principled refusal to treat ‘culture’ and ‘society’ as two separate entities. A good example is this statement by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore, India, which was established in 1996: ‘We use the phrase “culture and society” to emphasize that culture must be seen not as a transcendent entity but as part of a network of social and political relations, indeed as integral to the formation of such relations’ (http://www.cscsban.org/html/about.htm). Thus, as Frow and Morris (2000: p. 328) observe, cultural studies depends on a theoretical paradox: it must continually undo the opposition between ‘culture’ and ‘society’ that is often the starting point for cultural analysis. This paradox creates a tension that is constitutive of work in cultural studies. A brief consideration of some foundational work in British cultural studies will clarify the distinct characteristics of the ‘culture and society’ paradigm that has emerged from that work. Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (Hoggart, 1957) was a passionate and wideranging study of changes in English workingclass culture in the early to mid twentieth century resulting from the emergence of mass media and mass literacy. Himself from a working-class background, Hoggart was deeply pessimistic about these changes, arguing that ‘we are moving towards a mass culture; that the remnants of what was at least in parts an urban culture “of the people” are being destroyed; and that the new mass culture is in some important ways less healthy than the often crude culture it is replacing’ (Hoggart, 1957: p. 24). Hoggart’s critique of mass culture was not, however, formulated from the point of view of an elite ‘high culture’ and its aesthetic biases, but from a deep concern with the cultural fate of common people. As he put it: ‘The strongest objection to the more trivial popular entertainments is not that they prevent their readers from becoming highbrow, but

that they make it harder for people without an intellectual bent to become wise in their own way’ (Hoggart, 1957: p. 338). Yet Hoggart’s enduring influence on cultural studies has been not so much for his pessimistic outlook, but for his comprehensive focus on the social significance of popular culture as a key locus for the understanding of ordinary people’s everyday lives. The Uses of Literacy, described by Ioan Davies (1995: p. 7) as ‘part autobiography, part social history, part study of education, part analysis of the media’, presents an integration of ‘aesthetic’and ‘sociological’ perspectives on culture, paving the way for the fundamental interdisciplinarity that is so central to the analytical style of cultural studies. The same can be said of the work of Raymond Williams. As the title of his book Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958) suggests, for Williams the understanding of culture is inextricably linked with, and provides a vital way into, the understanding of society as a whole. ‘The development of the word culture is a record of a number of important and continuing reactions to (…) changes in our social, economic, and political life, and may be seen, in itself, as a special kind of map by means of which the nature of the changes can be explored’ (Williams, 1958: p. 16). Williams’s concept of culture is expansive: it is a ‘natural’, common and constitutive dimension of any human society. This is particularly clear in his subsequent book, The Long Revolution (1961), in which he moved ‘the whole ground of debate from a literary-moral to an anthropological definition of culture’ (Hall, 1980a: p. 19). Here, Williams defines ‘culture’ as ‘a description of a particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour’ (Williams, 1961: p. 57). It is in this sense that Williams says that ‘culture is ordinary’ (Williams, 1989b): it refers to the common meanings that underlie the lived experience of the everyday. Moreover, these meanings are not fixed but are ‘made and remade, in ways we cannot know in advance’ (Williams, 1989b: p. 10). In short, according

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to Williams the study of culture has to be defined as the study of ‘relationships between elements in a whole way of life’ (1961: p. 63), encompassing the material, intellectual and spiritual dimensions of ‘society’. This integrative ‘culture and society’ approach also underpins a classic Australian book, Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country (1964), which was a powerful social critique of the ‘Australian way of life’ in the early 1960s Although Horne was never directly associated with cultural studies, his work was fundamentally motivated by an expansive notion of ‘culture’ as intrinsically bound up in the shaping of social relations and institutions. In other words, it is exemplary of a ‘culture and society’ approach, where ‘culture’ and ‘society’ are not separate entities but thoroughly intertwined and mutually constitutive. Note, too, that Horne’s book was written within the same decade as the most influential early British works. In both countries the first two decades after the World War II were a period of massive economic, social and cultural modernization and unprecedented prosperity and stability, manifested among other things by the socalled ‘embourgeoisement’ or ‘suburbanization’ of the working classes (their material and symbolic integration into a seemingly consensual, inclusive and affluent national culture) and the rapid rise of an increasingly pervasive mass consumer culture (of which television, introduced in most countries at some point during these two decades, was to become the pinnacle). Cultural studies can be seen as a critical response to these socio-cultural changes, which signalled the coming of age of capitalist modernity as an increasingly universalized ‘way of life’, at least in the developed West. Indeed, much cultural studies analysis is precisely an examination of the structures, practices and experiences of this way of life. The prominence of the study of popular media within cultural studies should be understood in this light. When Hoggart founded the CCCS, he envisioned the cultural studies project as the combination of three disciplinary

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approaches: ‘one is roughly historical and philosophical; another is, again roughly, sociological; the third – which will be the most important – is the literary critical’ (quoted in Shulman, 1993: p. 1).5 A few years later, the official description of the CCCS’s focus purported to study: cultural values, attitudes, forms and relationships in a period of transition and crisis; paying special attention to the ways this pattern of change expresses itself in, and is in turn shaped and moulded by, expressive forms – language, media, images, symbols and myths – within which the society conducts the dialogue with itself. (CCCS, Fifth Report 1968–69, quoted in Davies, 1995: p. 36)

Here, the mutual entanglement of culture (expressive forms) and society (values, attitudes, forms and relationships) is eloquently articulated. The reference to expressive forms through which ‘the society conducts the dialogue with itself’ is a crucial addition: cultural studies itself, in fact, can be seen as a sustained effort to intervene in that dialogue. This characterization of cultural studies is mirrored in much later accounts of the field. For example, Frow and Morris define the cultural studies concept of culture as ‘a contested and conflictual set of practices of representation bound up with the processes of formation and re-formation of social groups’ (Frow and Morris, 2000: p. 328). Again, it is the inextricable intertwining of culture (representations) and society (the formation and re-formation of social groups) that is of essential import here, pointing to crucial links between meaning-making and social relations. What merits emphasizing, however, is that in this more recent definition the benign allusion to society’s ‘dialogue with itself’ has made way for a more jarring reference to ‘contested and conflictual (…) practices of representation’, signalling the profoundly more inharmonious and intractable social field of ‘culture’ towards the end of the twentieth century. Another major difference is that by the 1990s cultural studies had reached a level of theoretical self-consciousness and discursive density, which was not yet evident

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in the 1960s. Moreover, while an active relationship between cultural studies and cultural politics – defined broadly as a critical intervention in the cultural organization of society – is an enduring element of the cultural studies project, how that relationship can be forged is a vastly more fraught issue today than in the 1960s. To appreciate this change it is illuminating to return briefly to the early practitioners. Hoggart, Williams and Horne were intellectuals for whom cultural analysis served a clear purpose of critical intervention within society at large – a cultural and intellectual politics whose target was, to all intents and purposes, a critique of the society as a whole. For Hoggart and Williams, writing in the British context, the critique was aimed at democratizing a (national) culture whose predominant class hierarchies had long sustained an entrenched cultural elitism that served to exclude the working classes from the very realm of ‘culture’. That is, their political vision strove for the advancement of a cultural democracy against the seemingly unalterable opposition of ‘culture’ and ‘democracy’ in the then dominant social imaginary. For Horne, writing in a national context where hierarchies of class and culture were less significant – indeed, where egalitarianism is an overriding element in the national selfimage – the political and intellectual stake was a general critique of that self-image (‘the lucky country’) to promote the construction of a more cosmopolitan future for Australia (Morris, 1992: p. 453). Having established the CCCS, Hoggart soon left for Paris to become the assistant director general for humanities, culture and social sciences at UNESCO. Williams, who went on to publish many important theoretical works until his death in 1988 (see e.g. Williams, 1974, 1977, 1983), nevertheless insisted that the beginnings of cultural studies should be sought outside the walls of academe, namely in the adult education movement. As he recalls: ‘In the late forties people were doing courses in the visual arts, in music, in town planning and the nature of community, the nature of settlement, in film, in press,

in advertising, in radio’, which represented ‘a renewal of that attempt at a majority democratic education which had been there all through the project’(Williams, 1989a: p. 154). It is this ‘grassroots’ element of cultural studies that Williams considered vital to its politics, not its academic recognition or theoretical sophistication. Similarly, Horne, according to Morris, is ‘an ideal model of a “public intellectual” ’, having worked as a journalist, newspaper and magazine editor, literary autobiographer, essayist, novelist, historian, academic and cultural policy-maker (Morris, 1992: p. 453). In short, all these men were intellectuals who practised a kind of cultural studies that reached towards a non-specialist, general readership, intervening in the discourse on ‘culture and society’ in the national public sphere. The critical purpose of their work was predicated on the intellectual’s role in the creation of a nation-wide, democratic ‘common culture’(Williams, 1958). However, such unproblematic assumptions of the intellectual as an organic member of the national society, and of the ideal nation as a consensual, cultural democratic ‘whole’, soon became untenable.

THE DISPERSAL OF ‘CULTURE’ After ‘1968’, notions of ‘common culture’ became increasingly less tenable, credible or acceptable (Couldry, 2004).6 In the aftermath of the tumultuous revolutions symbolized by that year, the political horizon of consensus had made way for division and contestation. The politicization of gender and sexuality, of race and ethnicity and, in an increasingly globalizing world, of national culture and the historical legacies of colonialism from the late 1960s onwards, has fundamentally broken up the ‘holistic’ notions of culture/society that informed the early works. The experience of culture and society as deeply fractured and contested is reflected in the way ‘culture’ has come to be conceptualized in cultural studies, moving resolutely away from the totalizing approaches of the earlier period. Michael Denning (2004) describes this shift as

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the ‘sea-change’ from modern to postmodern concepts of culture. Put succinctly, these postmodern concepts do away with any understandings of ‘culture’ as a comprehensive and fully knowable ‘expressive totality’, replacing it with the idea of culture as ‘site of struggle’ or, more precisely, an open-ended series of dispersed, multiple and overlapping ‘sites of struggle’ (to which I shall return). For Fredric Jameson, the postmodern refers to ‘a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life – from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself – can be said to have become “cultural” in some original and as yet untheorized sense’ (Jameson, 1984: p. 87). Cultural studies is deeply invested in this new, rather tortuous, but also versatile notion of ‘culture’. Simon During (2005) captures the convolution of the postmodern understanding of culture this way: Culture is not a thing or even a system: it’s a set of transactions, processes, mutations, practices, technologies, institutions, out of which things and events (…) are produced, to be experienced, lived out and given meaning and value to in different ways within the unsystematic network of differences and mutations from which they emerged in the first place. (During, 2005: p. 6)

Culture today is so pervasive, says During, that cultural studies can apparently be ‘just about anything’ (During, 2005: p. 7). This, of course, aggravates the task of marking out the distinctiveness of cultural studies as a mode of cultural analysis, and reminds us of its boundary problem: how to set limits to what cultural studies is and does. Indeed, the sheer proliferation of work comprising cultural studies since the 1970s prompted Hall to characterize it in the 1990s as ‘a house of many mansions, (…) a lot of people who are in it don’t know one end of cultural studies from another’ (Hall, 1992: p. 287). In the face of this apparently unmanageable profusion (and confusion), then, it is helpful to distinguish different strands of cultural studies, based on their particular focal concerns and intellectual/political stakes. I will use Denning’s (2004) categorization of four

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traditions of critical theory as a tool for mapping the field (although Denning’s own Marxist inflection is too restrictive to cover the full range of work in the field). These critical theoretical strands do not belong to cultural studies per se, but they have been formative in the development of particular problematics and lines of research within cultural studies. I will briefly go over them, and then add a fifth one, if only to highlight the divergent impulses – theoretically, empirically and politically – that have bolstered variations of cultural studies analysis in the past three decades or so. In what Denning calls ‘commodity theories of culture’ the focus is on capitalist culture, which presents itself as the endless accumulation of commodified cultural forms and images. While classic critical theorists in this strand include Adorno and Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson, cultural studies research in this area includes all the discipline-defining work on popular media and culture, their modes of production, circulation and consumption, and their imbrication in the practices of everyday life. And while the classic theorists have tended to adopt a dystopian view of the exploitations and reifications of ‘mass culture’ (as was, as we saw earlier, Hoggart), contemporary cultural studies work is overall more circumspect in its assessments, preferring to lay emphasis on people’s active agency in the meanings and pleasures they derive from popular culture. This emphasis on agency reflects one of the most commonly accepted maxims in cultural studies: Marx’s (2001/1852) famous pronouncement that people make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. The idea that people are not passive ‘cultural dopes’ who are entirely manipulated by the media or by capitalism, but ‘use the limited resources they are given to find better ways of living, to find ways of increasing the control they have over aspects of their lives’ (Grossberg, 1997: p. 8), is central to cultural studies analysis, especially in studies of popular culture (see e.g. Ang, 1985; Hebdige, 1979; McRobbie, 1994; Morley, 1992; Radway, 1984).

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‘Popular culture’ has been a huge area of empirical research within cultural studies, to the point that it is often equated, inaccurately, with the study of popular culture. Nevertheless, in so far as popular cultural commodities are an integral part of the organization of everyday life in capitalist modernity, the study of their forms, uses and impacts is crucial for understanding ‘culture’ today. Some authors have forcefully argued for seeing popular culture as a site of resistance and empowerment (Fiske, 1989; Hartley, 1992), although uncritical celebrations are generally rejected as ‘populist’ (Morris, 1988; McGuigan, 1992). At its best work in this strand highlights the complex contradictions and relations of power that are articulated in popular cultural markets, texts and audiences, informed by the work of theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu (1984) and Michel de Certeau (1984). In ‘discipline theories of culture’ the focus is not on capitalism but on the state, inspired either by Althusser’s (1984) famous notion of ‘ideological state apparatuses’ or the work of Michel Foucault (1977, 1980). Here the state appears as a disciplinary apparatus engaged in the articulation of knowledge and power, capable of subjecting groups and individuals to processes of normalization, examination and surveillance (in prisons, hospitals, schools and so on). This altogether more austere perspective on ‘culture’ has spawned less abundant empirical research within cultural studies. Thematically, Paul Willis’s classic Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977) may be classed in this category, although its theoretical references were more to Althusser and Bourdieu than to Foucault. Indeed, the Foucauldian perspective has been taken up in a more munificent direction in cultural studies by authors such as Tony Bennett (1998), who has argued for a greater emphasis on the management of culture by government as a focal concern of cultural studies. In this perspective, ‘culture’ is cast as the object of reform and governance (rather than intellectual critique), spawning a subfield now known as cultural

policy studies (see e.g. Lewis and Miller, 2003). Denning’s third category is the ‘hegemony theory of culture’, which also focuses on the state but emphasizes the role of bottomup social movements and civil society rather than the top-bottom actions of government. Referring to Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) work, the concept of hegemony points to a nonfunctionalist and non-reductionist theory of (state) power. Hegemony is never fully secured, but must be struggled over continuously by winning people’s consent rather than through force. The struggle for hegemony, then, is ultimately a question of creating a ‘new cultural order’, and it depends on the cultural power to define, to ‘make things mean’. In this light, cultural studies analysis is cast as an attempt to intervene in the politics of representation: the discursive struggle for new meanings engaged in by a broad variety of social movements, civil society entities such as churches and voluntary organizations, independent media and filmmakers, artists and so on. The point of hegemonic struggle would be to articulate this diversity of struggles into a common counter-hegemonic project, capable of posing a radical-democratic alternative to the ruling hegemony of global capitalist modernity (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). A key cultural studies text in this regard is Hall et al.’s (1978) study of the politics of ‘mugging’ in 1970s Britain, Policing the Crisis. More recently, concerns with hegemony have been eclipsed by the rise of postmodernism, best articulated by Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984). Lyotard alludes to an ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’ (that is, a scepticism towards grand, hegemonic projects) in postmodern culture, replaced by a focus on the multiplicity of small, particularist narratives and language games. In this regard, the politics of representation never rises above the bewildering pluralism of restricted public spheres within which each instance of representational politics circulates. Most work in cultural studies engages in this kind of representational politics, whatever specific topic is addressed,

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without ever aspiring to the formation of a broader, new cultural order, that is, a new hegemony. This brings us to ‘recognition theories of culture’, which have become increasingly prominent as the twentieth century drew to a close. As Denning (2004: p. 89) notes, this perspective is associated with a shift in emphasis from notions of culture as a means of communication (or meaning) to notions of culture as communities (or identities), animated by the quest of subordinated groups and peoples for cultural recognition and social justice (Taylor, 1992). The analytical focus here is on the social and political construction of ‘identities’ – whether dominant or subordinate – around nation, race, ethnicity, diaspora, (post)coloniality, indigeneity, sex and gender, disability, and so on. Formative works in this area include Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Benedict Anderson’s book on nationalism, Imagined Communities (1983), Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994). Here cultural studies interfaces with other critical intellectual formations such as feminism and gay, lesbian and queer theory, critical race theories, and multicultural and postcolonial studies. All these works provide fundamentally sceptical, post-structuralist assessments of ‘identity’ as a value in and of itself; identities matter not as fixed essences but as contestable political constructions, that is, as sites of struggle rather than entities in need of shoring up. Hence, cultural studies has a problematic relationship with so-called ‘identity politics’. While generally sympathetic to the emancipatory longings of subordinated identity groups, cultural studies nevertheless adopts a deconstructive and demythologizing stance towards their essentialist tendencies. Importantly, such critiques are also levelled at institutional entities such as the nation-state. For example, the pioneering work of Paul Gilroy (1987, 1993), who has criticized cultural studies’ early figures such as Williams and Hoggart for their blindness to questions of nation, race and empire, has focused on the operation of discourses of ‘race’ in the imagination of

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‘Britain’ or ‘Europe’. The critical import of the title of Gilroy’s first book, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, speaks for itself. Finally, it is apposite to add another strand of cultural studies analysis, based on what can be called ‘globalization theories of culture’, following on logically from the previous strand. In this perspective, the increasing ‘deterritorialization’ of culture associated with globalization has focused analysis on transnational and cross-border flows of people, goods and images, and the general unsettling of nationally or locally bounded notions of culture. The Internet can be seen as both a metaphor and a conduit for the rise of the so-called network society (Castells, 2000), characterized not only by intensifying, multi-directional economic, social, cultural and political connections across the world but, crucially, by people’s increasing dependence on and awareness of them. It is in this area that cultural studies research increasingly overlaps with similar interests in adjacent disciplines such as cultural anthropology, geography and sociology (Appadurai, 1996; Clifford, 1997; Featherstone, 1990; Hannerz, 1996; Keith and Pile, 1993; Tomlinson, 1999). Guiding this research is an astute understanding of the inextricable, but variable, intertwinings of the local and the global, focusing the analytical eye on cultures of travel and tourism, transnational media cultures, migration and diasporic flows, Internet cultures and the cultural and political impacts of destabilizing notions of place, identity and belonging (e.g. Ang, 2001; Iwabuchi, 2002; Morley, 2000; Morris, 2006). The problematic of globalization also brings into the field a much wider range of international perspectives, including the work of Latin American authors such as Jesus Martín-Barbero (1993) and Nestor García Canclini (1996) and the work of Taiwanese scholar Kuan Hsing Chen, founder of the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Moreover, by the turn of the twenty-first century, the cosmopolitanizing impulse of these various perspectives on globalization has been supplemented by a darker view of the new global (dis)order, signified by the rise of a new US imperialism, the

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emergence of global Islamist terrorism, the threat of a ‘clash of civilizations’, and the prospect of a global environmental crisis. Punctuating this moment of global uncertainty was the publication of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s bestselling book Empire (2000). The five broad strands I have described here are a (too) schematic way of canvassing the ways in which ‘culture’ has been problematized and analysed in cultural studies. Needless to say, none of them is mutually exclusive, nor have later strands simply superseded earlier ones. For example, issues related to the commodification of popular culture remain relentlessly topical, especially in the context of globalization, while the question of identity politics – its limits and impacts – has become even more salient with the rise of global fundamentalisms in the early tweny-first century. To be sure, intense debates concerning various theoretical incompatibilities associated with divergent political orientations, and disagreements over method and purpose, have been part and parcel of the evolution of the field over time. In a profound sense such debates mark the distinctive analytical style of cultural studies – what may be called its modus vivendi: a stance towards intellectual work not as an end in itself, as the search for the perfect explanatory model, but as an endless process of coming to terms with the always changing and contextspecific interpretive tasks at hand. This is a dialogic approach to theory most forcefully articulated in Hall’s statement that ‘I am not interested in Theory, I am interested in going on theorizing’ (in Grossberg, 1996: p. 150). ‘The only theory worth having’, Hall says (1992: p. 280), ‘is that which you have to fight off, not that which you speak with profound fluency’. By this he meant not only that theoretical engagement must always be open to new influences and possibilities, but also that it must respond to the political and intellectual requirements posed by the emergence of new historical ‘conjunctures’.7 In this respect, Grossberg’s pop description of cultural studies as ‘an attempt to answer Marvin Gaye’s question “What’s going on?”

and theory [as] its tool to get a bit further along in that task’ (Grossberg, 1997: p. 4) is particularly apt.

MULTIPLYING ‘SITES OF STRUGGLE’ Stuart Hall’s own intellectual trajectory is a brilliant example of alertness to contemporary conjunctures – to ‘what’s going on’ – and inhabits all five strands I have distinguished above. In the 1970s, Hall’s empirical concerns – as reflected by the collective work of the CCCS and some of its graduates – can be summarized as focusing on how groups (e.g. working-class youth; media audiences) negotiate meanings through their consumption of media and cultural goods to articulate their position in society (e.g. Hall and Jefferson, 1975), reflecting the increasing ubiquity of commodified popular cultural forms and people’s active, and sometimes defiant, reception of them. Meanwhile, one of the CCCS’s most ambitious projects in this period, Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1978), took as its starting point a case of ‘mugging’ in Handsworth in 1972, analysing it not simply as an actual ‘crime’ but as a label that escalated in significance in the context of a ‘broader crisis in state hegemony of which mugging emerges as a displaced effect’ (Procter, 2004: p. 144). Hall’s most influential works in the following decades were a critical analysis of the cultural politics of Thatcherism in the 1980s (Hall, 1988), and the social and political implications of the increasing hegemony of postmodern capitalist relations in the 1990s, dubbed ‘New Times’ (Hall and Jacques, 1989). Informed by a Gramscian perspective inflected with the post-Marxist ideas developed by political theorist Ernesto Laclau (1977; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985), this work aimed to provide the intellectual means of reclaiming the ground of common sense which was so successfully appropriated by Thatcherism, and of rearticulating it with more progressive, popular-democratic ends in a society fundamentally altered by the rise of ‘disorganized capitalism’ (Lash and Urry, 1988) and its attendant cultural and

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discursive underpinnings (such as rampant consumerism, ‘choice’ and individualism). At the same time, Hall became increasingly involved throughout the 1980s and 1990s in debates about race and ethnicity, where he intervened through the strategic use of autobiography (Hall, 1997). As a West Indian immigrant in Britain, he argued for an end of ‘the innocent notion of the black subject’, emphasizing instead that ‘black’ is a politically and culturally constructed category that is composed of an ‘extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities’ and ‘cannot be grounded in a set of fixed trans-cultural or transcendent racial categories’ (Hall, 1996: p. 443). The political import of this deconstructive move is a repudiation of anti-racist struggles that are based on essentialist and reductionist notions of ‘race’ in favour of a politics which works with and through difference, ‘building solidarity and identification which make common struggle and resistance possible but without suppressing the real heterogeneity of interests and identities’ (ibid.: p. 444). Hall’s argument for the recognition of ‘new ethnicities’ is also informed by a deep awareness of the realities of globalization, in particular the implication of global migrations in the undoing of homogeneous and unitary notions of national culture and identity (Hall and Du Gay, 1996). In the British context, Hall made a prominent intellectual intervention in public debate about national identity through his contribution to the highly controversial Runnymede Trust report on ‘The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain’, which argued for a move away from singularly white definitions of ‘Britishness’ (Parekh, 2000). The extraordinary breadth of concerns and interests exhibited in Hall’s career reflects an acute responsiveness to the massive economic, political, social and cultural changes that have taken place not just in Britain but, in highly differentiated ways, in all developed capitalist democracies since the 1960s. His trajectory illuminates the situatedness of cultural studies practice within shifting sociopolitical contexts, each throwing up particular questions and inviting particular modes of

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engagement. It is in this sense that Grossberg describes cultural studies as a ‘discipline of contextuality’ (1997: p. 254). As he puts it: ‘Cultural studies has to be multiple and changing because the contexts – and within them, the political stakes and potential or actual struggles – are always multiple, fluid and contradictory’ (Grossberg, 1997: p. 261). Grossberg emphasizes the importance of radical contextualism for cultural studies as a mode of cultural analysis: ‘context is not merely background but the very condition of possibility of something’ (ibid.: p. 255). This epistemological account mirrors a general tendency in the expansion of cultural studies practices around the world. Here, ‘culture’ is obliquely invoked as the ground for the negotiation and contestation of meanings, values and identities, that is, as a complex site of context-specific social struggles. The metaphor of culture as an ongoing ‘site of struggle’ has become one of the most widely used and enabling ideas in contemporary critical discourse, adopted by critics and activists far beyond the world of academic cultural studies proper. A quick Google search (5 February 2006) for the phrase has returned references to a huge array of socio-cultural ‘sites of struggle’: education, language, leisure, the family, citizenship rights, religion, policy, consumerism, the law, bodies, intellectual property, race relations, markets, urban planning, aged care, motherhood, women’s smoking, women’s breasts, film production, cyberspace, college admissions, middle-class norms, electronic chatrooms, the workplace, the neighbourhood, the school, the meaning of words, biblical interpretation, national memory, Europe, theatre, the visual image, costume drama, the Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard in Los Angeles, Johannesburg, post-war Beirut, the Barcelona museum, Robben Island, mbira music in Zimbabwe, bank corruption in Mozambique, the bus as a vehicle of public transport, prostitution, gay rights in Taiwan. Depression was put forward as a site of struggle, rather than simply an illness, in order to envisage different ways of engaging individuals in distress. Calgary’s ceremony of welcoming visiting

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dignitaries with a white cowboy hat was interpreted as a site of struggle over the identity of this Canadian city. The life story of a young Kurdish-Swedish woman who was murdered by her father for rejecting an arranged marriage was presented as a site of struggle over patriarchal violence and ‘honour killing’. What characterizes this list is its extraordinary heterogeneity, but all these ‘sites of struggle’, no matter how idiosyncratic, are potential topics for cultural studies analysis. Indeed, such topics are generally the starting point for an analytical strategy that aims to illuminate their significance through their embedding in their multiple, multilayered contexts. As Frow and Morris (2000) put it: ‘Cultural studies often tends to operate in what looks like an eccentric way, starting with the particular, the detail, the scrap of ordinary or banal existence, and then working to unpack the density of relations and of intersecting social domains that inform it’ (Frow and Morris, 2000: p. 327). In this maze-like proliferation, ‘culture’ has become an inexhaustible, fluid and sprawling category, signifying a dispersed ‘network of embedded practices and representations (texts, images, talk, codes of behaviour, and the narrative structures organizing these) that shapes every aspect of social life’ (Frow and Morris, 2000: p. 316). But this leads to a difficult paradox that cultural studies has yet to resolve. The constitutive contextualization of cultural studies projects and practices visà-vis such proliferating ‘sites of struggle’ (which may of course overlap) produces a centrifugal effect on the field, fragmenting its theoretical concerns and empirical foci of research and contributing to its apparent ‘shapelessness’ (During, 2005: p. 6). As Simon During observes, ‘the sheer variety of topics and histories brought into the discipline through globalization, along with the consequent loss of shared references and competencies, threatens to disrupt its capacity to draw practitioners into a shared project’ (During, 2005: p. 5). This takes us back to cultural studies’apparent incapacity to demarcate its boundaries and

to find its centre, as it were. John Clarke (1991) referred to this problem when he suggested that holding onto the Gramscian concept of (and struggle for) hegemony was necessary because it ‘situates particular areas of substantive analysis within a more totalizing structure of political issues and resists the tendency to fragment cultural studies into different – and separate – domains’ (Clarke, 1991: p. 17). However, the possibility of formulating a hegemonic project which would be capable of bringing some order and unity into the unruly heterogeneity of actual cultural studies practices seems remote today, not only in a political sense but also theoretically, given the fundamentally ‘sceptical approach to “culture” as the field’s unifying category’ (Frow and Morris, 2000: p. 318). We are, then, very far removed from the belief in and search for a ‘common culture’ that sustained the work of early figures such as Williams and Horne. The centre, it seems, cannot hold. What then are the implications of this fundamental paradox at the heart of cultural studies? How can we still maintain some idea of cultural studies as a distinct mode of cultural analysis? And what does it say about its status as a ‘discipline’?

CULTURAL STUDIES AS POSTMODERN (INTER)DISCIPLINE: ENGAGING CULTURAL COMPLEXITY If cultural studies is a ‘discipline’, then, as we have seen, it is a discipline without its own object. It is therefore not surprising that cultural studies has always insisted on its interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary or even anti-disciplinary nature. We should keep in mind, however, that many established disciplines have also entered a period of uncertainty about their objects. Sociology can no longer rely on a definite definition of ‘society’ (Urry, 2000), anthropology has had to abandon the idea of self-contained ‘other’ cultures that constituted the discipline (Clifford and Marcus, 1986), and literary studies no longer operates with an agreed-upon

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idea of ‘literature’ (Easthope, 1991), not least as a consequence of the encroachments of cultural studies. Moreover, these and other disciplines (geography, history, psychology, economics, politics, law, communications, area studies) have now developed their own engagements with ‘culture’, their own approaches to cultural analysis. What then, to ask with Richard Johnson et al., ‘is cultural studies today when every discipline has made the cultural turn?’ (Johnson et al., 2004: p. 9). If cultural analysis is now a truly multidisciplinary endeavour, is there still a separate space within the academic landscape for cultural studies? This is a moot question. One way to resolve it is to differentiate disciplines not in terms of their unique object, but in terms of the particular ways in which they approach it. If culture is everywhere, then the specific epistemological angle of cultural studies, the perspective from which it problematizes ‘culture’ and asks questions about it, can still claim a distinct role in the broader field of cultural analysis. This angle or perspective is precisely the focus on ‘culture’ as ‘site of struggle’ – culture as terrain of ‘political’ contestation. Terry Eagleton (2000) describes the distinct partiality of a politicized approach to ‘culture’ thus: There is nothing inherently political in singing a Breton love-song, staging an exhibition of African-American art or declaring oneself a lesbian. These things are not innately or eternally political; they become so only under specific historical conditions, usually of an unpleasant kind. They become political only when they are caught up in a process of domination and resistance – when these otherwise innocuous matters are turned for one reason or another into terrains of struggle. (Eagleton, 2000: pp. 122–123)

The singing of Breton love-songs, say, could be analysed as an element of the Breton people’s struggle for independence – reiterating Frow and Morris’s earlier definition of cultural studies as a ‘contested and conflicted set of practices of representation bound up with the formation and reformation of social groups’ – but it could just as well be studied as the politically uncontentious expression of musical tradition or as a local community

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celebration (which would be more the realm of musicology or anthropology). Thus if, in general terms, ‘culture is the agency by which the chaos of reality is transformed into the ordered sense of human reality’ (Grossberg, 1997: p. 20), then the focus of cultural studies is not on all aspects of that process of transformation, but on the social negotiations, conflicts and contestations that are articulated in and through it. In short, it is only in so far as a cultural practice, process or event can be understood as having a ‘political’ dimension – as a social site of struggle over meaning, value and identity – that it is, nominally, within the realm of cultural studies analysis. At the same time, the very rise and current prominence of cultural studies has coincided with an expansion of politics in advanced liberal democracies, to the extent that more and more arenas of social life have become politicized, the object of ‘cultural politics’: in this sense, the very impulse to conceptualize the singing of Breton love-songs as a site of struggle is part of an intellectual history that is coterminous with the emergence of cultural studies. The phrase ‘site of struggle’ may be particularly attractive to those who favour more activist or radical versions of cultural studies, but I wish to stress that this doesn’t have to be so. ‘Struggle’ does not have to be envisaged in a combative way; it can also take the form of collaborative work, of forging compromises rather than outright confrontation, of the struggle for reform rather than radical change. In this regard, the arena of public policy is just as much a site of struggle as, say, the realms of cultural nationalism, gender relations or youth resistance: in all these instances, what is at stake from the point of view of cultural studies is a ‘commitment to examining cultural practices from the point of view of their intrication with, and within, relations of power’ (Bennett, 1992: p. 23). Cultural studies, then, is interested in the many forms of politicization of culture. It is important to stress, however, that while culture is everywhere, culture is not alwaysalready (or inherently) political: it is the articulation of ‘culture’ and ‘politics’ in concrete contexts that is central to cultural studies

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analysis.8 Such an analytical demarcation of the ‘object’ of cultural studies also enables us to clarify the boundaries between cultural studies and existing disciplines, each of which would have their own angle on ‘culture’. However, the boundary lines are inescapably blurred. To return to the example given above, a successful cultural studies analysis of the singing of Breton love-songs as a cultural practice would indeed illuminate its ‘political’ dimension in the everyday lives and historical circumstances of people living in Bretagne, but such a study might in all likelihood incorporate musicological and anthropological insights, as well as those of other disciplinary traditions (e.g. historical scholarship on Breton nationalism). In this sense, cultural studies needs these other disciplines as intellectual resources on which to draw (Felski, 2005). Conversely, other disciplines have embraced perspectives and approaches derived from cultural studies. As George Marcus (2001: p. 184) has observed, the anthropological habit of analysing ‘cultures’ holistically as discrete objects of study, modelled after the isolated tribal society, has declined markedly in recent years, bringing the anthropological notion of culture into greater overlap with that of cultural studies. Furthermore, anthropologists have increasingly entered into the study of contemporary media cultures (Ginsburg, et al., 2002), one of the key areas of cultural studies research. In a different vein, Rita Felski has forcefully questioned the idea, expressed by some literary scholars, that ‘literary and cultural studies should become one’ (Felski, 2005: p. 38). While literary studies’ key expertise resides in its sophisticated methods for the close reading of exemplary texts, one of the central tenets of cultural studies is precisely a ‘questioning of the view that a single work can be treated as an allegory of social relations’ (Felski, 2005: p. 39). Thus, while textual analysis is a crucial part of cultural studies’ methodological toolkit, cultural studies is not interested in texts per se, but in ‘shuttling between texts and institutions, aesthetics

and social analysis, semiotics and power’ (ibid.: p. 38). This is in line with Gregor McLennan’s argument for a ‘more synthetic and less polemical way of conceiving the relationships between cultural studies and sociology’ (McLennan, 1998: p. 11), focusing on the question of ‘how to address the (assumed) increased importance of cultural forms in defining social relationships in late/post-modernity’ (ibid.: p. 12). McLennan is wary of ‘misplaced rhetorical battles over disciplinary labels as such’ (ibid.: p. 2). Similarly political theorist Jodi Dean has argued that a conversation between political theory and cultural studies is especially useful for thinking about politics at a time when the political and the cultural are so inextricably intertwined. She spells out how such an exchange might help overcome partial biases within both fields: ‘To put it bluntly, political theory risks oversimplifying its accounts when it fails to acknowledge the multiplicity of political domains. Cultural studies risks non-intervention by presuming its political purchase in advance’ (Dean, 2000: p. 5). Coming into the debate from yet another direction, Barbie Zelizer has argued for a greater consideration of the uneasy coexistence of journalism and cultural studies, inasmuch as journalism’s claims to facts, truth and reality provides cultural studies with an opportunity to examine its own epistemological assumptions. How can its theoretical emphasis on meaning as contestable construct and knowledge as always situated be reconciled with its ‘capacity to instantiate itself as a field of knowledge secure in its own claims and in what counts as evidence’? (Zelizer, 2004: p. 114). In short, these diverse intersections between cultural studies and other disciplines illuminate how ‘cultural studies is both like and unlike literary criticism, communication studies, sociology, anthropology or history’ (Felski, 2005: p. 41) – as well as other disciplines. The cultural turn in the Humanities and Social Sciences, then, has led to the unsettling of disciplinary boundaries, even if those boundaries continue to be heavily guarded.

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Disciplines are still powerful building blocks for the division of labour and expertise within the contemporary academy, but mutual contamination is rampant. As Vincent Leitch (2003) observes, ‘each discipline itself is always already infiltrated by some other discipline(s)’ (Leitch, 2003: p. 170). Leitch (2003) refers to this situation as ‘postmodern interdisciplinarity’: the de facto and unstable intermixture of the disciplines without, for the time being, resulting in a new, postdisciplinary synthesis. In this situation the position of cultural studies is less that of a discipline in its own right than that of the interdiscipline that, ironically, provides fuel for the reinvigoration of the older disciplines. What then, in this situation, can the future for cultural studies be as an academic enterprise? How can an interdiscipline maintain a space for itself in the uneven and moving terrain of disciplinary intermixture? As many theories of hybridity have illuminated (Bhabha, 1994; Werbner and Modood, 1997), occupying the space of the ‘inter’ – the in-between – is steeped in the ambivalences of (un)belonging, riven simultaneously by insecurity and creativity. Cultural studies occupies such a hybrid space within the contemporary landscape of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Bennett (1998) has forcefully argued, for important reasons of academic Realpolitik, that cultural studies should overcome its ‘bashfulness’ regarding its status as an intellectual discipline, and become much more definite and self-aware about its theoretical and methodological principles – that is, undertake to ‘codify’ itself as a discipline. Indeed, several important efforts have been made in recent years to clarify the specificities of cultural studies as a scholarly practice, and to elaborate its epistemological and methodological procedures (e.g. Couldry, 2000; Frow and Morris, 2000; Johnson et al., 2004; Saukko, 2003). These attempts to ‘disciplinarize’ cultural studies notwithstanding, it is doubtful that cultural studies can ever become a ‘discipline’ in a conventional, modernist sense. ‘Bashfulness’ about its own disciplinary status may in fact be intrinsic to cultural studies!

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Johnson et al. argue that ‘as culture becomes the site of competing disciplinary claims and imperial skirmishes, cultural studies has a role, still, in exceeding conventional definitions’ (Johnson et al., 2004: p. 23). They suggest that cultural studies can make a virtue of being ‘a kind of specialism of non-specialty’, interested in ‘interpreting and explaining cultural processes as a whole, as they operate in time, space and social relations’ (Johnson et al., 2004: p. 267). This description stresses the integrative role of cultural studies as the (inter)discipline that fills the gaps left open by other, more specialized disciplines, and compensates for the consequent fragmentation of knowledge. What it does not take into account, however, is the fragmentation of a different kind that cultural studies itself has both embodied and produced in its insistence on the radically contextual singularity of ‘sites of struggle’. Indeed, this chapter has highlighted the multiplicity – indeed, the potentially infinite proliferation – of objects of study across the scattered realms of ‘culture’ that cultural studies has charted. One implication of this double development – at once expansion and dispersal – is a tendency for the field to be divided up in ever more specialized subfields. Thus, cultural studies today can be said to comprise a disorganized array of discrete yet overlapping specialisms such as media studies, film studies, television studies, journalism studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, diaspora studies, multicultural studies, race and ethnic studies, disability studies, visual culture studies, queer studies, trauma studies, memory studies, science and technology studies, Internet studies, food studies, whiteness studies, leisure studies, cultural policy studies, popular music studies, urban culture studies, and numerous more (Leitch, 2003). In the process, these subfields tend to become specialized areas of study with few interconnections in practice. One of the key contradictions of cultural studies, then, is that in its tendency to hone into ever more specific sites of struggle as the focus of cultural analysis, it tends to neglect exploring how these different sites of struggle

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might relate to each other, in order to arrive at a broader, more ‘macro’ understanding of how different cultural realities, practices and processes might ‘hang together’. Indeed, in its suspicion of totalizing notions of culture and society – that is, in its abandonment of the idea of a ‘common culture’ or, in more political terms, the vision of a new hegemony – cultural studies rarely attempts to map the cultural field beyond its specific instances. It is not clear, in fact, whether cultural studies has the conceptual tools to do so in the face of the enormous complexity of contemporary culture and society. For Nick Couldry, the most important task for cultural studies in the twenty-first century is ‘to open up a terrain of sustained empirical research about cultural experience in today’s exceptionally complex cultural environments’ (Couldry, 2000: p. 10). Indeed, references to cultural complexity are routinely made within cultural studies – its impulse is to assume that its objects of study are necessarily ‘complex’, reflecting the need to avoid reductionisms of all kinds – but what does engaging cultural complexity actually mean from a cultural studies point of view? For Couldry (2000), recognition of the complexity of culture describes the ‘political’ purpose of cultural studies: precisely because (the ideal of) a coherent and bounded ‘common culture’ can no longer be presumed, taking cultural complexity seriously by opening the field up to as many perspectives as possible is ‘part of expanding the possibilities for everyone to be active and critical participants in the culture around them, a question of citizenship’ (Couldry, 2000: p. 42). Here, then, we have a suitably moderate and open-ended definition of cultural studies as an engaged intellectual practice, with clear analytical and political implications: making cultural complexity manageable is not just intellectually challenging but also socially empowering. Interestingly, ‘complexity’ has become a buzzword in a range of disciplines in recent years; this reflects the general intellectual uncertainty about the theories, concepts and research directions to be meaningfully

pursued in a time of massive social, economic, political and cultural dislocation and transformation at global, national and local levels of life (e.g. Hannerz, 1992; Rosenau, 2003; Urry, 2003). Interest in complexity is itself a signal of the epistemological crisis of the disciplines. Cultural studies is caught in the middle of the crisis as both its symptom and its messenger. ‘There is complexity’, argue Annemarie Mol and John Law (2002), ‘if things relate but don’t add up, if events occur but not within the process of linear time, and if phenomena share a space but cannot be mapped in terms of a single set of threedimensional coordinates’ (Mol and Law, 2002: p. 1). The contemporary crisis of the Humanities and the Social Sciences may usefully be articulated as one of uncertainty about where the cultural analyst stands in the face of global cultural complexity. Different disciplines set about the challenge posed in different ways. García Canclini characterized disciplinary differences in this way: ‘The anthropologist arrives in the city by foot, the sociologist by car and via the main highway, the communication specialist by plane’(1995: p. 4). The point for the cultural studies analyst is to use all modes of transportation – feet, car, plane, and other means of ‘getting there’ as well, including the mobile phone, the evening television news, the tourist map, the city archives or, indeed, conversations overheard in the bar – in order to analyse cultural complexity in complex ways: the coexistences at any single moment or place, the multiple realities people live in, the partial connections and interferences between those realities. At the same time, the cultural studies analyst recognizes that she is an inhabitant of the city in the first place, not just a visitor: her quest for knowledge is propelled by being situated at some point inside global cultural complexity – there is no point outside from which a total overview can be had. As such, cultural studies is both committed to ‘taking seriously the full complexity of being “inside” culture’ (Couldry, 2000: p. 4) and must always fight off the inevitable simplifications (reductionisms, ethnocentrisms, prejudicial localisms) that

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always attend its discourses. After all, ‘there is always more going on than one is aware of from a particular situation in the field’ (Frow and Morris, 2000: p. 319). It is in this precarious balancing act that cultural studies, as a postmodern (inter)discipline and as an engaged, global intellectual community, is staying poised.

NOTES 1 There is no reason, from a conceptual or philosophical point of view, why cultural studies’ political inclinations would necessarily be associated with the left. However, by virtue of its social history and evolution the actually existing cultural studies community consists overwhelmingly of scholars and activists with left-wing sympathies, although exactly what ‘the left’ represents is a subject of continuous debate. 2 Individuals such as Angela McRobbie, Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, David Morley, Paul Gilroy and Charlotte Brunsdon were postgraduate students during these years, and most of them have gone on to become torch-bearers for cultural studies in Britain and beyond. 3 Grossberg recalls that they read an eclectic mix of works which included ‘interpretive and phenomenological sociology (including symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology), structural anthropology and semiotics, humanistic Marxism, rhetorical theory, and anything else we could find’ (1997: p. 24). 4 I visited the Birmingham Centre with some costudents in 1980, when Richard Johnson had just succeeded Stuart Hall as the centre’s director, and I did a long interview with Hall for the Dutch film magazine Skrien in 1981, focusing on his conception of popular culture as a ‘site of struggle’. 5 Hoggart’s emphasis on the literary critical – that is, the close reading of texts – is another enduring legacy that has shaped the analytical machinery of cultural studies: for many, textual analysis is the principal ‘method’ in the cultural studies toolkit. This is one explanation why literature departments have been key sites for the institutionalized adoption of cultural studies. In media and communication studies, textual analysis was applied widely to popular media such as television and advertising. A social-scientific counterbalance to textual analysis in cultural studies is the ‘method’ of ethnography, which can be described as the ‘close reading’ of everyday practices (see e.g. Willis, 2000). 6 ‘1968’ is put in quotation marks here because it refers to a year of social and political upheavals (e.g. the failed May 1968 student revolution in

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Paris) that have acquired mythic significance in the cultural history of the second half of the twentieth century. See Mercer (1994) for a critical account of this myth. 7 The Althusserian concept of ‘conjuncture’ refers to the concrete and singular state of affairs as ‘overdetermined’ by the complex confluence of relatively autonomous social practices at any given time and space (see Althusser, 1984). 8 Too often cultural studies indulges in an epistemological reductionism that simply equates ‘culture’ and ‘politics’, as if the two were coterminous. For a trenchant critique of this tendency, see Mulhern (2000).

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12 Feminism and Culture: Theoretical Perspectives Griselda Pollock

Women are feminism’s greatest problem. Rosalind Delmar, What is Feminism?, 1986

Feminism has always been a contested site, struggling with internal contradictions around class, sexuality and ‘race’ that fracture and differentiate the necessary, but problematic, calling card of gender. Changing theorizations of culture have enabled us to think about women’s historical place in culture, women’s differential relations to language and identity, women’s specific experience and construction of subjectivity and sexuality, and the cultural construction of femininities as discursive, psychic and social positions. As the epigraph by Rosalind Delmar makes plain, however, in the very act of identifying ‘women’ as a subject of a specific domain of cultural analysis, that term unravels to become the core problem of feminist thought. The term feminist functions as a perpetual provocation to keep certain issues constantly in play. It resists any tendency to stabilize around the fictions of the generically human or monolithically universal and other androcentric, Eurocentric, heteronormative

or phallocentric habits of Western culture. To focus on ‘woman’ might only reinstate ideologically limited viewpoints. No one comes nakedly before the court of history in gender. We are textured by a complex of social relations, generation and geography, culture, moment, class, ethnicity, sexuality. There is thus no woman in general. Yet to begin feminist analysis we must posit ‘woman’ as our hypothetical, if abstracted, object. ‘Woman’ is a marker for a specific set of social relations and meanings where gender is the axis of power, difference and possibility. International feminist theorists work with the differential legacies of Confucian, Shinto, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, African, Hindu and Muslim cultural traditions, each of which confronts those designated by their cultures as ‘woman’ with different sets of questions and issues.1 Thus there are equally differentiated international feminisms, emerging in different sites and moments, subject to histories and ideologies. Teresa de Lauretis names feminism but one ‘technology of gender’, itself producing (self-)representations, emerging under the pressure of modernizing historical

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forces to expose gender as a critical category of social relations and as a mode of experiencing and thinking the world (de Lauretis, 1987). Unstable concepts of what women are or might be at any time or in any culture come into conflict within the larger fields of social, economic, cultural, geographical differences and differentials of power under traditional or global capitalist systems. The struggle for feminist understanding is a struggle within as well as with class, racialization, globalization as much as it concerns placing gender and sexuality in full theoretical and cultural view as a formative axis of social relations and power, subjectivity and cultural meaning. Feminist theory in cultural analysis signifies, therefore, problematics not an essence; critical practices not a doxa; dynamic and selfcritical responses not an ideology, situated interventions not a platform. It is the precarious and evolving product of its founding paradox. Seeming to speak in the name of ‘women’ as both a theoretical category (sex/gender) and a politically summonsed social collectivity, feminist analysis deconstructs its apparently defining term ‘woman’. Increasingly, it doubts even the efficacy of the collective category ‘women’. To speak for ‘women’ may be to instate an economically or culturally privileged group of women as the norm which would thus exclude ‘women’ centred in quite different geopolitical socio-economic, sexual positions or cultural traditions (Mohanty, 2003). The history of the last 30 years of international feminism could be presented as the passage from essence to difference: from the founding declaration of women as a socio-political collectivity to our realization of the full complexity of placing sex/gender variously and specifically on the historical map. Feminist theory does not follow a linear progress in its thinking. It is a synchronic configuration of debates all of which contribute something valuable, all of which remain caught up in the very systems they critique. The current field of feminist theory is, therefore, extremely complex as the product of a momentous cultural revolution that, for the first time in history, brought

women in substantial numbers into higher educational institutions to produce radically new ways of thinking, to research and speak in the name of women about the condition of women. I cannot sufficiently stress the historical novelty and continuing fragility of this situation, or emphasize its long-term significance for human history that at last some women have access to the production of knowledge. The English word ‘gender’ originates from the Latin root gener- that leads both to generate (linking the word unconsciously with reproduction and its sexed partners) and to classify, to make a sort, or class. Feminist theory has to acknowledge how these two different elements – a linkage to the social management of reproduction with its attendant heterosexualism, and the creation of a class or groups defined by sex – interface (Haraway, 1991a). Writing a manifesto for materialist feminism in 1975, Christine Delphy defined feminism as ‘first of all a social movement’ based on there being ‘a cause for revolt’ (Delphy, 1981: p. 197). That means that what we revolt against – gender relations – cannot, by definition, be ‘natural’; if it is resistible, it must be socially conditioned. Gender emerged in Anglophone feminist studies to mark a distinction between sex: something to do with gonads and hormones that cause very minor variations in human body-types to enable sexual reproduction; and gender: the symbolic, cultural, social, political and economic construction of a hierarchy – variations of power, safety and access – attributed ideologically to sex, while serving historically changing social and economic purposes (Riley, 1988). Gender relations produce asymmetry between their players who are termed ‘men’ and ‘women’, an asymmetry that is disguised ideologically by the implied complementarity of the heterosexual pair in a reproductive sexual act. Do we have a gender? Is it an attribute from birth, body, nature? Are we members of a gender (as a socially defined group, like a class)? Is it physiologically, psychologically or socio-culturally determined or pure social, linguistic, cultural construction? Can one

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change gender? Does that require changing a bit of the body, a name, a dress-code, an identity document, or other people’s anxieties that something they rely upon to be beyond alteration can so radically be changed because a person feels themselves to be subjectively at odds with their own body-type? (Butler, 1990; Halberstam, 2005). Feminist revolt implies a belief in the possibility of change but it must also theorize what that change might involve. Thus, Delphy (1981) argues, there must be a concurrent feminist revolution in thought that strives to create the new kind of knowledge: It will not leave untouched any part of reality, any domain of knowledge, any aspect of the world. In the same way that feminism-as-a-movement aims at the revolution of social reality, so feminismas-a-theory (and each is indispensable to the other) must aim at the revolution of knowledge. (Delphy, 1981: pp. 197–198)

SITUATING FEMINISM IN THE ACADEMY Revolutions in knowledge take place both inside and outside the production centres of knowledge: the university (Readings, 1996). American lesbian poet Adrienne Rich wrote ‘Toward a Woman-Centred University’ (Rich, 1980 [1973–1974]) because ‘immense forces in the university as in the whole of patriarchal society, are intrinsically opposed to anything resembling an actual feminist renaissance’ (Rich, 1980: p. 126). As the privileged modern site of knowledge production, the university is not neutral. It is man-centred: ‘a breeding ground not of humanism, but of masculine privilege’. Where, asks Rich, do we find the majority of women in the university? Working as cleaners, cafeteria assistants, clerks, secretaries and amongst the lower grades of the often part-time academics. Some are token ‘exceptions’ whose success leads to identification with the institution’s elite leadership caste. Feminist academics were emerging, willing to take personal risks, confront their own realities, speak their minds, be hated for solidarity with other women

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in the attempt to transform the institutions of knowledge and make them not only structurally more accessible, but intellectually more hospitable to a wider range of women from varied parts of divided and exploited societies. Feminist theory is not just a selfserving addition to the esoteric academic sphere: it challenges the rational/impersonal modes that mask androcentric self-interest. In the name of a transformative democracy, feminism creates a critical relation between experience and knowledge, theory and practice, the privileged space of the academy and other social practices. Yet such a vision immediately encounters the tough issues of divisions between women, class and race being the constant and real injuries that afflict the feminist struggle for democracy. Teaching AfricanAmerican Women’s History, Elsa Barkley Brown explores the problem of ‘how to centre our work, our teaching, in the lives of the people about whom we are teaching and writing’. Against the normative assumptions embedded in students by not only an androcentric, but a white and middle-class vision of the world, teachers and scholars from marginal groups have to deal with what is not merely ‘an intellectual process’: ‘It is also about coming to believe in a variety of experiences, a variety of ways of understanding the world, a variety of frameworks of operation, without imposing consciously or unconsciously a norm’ (Brown, 1988: p. 10). She mobilizes Bettina Apteker’s concept of ‘pivoting the centre’. No one can or has to imagine what it feels like to be other than themselves. They can, however, learn to centre themselves in an experience other than their own and see its internal system without adopting it or relativizing it against the implicit centre of centres: racist, sexist, heterosexual normality that is home to the privileged and unmarked subjects of our societies. bell hooks is an African-American feminist theorist whose experience as student and then professor, coming from a Southern black, working-class family who encountered the triple alienation of class, race and gender as she entered the elite American education

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system, exemplifies the struggles involved in creating the space for inclusive feminist theory and practice. bell hooks links feminist theory and practice as a continual struggle. Feminist education – the feminist classroom – is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgement of the union of theory and practice, where we work together as feminist teachers and students to overcome alienation and estrangement that have become so much the norm in the contemporary university. (bell hooks, 1989: p. 51)

In Conflicts in Feminism, bell hooks engages in a ‘Conversation about Race and Class’ with white working-class woman fellow academic Mary Childers. Sharing some experiences of class while differences around race distinguish them, both scholars explore the challenge of finding words and terminologies that do not exclude or reiterate oppressive relations. Saying ‘feminist movement’ without the definite article allows for multiple sites, languages and experiences. Both also stress the issue of attitudes and behaviours, what we might call the living cultural relations that shape the ways we experience ourselves and each other in the world. Culture involves the tone of voice, the modes of address, the notion of the proper and improper, ways of using our bodies, gestures, vocabularies: all these mark us, and locate us socially, and can harm others. Democratic feminist theoretical practice starting as a critique of institutionalized relations for producing knowledge has questioned the power relations embedded in selective behaviours, and privileged forms of speech and writing. Nowhere is this more visible than in the challenge to the exclusion of the personal from the public. Daring to breach the boundaries between academic and everyday, between officially sanctioned knowledge and situated understanding has been a hallmark of feminist work (Haraway, 1991c). Feminist theory struggles with the question of ‘experience’, insisting on the situatedness of knowledge and the values of ways of knowing that are not those Adrienne Rich identified as most serviceable to the elite men of the traditional university hierarchical mode. Yet experience per se is not knowledge.

As Steedman writes: ‘Once a story is told, it ceases to be a story; it becomes a piece of history, an interpretative device’ (Steedman, 1986: p. 143). The Italian feminist Teresa de Lauretis provides us with a semiotic theory of experience. What feminists initially insisted upon as ‘the personal’, as a kind of spontaneous resistance to the formal systems of patriarchal knowledge in which women’s lives and social experience were made invisible and unrecountable, can be productively theorized, not as the raw data of sensory or mental relations to things that are ‘idiosyncratic and individualistic’. It can be understood in … the general sense of a process by which, for all social beings, subjectivity is constructed. Through that process one places oneself or is placed in social reality, and so perceives and comprehends as subjective (referring to, or even originating in, oneself) those relations – material, economic, interpersonal – which are in fact social, and in a larger perspective, historical. (de Lauretis,1984: p. 159)

Thus subjectivity, mediated at the intersection of the singularity of a self-awareness and the complexity of the socially/historically formed representations, is a constant work of daily construction that involves both receiving representations made to us by culture – of gender, class, age, race, identity and so forth – and processing these significations so that we are at once produced and (re)producing. De Lauretis proposes a model of gender as productive representation and self-representation. This avoids the blunt and depressing picture of complete ideological manufacture of ‘subjects’ for the pre-determined system of social roles and locations: what some might call social constructionism. Theorizing experience, consciousness and representation takes us to semiotics – the study of signs as producing meanings – and the subject or subjectivity. In her theoretical autobiography, Lacanian feminist Shoshana Felman reminds us in a different way that ‘getting personal’ or accessing our experience through stories or even histories is deeply problematic because of the imbrication of language and culture, and because the very concepts of the personal – subjectivity – are

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already appropriated and suffused with both patriarchal ideology and phantasy. We are … all unwittingly possessed by ‘the male mind that has been implanted in us’… We may ‘get personal’ with a borrowed voice – and might not even know from whom we borrow that voice. Getting personal does not guarantee that the story we narrate is wholly ours or that is it narrated in our own voice… I will suggest that none of us, as women, has as yet, precisely, an autobiography. Trained to see ourselves as objects and to be positioned as Other, estranged to ourselves, we have a story that by definition cannot be self-present to us, a story that, in other words, is not a story, but must become a story. (Felman, 1993: pp. 13–14)

The post-colonial theorist Chandra Mohanty warns us that feminism is marked by global power formations. These are most evident when Western scholars address themselves to the condition of women ‘elsewhere’. The economic and social power of the West has meant that much of what constitutes feminist theory originated in Western academic institutions. This is changing now. Feminists from all continents and regions are speaking to each other without the mediation of the West, appropriating ‘feminist tools’ and questions but radically transforming them in relation to specific national, regional or cultural conditions (Ogundipe, El Sawaadawi). Despite this change since Mohanty wrote in 1988, her postcolonial warnings remain relevant: Western feminist scholarship cannot avoid the challenge of situating itself and examining its role in such a global economic and political framework … I am not making a culturalist argument about ethnocentrism; rather I am trying to uncover how ethnocentric universalism is produced by certain analyses. As a matter of fact, my argument holds up for any discourse that set up its own authorial subjects as the implicit referent, i.e. the yardstick by which to encode and represent cultural Others. It is in this move that power is exercised in discourse. (Mohanty, 2003: pp. 20–21)

If feminist theory is not to become the professional capital of a new classed and raced gender-elite, it must do its intellectual work for change in constant self-criticism of its complex responsibility to these lived and everyday injuries of social violence,

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alienation and estrangement. Many workingclass feminists have battled with the idea that to acquire knowledge is to be forced to change class: how to be an educated workingclass woman, how not to be colonized as many women from many parts of the postcolonial societies already know themselves, renders the struggle for international, postcolonial and socially transformative feminist theory a continuous and still unfinished work of analysis (Spivak, 1987 [1981]). So there is no one story of feminist cultural analysis. Instead I shall set out some of the theoretical problems and conceptual issues that are fundamental to feminist questioning which plots a trajectory from the social-structural to the subjective-enunciative, from the desert of structuralist analysis of the socio-economic and linguistic foundations of phallocentrism to the engagements with pleasure and fantasy in the potentially resisting and transformative plays of subjectivity, writing and aesthetics.

WHAT IS WOMAN IN FEMINIST THOUGHT: DIFFERENCE? Just after World War II a French existential philosopher prepared to write an autobiography. Simple enough. But no. The philosopher was Simone de Beauvoir. To write of herself, a woman writing a woman’s life, she had to understand something more about being a her self: a woman. ‘For a long time I hesitated to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new. Enough ink has been spilled in quarrelling over feminism, now practically over . . . . After all is there a problem? And if so what is it? Are there women, really?’ (de Beauvoir in Marks and Courtivron, 1981: p. 41). Two passages demonstrate the radical nature of her answers to these questions. One is the book’s famous conclusion which is declared in its opening sentence: One is not born, but rather becomes a woman. No biological, psychological or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society. It is civilization as a whole which produces this creature, intermediate between male

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and eunuch which is described as feminine. (de Beauvoir, 1984: p. 9)

The naturalism of biological sex is dismissed. Femininity is a social and cultural construct. How can this be? De Beauvoir’s second most important passage explains that all human beings are trapped in ambiguity between what is given as human potentiality and what is realized within the frameworks of a lived, hence socially and historically shaped, world. For women this is more conflicted because ‘she’ is at once a member of the human community and constructed as what the norm within that community creates as its self-defining Other. Now what specifically defines the situation of woman is that she – a free autonomous being like all human creatures – nevertheless discovers and chooses herself in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to turn her into an object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is forever to be transcended by another consciousness which is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject – which always posits itself as essential – and the demands of a situation which constitutes her as inessential. (de Beauvoir, 1984: p. 229)

De Beauvoir’s analysis of the distorting trajectory by which a little girl becomes this creature of a society that demands of her to be Other and an object to the subject, Man, drew on Freud’s work on sexuality, and on the then hardly known theory of the mirror phase propounded by still little-known ‘Dr Lacan’ whom de Beauvoir consulted while researching the book in the 1940s. De Beauvoir opens a major new chapter in feminist theory by theorizing femininity as a structural – negative – condition of a patriarchal culture not a result of a natural difference between the sexes. Does that mean she introduces a theory of the social construction of ‘gender’: that upon physical differences between boys and girls society constructs arbitrary codes of behaviours, roles, expectations and meanings? In one sense, yes. By virtue, however, of her matching existentialist theories of

the subject existing only in relation to an Other with psychoanalytical theories that indicated that that ‘otherness’ was founded on the psychic structures that create sexual difference as a psychological condition (the paradigm of castration: having or not having), de Beauvoir is also anticipating a whole genealogy of feminist theory that will play itself out across philosophy (Irigaray, Butler), linguistics and semiotics (Kristeva) and lesbian theories (Wittig). To identify the positioning of Woman as Other to Man means: a)

b)

c)

that there is a linguistic/meaning system in play defining the very terms in which we are asked to recognize ourselves that is neither essentially derived from nature/anatomy/biology nor merely socially constructed by imposed norms; that this system is asymmetric and hierarchical in so far as it is not reversible. Woman is Other so that Man is Subject but not vice-versa; that to be Other is to be defined by someone else, to be an object for someone else’s Subjecthood, to be constrained by definitions of your function in constructing and maintaining this asymmetrical relation.

Woman is, however, represented, within this dynamic, constantly-being-produced system of hierarchical differentiation, as a fixed, defined essence: the eternal feminine. Nothing reveals the contradiction within this ‘fiction’ so much as the assertion that a woman can be unfeminine, as if there is an eternal essence and yet at the same time some female people can be deficient with regard to what is their essence. This mythical ‘eternal feminine’ is a standard against which proper womanhood is judged, and women are ideologically policed into conformity with the exigency of patriarchal othering. Femininity is, therefore, revealed to be a culturally defined condition for which girls are trained with deep psychosocial repercussions for the person thus subjected – being made an object – by this othering in a gendering hierarchy. Femininity as otherness to the Man-Subject becomes an internalized position that creates within the person thus re-constructed as ‘feminine’ a conflict between her inevitable (however

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experienced) humanity and an externally generated, yet internalized ‘identity’ of Woman as Other for the Subject: Man. Feminists, in challenging the current constructions of femininity as Man’s negative Other, are thus predictably (mis)represented in an array of stereotypes created to ridicule and disdain them as monstrous: amazons, harridans, manhaters, lesbians, castrators and so forth. De Beauvoir’s existentialist version of the asymmetry of the subjective pair Man/Other will be variously reconfigured through the development of a self-conscious feminist theoretical project which must unpick the patriarchal or phallocentric (I will shortly explain these terms) systems on the basis of a shared understanding that meanings and hence identities and subjectivities are produced; they are not spontaneous or facts. Being interviewed in 1974 by a French Marxist-Psychoanalytical Feminist collective, Psychanalyse-Politique, Julia Kristeva resumes de Beauvoir’s terms but with a post-structural difference: ‘The belief that “one is born a woman” is almost as absurd or obscurantist as the belief that “one is a man”’ (Kristeva, 1974: p. 137). ‘Almost’ is the key word here. Kristeva acknowledges that there are many goals that women have to achieve through the demand for ‘women’s rights’: safe abortion and contraception, childcare facilities, equality of opportunity, employment, and pay, and security. But: On a deeper level a woman cannot ‘be’; it is something that does not even belong in the order of being. It follows that a feminist practice can only be negative, at odds with what already exists so that we may say ‘that’s not it’ and ‘that’s still not it’. In ‘woman’ I see something that cannot be represented, something that is not said, something above and beyond nomenclatures and ideologies. (Kristeva, 1974: p. 137)

The Hegelian feminist Judith Butler recognizes in de Beauvoir’s use of phenomenology to make the statement that ‘one becomes a woman’ one of the various ways philosophers have reflected on ‘acts’, constitutive practices that equally depend on the performative dimensions of language.2 Butler writes: … gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather

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it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self… (Butler, 2003 [1988]: p. 392)

Repetitious acts over time produce the illusion of a continuity of fixed identity. We who are thus engendered and constantly re-engendering through repeated enactment, fall prey to the belief in the very identity that is created by performative promise. The grip of a heteronormative concept of gender (sex and gender are collapsed to naturalize reproductive sex and its apparently complementary pair: man/woman) can be challenged. Thus the possibility of a gender politics – gender trouble as Butler put it (Butler, 1990) – becomes thinkable: ‘If the ground of gender identity is stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation of such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking and subversive repetition of that style’. Through Butler, we can recognize how much more complex are our relations to bodies, signs and identities. Materialist-lesbian-feminist novelist Monique Wittig re-used de Beauvoir’s opening sentence as her title in 1981: ‘One is not Born a Woman’. Wittig argues that ‘women’ form a kind of class in the social relations of patriarchal economic exploitation of female bodies and labour. ‘Women’ have been ‘compelled in our bodies and in our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for us’ (Wittig, 1993: p. 103). Wittig pierces this idea of natural division by retheorizing the social forces that oppress women. What Wittig calls ‘lesbian society’ accomplishes the transformation in practice. Woman is understood, therefore, in the way we might understand ‘slave’ in slavery and ‘proletarian’ in capitalist relations of production: not the essence or nature of the individual

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as slave or worker, but the socio-economic designation of a specific position in relations of exploitation and oppression. This leads Wittig to her important statement that: Lesbian is the only concept that I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man) because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to man, a relation we have previously called servitude, a relation which implies personal and physical obligation (forced residence, domestic corvée, conjugal duties, unlimited production of children), a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or stay heterosexual. We are escapees from our class in the same way that runaway slaves were when escaping slavery and becoming free. (Wittig, 1993: p. 108)

Any notion that a difference already exists between men and women is replaced by our exploration of how such a semioticallycharged differentiation within humanity is produced whose embodied products are obliged to understand themselves through the systems’ signifiers – masculine/feminine, man/woman – that exist as non-complementary, asymmetrical binary oppositions which have profound and real social, economic and psychological effects.

FEMINIST MATERIALISM, GENDER AND GLOBALIZATION Before we proceed to look briefly at these texts, we need to pause for some terminological clarification. Sex is a biological term that is used in the study of animal life and simply registers that, for the purposes of reproduction, different members of a species have different parts relevant to that activity – which consumes a small part of their living time. Gender helps us to understand that societies impose upon the potential/necessity for sexual reproduction a series of social and cultural meanings. Hence the term sex/gender system (Rubin, 1975). Gender is a cultural construction of meaning for the minor fact of anatomical difference relevant to sexual reproduction and is linked in with the social

organization of reproduction that becomes a site for economic, social and political power. Gender is based on creating inequality between the sexes in order to facilitate what the anthropologists call the exchange of women – the trading of daughters between fathers of families so as to acquire wives (aka domestic servants and child-bearers) for their families via their sons. What we call men are subjects privileged by the exchange system; what we call women are those who are reduced to being objects of exchange – they can be sold or bartered – as the daughters pass between men. Even now that some of the power of traditional kinship systems has waned with modernity and advanced nations encourage young people to choose their own sexual partners – and this is still very limited to urban modernized areas of world societies – the concept of woman (self-sexualizing for better exchange) is based on an asymmetry created in this deep social structure of exchange. This is the most important concept to grasp. Man refers to a human being in whom his social, economic and political identity is not entirely defined by his relation to reproduction. Yes, fatherhood is important in many legal and social ways. But Man is the human being allowed many paths to social recognition and meaning. Woman refers to a human being defined exclusively by her sexual function, which becomes the reason for excluding her from all other social arenas such as religion, politics, and so forth (not always economics, for women are traders in many parts of the world). Thus from Confucianism to Western Christian patriarchy, we have the idea that the destiny of woman is to be wife and mother – to obey father, husband and son, to be a relative creature. Thus woman does not describe a human female person but a social construction of a person defined by her sexual function vis-à-vis reproduction, which means in relation to heterosexuality under the law of the father: patriarchy. No longer is this enforced in the West through the unchallenged power of the father and the elders as in traditional society. In some societies, socialist as well as liberal regimes for instance, women’s equality and

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access to abortion or to fertility is defined by the government on the basis of what the society needs in terms of production and reproduction. (This accounts for the suspicion in post-socialist and currently socialist societies that socialist gender equality has nothing to do with feminism: managing women as workers and controlling fertility for the needs of the state is patriarchy in another form.) In other societies, women are made to experience themselves through internalizing their role in sexual reproduction: they are made to be scared of being or terrified of an association as a lesbian. They are made to consider themselves unsuccessful as a woman unless they are successful in the heterosexual realm. Women are not expected to aspire to being a person with a sexuality but to being a sexualized person legitimated by social markers of marriage or desirability in relationships. Feminist studies of the sex/gender system from anthropology to contemporary sociology track the multifarious ways in which this logic will play itself out: the less the pressure is exercised by traditional and directly authoritarian controls, the less capitalism, for instance, needs to maintain those controls because it needs workers and cheap ones such as women in former colonies for its production system, the less rigid the logic will appear. But we need only counter the relative freedom of access to education and work with the ever more powerful messages being projected to women via the media – encouraging women to spend ever more money and invest more time in creating, by diet, exercise, cosmetics and now surgery, ‘women’, i.e. sexually desirable beings for men and for their sexual function – to see the persistence of the logic moulding itself to changing socio-economic histories. The third term we need to consider is sexual difference, which is associated with psychoanalysis – a study of the unconscious and the formation of what is called human subjectivity under a regime of phallocentrism. Psychoanalysis explains how the deeper rules of culture, including the asymmetrical hierarchy of the sexes, are installed in each individual at an unconscious level through an apparatus,

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the psyche, and core fantasies such as castration. The tiny infant – the term means without speech – is born into the world full of potentialities. These are disciplined and shaped by its interaction with the already established systems of language and meaning embodied in its parents. But the learning of the rules of culture happens before language. The infant can only ‘think’ with its fantasies of nurture and of prohibitions on what the infant wants. For each child they must find out who they are according to an already written social code embodied in language or cultural practices and already in action and projected at them by their parents, who represent the social prohibitions on the very desires generated in infant dependence on their parents. Sexual difference stands for both the installation of the cultural rules – the symbolic system of the exchange of women which is what the Oedipal complex performs when it denies the child’s cross-generational desire, the incest taboo – and a process that, because it is a process taking place through fantasy, is never complete. Feminists theorize sexual difference as both an effect in us of the law of the Father (the NO – the prohibition of the infant’s desire directed towards its primary love objects, its parents) and its failure, the place of other possibilities including the effects of different relations to the law of the Father resulting from the imposition of sexual difference. Thus feminist theory does not suggest that in essence, and by virtue of their bodies, women are different. But between social constructions of gender that make distinctions that we then live and psychically installed formations in sexual difference that generate incompletely and internally conflicted different psychic pathways to subjectivity and sexualities, there are possibilities in those effects of difference that sexuate masculine and feminine subjects that might be productive for thinking about non-Oedipal human potentiality and other ways of organizing society than according to the exchange of women/castration. If we do not retain the space of difference-as-potential, we are left with imagining that the solution to gender

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inequality or oppression is to make women over as men – seemingly the normative human being within each community. Equity of treatment under the law is, of course, desirable. But identity of humans in a false universalization of white, heterosexual, masculine normativity is not. So feminist theory has radically shifted the usually negative understanding of the term feminine (de Beauvoir’s eunuched other) to refer not only to Kristeva’s dissident, change-creating negativity and excess – what is not spoken in the current phallocentric system – but also to the potentialities of the differential differentiated women experience in their various worlds, their sexed bodies and their others that new systems of cultural meaning might produce. The unexplored difference of the feminine can become a source of productive otherness. It is with this in mind that we can approach two influential arguments in feminist theory. The American feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway published ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ in 1985 which concluded with the declaration: ‘Though both are bound in a spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’ (Haraway, 1991b: p. 181). Confronting feminist problematics from the position of science, technology and socialistfeminism in the conditions of globalizing capitalism and an emerging information society at the end of the twentieth century, Haraway proposed a blasphemy – not a heresy – against conventional American feminist thought that had initially endorsed or even idealized a positivist and essentialist feminist idea of women very different to the European tradition I have outlined above. Blasphemy refers to thinking what is unacceptable even within feminism rather than substituting a new belief system. Haraway asks herself how can we think beyond ideological frames without falling prey to religion, the constant and ever more powerful shaper of our imaginations, the locus of ideas of essence and transcendence, which can in secular form lead to the idealization of all things Woman – expressed for some in the form of recovering an ancient Goddess as a feminist ideal or valorizing

everything traditionally associated with our mothers as an aesthetic project. Historical materialism obliges us to work through the dialectics of existing social realities, seeking out their contradictions. Idealism imagines permanent truths beyond the social realm. In comforting ourselves against the violation of our humanity, women have risked a complicity with religious ideologies by imagining a pure or natural femininity somehow repressed by patriarchy to which we can appeal for resistance and alternatives to patriarchy. Often imagined through returning to archaic religious and mythic traditions of Great Mothers and Goddesses, benign and peace-loving, rooted in the earth, this tendency can equally be analysed to reveal the same nostalgic, infantile longings for (and inverse fear of) an all-powerful parent that Freud discerned as the founding illusion of religion (Freud, 1990 [1930]). Haraway draws upon new technological transformations and possibilities (in the informatics of domination in a cyber-information age) as much as on the imaginative works of feminist science-fiction writers to propose a post-gender world that has ‘no truck with … seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity’ (Haraway, 1991b: p. 150). A hybrid figure between human and machine, the cyborg becomes Haraway’s metaphor for feminist thought that steadfastly refuses the comfort of myths of origin, of an originating nature before social corruption or economic oppression. This dream of a pure past participates in the Western imaginary that both looks back to a state of originary abstracted individual selfhood (The Garden of Eden) and fantasizes its ultimate liberation through a man in space. Linking all fantasies of origin in Marxism and psychoanalysis, in religious thought and philosophy, Haraway invites us to think with the cyborg as a figure ‘resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity’. Cyborgs refuse the binary oppositions which we can show structure sexual difference as well as so much else; nature/culture, private/public, human/animal, human/machine. Cyborgs do not dream of

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community, or a return to Eden. Nor do they propose vanguard parties that alone know where we are going and why. Politically they seek elective affinities, coalitions that are not built on unities or unified identities hence are open to the figures of multi-levelled complexity across differences of ethnicity, sexuality, location, age, ability as well as class and gender. Allowing the real complexity of ‘women of colour’ in which race-class-gender-sexuality are complexly interwoven to determine the vision of feminist futures, Haraway posits the cyborg as both the dangerous product of the violence of contemporary science and militarized technology in the service of a world domination of extreme intensity by military-industrial, global capitalism and the necessarily dialectical image of a resistance to the dualisms that are structural to systems of domination: self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/ part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/ passive, truth/illusion, God/man – are just a few she lists. Haraway’s complex weaving of social theory, poetics and science fiction shares with more theoretically rigorous exercises in feminist uses of structuralism, the adamant refusal of origin, first cause, back to basics.

FEMINISM AND STRUCTURALISM – CULTURE AS EXCHANGE AND SIGN SYSTEM If we apply this approach to the two key binaries we have encountered so far, Self/Other and Man/Woman, we can now attend to the common system in which both terms are produced relative to each other with neither having an identity (or essence or nature) outside a relational signifying system. Gayle Rubin brought out the feminist possibilities in the structuralist anthropological work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose studies of non-industrial societies used semiotics to define the Elementary Structures of Kinship. Culture, for Lévi-Strauss, is a system of

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exchange, primary amongst which objects of exchange are ‘women’. If Marxism defines production as the constitutive process of society and hence privileges social relations of production (class) as the determining matrix of culture, following the work of Durkheim’s student Marcel Mauss on the gift, structural anthropology privileges exchange as the practice that generates reciprocal bonds between ‘human groups’ and thus predicates society/culture. In pre-state societies, kinship refers not to lists of relatives but to the social categories and statuses that are ‘the idiom of social interaction, organizing economic, political and ceremonial as well as sexual activity’ (Rubin, 1975: p. 169). Indeed these are all closely interwoven. In such societies ‘marriages are the most basic form of gift exchange’ and women are the most precious ‘gifts’ – implying that they do not possess themselves but are to be given. The ‘law’ that enables this exchange, named the sex/gender system, is the incest taboo. This taboo prohibits sexual partnerships within socially defined ‘in’ groups in order to make its young available to the necessary exchanges with socially defined ‘out’ groups who are then bound through this social bond – marriage – into relations of reciprocity which create sociality. Thus we must think of a system of exchange as a kind of communication system. Kinship is a signifying system. Meanings are produced by differentiations created by the system that themselves are produced as the signifiers within the system itself. A exchanges X with B and receives in exchange something of equivalent value, Y, from B. This sets up a reciprocal, egalitarian relation of A to B signified through A’s gift and B’s return: X and Y becoming equivalent with each other – exchanged objects – but different in status from A and B who are agents: exchangers. What is exchanged is, by definition, on a different level: not an agent/subject of the reciprocal relations but both its object and the very signifier of the constitution of A and B’s social relation. A and B become instances of Man and X and Y of Man’s available others

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to be exchanged to form bonds of cultural connection between Men. The gift/exchange process creates and defines both its participants and its elements. Thus translated into the sex/gender system, the signifier of the exchanged X is ‘woman’ or woman-equivalent, creating woman as an equivalent for values rather than a signifier for agency and a participant in social bonding. If A gives his daughter as a wife for B’s son, he will receive an agreed number of cattle, shells, or whatever is the currency or valued materials. The value and meaning of ‘woman’ is expressed in equivalent objects of use for material life and production, also exposing the fact that woman is exchanged as a productive value (for her work and the surplus that can be produced through her sexual body). The word ‘daughter’ itself signifies not beloved child so much as potential for exchanging with a male peer in return for valued materials. In patriarchal societies, ‘Woman’ does not, therefore, designate a singular human being/subject. ‘Woman’ as sign is not synonymous with agency, exchanger, representative of the social bond made by the exchange, society. Man is the term that designates that place (although differentiated by generation, hence we talk about patriarchy and the law of the Father). Woman is a sign. The body and labour of a female person is the signifier; the signified (the mental concept of meaning signified by the signifying material) is social solidarity or bonding between the exchangers, signified as ‘men’. This in part explains the extreme vulnerability of men-subjects to any challenge to this hierarchy of the sexes. A man is defined only by his notbeing his instrumentalized other. What is their meaning if they are not created as men through the objectification of women? Women have their full humanity to regain; men only their illusions as well as privilege to lose. Thus structural anthropology begins to provide us with a set of theoretical resources to explore the socio-linguistic processes by which woman becomes not only Other in de Beauvoir’s sense but a sign whose exchange between men is constitutive of sociality. What

we call sex/gender and heterosexuality are the effects, and the necessarily produced preconditions of the exchange system: Gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes. It is a product of the social relations of sexuality. Kinship systems rest upon marriage. They therefore transform males and females into ‘men’ and ’women’ each an incomplete half which can only find wholeness when united with the other. Men and women are of course different. But they are not as different as day and night, earth and sky, yin and yang, life and death. In fact, from the standpoint of nature, men and women are closer to each other than either is to anything else – for instance mountains, kangaroos, or coconut palms. The idea that men and women are different from one another must come from somewhere other than nature. (Rubin, 1975: p. 179)

Rubin argues that ‘men’ and ‘women’ are engendered in order to institute the heterosexuality that is necessary for the constitution of social exchange and bonding through marriage. Related to this engendering is the taboo against non-heterosexual desire and sexualities so that the oppression of women and suppression of homosexualities are intimately related. To institute the founding system of difference between exchanger and exchanged the major price is the suppression or control of all female sexuality, that is, a female person’s independent sexuality and desire that cannot be allowed to act against the demands of the system which establishes both masculinity as power and notably masculine power as figured through the ‘father’. This sexuality may be physically controlled through genital mutilations or psycho-ideologically policed by custom, punishment or even words. In a daring move, Spivak looks behind the structure which defines gender: women and men, and social relations of sexuality through the concept of reproduction. She ‘blasphemously’ uses a physiological argument to point out that, in fact, female sexual pleasure, unlike that of the male, is entirely independent of reproduction. Patriarchy confines women to their reproductive function within a ‘uterine social organization’ with men appropriating the values created by women’s bodies. Women’s orgasmic pleasure,

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however, lies in an organ – the clitoris – that has nothing to do with reproduction, unlike male sexuality, in which the spasm of orgasm always involves the ejaculation of sperm. Here Spivak’s analysis of a sexual economy links back with Haraway’s socialist feminist address to the conditions of exploitation of women workers in the Third World. At the other end of the spectrum, it is this ideologico-material repression of the clitoris as the signifier of the sexed subject that operates the specific oppression of women, as the lowest level of cheap labour that the multi-national corporations employ by remote control in the extraction of absolute surplus-value in the less developed countries. (Spivak, 1987 [1981]: p. 153)

Whatever our mode of analysis – Spivak lists various feminist models – she concludes: What a heterogeneous sex-analysis would disclose is that the repression of the clitoris in the general or the narrow sense (the difference cannot be absolute) is presupposed by both patriarchy and family. (Spivak, 1987 [1981]: p. 153)

Spivak shows that the intimacies of what are offered in the West as the most individuated and subjectivized of experiences, sexual pleasure, lie within the construction of the systems of power that generate, naturalize and ideologically perpetuate the asymmetrical relation of the sexes and the subordination of women’s bodies and subjectivities to patriarchal-capitalist economy and social organization. If we ask ‘why are women subordinated?’ we can now analyse how and through what violence patriarchal domination is established through either the surgical, physical or psychological ‘castration’ of women so that their autonomous sexuality is sacrificed to the social-exchange system that produces value for men; or their sexuality is alienated from them by more ideological means. It is only now that we can see why sexuality is so central to feminist theorization but how complex the theorization of sexuality now becomes.

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FEMINISM AND POST-STRUCTURALISM – DISCOURSE AND SEXUALITY Writing a history of feminism, Rosalind Delmar (1986) remarked that while education, employment and civil rights were the dominant concerns of nineteenth-century feminism, contemporary feminism generated a new focus on ‘sexual politics’, ‘Sexual Politics’ held together the idea of women as social group dominated by men as social group (male domination/female oppression), at the same time as turning back to the issue of women as sex outside of the bounds of reproduction. It threw political focus onto the most intimate of transactions of the bedroom: this became one of the meanings of ‘the personal is political’. These two aspects have not always stayed held together: Some feminists have attached most value to the study of ‘women’ as social group and object of political concern. It is, however, the pursuit of questions about the female body and its sexual needs that has become distinctive of contemporary feminism. (Delmar, 1986: p. 27)

Around 1970, sexuality became a flashpoint for a liberalization of sexual mores. Women could be deemed active and desiring subjects without being negatively labelled. Yet sexual freedom incited a censorious backlash which itself also served to make sexuality and its social management a critical issue. Dealing with pornography, eroticism, homosexuality, heterosexuality, sexual fantasies, taboos, rape, abortion, and the part played by race and class in the experience of all of the above, the expanding feminist discourse can be subjected to a further analysis as a result of the decisive impact of Foucault’s first volume of History of Sexuality (1976), translated in 1978. Criticizing the idea that ‘liberation’ to be sexual and talk openly about sexuality was a sign of release from a repressive, censorious and silenced ‘Victorian’ past, Foucault blasted open what he called ‘the repressive hypothesis’ to show how, since the nineteenth century, sexuality has, in fact, been the subject of incessant talk and hence of the play of power. This ‘talk’across medicine, psychiatry, economics, family management, population politics, social etiquette, law, art and so forth

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constituted, despite the different inflections in these sites, a discourse. Discourse makes knowledge function as power. Discourse creates an object for a specialist savoir: an expertise. Discourse creates experts, who, in having this expertise over a specific (constructed) object, exercise institutionalized discursive power (doctors over patients, etc.). Foucault contested the everyday ideas about sexuality as a kind of ‘force, an impulse, an instinct, that emanates from the inner biological recesses of the individual and is the natural expression of biologically governed processes’ (Wood, 1985: p. 156) by arguing instead that ‘it appears rather as an especially dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young and old people, parents and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, an administration and a population. Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one endowed with the greatest instrumentality’ (Foucault, 1978: p. 103). Foucault revealed how this package of attitudes was produced during the nineteenthcentury bourgeois cultural and political revolutions as part of a new ‘bio-politics’ – a politics in which the productive and reproductive body of society’s members become, through various, non-unitary strategic practices, the point of application for social power/management. Of course, in every society there is what we might call the potential of sex: the reproductive coupling of designated partners whose relations are subject to strong social rules and controls (kinship, marriage laws, honour or criminal codes etc.) and also the potential of the body to generate pleasure and experience erotic desire and fantasies that may also bring into being secondary cultural forms of images, literatures and rituals. What Foucault names ‘sexuality’ is a historically specific construct of the European bourgeoisie as it introduced a hygienic and economic view of both aspects of sex in contrast to a superseded aristocratic/feudal model of alliance founded on ‘blood’ and bloodline. The bourgeoisie emphasized its own body – labour, health, procreativity as its ‘capital’ – and thus displaced blood and alliance with

a new formation – ‘sexuality’. This refers to a radically expanded sense of everything that pertains to the political management of both the body’s healthy functions and its policed pleasures. ‘Sexuality’as an apparatus can be identified through what Foucault calls ‘strategic unities’ that emerged as the forms through which ‘sexuality’ was played out in discourse, practices and institutions. Interrelated on the axis of a new pairing of normal (desired for the system) and what is designated by contrast as abnormal, dysfunctional and thereby vulnerable to ‘administration’ by the emerging army of experts, four key figures emerged. Central and normative is the Malthusian couple – the heterosexual, married couple, who only marry when their means ensure they can economically afford to sustain themselves and grow a bevy of healthy children to work in the family business and participate in economically advantageous marriages. Set against one element of this couple, the dedicated wife and mother, is the far more fascinating object, therefore, of the discursive work of this system: the hysterical wife. She is the product of A hystericization of women’s bodies: a threefold process whereby the feminine body was analysed – qualified and disqualified – as being thoroughly saturated with sexuality; whereby it was integrated into the sphere of medical practice, by reason of a pathology intrinsic to it; whereby finally it was placed in an organic communication with the social body (whose regulated fecundity it was supposed to ensure), the family space (of which it had to be a substantial and functioning element), and the life of the children (which it produced and had to guarantee by virtue of a biologico-moral responsibility lasting through the entire period of the children’s education): the Mother, with her negative image of the ‘nervous woman’. (Foucault, 1978: p. 104)

This passage shows the intricate relations between a bio-political level of population control, a medical discourse on the pathologies of the female body associated above all with their sexual organs and reproductive activity, and the social discourse of idealizing domesticity and motherhood as women’s social and only proper destiny. The negative

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of the ideal is the frigid wife, the lesbian daughter or any woman, who through will or need resists this newly empowered biopolitical system for policing women into the service of patriarchy by means of a plait of naturalizing discourses from the modern sciences, medicine, sociology, economics, biology, psychiatry. For resisting what was a political programme, ‘women’ were deemed ‘ill’, in need of experts (gynaecologists or psychologists) to return them to their ‘natural’ duties (a contradiction in terms). Foucault’s phrase ‘saturated with sexuality’ marks another aspect of the asymmetrical relation of ‘woman’ to the social; it is woman who is increasingly colonized by ‘the long march of the empires of gender over the entirety of the person’ (Riley, 1988: p. 15), so that in modern bourgeois cultures, woman and gender become synonymous in ways that actually generated a new, political form of resistance: feminism and the women’s movement. Feminism arises concurrently with the bourgeois creation of women as a collective, gender-defined, identity: women unified by gender despite profound divisions of class, region, ethnicity and culture. Feminism is a historical product releasing women from both patriarchal incarceration and its negative resistance: hysteria. The hysterical/hystericized woman takes her place with two other figures of bourgeois sexuality: the masturbating child whose discovery of the pure rather than economically dispersed pleasure of his (sic) body must be curbed as must the possibility of an equally economically spendthrift adult male homosexuality. Female homosexuality – obscured and unspoken in the figure of the unmarried daughter or sister – was simply repressed by being kept unthinkable and unnamed. Thus Foucault concludes: Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries to gradually uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensifications of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the

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formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power. (Foucault, 1978: p. 106)

While Foucault has been critiqued by feminists for not fully considering gender as an independent factor in his analysis (Bland, 1981), lesbian-feminist Biddy Martin welcomes Foucault’s insistence that ‘our subjectivity, our identity, and our sexuality are intimately linked; they do not exist outside or prior to language and representation, but are actually brought into play by discursive strategies and representational practices’ (Martin, 1988: p. 9). Power, discourse and the body are in a dynamic, not only an oppressive, relation. The aim is not to liberate the free nature of female sexuality from the domination by men; it is to work strategically to rewrite and restructure the productivity of discourses and practices.

TECHNOLOGIES OF GENDER AND DIFFERENTIATED SEXUALITIES We can recall here de Lauretis’ Foucaultinspired idea of gender as a technology: ‘the representation of gender is its construction: and in the simplest sense it can be said that all of Western art and high culture is an engraving of that construction’ (de Lauretis, 1987: p. 3). This engraving/construction goes on every day in the media, schools, courts, hospitals, art galleries, cinemas, but also in the academy (Rich, 1980 [1973–1974]), and in feminism too. Feminist theory constitutes a technology of gender even as it works to deconstruct those representations it inherits and wishes to resist. De Lauretis identifies the resistance in/of feminist theory as ‘a view from elsewhere’. Film theorists talk of offscreen space, the space beyond the frame that is never shown, for it might reveal the very mechanisms of production of the illusion offered within the frame: For that ‘elsewhere’ is not some mythic distant past [GP: the goddess] or some utopian future history [GP: the cyborg perhaps]; it is the elsewhere

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of discourse here and now, the blind spots, or the space-off, of its representations. I think of it as spaces in the margins of hegemonic discourses, social spaces carved in the interstices of institutions and the chinks and cracks of the power-knowledge apparati. And it is here the terms of a different construction of gender can be posed – terms that do have effect and take hold at the level of subjectivity and selfrepresentation: in the micropolitical practices of daily life and daily resistances that afford both agency and sources of power or empowering investments; and in the cultural productions of women, feminists, which inscribe the movement in and out of ideology, that crossing back and forth of the boundaries – and of the limits – of sexual difference. (de Lauretis, 1987: p. 25)

Insisting that there is no outside of discourse, de Lauretis argues that there are, none the less, spaces in and off that are ‘inferable from what the frame makes visible even while it is made unrepresentable’. Feminist analysis exposes the ‘framing’, the dominant discourses, the hegemonic positions and their mechanisms. It is also a praxis and a poetics, desiring to produce new or different meanings not yet represented, not yet recognized as representations, not yet thought. Thus, If, in the master narratives, cinematic and otherwise, the two kinds of spaces [represented and in space-off] are reconciled and integrated, as man contains woman in his (man)kind, his hommosexuality, nevertheless, cultural productions and micropolitical practices of feminism have shown them to be separate and heteronymous spaces. Thus, to inhabit both kinds of spaces at once is to live the contradiction which … is the condition of feminism here and now: the tension of the twofold pull in contrary directions – the critical negativity of its theory and the affirmative positivity of its politics – is both the historical condition of existence of feminism and its theoretical condition of possibility. The subject of feminism is engendered there. That is to say, elsewhere. (de Lauretis, 1987: p. 26)

De Lauretis mentions ‘his hommosexuality’, a phrase that derives from French philosopher Luce Irigaray. Homos in Greek means same, hence homosexual as same-sex desire. Homme in French means Man. Irigaray (1985 [1977]) argues that phallocentric societies ultimately only recognize one sex.

Culture, at least in its patriarchal form, thus effectively prohibits any return to red blood, including that of the sexual arena. In consequence, the ruling power is pretence, or sham, which still fails to recognize its own endogamies. For in this culture, the only sex, the only sexes, are those needed to keep relationships among men running smoothly. Why is masculine homosexuality considered exceptional then, when in fact the economy as a whole is based upon it. Why are homosexuals ostracized, when society postulates hom(m)osexuality? Unless it is because the ‘incest’ involved in hom(m)osexuality has to remain in the realm of pretence. (Irigaray, 1985 [1977]: p. 192)

What remains unrepresented – unrepresentable – as Spivak has already suggested, in an apparatus of ‘mono-sexuality’ is any autonomous feminine desire, and specifically, lesbian sexuality. I do not want, in what follows, to be mistaken for suggesting that lesbians are the vanguard of the feminist movement. Monique Wittig posited not the female homosexual (again defining a subject by sexuality and sexual function in relation to a normative heterosexuality) but the more comprehensive class-subject, the lesbian, as a dissenting socio-economic position in contest with the phallocentric position of ‘woman’, the figure of the patriarchal political economy, just as the slave was the worked body of the plantation economy. Lesbian-feminist cultural theory is thus not a subset of feminist theory, a patronizing inclusion of sexual minority. It is a radical theoretical resistance to what we have so far identified as both a structural and a historical constellation of heteronormativity and patriarchal relations of economic, political and social power that works through its endlessly repeated cultural representations of woman as negated/subordinated other to Man. Sexual politics is a politics of representation. Wherever we find a representational void, a silence, or a proscription, we know that we are dealing with one of the critical spaces-off, the discourses in representation smothered by hegemonic framing as unor non-representable. Whatever our specific sexual proclivities, feminist theory as a whole

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cannot think through the challenges it faces without taking seriously what lesbian feminist theory proposes: that gender conceived as the inevitable opposition of man/woman violently, painfully and as Butler argues, mournfully, erases the conditions of subjective positionality and self-representation to the lesbian subject. Written in 1982 to ‘challenge the erasure of lesbian existence from so much scholarly feminist literature’ and to encourage heterosexual women to ‘examine heterosexuality as a political institution which disempowers women’ (Rich, 1993: p. 227), ‘compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’ by Adrienne Rich fostered a rigorous debate within the feminist communities. Rich proposed two key theoretical terms. Heterosexuality is not natural. Socially constrained and inducted, it must make unthinkable any counter-formation. Thus it erases lesbian existence, just the same way as a colonizing nation attempts to erase from the consciousness and experience of the colonized, the possibility of any autonomous or other order, forcing the colonized to identify entirely with the colonizer’s imposed reality and to see themselves as represented to them by and in the interests of the colonizing power. Rich also proposes another concept: lesbian continuum. In addition to the sexualities of women who desire women, there is a thread within all women’s communities, irrespective of their sexual orientations to men or women as sexual objects, that allows for a love of women, such as a love of the way women think, write, act, work together, create images and so forth, a pleasure in women’s sociality – a theme we also find in Luce Irigaray’s writings when she ponders what would happen if the women-commodities of the hom(m)osexual economies refused to go to market, refused to acquiesce to the modelling of themselves as virgins, wives, prostitutes, and instead began to socialize/think amongst themselves – not relative to men (Irigaray, 1985 [1977]). This brings us finally to feminist’s theory’s deep engagement with psychoanalysis: a theorization of fantasy and desire.

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FEMINISM AND THE PSYCHIC From France in the radical 1960s and later Britain, feminists reclaimed psychoanalysis, never without contest, because it explained the terms of asymmetry and exchange anthropology and sociology revealed were installed in each subject and that shaped subjectivity. In 1974 socialist feminist Juliet Mitchell defended psychoanalysis as not ‘a recommendation for a patriarchal society but an analysis of one’(Mitchell, 1974: p. xv). Psychoanalysis provides two major theoretical resources: a theory of the unconscious that liberates us from any sense of perceptual or physiological ‘reality’ and an utterly nonnaturalistic theory of sexuality. Starting from work with ‘bodies in trouble with patriarchal language’, the hysterics, Freudian psychoanalysis was forced to acknowledge psychic conflict at the core of human subjectivity and human sexuality. The demands of culture – to produce ‘men’ and ‘women’ by means of the Oedipus complex which, with the incest taboo, marks each subject horizontally as a potential sexual partner for social contracts that must erase the powerful vertical bond initially created by infant dependency on parents – are exacted at the price of repressing those drives and forces culture cannot allow, thus creating the unconscious as ‘an other scene’ whose impulses constantly seek to escape repression in dreams and, where conflict is intense, in neurotic symptoms. This thesis produces the kind of tension on which feminist theory thrives. Jacqueline Rose summarizes it thus: The question of identity – how it is constituted and how it is maintained – is, therefore, the central issue through which psychoanalysis enters the political field … if psychoanalysis can give an account of how women experience the path to femininity, it also insists, through the concept of the unconscious, that femininity is neither simply achieved nor is it ever complete. The political case for psychoanalysis rests on these two insights together – otherwise it would be indistinguishable from a functionalist account of the internalization of norms. In fact, the argument from a biological pre-given and the argument from a sociological role have in common

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the image of utter passivity they produce: the woman receives her natural destiny or else is marked over by an equally ineluctable social world. (Rose, 1986: p. 7)

Rose thus argues that psychoanalysis pulls us in two directions at once: it shows us how sexual subjectivity is a formation not an essence, and, at the same time, why it is never fully formed; why it fails at the point ‘of tension between ego and unconscious where they are endlessly remodelled and endlessly break’ (ibid.). This tension replays that between those theorists who stress the social and material forces shaping our collective experience through gender, class and race and those who also recognize the complicity as well as the creativity of phantasy, dreams, images, representations, fictions and other sites through which desire, as never completely harnessed to social purpose, plays. The apparent opposition between outside (society) and inside (subjectivity) is undone by psychoanalysis, which theorizes both the hinge between the asocial drives of the becoming-human-infant and the social forces, signified to the child by the already socially encoded but also unconsciouslyactive parental figures, and the creative or pathogenic forces of the unconscious striving, according to its own economy and logic, for what it wants – which could as easily be death (complete release from tension) as pleasure. Freud’s theses on sexuality – which we have seen is bound tight into a social system of reproductive exploitation we call patriarchy – were equally radical. In his Three Essays on a Theory of Sexuality (1905) Freud scandalized his contemporaries for three reasons. First, he negated the idea that any form of sexuality is abnormal by showing how diverse – perverse – all human sexual pleasures, aims and objects can be. Second, he explained the origin of this ‘polymorphous perversity’ in infancy, hitherto imagined as innocent of any erotic feeling. Freud’s infant is a passionhouse of drives whose body is radically eroticized according to zones that initially lean on needs for survival – the oral – and lead on to fantasies associated with control,

intake and expulsion – the anal – and then build upon a kind of auto-eroticism when the child discovers the pleasures associated with parts of its body – the phallic (covering all genitals). The initial objects of the drives that play over and groove their pathways across this curiously composed phantasmatic body (openings, exits and sites of stimulation, including the skin, mucous membranes and specifically sensitive organs) are associated initially with indistinct sources of pleasure that are eventually localized either in the other (object) or in the self (auto-eroticism). Eroticism swings between object/other oriented activity such as wanting the mother’s body, breast, look and touch, and auto-eroticism, finding sufficiency in the baby’s own body. This dialectic of auto- and allo-eroticization is what makes us human and what makes sexuality human: rather than being the residue of our animality, the novelty of human sexuality is this combination that results from the fact of human infants’ prematurity: to survive, the baby must solicit and sustain the attention of an other. Third, Freud revealed that the different social trajectories of human sexuality are created in puberty when social forces differentially impact on the return from latency of infantile sexuality as it becomes adult genital sexuality. Psychoanalysis as articulated by its classical proponents from Freud via Klein to Lacan, irrespective of the gender of analyst, maintains the drama of Oedipalization (locating it at different stages and by different mechanisms) as the ultimate social proscription of what the baby actually wants – that which will satisfy its needs, quieten its demands and be the total object of its desire – offering unconditional love and hence security of survival. Oedipalization is the social law that detaches the baby from its primary love-object: the Mother (a figure that is not necessarily its biological parent, but the fantasized holder of all that the baby needs for survival: milk, love, attention etc.). The incest taboo is not about preventing adults desiring their or other children. It concerns breaking the child’s initial erotic bonding with the parental generation.

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The problem arises in that the process of Oedipalization is, in patriarchal societies, asymmetrical. It is a complex, which means that the problem posed to the child necessitates a sacrifice so overwhelming that the process cannot be remembered; it is repressed, forming the unconscious out of the process that led up to this intolerable set of choices. Whatever the outcome, the child must make a sacrifice in order to survive. Castration is the term Freud used to describe the price societies exact from the child: a yielding or sacrifice of what it wants in return for a position in the cultural system; the Symbolic. For the child who will accept the designation ‘boy-becoming-man’, masculinity, the price involves the mortgaging of immediate pleasure in his tiny organ as a potential link with his major object, his mother, in return for the symbolic privilege which he imagines his father already has – since the father seems already to have a claim on the mother, and be a powerful rival for the boy-child. Rather than be mutilated and depleted (a fantasy generated by the child to explain difference as a result of punishment for transgressing the law of the father that focuses on that which seems to belong to the child – auto-erotically satisfying itself with its own body), the boy-child accepts the repression of his present desires in return for a symbolic substitute later: another woman. For the girl child, the deal seems a whole lot less clear and positive. Realizing that she cannot be like the father (who appears to have what he desires), as her organ seems – and I stress the seeming as this is all happening in unchecked fantasyexplanations of the enigmatic world with which the child is confronted – less equivalent to what she imagines signifies his power to have what he wants, the female child is forced to situate herself negatively in relation to a figure who was once supreme and allpowerful, the Mother, but who is now, by virtue of the power of the Father to deny the child what it wants, namely the Mother (source of all it then needs), reduced to powerlessness. Thus a catastrophic change of status befalls the Mother from all-powerful

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provider of life, the Big Other of the tiny demanding and needy baby, to a diminished term, the object of the Father’s desire, yet without power to resist his prohibition and maintain the infant-Other bond or dyad. As a result of this process, all that is associated with the early years of the infant’s passionate attachment to the maternal figuration of Big Otherness is repressed beyond even the unconscious, to become that which cannot even be imagined, let alone spoken. Woman, in the psychoanalytical formulation, initially rich with life, nurture and all that is good, is drastically eviscerated. For many psychoanalytically influenced thinkers, this amounts almost to a necessary ‘matricide’. Kristeva expresses this as the inevitable abjection of the mother, the maternal body, rich with physicality, milk and contact, so that an idea of the mother, a symbolic figure of love can be internalized by the child’s emerging psyche. Culturally, therefore, the feminine identified with the maternal becomes abject, dramatized in visual culture through the monstrous feminine that so often surfaces in horror movies, the Alien trilogy being perhaps the most exemplary instance (Creed, 1993). Such cultural representations that often associate the feminine-maternal with leaky, viscous, enveloping, even cannibalistic animality mark in culture the ambivalent psychic responses to the infant’s overwhelming dependence on the maternal subject and her body for life and survival. Psychoanalysis teaches us to acknowledge inversion: misogyny inverts the passionate attachment, the envy for maternal omnipotence, the rage at dependence, the anxiety of retribution from the all-encompassing maternal Other. Patriarchal societies do not, therefore, register a normal state of affairs or a natural hierarchy so much as register the psychic defences created to overcome the anxiety of all human infants’ dependency on a maternal-feminine Other in their formative moments. The deficiency – castration anxiety – of the to-become-masculine subject is deflected by projecting on to the all-powerful maternal-feminine the very lack that the boychild feels vis-à-vis its parents. By such inversion the once-all, woman, becomes both

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the castrated, the lacking, and the potential castrator – the repository of all fears of narcissistic depletion or wounding. Projected away from the masculine self, the feminine is entirely inverted to become the signifier of powerlessness, of impotence, of lack. In so far as this psychic structure is installed socially and economically, or vice-versa, the feminine is marked as lack, as other, as object, without agency. Psychoanalytical cultural analysis makes us pay attention to the repetitious performativity of this construction of sexual difference as the attribution of lack to the feminine, the negative term, the confusing object of simultaneous desirability and castrated insufficiency. Applied to cinema, and from there across visual culture, this model of analysis illuminates the repetitious structures of narrative and visual representation that, in this psychic register, recalls the ‘othering’, the negativization and the emptying out of the term feminine that we have tracked across so many forms of analysis. The most famous of all uses of psychoanalysis in cultural analysis remains Laura Mulvey’s inspired study of Western cinema as an apparatus that plays back to its spectators the patriarchal unconscious already installed in each subject (Mulvey, 1975). What arose from her analysis were important questions as much about cultural practice as about cultural theory. How could we refashion the cultural apparatuses, ‘cut to the measure’ of phallocentric desire (anxiety) so as to explore other languages of desire? It is in this context that the work of the so-called French feminists, thus collectively labelled from outside their clearly diverse and even antagonistic positions, can be reviewed. They explored how the ‘feminine’ can be both escaped (as negative Othering) and used as a resource for resistance and transformation (as differential, not-yet-spoken potentiality).

CONCLUSION Feminist cultural theory is a continuing work of analysis which is not confined to thinking

about women. But thinking about woman and women, thinking about images, and metaphors, thinking about systems and social orders, thinking about social collectivities and creative singularities, thinking about power and democracy, takes us to the heart of the humanities. Why has one part of humanity been dehumanized for the sake of the comfort and narcissistic privilege of the One, the Human, the Norm appropriated by Man/Men? What future does Humanity as a whole have if this abuse continues unchallenged? What future does Humanity have according to the various claims of feminists – is genderless equality the same as a post-gendered world of multiple differences and specificities, each experienced and articulated by singular rather than homogenized collective subjects? Does the revolt against patriarchy inevitably lead to a rejection of its prescribed roles of motherhood? What are the forces at work in changing cultures, cultures in transition, revolt, regression, given globalizing capitalism’s seemingly unchecked advances or the shifts in world power relations bringing China and India into new prominence, and perhaps finally allowing Africa to resume its dignity and world place after colonial rape and violation? Since historical change is constant, feminist analysis must be itself changing and adapting. Yet the time of sexual difference, women’s time, patriarchy’s time is deeper and slower. Modernity first seriously broke its rhythm. We are still researching the implications of the first feminist century. In undertaking this project of thinking feminism for the world, rather than merely for some women-selves, we need constantly to mine the rich resources of feminist cultural analysis generated in that historic moment of the late twentieth century. In doing so, we need to dare, like Ettinger (2000), to break the final taboo and imagine that the feminine is not a lacking other, a negative force of pure change, an empty space, but a creative resource for human thought, ethics, politics and aesthetics, which, in being admitted, will massively impact on women-subjects, but as powerfully determine the very future of both humanity and its socio-economic and earth worlds.

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NOTES 1 For instance EWHA Women’s University Press has published a series of eight books on curricula for women’s studies written by feminist scholars researching the situation of Asian women in their own varieties of cultural and political histories in Thailand, Philippines, India, Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan. 2 The English philosopher John Austin identified two modes of language: constative, which states things that are, and performative, which involve or presume an act. I promise, for instance, is different from I eat. Butler, often misunderstood to be talking about performance, role-playing, suggests that we are gendered performatively, that one neither is or becomes a woman or a man, but that through repetitious acts we are engendered. Thus there is no essence or norm against which for instance the homosexual man or woman is seen to be abnormal, for there is no original but only a system of speechacts the effect of which is a complex imprisonment of subjects in the current systems.

REFERENCES Abelove, H., Barale, M.A. and Halperin, D.M. et al. (eds) (1993) The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Barkley Brown, E. (1988) ‘African-American women’s quilting: a framework for conceptualizing and teaching African-American women’s history’, in M.R. Malson et al. (eds), Black Women in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 9–18. ∗ Beechey, V. and J. Donald (eds) (1995) Subjectivity and Social Relations. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Bland, L. (1981) ‘The domain of the sexual: a response’, Screen Education, 39. Butler, J. (2003 [1988]) ‘Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory’, Theatre Journal, 1988, 40: 4. Reprinted in Amelia Jones (ed.), Feminism and Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993) ‘Imitation and gender insubordination’, in Abelove et al., pp. 307–320. Butler, J. (2000) Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press. ∗ Chow, R. (1991) Women and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between East and West. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. ∗ Cowie, E. (1978) ‘Woman as sign’, m/f, 1.

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Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. ∗ Davis, A. (1982) Women, Race and Class. London: Women’s Press. de Beauvoir, S. (1984) The Second Sex, [1949] Tr. H.M. Parshley, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books; and New York: Vintage, 1974. de Lauretis, T. (1984) Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. de Lauretis, T. (1987) Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Delmar, R. (1986) ‘What is feminism?’, in Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (eds), What is Feminism? Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 8–32. Delphy, C. (1981) ‘Pour un matérialisme féministe’, l’Arc, 61, 1975. Tr. in E. Marks and I. de Courtivron, pp. 197–198. ∗ El Sawaadawi, N. (1980) The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World. London: Zed Books. ∗ Ettinger, B. (1993) ‘Matrix and metramorphosis’, Differences, 14(3): 176–208. Ettinger, B. (2000) ’Transgressing with-in-to the feminine’, in Penny Florence and Nicola Foster (eds), Differential Aesthetics. London: Ashgate. Ettinger, B. (2006) ‘Fascinance and the girl to m/Other matrixial difference’, in Griselda Pollock (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Image. Boston and Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 60–94. Felman, S. (1993) What does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Foucault, M. (1978 [1976]) History of Sexuality: Volume I. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Freud, S. (1977 [1905]) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Vol. 7 On Sexuality. Penguin Freud Library. London: Penguin Books. Freud, S. (1991 [1930]) ‘Civilization and its discontents’ Civilization, Society and Religion, Penguin Freud Library Volume 12. London: Penguin Books, pp. 243–340. ∗ Fuss, D. (1989) Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. London: Routledge. Halberstam, J. (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. Haraway, D. (1991a) ‘Gender for a Marxist dictionary’ [1987], Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, pp. 127–148. Haraway, D. (1991b) ‘A Cyborg manifesto: science, technology and socialist feminism in the late twentieth century’, ibid, pp. 149–181.

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Haraway, D. (1991c) ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism …’, ibid, pp. 183–201. hooks, b. (1989) Talking Back: Thinking Feminist Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press. Irigaray, L. (1985 [1977]) ‘Women on the market’, in This Sex Which Is Not One, Tr. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, pp. 170–191. Kristeva, J. (1974) ‘ La Femme n’est jamais ça’ [Woman can never be defined], Tel Quel, autumn, 1974, in Marks and de Courtivron, pp. 137–141. Kristeva, J. (1982) The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. ∗ Kristeva, J. (1986a) ‘The system and the speaking subject’, in Moi, pp. 24–33. ∗ Kristeva, J. (1986b) ‘Women’s time’, in Moi, pp. 187–213. ∗ Kristeva, J. (1986c) ‘A new type of intellectual: the dissident’, in Moi, pp. 292–300. Martin, B. (1988) ‘Feminism, criticism and Foucault’, in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (eds), Feminism and Foucault. Boston: Northeastern University Press, pp. 3–20. Marks, E. and De Courtivron, I. (1981) New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Brighton: Harvester Press. Mitchell, J. (1974) Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Mohanty, C. (2003) Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practising Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press. ∗ Moi, T. (1986) The Kristeva Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema,’ Screen, 16(3): 6–18; reprinted in Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Macmillan (1989), pp. 14–29.

∗ Ogundipe-Leslie, M. (1994) Re-creating Ourselves:

African Women and Critical Transformations. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Readings, B. (1996) The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rich, A. (1980) ‘Toward a woman-centred university’ [1973–1974], in On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978. London: Virago Books. Rich, A. (1993) ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’ in Abelove et al. Riley, D. (1988) Am I that Name? Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Rose, J. (1986) Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso. Rubin, G. (1975) ‘The traffic in women: notes on the “political economy” of sex’, in R. R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 157–210. ∗ Scott, J. (1991) ‘The evidence of experience’, Critical Inquiry, 17: 773–797. Spivak, G. C. (1987) ‘French feminism in an international frame’ [1981], In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, pp. 134–153. Steedman, C. (1986) Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. London: Virago Press. ∗ Trinh, T.M. (1989) Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wood, N. (1985) ‘Foucault on the history of sexuality: an introduction’, in Beechey and Donald, pp. 156–174. Wittig, M. (1993) ‘One is not born a woman’. Le Corps Lesbien [The Lesbian Body] 1975, reprinted in Abelove et al., pp. 103–109.

∗ The list contains some sources not in text but included for added value.

13 Material Culture Daniel Miller

MATERIAL CULTURE STUDIES: HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY The titles, topics and contents of the academic disciplines are generally received as though they were a logical, or at least reasonable, outcome of a division of academic labour into relatively discrete categories. We have literature therefore we have English, we have universal properties of materials therefore we have Physics. We assume there ought to be a discipline that studies language, even though this discipline has changed radically from one that a century ago was concerned largely with the evolution and the dispersal of languages and at another stage was almost entirely concerned with grammar. It seems reasonable that both are called linguistics, not because these approaches had much in common, but because of the object, language, that seems to require academic attention. Yet we do not assume that there must be a discipline concerned with the topic of artefacts – that is, objects created by us – even though one might have imagined that subjects as diverse as architecture and design, archaeology and indeed human geography would require such a discipline to exist.

So the study of material culture can be approached from the perspective of what would have existed if disciplines had been created according to a more reasonable allocation of academic endeavour. This may or may not coincide with the description of the nascent sub-discipline of material culture that currently does exist, mainly under the auspices of anthropology. To move from the merely extant to the contemplation of the counter-factual, to question what might have been, raises some fundamental issues. Can one have theories of material culture in much the same way that one has theories of language or space? How would such a discipline complement others and contribute to their relationships one with another? Putting a counter-factual perspective on this issue also raises a further question. Is it indeed merely fortuitous historical developments that account for the absence of an established discipline of material culture, or might there be some particular reason why this possible discipline became in some way an impossible discipline? I intend to argue the latter: to suggest that it is not just that we don’t have material culture, but that we have taken huge steps to try to ensure that we don’t have

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it, and that the grounds for this lie deep in the fundamental ideologies by which we live and construct our secular and religious cosmologies. Thus, to construct this counterfactual material culture we need first to acknowledge and then to confront the visceral distaste that is elicited by its very existence. This is why, before embarking on a description of material culture, I will first address the issue of materiality itself and the reasons why it has evoked such ambivalence. I will then examine how material culture studies evolved as much through a shifting set of re-alignments with other disciplines, such as anthropology and the emergent cultural studies, as through any established core concern. This then raises the question of whether we could or should look to such a core theory, as for example a theory of objects per se, and if so what such a theory might look like. Following this I will turn to current studies of material culture and try to characterize these through three brief case studies: research on housing, on clothing and on new media. Finally I will fly the kite for one radical implication of taking materiality as central to the study of humanity, which would be the dethronement of social studies and social science.

MATERIALITY1 If one looks at the development of human cosmology, and in particular its most extensive and developed version, world religions, one can discern a consistent theme that sets the fundamental purpose of human existence in opposition to mere materiality. This is perhaps clearest in the religions of South Asia such as Buddhism and Hinduism, but in many ways the nuances of distinctions within the various branches of Christianity, for example, the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism over issues of iconography and transsubstantiation, rest just as assuredly upon variants in this opposition to materiality. Recall in the birth of Protestantism the thousands put to death over arguments about the materiality of the host, or for Islam the impossibility of having images of the prophet.

Mere materialism, when contrasted with spirituality, is generally regarded as a kind of primitive consciousness, an acceptance of the most basic but also the most superficial view of the world. Religious wisdom, by contrast, becomes a search for some form of transcendence. In South Asia, although both in this life, in previous lives and in future lives we return to bodily form, the ideal of enlightenment is to reach a level of transcendence that would finally escape from the entrapments of the material. The essence of humanity is the soul, and the profundity of humanity lies in its ability to grasp the greater reality of higher forms that have never been reduced to mere bodily and material form, that is, spirits, gods, and other deities – although at least in most South Asian religions even these are seen as vulgar compared to the kind of perfect atheism of the most profound religious thought that can transcend any such crude anthropomorphism to conceive of an ultimate essence that lies beyond all forms of materialization and therefore can be apprehended only by the most difficult exercises of achieved wisdom. Today the same antipathy to materiality is evident across a range of ideological and practical forms that continue to define both humanity and its higher (the word is very deliberate) pursuits in direct opposition to the vulgarity of the material. Religions themselves continue to explore the logic of this anti-materiality, as in Engelke’s (2004, 2005) study of the way Apostolic Christians try to avoid even churches and bibles whose material form would reduce the immediacy of their relationship to the divine. More generally, the secular moralities that increasingly command popular allegiance focus on concerns with saving the planet from the rapacious denigration of materialism. These span a spectrum of hundreds of alternative movements, often invoking embodied spirits of the earth such as Gaia. In their wake political and development bodies desperately try to keep up with the complexities of contemporary capitalism, in order to audit the environmental impact of processes from global chains of procurement to the disposal

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of waste. Underlying all of this is a continued critique of mass consumer culture as a loss of humanity under a deluge of materiality. In most religious instances the concern is with the nature of materiality, but more recently this has merged with a concern with the quantitative increase in material objects themselves, and the assumption that an orientation to material objects is necessarily at the expense of a concern with people. Common to both of them is the fear that humanity is increasingly relinquishing its power to the forces of the tangible world. The word materialism changes its meaning depending upon what it is being opposed to. But overall one can discern considerable continuity between the contemporary fear of and opposition to material culture, and their historical and religious equivalents. Whether it be the history of sumptuary laws and the fear of luxury (Berry, 1994; Xenos, 1989) or Horowitz’s careful excavation of the history of anti-materialism in US ideology (1985, 2004), this fear was evident long before the emergence of the current environmentalist critique. It also seeps through into a wide range of contemporary social analysis, where the critique of capitalism shifts from the problem of social inequality or rapacious market systems to a general sense that all the products of capitalism of necessity vulgarize and diminish the humanity that lives by and through them. As Bourdieu pointed out (1979), this can become central to class prejudice where elites distinguish themselves from the vulgarity of working people precisely because of the necessity and materiality of the latter’s consumption (see also Hebdige, 1982). Whether through the contemporary environmental critique, through puritan asceticism, the religions of South Asia, or the formation of class prejudice as taste, there is a consistent insistence that a proper humanity is founded only on the victory of the spiritual over the merely material. Given this strident and consistent ideological fear of material culture, the fact that it does not exist as a fully fledged academic discipline may appear more than simply the

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fortuitous result of the allocation of academic interest in the recognized disciplines. Like the bad fairy at the academic feast it is and will always be regarded with considerable suspicion as an assault on the properties that define our essential humanity. This forms the often unacknowledged background to the tentative attempts to forge some kind of material culture studies. If such studies do exist then it is more because a whole swathe of disciplines have found that in some form or other they could not do without them. Indeed for certain disciplines they seem integral to their very existence. What, after all, are architecture and design if not material culture studies? Most of archaeology consists of reconstructing peoples and society from their material remains. Despite this integrity, a specific acknowledgement of the centrality of materiality has arisen within disciplines only at particular moments and for particular reasons. For example, within the history of anthropology there were times when materiality has been a dominant concern and times where it more or less vanished without trace (Stocking, 1985). At the point of its origin, anthropology mainly consisted of attempts to order and account for the diversity of human societies based on a consideration of objects brought back by missionaries and colonialists. Its first major theories were in effect, diffusionism, speculations based on ordering these objects over space, and evolutionism, illustrated mainly through the development and change in artefacts over time (Steadman, 1979). Nineteenth-century anthropology was in effect largely a branch of material culture studies. By contrast, when during the early twentieth century anthropology turned to ethnography, and an unmediated encounter with the peoples being studied which led to alternative theories such as functionalism, the role of material culture was repudiated and seen as tainted by its association with these earlier, now outmoded theories. As a result in at least what became social anthropology the study of material culture was relegated to the bottom drawer, as the loweststatus reminder of a previous period. For the

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next half-century it was mainly concerned with remnant issues such as the anthropology of art and the study of technology. There is a parallel history in archaeology, the initial reputation of which was partly founded on the way the discovery of stratigraphy seemed to prove early theories of social evolution (Grayson, 1983: pp. 210–213). But in this case it could not repudiate a link to the interpretation of artefacts since this became established following the three-age system as its core methodology and the source of its claims to knowledge about earlier societies (Schnapp, 1993: pp. 93–305). The revitalization of material culture studies occurred for equally fortuitous reasons. The extraordinarily wide influence of Lévi Strauss and his interpretation of Saussure led to a concern with structuralism and semiotics across a wide range of disciplines. This was significant, because it implied that fundamental structures and codes were to be found not only in language but in other media. The order of objects could be seen as a form of communication that reflects the underlying structures of a given society. In his book The Way of the Masks, Lévi Strauss (1982) treated objects as identical to myths, demonstrating how the mask of one tribe could be seen as an inverse transformation of an equivalent mask of the neighbouring tribe. Several of the most influential poststructuralist theorists took these ideas further. Foucault (2001, 2002) became interested in the history of ordering principles as artefacts in themselves in The Order of Things. Barthes (1967, 1973) applied his semiology to systems of objects such as clothing. Baudrillard, in particular, concentrated upon the order of things and the possibilities opened up by applying these ideas to the massive array of objects represented by consumer culture. Increasingly semiotics became associated with the idea that objects in some way or other had become representations of society, social relations or forms of identity. Baudrillard provided a twist to the idea that capitalist objects in general signified people living under capitalism. He argued (1981) that within contemporary capitalism there had

been a switch such that objects were no longer humble signifiers of persons. Rather, as commodities within a political economy geared primarily to the creation of ever more things, people had now become mere mannequins for objects, in effect the signifiers that legitimated the growing diversity of what really counted, which were commodities. The semiotic relationship between people and objects had thereby reversed. Semiotic ideas both of the more traditional and of the poststructuralist variants were applied liberally to areas such as architecture and design, while critical theories of representation were crucial to the origins of modern media studies and cultural studies more generally. One advantage of this approach is that it was not particularly tied to the tangibility of things, being equally appropriate to the study of the fleeting image dissected within media studies as it is to a consideration of monuments and memorials. Nevertheless, there were several quite profound limitations to semiotics as an entry point to material culture studies. One is that an emphasis on representation is almost always couched in hierarchical terms which divide the world on the one hand into that which signifies and on the other into that which is signified. As such the easiest way to assimilate semiotics into social science research was not just to emphasize artefacts as an array of signifiers, but to privilege social relations, for example gender or class, as the privileged signified. The relationship between the two could sometimes become quite static and mechanistic, and lacked the fluidity and sense of process I will argue is found in more dialectical approaches. There was also a tendency in the more structuralist versions towards a reification of structure itself, something found in the two most influential structuralists of the time, Lévi Strauss and Althusser – although it should be acknowledged that, as Keane (2005) has recently argued, there were also variants of semiotic analysis, particularly those associated with the work of Peirce, which do not require such a simplified logical relationship between persons and things, or the reification of structure.

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A more sustained development of material culture studies has emerged from another trajectory which harks back to my earlier discussion of the history of anthropology. Exemplified by the history of material culture studies at my own place of work, the Department of Anthropology at University College London, a quite different story can be excavated (Buchli, 2002). Anthropology at UCL was a centre for such research during times when the expression ‘material culture studies’ was otherwise almost unknown. It was first developed in association with the founding of the department by Daryll Forde. Having come to anthropology from geography, Forde (1934) took a strong functionalist position in his work Habitat, Economy and Society, arguing that the technologies through which societies adapted to their environment are fundamental to the development of their social and ideological orders. This paralleled the rather more influential work in the USA of figures such as Leslie White (1959), which profoundly influenced US archaeology (e.g. Binford, 1962), and also the cultural materialism associated with Marvin Harris (1964). If this philosophy rooted anthropology in the materialism of the 1950s and 1960s, it was the remarkable growth of Marxist approaches to anthropology that gave material culture its meaning during the 1970s and 1980s (e.g. Godelier, 1972). At this point there was also some alignment with the Marxistinflected semiotic studies that were growing within cultural studies in the UK, especially through the Open University (see Bennett et al., 1981; Gurevitch et al., 1978). During this period material culture at University College became associated with the study of long-term social evolution. By combining the findings of archaeology, history and anthropology it could once again work in the interstices of other disciplines in order to examine changes over hundreds, if not thousands of years. This long-term perspective was held to demonstrate other relationships between society, ideology and economy using much more sophisticated theoretical models from Althusserian Marxism than had been evident in the cruder evolutionism and

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functionalism that preceded it (e.g. Friedman and Rowlands, 1977). This also fitted well with the burgeoning of academic interest in topics such as pre-capitalist modes of production (Hindess and Hirst, 1977). While the fashion for such studies has largely departed there is still an acknowledgement that Marx himself provided a legacy in writings about materialism, whether in reference to the dimensions of power within social relations or to the forces of production, which retains considerable potency for the analysis of contemporary material culture (e.g. Rowlands, 2005). This particular patronage of material culture studies under the auspices of anthropology and its associated tradition of ethnography again, perhaps fortuitously, led to a growing impact on the emergent discipline of cultural studies. Although the first tranche of cultural studies that developed under the influence of Stuart Hall in Birmingham took an ethnographic approach and a largely sociological perspective leading to the highly influential early works of Dick Hebdige (1979), Paul Willis (1975) and others, this was not sustained in the long term, and the main movements that developed were much more theoretical in orientation and became associated first with post-structuralism and then with post-modern theory emanating from France. During this period many young scholars, fired up by the development of new terrain such as media studies or the study of popular culture but dissatisfied with the highly theoretical and speculative nature of their studies, turned instead to an approach from material culture that confirmed this emphasis on cultural technologies and cultural forms, but combined them with a classic anthropological approach to ethnography based on at least a year’s participant observation within a given community. Such scholars felt that the ‘trendiness’ of the new topics was probably best ameliorated by the conservatism of this ethnographic research tradition (Miller, 1998). Furthermore material culture studies provided a bridge to cultural studies that seemed relatively free of the tainted legacy of colonialism that

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some associated with the history of social anthropology. Another piece in this jigsaw was cut from a new orientation within material culture studies to the topic of consumption. In part this was also a response to the relative neglect of consumption in favour of relations of production fostered by Marxist theory in the 1970s and 1980s. But it also reflected a more general neglect of the vast topic of contemporary capitalist society as a mass consumer society which had hardly been studied in its own right since the time of Simmel. The sheer increase in commodities and the social concerns that arose from an assumption of a commensurate increase in our dependence on things made this an obvious target for something called material culture studies. As it happened, and in retrospect quite surprisingly, two of the most influential studies which helped launch the modern focus on consumption were written by social scientists trained in anthropology but equally prepared to embrace what had been considered more sociological concerns, that is Mary Douglas (Douglas and Isherwood, 1978) and Pierre Bourdieu (1979): surprising, in that anthropology had tended to be associated with a focus on just about any society that didn’t have mass consumption. Indeed another route into the discussion of both material culture and consumption came through an abiding anthropological concern with exchange and alienation (e.g. Appadurai, 1986; Kopytoff, 1986). In the wake of these developments there have also been considerable changes in the genres of material culture studies that had been retained during those decades when material culture had been disregarded as outdated. These started to undergo their own radical transformations. New configurations between these older and newer concerns, including material culture perspectives on the study of art (Gell, 1998; Myers, 2002; Schneider, 1996; Thomas, 1999) or architecture (e.g. Buchli, 1999), could emerge. For example, the traditional interest in museum studies as bastions of material culture could take a new turn through research on the consumption of the museum display

(e.g. Macdonald, 2002); an approach to consumption could become mirrored in a study of discard (Gregson and Crewe, 2003); an approach to the archaeological landscape could be inflected by Marxism (Bender, 1998) or Phenomenology (Tilley, 1994); an approach to photography could develop that emphasized not its ephemerality but its materiality (e.g. Edwards, 2001; Pinney, 1997; Wright, 2004); or an approach to fetishism that tried to understand rather than merely dismiss the phenomenon (e.g. Apter and Pietz, 1993; Spyer, 1998; Stallybrass and Jones, 2001). There is no scope to cover all the linkages here, but one may finally note the regional basis of these trajectories. Many of the examples given so far have come from Britain, but there are parallel histories elsewhere. The rise of material culture studies in continental Europe has become strongly associated with a discipline that does not exist in the UK, that of European ethnology. After decades of rather static positivism based on the recording of European material culture, European ethnology has also recently been stimulated, in part, by the excitement created around cultural studies. But this is tempered by the desire to retain the huge investment in the recording of material culture over the last several decades. So in areas such as Scandinavia, Germany and France the study of ethnology is increasingly looking to material culture studies in terms of its interdisciplinary potential for re-casting long-term approaches, in this case to the study of European popular culture.

CAN WE HAVE A THEORY OF THINGS? So far material culture has been considered as an almost fortuitous development of academic research which corresponds to a moving set of alliances and foci of interests that has as much to do with what it is not as with what it is. There is, however, an entirely different way of trying to delineate this topic, one that starts from a more fundamental and potentially more stable point of departure. That is the question as to whether one can ever have a distinct theory of things, where

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‘things’ stand for the most evident category of artefacts as both tangible and lasting? My own point of departure when I was appointed to a job defined as material culture in 1981 came from a combination of two theorists (Miller, 2005). I was intrigued by the links between Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1975) and The Sense of Order by the art historian Ernst Gombrich (1979), which was devoted to the frame around art works. Between them, they constituted an argument for what I called ‘the humility of things’ (Miller, 1987: pp. 85–108). This implied that objects are important not at all because they are explicit and visible, but because they act as the frame of interaction and behaviour that we rarely look at directly but which help determine, often unconsciously, our categorization and appraisal of our circumstances. The less we are aware of artefacts the more powerfully they can determine our expectations by setting the scene and ensuring normative behaviour, without being open to challenge. Such a perspective seems properly described as ‘material culture’ since it implies that much of what we are exists not through our consciousness or body, but as an exterior environment that habituates and prompts us. This somewhat unexpected capacity of objects to fade out of focus and remain peripheral to our vision and yet determinant of our behaviour and identity had another important result. It provides another reason why so many academics have looked down upon material culture studies as somehow either trivial or missing the point: the objects had managed to obscure their role and appear inconsequential. The work that most fully follows from these conclusions and that has probably been the single most influential text for anthropological studies of material culture was Outline of a Theory of Practice by Pierre Bourdieu (1977). In this book Bourdieu showed how the ability of objects implicitly to condition human actors becomes the primary means by which people are socialized. Bourdieu turned structuralism into both a more material, and a much more fluid and less deterministic engagement with the world than that which he inherited from

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the work of Lévi-Strauss. We are brought up with the expectations characteristic of our particular social group largely through what we learn in our engagement with the relationships found between everyday things. Bourdieu emphasized the categories, orders and the placements of objects, for example, spatial oppositions in the home, or the relationship between agricultural implements and the seasons. Each order was argued to be homologous with other orders such as gender, or social hierarchy, and thus the less tangible was grounded in the more tangible. These became habitual ways of being in the world and in their underlying order emerged as second nature or habitus. This concept combined Marx’s emphasis on material practice with the phenomenological insights of figures such as Merleau-Ponty (1989) into our fundamental ‘orientation’ to the world. So this was a theory of objects, but not as lame, sole artefacts. Bourdieu concentrated on whole taxonomies of material practices and their relationship to each other, such as agriculture, the order of space, and then in turn kinship or other social orders. The tangibility and the longevity of certain genres of object and their ability to constitute order were evidently highly relevant to their foundational role in socialization. This suggests that it is indeed possible to talk about a theory of material culture. But inasmuch as this directs our attention to artefacts such theories may be condemned as ‘vulgar’ because they adopt a common sense rather than an academic presupposition of what we mean by the word ‘thing’. However, it is probably impossible to delineate any clear boundary between tangible and intangible artefacts when considering, for example, video images, or urban landscapes or a dance. This might suggest that material culture is best understood as a subset of a more general theory of culture of some kind. But the term culture when put into the spotlight may be at least as problematic as the term material culture. Indeed it is probably the single most criticized concept within contemporary anthropology (Kuper, 1999).

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In response to these difficulties there have been various attempts to embrace a larger, more philosophically focused theory of cultural processes in which the critical component has been an attempt to transcend the common-sense dualism of subject and objects, or persons and things. The most recent attempts have been based on the concept of agency, and the potential for incorporating non-human as well as human elements within our conceptualization of agency. I will consider two examples of such a theory and then compare them with my own preference, which is for a dialectical theory of objectification.2 Probably the most influential contemporary theorist of objects as possessing agency has been Latour (1993, 1999). His starting point is that the world consists almost entirely of a hybridity within which it is impossible to disaggregate that which is natural, law-like and unchangeable and that which is human, interpretive and at times capricious.3 Latour claims that we continually refuse to accept this hybridity and instead engage in a constant and somewhat deluded practice of ‘purification’. Science engages in this purification in order to enhance its own status, by a form of selfrepresentation that renders it unequivocally objective and determined. The corollary of this lies in the degree to which the status of our humanity is enhanced by cleansing society of any such deterministic or mechanistic quality. One of his most influential strategies in the war against purification has been to take the concept of agency, once sacralized as the essential and defining property of persons, and apply it to the non-human world, whether this be organisms such as bacteria or putative transport systems for Paris (Latour, 1996). Where material forms have consequences for people that are autonomous of human agency, they may be said to possess the agency that causes these effects. A computer that crashes, preventing a form from being submitted in time, an illness that kills us, a plant that ‘refuses’ to grow the way we meant it to when we planted it, are the agents behind what subsequently happens. In a partial throwback to structuralism, what matters may often

not be the entities themselves, human or otherwise, but rather the network of agents and the relationships between them: ‘the prime mover of an action becomes a new, distributed, and nested set of practices whose sum may be possible to add up but only if we respect the mediating role of all the actants mobilized in the series’ (Latour, 1999: p. 181). As in one of his examples, men do not fly, nor does a B52 bomber fly, but the US airforce does. To make this point Latour needs to be as firm in his critique of ‘social’ anthropology as in his critique of science. His comments on Durkheim are always to the effect that social science privileges society and regards objects largely as projected representations of society, bracketing culture in opposition to nature. The hybridity that social anthropology recognizes as central to pre-modern societies has not been applied as it should have been equally to the analysis of societies such as our own that consider themselves modern, societies which fetishize science, nature and society. He chastises this Durkheimian tradition for missing the profusion of non-humans, and the effects of their agency. By contrast, he emphasizes the agency of this non-human world such as microbes or machines, which cannot be reduced to a mere epiphenomenon of the social. Artefacts are also very much to the fore within the other major contribution in recent years to a theory of object agency, that of Alfred Gell (1998) in his book Art and Agency. Essentially Gell’s book is a refutation of an aesthetic theory of art, which is replaced by a theory of the effects that art has achieved as the distributed agency of some subjects upon other subjects. Central to this is a theory of abduction. This is not a theory of causal inference, but rather a theory of inferred intentionality. Gell argues that we naturally tend to imagine there must have been some kind of social agency whenever we encounter an effect. We seem to have a love of imputing agency to other persons and to things. For example, we happily anthropomorphize objects as agents, such as when we accuse a car of treachery if it breaks

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down when we need it. Webb Keane (1997) has contributed an entire ethnography based on much the same argument. In Keane’s book a cloth does not ‘tear’ merely by accident, someone must have caused this; we need to attribute the agency that is assumed to lie behind the event. So Gell’s is a theory of natural anthropomorphism, where our primary reference point is to people and their intentionality behind the world of artefacts. In his final chapter he argues that this provides a theory of the work of art. In effect the creative products of a person or people become their ‘distributed mind’ which turns their agency into their effects, as influences upon the minds of others. Gell (1998: pp. 20–21) and Latour (1999: pp. 176–180) have similar discussions of the agency of guns and landmines as against those who fire or plant them, in order to make their points about the centrality of agency. But while Latour is looking for non-humans below the level of human agency, Gell is looking through objects to the embedded human agency we infer that they contain. In this sense Gell is closer to the core of recent British social anthropology, which seems to have gravitated around an axis that leads from Durkheim to Mauss. For Strathern (1988) the form of objectification that dominates in Melanesia is that of personification, where it is a person who becomes the object through which people read the prior agency that created them. In this social anthropological version of agency it is entirely possible to extend the idea of agency while retaining a privileged foundation in social relations. In contrast, another tradition focuses upon the artefactual world because it starts from the way human beings externalize themselves in the act of creation, which then turns out to be an act of self-creation. This is the dialectical tradition, which also underlines the contribution of Bourdieu discussed above. The source of this alternative tradition is the writings of Hegel. In his Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel (1977) suggests that there can be no fundamental separation between humanity and materiality. Everything that we are and do arises out of the reflection upon

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ourselves given by the mirror image of the process by which we create form and are in turn created. To take Bourdieu’s (1970) best-known example, the Kabyle house is not a natural emanation but is created by artisans of greater or lesser skill to become the cultural object within which these artisans see their own identity as Kabyle reflected and understood. We cannot comprehend anything, including ourselves, except as a form, a body, a category, even a dream. As such forms develop in sophistication we are able to see more complex possibilities for ourselves in them. As we create law, we understand ourselves as people with rights and limitations. As we create art we may see ourselves as a genius, or as unsophisticated. We cannot know who we are, or become what we are, except by looking in a material mirror, which is the historical world created by those who lived before us that confronts us as material culture, and that continues to evolve through us. For Hegel this circular process had a particular sequential form, the fundamental process of objectification (Miller, 1987: pp. 19–33). Everything that we create has, by virtue of that act, the potential both to appear, and to become, alien to us. We may not recognize it as the creation of history or ourselves. It may take on its own interest and trajectory. A social order, such as a hierarchy, may come to us as something immutable that situates us as oppressed. It does not appear to have been created by people, it is experienced as sui generis. Even a dream may be attributed to some other agency and literally ‘haunt’ us. But once we appreciate that these things are created in history or in our imaginations we can start to understand the process which accounts for our own specificity, and this understanding changes us into a new kind of person who can potentially act upon that understanding. A society may gradually develop a system of education. By going to school a member of that society gains the ability to reproduce accumulated understandings from the generations. As such, education may correspond to an element of our ‘reason’,

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and in The Philosophy of Right Hegel (1967) argues that such an educational system corresponds to what may be called ‘real’ education, i.e. one that fulfils the reason behind the idea of education, which is to enhance the capacities of those who are educated. A person is created through such a process. It is not that education happened to them. We can’t separate out the bit of them that is constituted as educated from some other bit that is not (Miller, 2001: pp. 176–183). But every form we produce will tend to its own self-aggrandizement and interests. Education may become institutionalized as a system increasingly geared to its own interests. It may become an oppressive single-sex boarding school whose sadistic staff cripple rather than build the capacity of its pupils. As such it detracts from, rather than expands, who we may be. For Hegel this would no longer be ‘real’ education, it would be a form of alienation. So our humanity is not prior to what it creates. What is prior is the process of objectification that gives form and that produces in its wake what appear to us as both autonomous subjects and autonomous objects, which leads us to think in terms of a person using an object or an institution. What is true for institutions is also the case for tangible objects, whether monuments or cosmetics, whether individually or in some larger fetishism of the commodity. We may creatively extend our public persona through our shoes, or we may become enslaved to the pursuit of our shoe collection. In the first instance, since we may equally well be considering shoes or systems of education, what emerges from this Hegelian tradition is not specifically a theory of material culture but a theory of culture – something that is more evident in later writers influenced by Hegel such as Simmel, who specifically made this claim (1968, 1978), or Sartre (1976) or, more recently, Harvey (1996). But this is consistent with what has been said above about material culture studies. There is little to be gained by trying to construct a definition of either material culture or materiality, both of which change their meaning according to context. Most

commonly what they are defined against is such things as spirituality or the virtual. While we can discuss the possibility of a theory of objects, it is impossible to define the boundaries between objects and whatever is not an object. Particular attributes that may define certain genres of object, such as tangibility, or longevity, or repetition, may be relevant to certain cultural uses and perceptions. As such it is better to work downwards from dialectical theory in general to the kinds of cultural theory that can be derived from dialectical traditions and in turn to the specific genres of material culture that exemplify certain elements of those cultural theories, with due regard to the contingencies of their historical context. The best criterion for delineating material culture is one of efficacy rather than definition; and this leads on to the next section, which is concerned not with what material culture might be, but rather with what it does.

CONTEMPORARY MATERIAL CULTURE STUDIES So far I have considered the scope of material culture studies from two perspectives: the history of the disciplines, and the question of whether it is possible to have a theory of material culture per se. There is, however, a third means of delineating the topic of material culture studies which seems apt given the emphasis upon a theory of practice, and that is to ask what scholars working in the field of material culture have actually achieved. In relevant journals such as the Journal of Material Culture or the current lists of publishers such as Berg that focus upon material culture, one finds a strong inter-disciplinary tradition. These publications suggest that several disciplines, such as architecture, or food studies, see material culture as having the potential to rescue them from their own parochialism; they look to the wider significance of their results for other disciplines rather than simply becoming an artefact of their own particular methodology.

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An example is archaeology, which has to acknowledge its dependence upon the artefactual world as the source of its evidence, but is attracted to approaches that transcend any simple assumption of representation between artefacts and social relations (e.g. Hodder, 1999; Meskell, 2004; Thomas, 1998). Similarly in the study of design, Attfield (2000) argues in her textbook Wild Things for just such a potential within material culture to return design to the social sciences and humanities rather than remain merely the ugly stepsister to fine arts (for a case study see Clarke, 1999, on Tupperware). A final example has been the rise of a more selfconscious and self-critical museum studies, where once again the necessity of material culture now seems blindingly obvious and yet for many decades was neglected. As with design this self-consciousness about the wider possibilities of material culture does not detract from the relationship of its artefactual base to humanity; quite the contrary, it forms part of a rise in concern for the social context and consequence, in this case of collections and their display (e.g. Hecht, 2001; Macdonald, 2002). So material culture has become an interdisciplinary meeting point between academics who often seem to feel that this perspective is marginalized in their home discipline but that it can be discussed within such an undisciplined environment. There is a vast range of current research that could be incorporated in such a survey – many of these genres such as cultural heritage, landscape and photography are summarized in the recent collection by Buchli (2002). Indeed there are whole disciplines such as cultural geography whose engagement with material culture would warrant extensive discussion in its own right (e.g. Cook and Crang, 1996; Gregson and Crewe, 2003; Thrift, 2005). The field is far too large to be encompassed in any one paper, so I have limited myself to three examples: housing, clothing and new media. One of the most important consequences of material culture studies has been its ability to apply some resolution to genres of study which seem to define themselves according to

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a peculiar polarity. Architecture, for example, constantly looks upwards towards art and aesthetics, and on the other hand its applied nature forces it to look downwards to technical and functional issues. To combat this dualism, material culture studies seems to offer a perspective whose status derives neither from aesthetic functionalism as in modernism, nor from practical functionalism as in ergonomics, but rather from its concern with the consequences of architecture for populations, based on its dialectical balance between observations of how objects make people and how people make objects. Buildings cannot be regarded as pristine forms unsullied by their inhabitants. Material culture perspectives developed largely from a tradition of studying vernacular housing that was not designed by architects. It used methods derived from structuralism (see Glassie, 1975), and was linked to new research in archaeology (Hodder, 1982). The emphasis followed the structuralist concern at that time with architecture as the material embodiment of mental structures. It proceeded through the influence of Bourdieu, who first demonstrated in considerable detail how for the Kabyle house material structures seemed not just embodiments of intellectual order, but (as practical taxonomies) also the basis of socialization that created the specificity of populations (see vom Bruck, 1997). This adds both an ethnographic methodology and a concern for the dialectics of embodiment. In addition recent work has torn up the conventional division between architecture as structure and interior forms as possessions, making the study of housing a combined analysis of exterior and interior, of that which was designed and that which was subsequently purchased or transformed, with an emphasis upon the forces that allowed for or inhibited the appropriation of space. As a result Daniels (2001) is able to show that actual Japanese houses may bear little similarity to the stereotypical image of tidy minimalism; ordinary Japanese homes and their interiors are often just as messy and contradictory as homes elsewhere. In turn this parallels the representation of Japanese

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family life, which had also been reduced in its representation in the West to stereotypes of gender and other relations: ethnographic analysis reveals family relations in Japan to be just as messy as the households they live in (compare Steedman, 1992). Similarly, more historical work on architecture, such as that done by Buchli (1999), shows how the same architectural form, an apartment block in Moscow, took on different meanings as successive inhabitants brought to bear not only different ideologies but also different practices of use. These dovetail with studies of houses in relation to households within social anthropological studies on the one hand (e.g. Wilk, 1984, 1989), and studies in geography and sociology looking at the social context for changes in usage on the other (e.g. Zukin, 1982). A series of recent collections of essays have shown how a combination of historical studies, ethnographic studies, design studies and studies of what might be called living history combine to create a perspective that complements architectural and housing studies by focusing on the balance between the forces that create housing and their consequences over the long term for those who dwell in them. Different collections have focused on the development of domesticity (various contributions within Cieraad, 1999), or examined the house as instrumental in the localization and appropriation of global forms (contributions within Birdwell-Pheasant and Lawrence-Zúñiga, 1999), or considered the relationship to the state and private institutions (Chapman and Hockey, 1999). In one of these recent collections (Miller, 2001) several contributions focus upon the dynamics of this relationship at several levels. Starting with the ethnography of people moving house, Marcoux (2001) challenges the popular conception of this act as simply a form of rupture. He shows how people use moving house as a way of bringing up to date the materialized narrative of their own history. A less dramatic change comes in doing up rooms and transforming home interiors. Clarke (2001) uses this activity to examine the way social aspirations are

objectified through practice to become again a form by which people re-configure their relationship to who they might be. At a still slighter level Garvey (2001) shows that even moving furniture around within a room from time to time becomes essential to Norwegian housewives’sense of themselves as not simply stuck in a rut or in timeless repetition. Material culture refuses to regard either the house or its inhabitants as given, but concentrates instead on the dialectic of mutual transformation. The study of clothing has its own problematic research biases analogous to those present in the study of architecture and housing. The equivalent pole to that of aesthetics and modernism is the vast amount of writing devoted to fashion in the sense of haute couture and the products of leading designers. Alternative theories are present but rarely attempt to ground fashion to the degree epitomized by Simmel’s (1957) 1904 analysis of fashion as the tension between individualism and conformity; this is why Simmel remains a key citation today. There are thus several openings for an original contribution by material culture studies, both in reconciling social and material aspects of clothing and, because of its ethnographic foundation, in returning such studies to ordinary social experience. Ethnographically-based research means that perhaps for the first time everyday high-street clothing can be considered in terms of the everyday experience of simply getting dressed and managing one’s own appearance during the course of the day. This perspective acknowledges the degree to which, notwithstanding the vast arena of choice and difference that seems to be available to the affluent populations of many regions of the world today, the choice of clothes can become a cause of considerable anxiety and a sense of failure that can impinge on people’s lives, not just as some minor aspect of style, but as a major part of the contradictions of the self (Clarke and Miller, 2002). Women in particular seem to feel that getting dressed exposes them to considerable stress and anxiety that make explicit deep and powerful issues about identity and

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public exposure. Despite considerable care, expense and attention to their appearance they can still find themselves regarded, or regard themselves, as complete failures in the management of the self (e.g. Woodward, 2005). This typical bridging role accomplished by material culture studies is evident in the two trajectories that influence students coming to such research. Students with a background in specialist institutions such as textile conservation, design or museum collections often come with considerable expertise in the analysis of cloth and textiles. By contrast, students whose background lies more in cultural studies, sociology or social anthropology may have training in semiotic and symbolic analysis and an interest in the ‘social life’ of clothing. When they meet, specialists in textiles may have very little respect for those they lump together as ‘cultural studies’. They see this social analysis as merely mapping differences in clothing and fashion onto social categories such as class, ethnicity and gender. Such mapping removes any specificity from clothing studies since much the same mapping can be achieved with, for example, food or housing. In turn, social scientists may denigrate scholars of textile pattern, form and technology as ‘positivists’ who study such things merely because they have collections. They see such attention to detail as emulating the assumptions of objectivity in the natural sciences and thus a kind of ‘right wing’ failure to appreciate properly the politicized nature of all such research, which they have been trained to elicit from the material as what really ‘matters’. Material culture studies has become a point at which the insufficiencies of both trajectories are revealed. The dissection of clothing’s materiality, here in the vulgar sense of pattern, fibre, fabric, form and production, is not opposed to, but is part of its consideration as an aspect of human and cosmological engagement. The sensual and aesthetic – what cloth feels and looks like – is the source of its capacity to objectify myth, cosmology, morality, power and values (e.g. Henare,

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2005; Küchler, 2005a). Clothing studies remain concerned with what might have been termed the political, or the study of gender, but view these as diminished by being abstracted as separate academic ‘debates’. For example, a consideration of the contemporary political economy of clothing that re-distributes used clothes down the same global chains that start with the supply of raw materials such as cotton, and links the affluent fashionbased cycles of London and New York with the impoverished populations of Zambia or India, has to be understood in part through appreciating the technologies of shredding, fibre and form (Hansen, 2000; Norris, 2005). Equally, however, material culture studies tries to avoid a reduction to the kinds of technological determinism that may derive from such close attention to the materiality of clothing that it becomes de-contextualized from social studies and the effects of cultural relativism. For example, Banerjee and Miller (2003) in their analysis of the contemporary sari in India argue that its specific form as unsewn cloth is an essential component in accounting for the remarkable degree of difference in the experience of wearing the sari as against wearing the sewn garments of European traditions. The sari is constantly transformed during the day to reflect changes in the particular relationship to different people being encountered and changes also in emotion being expressed and in contexts of appropriate behaviours, including modesty and deportment. A woman can shift her clothing around a hundred times a day in response to changes in her environment in a way that is not possible with tailored clothing. They argue that this leads to a very different experience of being a woman. Even within South Asia this distinction can be exploited, as is evident in the current distinction between the sari and its main local competition the ‘pyjama’style shalwar kamiz. Indeed, they argue that this competition has become a battleground for competing concepts of rationality and modernity in contemporary South Asia. But they do not argue that any of these things are an intrinsic condition of wearing unsewn

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as against sewn cloth. The shalwar kamiz includes a long scarf-like element called a dupatta that could have been used in the same shifting of appearance and in the same production of ambiguity as is found in the sari, but this is not generally the case. So the object of study – the sari-wearing woman – is not separable into elements that express the agency of the object and other elements that express the agency of the person. Here the theoretical language of dialectics that dissolves the separation of person and object becomes equally an outcome of the ethnographic sensibility to the impossibility of such a dualistic perspective. In this sense, a material culture perspective contains its own bridges between substantive research and theory. The same observations may be used to contribute to basic issues as to the nature of humanity and the wider ambitions of both anthropology and social science more generally. For example, Keane (2005) argues against the idea that clothes are signs or representations of social relations. The problem with such studies is precisely that clothing becomes reduced to its ability to signify something that seems more real – society or social relations – as though these things exist above or prior to their own materiality. In effect, Keane is saying not just that the emperor has no clothes, but that the clothes should no longer have an emperor: that the study of clothing as material culture is not merely the handmaiden to the study of society or culture or identity. Rather, we are prepared now to see clothes themselves not just as having agency but as part of what constitutes and forms lives, cosmologies, reasons, causes and effects. Küchler (2005b) takes this still further through a critique of our privileging of humanity as homo sapiens, those who are distinguished through their possession of intelligence. By focusing upon new forms of textile that include elements that can respond to and anticipate their environment, what is becoming known as i-wear, she shows how intelligence can also be considered an aspect of materiality, and that it is not just the social but also the intellectual characterization of humanity

that needs to be re-introduced to its own materiality in order to transcend a false dualism that impedes rather than facilitates our understanding. The third example of a genre of material culture studies – the study of new media – also contrasts with clothing studies, since the issue of materiality, in the sense of the tangible, is rather more evidently problematic, as communication is even in colloquial terms less evidently a ‘thing’. Indeed this abstract nature of communication, and the relationship of that abstraction to the constitution of the personhood of the user, has been pivotal to its theorizing, as evident in extensive discussion of the term ‘virtual’. Given the sophistication of media theory, the crudity of technological determinism that followed the development of the Internet was in retrospect quite disturbing. For several years there was hardly a voice raised against the assumption that the invention of the Internet would of necessity lead to the rise of a new and virtual world that was going to change our understanding of ourselves, our relationships and our humanity more generally. Indeed to a degree it may have been the sophistication of the theory that was the problem. The Internet came into being following around a decade of writing under the auspices of the term ‘post-modern’ that became a leitmotif of both academic and non-academic writing about the contemporary world. It presupposed a kind of virtual abstraction from older forms of grounded humanity as well as developing a strong sense of the constitutive contribution of the performative (e.g. Butler, 1990). It may well be that the Internet was initially viewed as the saviour of this literature, since it seemed that finally by going on-line we could view this new fragmented multiple performative self that was supposed to have arisen in late capitalism but was not terribly evident to more substantive research in offline worlds. Turkle (1995), who was one of the first to research and consider the potential of the Internet for such playing around with virtual roles (avatars), saw it as nothing particularly different from the kind of understanding of role and frame

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that was already familiar from sociological work such as that of Goffman. Nevertheless influential theorists such as Castells (1996, 1997, 1998) claimed to have discovered just such a transformation in aggregate as well as personal terms in the very nature of the self as at least in part a product of new media and their associated networks. If anything, this new superficiality that was claimed by theories of the post-modern was a description of the theorists rather than the theorized. It was the discourses about new media that were no longer grounded. Rather they became entranced for a few years by the ideal of the virtual, which was then largely abandoned as they became equally entranced by the inevitable march of e-commerce, which made completely different but equally insistent claims as to the world-transforming imminence of the Internet. It is hard, even a few years on, to acknowledge the sheer level of hype, expectation, but above all, certainty, that led this so called hard-headed commercial arena to waste unimaginable sums upon capitalizing speculative projects that ended in a fiasco more reminiscent of the South Sea bubble or the Dutch tulip fiasco of the seventeenth century (e.g. Cassidy, 2002). To put this in modern parlance, the discourse of the Internet was leveraged essentially on the predication of technological determinism. Once again a material culture approach has attempted to steer a course that tries for a balanced path, avoiding such technological determinism on the one hand, but on the other hand rejecting the kind of cultural relativism, or indeed postmodern critical discourse, that is aghast at any form of functionalism or direct acknowledgement of the causative potential of the specific materiality of persons and objects. Technology has effects, but these effects are contingent and depend upon various processes of appropriation. For example, rather than seeing media forms as virtual, Tacchi (1998) approached a more conventional old medium, radio, and considered the specific materiality of sound as a presence as opposed to silence (see also Bull, 2001; Bull and Back, 2004). By viewing radio sound as a

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form of materiality it became much easier to examine the social consequences of radio. Likewise in Miller and Slater (2000) an ethnographic approach to the Internet was used to refute the assumption that there was anything intrinsically virtual or indeed postmodern to the use of the Internet. It followed upon a previous study by Slater (1998), which was one of the first to establish that the Internet was not being used to create a new type of self, nor a new virtual community, but, more on a par with the telephone, was rather an extension by way of a new form of communication of several given modes of sociality. In turning to the Trinidadian evidence the advantages of a dialectical perspective became clear as a way of repudiating any simple theorizing of media appropriation. One could not simply study the appropriation by a people – the inhabitants of Trinidad – of a technology (the Internet), because the Internet does not exist as a given thing. It is a potential configuration of practices such as chat, web-surfing and email that takes its form in a given cultural usage. But equally there is no such static identity as ‘Trinidadian’, and a person from Trinidad who uses the Internet is a different person from one who doesn’t, so that what is being studied is the dialectical process that emerges in the dynamics of a new entity – the Internet-using Trinidadian (analogous to the sari-wearing South Asian) who is not reducible to these as component parts. A changing Trinidad now saw itself partly through the lens of its use of the Internet. As a result it was possible to acknowledge effects that were quite unexpected. For example, the ethnographic evidence suggested that the Internet, far from breaking down territorial boundaries, could become a means for fostering an intense nationalism. This aspect of material culture studies becomes an important riposte to those who want cultural studies to contribute to what are seen as ‘debates’ on, for example, gender, class or ethnicity. In contemporary material culture studies many researchers tend to repudiate such social categorization in favour of what might be termed (not too seriously) a radical empiricism. A given

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material genre, be it housing, clothing or new media, may turn out to exhibit distinctions in which a social dualism is salient that corresponds to something like gender, though that social parameter is in turn changed by this association. But it is equally possible that the study of, for example, mobile phones has almost no bearing on given social parameters such as gender, and that to reduce such studies to ‘gender studies’ is an unwarranted imposition. Rather it may be that the social division that might separate, for example, texting from voice, reveals a previously littleunderstood or appreciated social distinction which emerges as a result of this privileging of a material genre in the first instance rather than any social parameter of difference. Taking these three case studies it is probably neither possible nor desirable to try to create a definition of the study of contemporary material culture as an academic practice. Rather, it is a perspective with certain tendencies that continue to develop in order to exploit topics, issues and even methodologies that seem to fall between more established disciplines including recently established disciplines. Clearly there is a fairly crude delineation of genres of objects, even though in each case this leads fairly quickly to the problematization of the concept of the object itself. Indeed one consistent theme has been that the critique represented by material culture studies is directed as much to the de-materialized concept of personhood and humanity as against a technological or material determinism inherent in tangible things. Material culture studies, at least, when practised under the auspices of anthropology, has also tended to adopt a more ethnographic, or ethnographically oriented, approach to situating material genres. This in turn has led to an adoption of theoretical perspectives, whether these arise from phenomenology, dialectical reasoning or science studies, that problematize colloquial distinctions of persons and things. In the conclusion, I want to consider how these developments might have a long-term radical effect on the understanding and constitution of social studies more generally.

CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE The initial argument of this chapter concerned the arbitrary nature of our current disciplines and the subject areas they are supposed to pertain to. Hopefully this was borne out by what followed, because in certain respects the discussion of theory followed by practice has allowed us to throw all these disciplinary niches up in the air and consider whether there is some different configuration in which they might be allowed to re-settle on the academic landscape. The premise was that material culture is not searching for some protected niche within the domains of other disciplines but rather starts from its fundamental nature as in some ways logically prior to many of those disciplines. A hint of this change in direction comes also with the rise of cultural studies. As one would expect, the establishment of a new discipline leads to issues of territory and domain in relation to previously established disciplines. One response to a discipline termed cultural studies in Britain has been a defensive response within British social anthropology, resting in some measure on a reaffirmation of the term society and indeed social relations now opposed to the very concept of culture. But while any and every term will have its limitations and be abused, there are strong grounds for seeing the term social as particularly suspect. This is because it seems to have been used to support the wider and unacknowledged ideology of antimaterialism that fostered a sense of the person constituted by the relationship to other people, as opposed to their wider material environment. But today preserving the place of terms such as society or social relations on the pedestal once inhabited by the ideal of divinity looks a great deal more fragile. In retrospect it may well be that Durkheim, who, if credit can be given to any one individual, may be the founding figure of this tradition of social science, quite consciously sought to raise society up to the level of a transcendent subject of study: this in acknowledgement that society itself could have a role in substituting for the divine as our subject of devotion,

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within what was otherwise an increasing secular world. French theory has constantly worried away at the foundations of this edifice. In different ways Foucault and Bourdieu landed blows. Bourdieu showed how practice and material taxonomies in some ways have to be understood to be just as important as social relations per se in the process of socialization. Foucault also saw larger forms of power and discourse as again transcendent forms of order rather than either reflections of or moulds for the production of something called society. More recently there is the writing of Latour, who constantly rails against the legacy of Durkheim as fostering this elevation of society and the social context in duality with science defined precisely by its purification from society (see also Strathern, 1988, 1990). Perhaps then there is a growing sense that a humanity that exhibited a more fragile secularism at the time of Durkheim required the social as a kind of crutch of transcendent identification. But that same humanity has now reached a kind of collective selfconfidence that can cope not only with the loss of the divine but also its substituted representation in the image of society. In short, for Durkheim society was as much created in the image of religion as the other way around. At a kind of seismic level, then, we may be ready again to move the foundations. Giving disciplines titles such as sociology, social anthropology and social sciences reflects the Durkheimian vision of a secular humanism predicated in moral, academic and conceptual terms as primordially social. That time has passed. In the twenty-first century, where most of academe stands on resolutely secular grounds, and where science occupies if anything the dominant position, it seems that the basic materiality of humanity has become much more acceptable as the premise of academic endeavour. We no longer need to protect concepts such as society (except perhaps against a certain political liberalism that would replace it with the individual). Instead we can focus on the wider cultural landscape within which individuals, social structures and institutions operate.

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We can recognize that the emphasis needs to be, as it was with Bourdieu, more on how in the creation of things we also create people as social beings, rather than simply concentrating on what people, as pre-given entities, do with things. Indeed one crude definition of material culture might have been that it represents a concern as much with how things made people as with how people made things. Today this seems to have been transcended by a larger concern to dissolve, at least at a theoretical level, the basic distinction between objects and persons (Miller, 2005). If such trends towards an acknowledgement of our fundamental materiality continue, we may look forward to the day when subjects such as social anthropology and sociology have to regard themselves as subsections of material culture, rather than the other way around.

NOTES 1 I would acknowledge that this section and several later sections contain some repetition from my introduction to Miller, 2005. 2 There is no pretence to a comprehensive survey of possible theories of the object here; for example, there are several versions of phenomenological theory including the abiding influence of Heidegger that would make similar claims, but are not being discussed in this paper, even though I would certainly acknowledge they have had a major influence on material culture studies, for example Ingold, 2000, Tilley, 1994 and others.

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Bennett, T., Martin, G. and Woolacott, J. (ed.) (1981) Culture, Ideology and Social Progress: A Reader. London: Batsford Academic and Educational Ltd. Berry, C. (1994) The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Binford, L. (1962) ‘Archaeology as anthropology’, American Antiquity, 28: 217–225. Birdwell-Pheasant, D. and Lawrence-Zúñiga, D. (eds) (1999) House Life. Oxford: Berg. Bourdieu, P. (1970) ‘The Berber House, or the world reversed’, Social Science Information, 9: 151–170. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1979) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Buchli, V. (1999) An Archaeology of Socialism. Oxford: Berg. Buchli, V. (ed.) (2002) The Material Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. Bull, M. (2001) ‘Soundscapes of the car: a critical ethnography of automobile habitation’, in D. Miller (ed.), Car Cultures. Oxford: Berg, pp. 185–202. Bull, M. and Back, L. (eds) (2004) The Auditory Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London, Routledge. Cassidy, J. (2002) Dot.con. London: Allen Lane, Penguin. Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Castells, M. (1997) The Power of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell. Castells, M. (1998) End of Millennium. Oxford: Blackwell. Chapman, T. and Hockey, J. (eds) (1999) Ideal Homes? London: Routledge. Cieraad, I. (ed.) (1999) At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, Clarke, A. (1999) Tupperware; the Promise of Plastic in 1950s America. Washington: Smithsonian. Clarke, A. (2001) ‘The aesthetics of social aspiration’, in D. Miller (ed.), Home Possessions. Oxford: Berg, pp. 23–45. Clarke, A. and Miller, D. (2002) ‘Fashion and anxiety’, Fashion Theory, 6: 1–24. Cook, I. and Crang, P. (1996) ‘The world on a plate’, Journal of Material Culture, 1: 131–154. Daniels, I. (2001) ‘The “untidy” house in Japan’, in D. Miller (ed.), Home Possessions. Oxford: Berg, pp. 201–229. Douglas, M. and Isherwood, B. (1978) The World of Goods. London: Allen Lane. Edwards, E. (2001) Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums. Oxford: Berg.

Engelke, M. (2004) ‘Text and performance in an African Church: the book, “Live and Direct”’, American Ethnologist, 31(1). Engelke, M. (2005) ‘Sticky subjects and sticky objects’, in D. Miller (ed.), Materiality. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, pp. 118–139. Forde, D. (1934) Habitat, Economy and Society. London: Methuen. Foucault, M. (2001) The Order of Things. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (2002) Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Friedman, J. and Rowlands, M. (eds) (1977) The Evolution of Social Systems. London: Duckworth. Garvey, P. (2001) ‘Organised disorder: moving furniture in Norwegian homes’, in D. Miller (ed.), Home Possessions. Oxford: Berg, pp. 47–68. Gell, A. (1998) Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glassie, H. (1975) Folk Housing in Middle Virginia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Godelier, M. (1972) Rationality and Irrationality in Economics. London: New Left Books. Goffman, E. (1975) Frame Analysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gombrich, E. (1979) The Sense of Order. London: Phaidon Press. Grayson, D. (1983) The Establishment of Human Antiquity. New York: Academic Press. Gregson, N. and Crewe, L. (2003) Second-hand Worlds. Oxford: Berg. Gurevitch, M. et al. (1978) Mass Communication and Society (Course DE353). Open University Press. Henare, A. (2005) ‘Nga Aho Tipuna (Ancestral threads): Maori cloaks from New Zealand’, in S. Küchler and D. Miller (eds), Clothing as Material Culture. Oxford: Berg, pp. 121–138. Hansen, K. (2000) Salaula: the World of Second Hand Clothing and Zambia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harris, M. (1964) The Nature of Cultural Things. New York: Random House. Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell. Hebdige, D. (1979) Subculture: the Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Hebdige, D. (1982) ‘Towards a cartography of taste 1935–1962’, in B. Waites, T. Bennett and G. Martin (eds), Popular Culture: Past and Present. London: Croom Helm, pp. 194–218. Hecht, A. (2001) ‘Home sweet home: tangible memories of an uprooted childhood’, in D. Miller (ed.), Home Possessions. Oxford: Berg, pp. 123–145.

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Hegel, G. (1967) The Philosophy of Right. Tr. T Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hindess, B. and Hirst, P. (1977) Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production. London: Routledge. Hodder, I. (ed.) (1982) Symbolic and Structural Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodder, I. (1991) Reading the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodder, I. (1999) The Archaeological Process: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Horowitz, D. (1985) The Morality of Spending; Attitudes Towards the Consumer Society in America 1875–1940. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Horowitz, D. (2004) The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment. London: Routledge. Keane, W. (1997) Signs of Recognition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Keane, W. (2005) ‘Signs are not the garb of meaning: on the social analysis of material things’, in D. Miller (ed.), Materiality. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, pp. 182–205. Kopytoff, I. (1986) ‘The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Küchler, S. (2005a) ‘Why are there quilts in Polynesia‘, in S. Küchler and D. Miller (eds), Clothing as Material Culture. Oxford: Berg, pp. 175–192. Küchler, S. (2005b) ‘Materiality and cognition: the changing face of things’, in D. Miller (ed.), Materiality. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, pp. 206–230. Kuper, A. (1999) Culture: the Anthropologists’ Account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Latour, B. (1996) Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1999) Pandora’s Hope, An Essay on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1982) The Way of the Masks. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Macdonald, S. (2002) Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum. Oxford: Berg. Marcoux, J.-S. (2001) ‘The refurbishment of memory’, in D. Miller (ed.), Home Possessions. Oxford: Berg, pp. 69–86. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1989) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.

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Meskell, L. (2004) Object Worlds in Ancient Eygpt. Oxford: Berg. Miller, D. (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell. Miller, D. (ed.) (1998) Material Cultures. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Miller, D. (2001) The Dialectics of Shopping. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Miller, D. (ed.) (2001) Home Possessions. Oxford: Berg. Miller, D. (2005) ‘Materiality: an introduction’, in D. Miller (ed.), Materiality. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, pp. 1–50. Miller, D. and Slater, D. (2000) The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg. Myers, F. (2002) Painting Culture: the Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham: Duke University Press. Norris, L. (2005) ‘Cloth that lies: the secrets of recycling in India’, in S. Küchler and D. Miller (eds), Clothing as Material Culture. Oxford: Berg, pp. 83–106. Pinney, C. (1997) Camera Indica. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rowlands, M.A. (2005) ‘Materialist approach to materiality’, in D. Miller (ed.), Materiality. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press. Sartre, J.-P. (1976) Critique of Dialectical Reason. London: New Left Books. Schnapp, A. (1993) The Discovery of the Past. London: British Museum Press. Schneider, A. (1996) ‘Uneasy relationships: contemporary artists and anthropology’, Journal of Material Culture Studies, 1: 182–210. Simmel, G. (1957) ‘Fashion’, American Journal of Sociology, 62: 541–558. Simmel, G. (1968) The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays. New York: New York Teachers College Press. Simmel, G. (1978) The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge. Slater, D. (1998) ‘Trading sexpics on IRC: embodiment and authenticity on the internet’, Body and Society, 4. Spyer, P. (ed.) (1998) Border Fetishisms. London: Routledge. Stallybrass, P. and Jones R. (2001) ‘Fetishizing the glove in Renaissance Europe‘, Critical Inquiry, 28: 114–132. Steadman, P. (1979) The Evolution of Designs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steedman, C. (1982) The Tidy House. London: Virago. Stocking, G. (1985) Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press. Strathern, M. (1990) ‘Artefacts of history: events and the interpretation of images’, in J. Siikala (ed.), Culture

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and History in the Pacific, Transactions of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 27. Tacchi, J. (1998) ‘Radio textures: between self and others’, in D. Miller (ed.), Material Cultures: Why some Things Matter. London: UCL Press. Thomas, J. (1998) Time Culture and Identity: An Interpretive Archaeology. London: Routledge. Thomas, N. (1999) Possessions: Indigenous Art/ Colonial Culture. London: Thames and Hudson. Thrift, N. (2005) ‘Beyond mediation: three new material registers and their consequences’, in D. Miller (ed.), Materiality. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, pp. 231–255. Tilley, C. (1994) The Phenomenology of Landscape. London: Berg. Turkle, S. (1995) Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster. vom Bruck, G. (1997) ‘A house turned inside out’, Journal of Material Culture, 2: 139–172. White, L. (1959) The Evolution of Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Wilk, R. (1984) ‘Households in process: agricultural change and domestic transformation among the Kekchi Maya of Belize’, in R.McC. Netting, R.R Wilk and E.J. Arnold (eds), Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wilk, R. (1989) ‘Houses as consumer goods’, in H. Rutz, and B. Orlove (eds.), The Social Economy of Consumption. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Willis, P. (1975) Profane Culture. London: Macmillan. Woodward, S. (2005) ‘Looking good and feeling right – aesthetics of the self’, in S. Küchler, and D. Miller (eds), Clothing as Material Culture. Oxford: Berg, pp. 21–40. Wright, C. (2004) ‘Material and memory’, Journal of Material Culture, 9: 73–86. Xenos, N. (1989) Scarcity and Modernity. London: Routledge. Zukin, S. (1982) Loft Living : Culture and Capital in Urban Change. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

14 Culture: Science Studies and Technoscience Andrew Pickering

Sociology’s general concepts and methodological strategies are simply overwhelmed by the heterogeneity and technical density of the language, equipment and skills through which mathematicians, scientists and practitioners in many other fields make their affairs accountable. (Lynch, 1992: pp. 298–299)

Science and technology studies (STS) was born in the early 1970s as an extension of the sociology of knowledge (Durkheim, 1995; Durkheim and Mauss, 1963; Mannheim, 1936) into the hitherto forbidden territory of science. For much of its first 20 years, its practitioners presented a united front on a philosophically charged battlefield, but as the focus of STS research moved away from scientific knowledge and towards explorations of scientific practice (Pickering, 1992), a rift developed between what I call humanist and posthumanist perspectives, becoming public in 1992 in the so-called ‘chicken debate’ between Harry Collins and Steve Yearley (1992), speaking for the humanist wing of science studies, and Michel Callon and Bruno Latour (1992), speaking

for the posthumanists. My concern here is specifically with the posthumanist wing of STS, but some discussion of the nature of the rift will help to illuminate what follows.1 There are many ways into the chicken debate – named after Collins and Yearley’s opening salvo, ‘Epistemological Chicken’ – but my epigraph from Michael Lynch is a convenient place to start. From the late 1970s onwards, historical and ethnographic studies of ‘laboratory life’ began to portray the immense richness and complexity of scientific practice and culture.2 Hence Lynch’s sentiment that sociology as a discipline was (or should be) ‘overwhelmed’ by what had been found. One could say that posthumanist STS has taken Lynch’s remark seriously in seeking in various ways to transcend conventional sociology, but it is worth noting that his assertion is by no means incontestable. Traditional sociologists could reply to Lynch that they are not overwhelmed at all by the richness of lab life.As good scientists, their job is precisely to find simple truths lurking

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behind the clutter of visible phenomena. Durkheim has given us a blueprint for this, locating such reliable hidden variables as social structure and social interest as causal variables that explain visible phenomena. This line of thought – which, one might note, has the sanction of several centuries of Enlightenment science behind it – defines what I have been calling humanist STS, where the epithet ‘humanist’ is intended to point to the definitively human and social character of the explanatory variables around which such analyses revolve.3 In contrast, posthumanist STS, as I said, takes Lynch’s observation seriously and seeks to study and analyse the world of science as found, and we could, in fact, put this bifurcation in science studies in terms of a methodological injunction in studying culture. If the instruction in the humanist STS is to reduce the complexity of the visible by finding (or, one might say, constructing) a hidden social order behind the scenes, the instruction in posthumanist STS is to stay with the visible and to try to make sense of that. Posthumanism, one might say, aims at theories of the visible (Pickering, 1997a). Here we arrive at an expository problem. Just how do the phenomena of laboratory life overwhelm the conventional sociologist, and how should we best get to grips with them and bring them into focus? There are no simple agreed answers to these questions, so let me begin by addressing them in my own way and complicate the picture as we go along. Here are some points to bear in mind: 1 Studies of scientific practice confront us with the brute materiality of science, the omnipresence of machines and instruments in the laboratory. Science has a material culture, irreducible to either knowledge or social relations. This is one sense in which studies of practice overwhelm traditional sociology. 2 The social is not an unproblematic given to which one can appeal to explain particular bodies of belief. Studies of practice point to the conclusion that social roles and relations are themselves at stake – constituted and transformed in scientific practice. This lack of a stable social basis again

3

4

5

6

overwhelms the Durkheimian blueprint, which insists on social explanations for social facts. We can connect these two points together. What is it in science that resists a Durkheimian projection of the social into knowledge? Most evidently, scientists struggle with material devices that are not fully predictable and under control, and one aspect of this struggle is that the social is often reconfigured in the production, use and circulation of scientific machines and instruments. There is a certain symmetry here, which I am inclined to formulate in terms of performance and agency, though others are more reluctant. We can think of scientific practice as a field in which human and nonhuman agency intersect in a reciprocally transformative fashion. We thus arrive at a decentred vision in which the human and nonhuman appear on the same plane, as mutually constitutive of practice and as each irreducible to the other. This symmetry is a defining feature of posthumanist science studies. So, if we were inclined to speak of material culture under heading (1), now we should also speak of ‘social culture’ and ‘material-social culture’ – which sounds odd. A better way of putting this is to say that the culture of science is a hybrid of the material and the social, and one aspect of this formulation is worth noting: the outside of ‘culture’ disappears. There is no Other left to which one can appeal for explanations. If culture here has a dynamics, it has become an endogenous dynamics (in contrast to the exogenous social causation of humanist STS). One can extend this series. Though I will not elaborate the point here (see Pickering, 1995a, Chapter 4) one can also see bodies of knowledge and conceptual structures as cultural elements with which the material and social strata of scientific culture collide in reciprocally transformative intersections. Culture thus takes on the sense of a material-social-conceptual assemblage.4 I use the word ‘assemblage’ to evoke the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (for example, Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) which resonates with many of the findings of posthumanist STS, and because I now need to introduce another Deleuzian concept, that of multiplicity. In Anglo-American philosophy, scientific culture has usually been discussed as a unitary thing, typically characterized by a single big theory in physics – Newtonian mechanics or Einsteinian relativity, or Darwinism in biology – and the idea of scientific culture as unitary was only intensified by Kuhn’s immensely influential notion of all-embracing paradigms and their

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discontinuous shifts in scientific revolutions (Kuhn, 1970 [1962]; also Feyerabend, 1993 [1975]). To the contrary, however, empirical studies of science reliably turn up a vision of scientific culture as a thing of shreds and patches, a disunified field consisting of all sorts of elements – arrays of different instruments, theoretical models, shifting social relations and what have you – which do not necessarily hang together at all (for a version of this idea in philosophy of science, see Dupré, 1993). And the work of doing science typically consists in trying to make constructive alignments within some small subset of these elements. Such unity as scientific culture possesses, then, is a made thing, not a given state of affairs, always liable to be transformed and perhaps undone in future practice. When one speaks of scientific culture as an assemblage, then, one should not assume that the elements of this assemblage are locked together forever – an assemblage is a temporary and localized knot in a field of multiplicity. 7 This observation generates another question of method, that of units of analysis (Pickering, 1997b). If scientific culture is unitary, then, as the word suggests, this question does not arise. If, following Kuhn, we take each scientific community to be characterized by its own paradigm, then that paradigm is obviously what we should study. But if scientific culture is multiple, then all sorts of problems arise in choosing what to study. At the microlevel, within the laboratory, there is no single, special, central, key object to look at; at the macrolevel, it is by no means clear where science ends, where its boundary lies. To put the point constructively as another methodological injunction: the appropriate unit of cultural analysis is no longer given in advance; it has to be found in each empirical instance. Just which elements are in play here has to be the question.5 8 Under heading (4) I referred to an endogenous cultural dynamics. At issue here is the problematic of time and change. The traditional social sciences, including humanist STS, are weak on this. The hidden order they seek behind the flux of appearances is not itself construed to be in flux, but rather to be something reliable that somehow explains the flux (though actually if one pursues the matter one sooner or later arrives at a black hole where the explanation should be). If one stays with the visible, however, one finds that cultural change, not constancy and reproduction, is the order of the day, and that the best way to grasp this is in quasi-evolutionary terms. Cultural elements continually sport and sprout, constituting

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an ever-changing environment for each other’s becomings. And the endogenous dynamics of culture can, then, be seen as one in which elements are continually finding temporarily stable forms and niches within this flow. If cultural stasis figured as the natural (though hidden) order of things in humanist science studies, then it becomes a problem inviting analysis in posthumanist science studies. Rather than reliable enduring causal forces, we should think in terms of cultural becoming and temporal emergence.

This list of points is sufficient, I think, to mark the key features of ‘culture’ as it appears in posthumanist science studies: as visible; as visibly multiple and heterogeneous (material, conceptual, social); as having no outside (in the sense of base/superstructure models, there is nothing basic that explains culture); as a decentred field of symmetric encounter of multiple agencies (including, importantly, that of the material world itself); as having no pregiven boundaries (the question of units of analysis); and as evolving open-endedly and emergently in time. One last topic remains to be discussed in this section: the relation between science and technology. For much of the twentieth century, science and technology were seen as quite different fields. Crudely, science was seen as, above all, a body of disinterested and uniquely rational knowledge; technology was instead seen as the greasy, dangerous and metallic world of powerful machines; and the assumed connection between the two was an asymmetric and one-way flow from science to technology: scientific knowledge comes down to earth as machines; knowledge is what gives us dominion over nature. This picture can, however, be challenged in all sorts of ways. As far as a posthumanist analysis is concerned, a conception of material agency (point [3]) immediately suggests almost an identification of science and technology: if scientists struggle with the powers of machines and instruments, even more so do engineers. And if the unit of analysis is not given in advance, one might suspect that science and technology often figure as parts of the same assemblage. Empirically, the actor-network approach to

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STS of Michel Callon and Bruno Latour (and later John Law and many others) was launched precisely by leaping in and analysing assemblages in which science and technology did prove to be constitutively entangled with one another. Callon’s (1986) study of scallop farming in St Brieuc Bay and Latour’s (1983, 1988) study of Pasteur’s bacteriology were and remain canonical examples. More generally, then, posthumanism paints a picture in which science and technology do not figure as distinct realms but as often inter-related aspects of the same cultural field. Humanist science studies inherited a welldefined agenda or blueprint from the sociology of knowledge tradition. Given a body of scientific knowledge or a technological artefact, the object was to give an explanation in terms of canonical sociological variables, and when that object had been achieved, the job was done – nothing more needed to be said. Implicit in the preceding discussion was the idea that posthumanist STS takes the stance that that blueprint is itself overwhelmed by the richness of scientific practice and culture, and no single new unifying blueprint has emerged, though some themes have come to the fore, as indicated below. Posthumanist STS is thus a much more open-ended field than its humanist counterpart. What follows is therefore intended as an overview of some interesting and important work in this area, loosely structured under a series of headings. With the caveat that the overview is doubly partial – it undoubtedly features important omissions, and it is structured by my own limited perspective – I begin with theoretical issues before turning to more empirical topics.

DISCIPLINE AND ONTOLOGY I have described humanist and posthumanist STS as having very different relations to the mainstream disciplines and now I want to clarify and expand this point. One aspect of the development of STS as a field has been a pointed critique of philosophical ideas of an unsituated reason as the still centre of science, and one philosophical accommodation to this

critique has been a retreat to a sort of multidisciplinary eclecticism (Giere, 1993). One has somehow to add up the forces of reason and of society, traditionally conceived, to understand why at specific places and times specific groups of scientists have offered this or that account of nature. If reason points to one path of scientific argumentation and society to another, the upshot in knowledge production will be a vector sum of the two. I want therefore to emphasize that the challenge to the mainstream disciplines from posthumanism cannot be accommodated by any such manoeuvre. Adding up hidden entities – social interests as discerned by sociologists, the rules of reason as determined by philosophers – is not the same as giving an account of decentred and endogenous dynamics in the realm of the visible. Posthumanism opens up a space for cultural analysis quite different from the familiar disciplines, and inasmuch as it crosses the terrains of the latter, it requires an antidisciplinary rather than a multidisciplinary approach. We could put this more strongly in terms of ontology (Pickering, forthcoming). The mainstream disciplines presume a modern ontology, a world of stable entities that accord with disciplinary identities – social structures and interests in sociology, for example. Posthumanist STS, in contrast, speaks of entities that not only elide the boundaries of the traditional disciplines, such as that between the human and the nonhuman, but, perhaps even more importantly, have a dynamic, organic, lively quality – entities which evolve and change rather than stay the same. Thus the basic ontology of the actor-network approach is nonmodern, that of a coupled network of actants (Latour’s neologisms), indifferently human, nonhuman or hybrid, whose properties serve reciprocally and emergently to define the properties of the others (Latour, 1987). Donna Haraway’s (2004 [1985]) invocation of the cyborg is an arresting image that goes in the same direction. The cyborg – the cybernetic organism – points to a literal and metaphorical reconfiguration of our very bodies by science and technology. Her insistence that cyborg

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assemblages are characteristic phenomena of the post-World War II era is not intended as a naturalization of prewar bodies, but as a denaturalization of both formations; and the appeal to science fiction at the end of her Cyborg Manifesto is an affirmation of the open-endedness of cultural dynamics and of her conviction that we are not prisoners of the present. My own discussion (Pickering, 1995a) of the ‘mangle of practice’ offers a detailed schema for thinking about the coupling of the human and the nonhuman in an inherently temporal process that I call mangling (as well as detailed case studies and a confrontation with the traditional disciplines and humanist STS). One further point in this connection. If posthumanist STS represents an antidisciplinary shift away from the traditional disciplines, one needs to ask whether one can resituate it in relation to other genealogies. In philosophy, the difficult but numinous writings of Alfred North Whitehead (1926) and Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) are often invoked, and citations to Deleuze’s name increasingly figure as an identifier for the new STS and its extensions in all sorts of directions. More accessible is the pragmatist tradition, especially the writings of William James: ‘for rationalism reality is ready-made and complete for all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future’ (James, 1978 [1907, 1909]: p. 123). One can even find inspiration in the sciences themselves. If humanism aims at an explanatory structure mimicking that of classical physics, the dynamics of culture envisaged in posthumanist STS is one of Darwinian evolution in which species and their environments (now science, technology and society) evolve together.6 In more recent science, inspiration can also be found in sciences of adaptation such as cybernetics, self-organization and complexity (Pickering, 2002, 2005c).7 There might be more to this idea than meets the eye. Historically, science studies has been indifferent to its object. Any science is grist to the humanist’s mill. One could

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say that humanist STS does not care about the substance of the sciences it analyses. One could also say the same thing about posthumanist science studies. I am confident, for example, that one could offer a mangle-ish analysis of any science. But the very oddness of the posthumanist ontology also makes visible an interesting pattern of tensions and affinities with specific sciences. There are obvious tensions and incommensurabilities between posthumanist and humanist science studies, but there are similar tensions between, say, my analyses of practice in modern physics and modern physics itself. Posthumanist analyses necessarily read the modern sciences against the grain, arriving at an ontology of decentred becoming (of fields of machines, instruments, knowledges, social relations), even while those sciences are organized around a different and more familiar ontological vision (of enduring hidden nonhuman entities such as quarks). This ontological tension vanishes when sciences such as cybernetics are contemplated from a posthumanist perspective. Instead an ontological affinity becomes evident, on the basis of a shared decentred ontology of becoming (spelled out, of course, in different ways and in relation to different objects). Thus posthumanism conjures up a new kind of project in the cultural analysis of science, different from the universalizing project of explanation, however that is conceived. The new project entails a cultural mapping of ontological tensions and affinities, a work itself of constructive cultural assemblage, exploring the affinities and resonances (not identity) of all sorts of posthumanist fields in science and philosophy, which necessarily implies not indifference to but an intense interest in the substance – ideas, methods, rhetorics, social bases and social relations – of fields as diverse as science studies itself, evolutionary and developmental biology, fractal geometry, cellular automata studies and complexity theory, not to mention the philosophies of James, Whitehead and Deleuze. This work of cultural exploration, mapping and assemblage has always been possible, but has never arisen within the modernist formation, which takes

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itself for granted as having no other worthy of recognition. It is only the oddity of the posthumanist ontology that draws attention to the relevant differences. I will return to these remarks as we go along.

SCIENCE STUDIES Now for substance. We can review some of the areas that have been interestingly addressed in posthumanist STS, and we can start with science itself. Oddly enough, given the origins of the field in studies of laboratory life, studies of science as practice and culture have not lately been the most active area in the field. In the past decade, only three book-length studies come to mind. Two of them, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesising Proteins in the Laboratory (1997) and Karin Knorr Cetina’s Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (1999), are second-generation studies of the laboratory.8 If the first generation aimed to show that there was nothing transcendentally special about science, these are studies, one might say, of the mundane specialness of science. As the word ‘epistemic’ in both titles signifies, these books aim to get at distinctive features of science as a knowledge-producing enterprise. Rheinberger’s study of the history of research in molecular biology explores the ways in which things are turned into inscriptions, and analyses the dynamics of research, finding inspiration in Derridean deconstruction in exploring the endless temporal unfolding of meaning in the lab. Knorr Cetina’s book is unique as an extended comparative study of scientific cultures, with high-energy physics and, again, molecular biology as its two poles. The historical-comparative method is familiar in humanist sociology as an effort to identify key explanatory social variables, but that is not Knorr Cetina’s objective. Her aim is rather to contest any residual temptation to see science as a universal and unsituated method by showing just how differently particle physicists and molecular biologists go about the ‘same’

job: producing knowledge. She offers us a vision of the former as an enterprise which is, above all, semiotic, uniquely obsessed with the production and manipulation of signs (including fake signs – ‘background’ – to be strenuously eliminated). Molecular biology, in contrast, is more straightforwardly material and organized around caring for and interacting with the biological systems that carry research along with their performativity – and correspondingly less obsessed with the potential for error. Interestingly, Knorr Cetina also identifies the social form of current experimentation in high-energy physics, with its cast of thousands of collaborators, as a hitherto unrecognized form of social organization – a ‘superorganism’ as a mode of ‘distributed cognition’ – that might be a model for understanding other organizations in contemporary society more broadly.9 The third book to mention here is Peter Galison’s Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (1997). From a theoretical perspective, the most interesting feature of this book is Galison’s documentation in a variety of studies of the fact that, as mentioned earlier, scientific culture is disunified and multiple, consisting of a myriad specialist sub-cultures. Against Kuhn, Galison rejects the idea that these subcultures should be considered noncommunicating, incommensurable ‘island-empires’, and he documents instead the establishment between them of what he calls trading zones, in which individual subcultures can exchange goods and services. Following the lead of anthropology, and extending earlier work on ‘boundary objects’ by Star and Griesemer (1989), Galison emphasizes that such zones do not create equivalences between subcultures, but rather entail the construction of intercultures, distinctive trading cultures which he understands as analogous to familiar trading languages: pidjins and creoles. Galison finds such linkages within the subcultures of physics (between experimenters and theorists in high-energy physics, for example), but also between the subcultures of physics and other worlds, frequently military ones. The history of the bubble chamber as a key experimental

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device in particle physics, for instance, has to be understood in terms of a cross-over into science of hydrogen-bomb personnel and techniques. Image and Logic thus engages with another theme mentioned earlier: that the units of cultural analysis in science studies cannot be presumed in advance; they have to be explored in historical practice. There are perhaps three reasons for a relative decline of vitality in science studies in recent years. One is that the more one studies scientific culture, the more scientifically complex the issues become and the smaller the potential readership. Another is a ‘postmodern’ decline in the status of the pure sciences – nobody cares much anymore about particle physics, for example. This might remind us to think of the so-called Science Wars – a savage attack on STS as a field launched by scientists and their mouthpieces in the philosophy of science in such works as Gross and Levitt’s The Higher Superstition (1994).10 The third reason for a move away from science studies per se is more interesting: an expansion of the unit of analysis from science to ‘technoscience’.

TECHNOSCIENCE As popularized by Latour in Science in Action (1987), ‘technoscience’ refers to situations in which transformations in science, technology and society are strongly and visibly coupled to one another – the development of the Diesel engine as a commercial proposition, for example, entailed a scientific reconceptualization of how the engine worked, the involvement of a large team of engineers in the development of the engine, and the proliferation through society of mechanics competent to service the engines in public use (not to mention Diesel’s suicide). Science in Action (pp. 153–155) also contains a wonderful if fictional excerpt from Latour’s diary, following ‘the boss’ of a scientific laboratory around as he travels the world talking to scientists, politicians, businessmen and journalists trying to convert his lab’s latest results into future collaborations and

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funding, publicity, the establishment of new research institutes, training schemes and commercial enterprises. At a more macro level, Haraway’s (2004) Cyborg Manifesto pointed to global circuits of production and consumption centred on postwar information technologies and sciences. Haraway’s and, especially, Latour’s writings quickly became exemplary for more research in STS than I can discuss here. I do, however, want to point to an overall reconceptualization of ‘science’ that has gone along with explorations of technoscience. In traditional history and philosophy of science, the natural state of science was represented as one of autonomy from technology and society. At most, social forces were understood as external causes acting upon science, usually with deleterious results. But posthumanist STS suggests a different and more complex social, material and conceptual geometry. On the basis of her studies of organic chemistry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example, Ursula Klein (2005) has argued that chemistry always was technoscientific, with the production of chemical knowledge going hand in hand with pharmaceutical and commercial considerations. Sometime later in the nineteenth century, research in organic chemistry became the speciality of academic institutions, but remained connected to the mundane worlds of industry and production, especially the synthetic dye industry, by circuits of knowledge, materials and trained manpower, and in the late nineteenth century by the re-implantation of academic research within the body of industry itself, in the shape of a new social institution: the industrial research laboratory. One has the image, then, of academic science as a finite and temporary detour, Latour’s word, away from the concerns of the everyday, which I have tried to conceptualize (echoing Foucault) in the idea that the everyday world is both a surface of emergence and a surface of return for science (Pickering, 2005b). Science, one might say, grows out of the mundane world and, as technoscience, comes back to inflect the dynamics of the latter. The autonomy of scientific culture thus becomes

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a problem for research, rather than something one can take for granted in cultural analysis.11 From here one can move in a couple of directions. One concerns the possibility of historical periodization in terms of coupled macro-transformations of science, technology and society. Historians often refer to the locking together in the later nineteenth century of academic chemistry and the synthetic dye industry as part of a second industrial revolution (also including a similar lock-in of physics and the electrical industry), marked by the appearance of a new chemistry (Kekulé’s structure theory), new technologies of production of new substances, and significant transformations in key institutions: a new mode of production in industry; a tuning of the universities towards the production of technoscientific workers; a tuning of the law (especially the patent system); and a topological ‘enfolding’ of science by industry (the industrial research system). From there, one could look backwards to the real Industrial Revolution, and note that the title of E.P. Thompson’s great work, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), itself points to an endogenous and decentred dynamics in which social transformations were surely bound up with steam engines and spinning jennies. Or we could move in the opposite direction, towards Haraway’s claim that World War II can be seen as another big shift in technoscientific culture, with the postwar ‘informatics of domination’ replacing the familiar and vaguely comforting oppressions that Marx taught us about. I have elaborated on this idea, trying to analyse a distinctive cultural stratum of ‘cyborg sciences’ and ‘cyborg objects’ that grew out of World War II (Pickering, 1995b). In the end, what comes into view here is the possibility of a largescale history of agency (Pickering, 1997b), centred not on ideas but on the great centres of intersection of human and nonhuman agency: factories, battlefields, hospitals, farms, the home – though there seems to be little enthusiasm in the contemporary academic world for ‘big picture’ historiography. Another direction in which to move is from technoscientific production to consumption.

Relatively little work has been done on what it is like to be on the receiving end of a technoscientific assemblage, but I can mention some suggestive examples (see also Star, 1991). In his book, The Railway Journey (1986), Wolfgang Schivelbusch brilliantly evokes the new subject position of ‘panoramic seeing’ – a new way of apprehending the world that came along with nineteenthcentury rail travel. He also points out that rail travel itself evoked new ways for bodies to be: a condition known as railway spine, for example, and the appearance of ‘shock’ in railway accidents. Schivelbusch further discusses railway furnishings and station architecture as ways to tune human bodies and minds into the new technoscientific assemblage. All of this (and more) helps to fill out the use and consumption aspects of technoscientific culture – to illuminate key features of the world we live in. Closer to the present and at a more microlevel, Emilie Gomart and Antoine Hennion’s (1999) study of drug users and music lovers wonderfully conjures up individual constructions of social and material assemblages aimed at optimizing the experience of drugs and music (and both together) – dispositifs in which people can gain pleasure by ‘losing themselves’. New reproductive technologies, which upset so many received ideas about the family and relationships, also thematize strikingly the social shifts that can accompany the penetration of technoscience into the most intimate realms of everyday life. One of the most imaginative works in this area is Charis Cussins’s ‘Confessions of a Bioterrorist’ (1999 – not quite such a loaded title when she wrote it), a fictional narrative which weaves together elements from current reproductive technology, human and animal, the San Diego zoo, and species conservation efforts, local and global. Most strikingly, its central theme is the emergence of new desires in technoscience: the leading character, one of three women all called Mary, finds that she wants to give birth to a monkey and succeeds in doing so (on Christmas Day, as I recall it). ‘Desire only exists when assembled or machined’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987).

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Fiction remains a neglected genre, even in posthumanist STS. One last topic under this heading. It is interesting to think about contrasts and intersections between Western technoscience and other cultures. There are many angles on this, but I will focus on two studies in the field of medicine. In his study of contemporary Chinese medicine, Volker Scheid (2002) argues that one cannot get to grips with Chinese medicine in terms of the classifications and ontology of modern Western biomedicine, and that a posthumanist ontology that recognizes multiplicity and becoming is a more appropriate point of departure. In a sense, then, he continues the project of cultural mapping mentioned above, but now outside the field of the Western sciences: Chinese medicine can be another element of the cultural assemblage that includes posthumanist STS, continental philosophy and the Western sciences of adaptation and emergence already listed. Scheid’s ontological argument points towards a disjuncture of Western science and other cultures, and, indeed, the clash between Western biomedicine and different non-Western traditional medicines has long been thought to be exemplary of the incommensurability of different Kuhnian paradigms – the impossibility of translation between different cultures. However, the matter turns out to be less simple than this, and a recent study of institutionalized syntheses of scientific biomedicine and traditional Korean medicine (KM) offers an important corrective (see also my earlier remarks on Galison’s trading zones in physics). Like Scheid, Jongyoung Kim (2005, 2006) has shown, first, that KM is no more a monolithic unitary culture than any Western science, and, further, that partial translations between KM and biomedicine are indeed possible, linking creatively transformed elements of both. Kim discusses, for example, the scientific purification, analysis and testing of traditional herbal remedies, and the use of MRI techniques as scientific validation of acupuncture. Elaborated in new hybrid institutions combining expertise in

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biomedicine and KM, such work constitutes a partial integration of the two medicines, injecting aspects of KM into the circuits of Western science and medicine while reciprocally redefining the knowledge of both East and West. Kim emphasizes that such syntheses are not easily accomplished and, importantly, neither are they fully symmetric. The terms of engagement are Western and scientific, and certain elements of the culture of KM – qi and meridians, for example – tend to get lost along the way. One might think, therefore, that this is just another story of Western domination. But in fact the process is more interesting than that. Shifts of power and status take place: practitioners of KM have gained status in Korea and in the world at large and have become seriously wealthy; new tensions have broken out in KM between those favouring scientification and those who oppose it (the former gaining new access to funding, the latter not); new commodities arising in KM now circulate from Korean suppliers into global markets, especially the USA, feeding both the Western appetite for complementary medicine (rather than biomedicine) and the Korean government’s aspirations towards globalization of Korea’s economy. Philosophically, then, Kim’s study shows that an image of brute difference and otherness between cultures is a mistake: in practice, partial creative syntheses are possible. And a more general conclusion also follows: power and status are amongst the ingredients of the social-material-conceptual assemblages we have been discussing and, rather than figuring as exogenous causes, are caught up in the same endogenous dynamics as the other elements.

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND THE CONSTITUTION OF CULTURE We can widen our sense of ‘culture’. The discussion so far has largely pertained to cultures that are more or less closely attached to particular sciences, technologies and objects. But one can, of course, have a sense of

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‘culture’ as that which we all inhabit, as somehow constitutive of the spaces we live in. I want now, therefore, to discuss three bodies of work that move in this direction. The first concerns economics. One might think of, and criticize, economics as just another scientific discipline, a putatively objective reflection on its given referent: the economy. But returning to my earlier remarks on science as a detour that returns to transform its object, scholars such as Donald MacKenzie, Michel Callon and Karin Knorr Cetina (e.g. MacKenzie, 2006; Callon, 1998; Knorr Cetina and Preda, 2005) have begun to argue that this is to miss the point. The key entity of neoliberalism, the market, has itself been reconstituted by economics as a discipline. It is not simply that specific calculational techniques have become indispensable to knowing and participating in economic and financial markets; in fact, markets are built around those techniques in empirically specifiable ways. This is clearly a politically as well as intellectually important topic: these economic entities we all live within and are instructed to worship are not givens that exist outside the sphere of culture and the social; they are again parts of a material, conceptual and social assemblage of enormous consequence. This topic is covered at greater length in this volume under the heading of Culture and Economy, so I will not pursue it further here. One can think along similar lines concerning another enveloping cultural phenomenon, a discourse of globality, of the planet as an interconnected unity that needs to be managed as such. Today we take the possibility of such discourse for granted, but Fernando Elichirigoity’s Planet Management (1999) traces back an important thread in the construction of such a discourse to the Club of Rome’s 1972 Limits to Growth report, as a culmination of a historical trajectory leading from MIT’s Servomechanisms Laboratory in World War II, through the development of real-time computer control, the SAGE early-warning project and associated developments in computer simulation techniques. Elichirigoity’s purpose is not to establish the

guilt by association of Limits with warfare, but to analyse the global discourse of Limits as the emergence of a new space of Foucauldian governmentality – a new domain of calculation and planning transcending the nation state and, interestingly, thematizing the posthumanist coupling of people and things – natural resources, production, consumption, population growth.12 Elichirigoity also emphasizes that the existence of the discourse of globality which Limits helped to create is inherently a technological one, depending on all sorts of postwar information-gathering and computer modelling techniques. Current debates over global warming have precisely the same quality. From another angle, we can turn to ‘culture’ in one of its more traditional guises, that of the arts and entertainment. Since its inception, STS has been a rather sober field as far as its objects of analysis have been concerned, focusing on classical sciences and productive technologies. Recently, however, attention has begun to move to lighter matters. And while the historical tendency has been to see the arts and entertainment as being separate from, and possibly a Romantic reaction against, the grey worlds of the laboratory and the factory, STS scholars have begun to emphasize that the arts are often themselves technologically constituted. At the heart of the distinctive cultural formation we call the 1960s, for example, was a novel technological device: the electric guitar. And it is interesting to note that the sound of the electric guitar changed as the 1960s went on. These instruments were built with solid bodies (unlike the hollow resonant bodies of the classical guitar) precisely to avoid feedback effects, but one of the great discoveries of the 1960s – often epitomized by Jimi Hendrix’s rendering of the Star-Spangled Banner at the Woodstock festival in 1969 – was that one can generate a distinctive sound from the feedback itself (McSwain, 2002). Here one might say that the emergent powers or agency of a technological assemblage – the electric guitar, electronic amplification, massive speakers, a specific musical technique – co-evolved with the wider cultural formation of the 1960s

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itself, including an emergent desire for a kind of sound that had never before been heard as music. And it turns out that much the same can be said of another new instrument of those days, the electronic synthesizer. As Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco’s magisterial and highly entertaining Analog Days (2002) makes clear, the history of the synthesizer was one of continual experimentation – with material set-ups, to see what they could do, what sounds they could make; with social relations, bringing musicians into the process of technological development, and also finding out how synthesizers could be used in performance; and in the intertwining of both. And here we can return to the posthumanist project of cultural mapping and assemblage that I mentioned earlier. The previous discussion focused on affinities between posthumanist science studies and specific sciences that shared its ontology, but now we can see how to extend the list. The sound of rock music more or less demands a posthumanist analysis, as a constitutively joint product of a human musician (playing the notes, listening to and exploiting unpredictable feedback effects) and a nonhuman system (guitars, amplifiers, speakers, synthesizers). Hendrix at Woodstock (and many other performers at many places) can stand as another kind of exemplification of the posthumanist ontology in action, displayed to the world. We could pursue this observation in many directions. One is back to science itself. Specifically, we can note that ‘feedback’ is a key word in the lexicon of cybernetics, so there is another field of cultural affinities to be explored here, now between sciences such as cybernetics and popular culture. Brian Eno, for example, began his musical career playing the electronic synthesizer for Roxy Music in the early 1970s, before branching off into more radical forms of music after reading the cybernetic works of Stafford Beer (Eno, 2003). I have discussed the cybernetic sound-and-light machines, robot artworks and innovations in adaptive and interactive theatre and architecture of another leading British

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cybernetician, Gordon Pask (Pickering, 2002, 2006). And in her How We Became Posthuman (1999), Katherine Hayles explores resonances between three generations of technical development in cybernetics (and artificial life research) and such diverse literary works as Bernard Wolfe’s neglected masterpiece, Limbo (1952) and the widely praised fiction of Philip K. Dick and Richard Powers (and one should surely throw in the writings of J.G. Ballard here). What begins to emerge in these studies is thus a cultural assemblage that reaches far beyond posthumanist science and posthumanist science studies into distinctively posthumanist approaches to entertainment, the arts, literature and popular culture. I will return later to this assemblage, but now I want to explore some more vectors of development within science studies.

THE ENVIRONMENT, ANIMALS AND LOVE We have so far remained on the classic terrain of science and technology studies. All of the work mentioned has included bodies of scientific knowledge or fields of machines as its defining referent, even though often seen as co-evolving with other cultural assemblages. But recently there has been a growing tendency for posthumanist STS to overflow its banks. It took a lot of hard scholarly work to get science and technology into focus as fields of performative interplay between human and nonhuman agency, but having arrived there it became clear that it might be easier, and also productive, to start elsewhere. An obvious site of lively nonhuman agency would be the environment, so let me point to a few extensions of the posthumanist approach onto the terrain of environmental studies.13 We could begin by noting that a constant theme of Latour’s writing has been that one has only to pick up a newspaper to find instances of technosocial imbroglios, hybrid ontologies, often centred on the environment. As a good Frenchman, mad cow disease

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(as afflicting the British) is one of his favourite examples, coupling animal bodies (as already sick, or to be slaughtered now to check the disease, or to be slaughtered later as food), human bodies and desires (dietary opportunities and preferences), circuits of foodstuffs (leading through cows to us), capital (agribusiness), the outer reaches of biology (prions), the law and international relations. Latour’s recent book Politics of Nature (2004) continues this line of thought into a project that he calls political ecology, examined further in the next section. I have experimented with taking the history of the Mississippi River as an exemplary object for posthumanist thinking (Pickering, forthcoming). Following McPhee’s (1989) wonderful account, we can see this history as a dance of human and nonhuman agency between the river and the US Army Corps of Engineers, in which the physical form of the river (flood plains, levees, flood-control and overflow structures), along with scientific understandings of river dynamics, and social institutions concerned with the distribution of water, have evolved open-endedly in an interplay between the ACE’s attempts at control and responses by the river, which from time to time have included destroying the ACE’s control structures. It is worth noting that, like Schivelbusch (discussed above), McPhee is a writer, not an academic. This relative freedom from disciplinarity no doubt explains, at least in part, an ability to produce straightforwardly posthumanist narratives. Along similar lines, Adrian Franklin (forthcoming) focuses on the properties and becomings of gum trees in analysing a dance of human and nonhuman agency that contributes to the continuing evolution of the human and nonhuman geography of Australia. Fire is a key part of the life of gum trees, but it also threatens the extension of Australian suburbia, and fire-control technologies and institutions have grown up in only partially successful attempts to shield the latter. One of the many fascinating aspects of Franklin’s study of the changing Australian landscape is that he documents the emergence of a paradoxical human desire for fire within this

assemblage: many bush fires, it seems, are started by volunteer firemen. Back in the realm of animals, Dawn Coppin has analysed the history of pig-farming in the USA as that of an evolving multifaceted assemblage in which the very bodies of pigs have been transformed, leading, for example, to pale pigs with so little fat that they are incapable of surviving the rigours of life (sunshine, cold) outside modern ‘confinement facilities’ (Coppin, 2002). Interestingly, this particular co-evolution of the human and the nonhuman has revolved to a considerable extent around human struggles to minimize the agency of the nonhumans (Coppin, forthcoming). If pigs could once take care of themselves, foraging for food and raising their young on the periphery of the farm, the ambition for a confinement facility is the pig that does nothing, reproducing and growing on the spot, so to speak, or at least within a minimal area. It has turned out that this minimization of animal agency has not been easy; that new forms of porcine agency emerge as old ones are curtailed. In confinement, it turned out, for example, that baby pigs had a tendency to die unless provided with a square foot of sod, a phenomenon which was later understood in terms of nutritional deficiencies, which commercial suppliers in turn emerged to address. Many other emergent resistances to confinement have also appeared in the history of pig-confinement, often addressed by agricultural architecture. In early facilities, piglets were often crushed to death by their mothers lying on top of them. One solution was to arrange the physical restraints on movement so as to leave the piglets an escape route, through the bars that keep the mothers in place. In traditional pig farming, animal wastes served a beneficial purpose as fertilizer for crops. In confinement, waste became instead a problem. Slotted floors were the solution, so that excrement could fall through into a ‘lagoon’ below, but even so considerable experiment was required to find suitable materials and orientation for the slats: it turned out that pigs could destroy wooden

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slats very quickly, and that the pig’s ability to get up was sensitive to the orientation of the slats to their bodies. In these ways and others, the architecture of pig-farming evolved as a key nexus in the interrelation of humans and nonhumans – much like the station architecture discussed by Schivelbusch, the cybernetic architecture of Gordon Pask, and the material form of the Mississippi River and the ACE’s control structures.14 And here I could enter a general comment. From a posthumanist perspective, architecture comes to the fore as a key element of culture, not, as usually thought of, in its symbolic aspects, but as a performative technology mediating and transforming relations between the human and the nonhuman. One can also invoke Michel Foucault’s analysis of discipline here (Coppin, 2003; Foucault, 1979). The old way of pig-farming, with pigs free to roam the land and take care of themselves, is comparable to Foucault’s ancien regime, with the sovereign/farmer intervening only occasionally but spectacularly into pigs’ lives, and slaughter as the equivalent of the punishment meted out on Damiens the regicide. Confinement facilties, in contrast, make possible a disciplinary regime of individual surveillance and the birth of a science of hog-farming – typically involving one of those detours I mentioned earlier in connection with technoscience, through agricultural science departments at universities. Amongst leading STS scholars, Donna Haraway, too, has turned her attention to animals. The companion piece to her 1985 Cyborg Manifesto is The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Haraway, 2003). Here she focuses on the co-evolution and co-development of humans and dogs over a range of time scales, even flirting with the idea that what we take to be defining features of our humanity such as speech have emerged from a decentred dance of agency (2003: p. 28) in which dogs historically took the lead (so to speak). The most striking and important feature of Haraway’s latest manifesto is its focus on love – hardly a common topic in the STS

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literature. She is most interested here in those aspects of our relations with dogs that can be viewed in a positive light, and she offers what I would call a performative analysis of love between humans and dogs – love now understood as a willingness to explore what a dog wants to do and to adapt one’s own performances to that – in contrast, say, to asymmetric training regimes that seek simply to impose onto animals behaviours that we humans choose a priori. Love, then, is a word we might ascribe to both the process and the product of establishing a symmetric performative relationship with an other that might not even be able to speak. Haraway’s great achievement here, then, is to offer us a conception of love that scholars interested in cultural analysis can work with – not a label for some romantic inner state of mind, nor a pseudonym for sex, but a visible way of being in the world, contrastable with other, nonloving, ways of being. Her focus in the new manifesto is love between people and dogs, but one could readily extend her analysis to relations just between people. The Biblical injunction to love thy neighbour starts to make sense in performative terms; if one wants an example of brute non-adaptive and nonloving behaviour, think of the US presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. One could also think of love in connection with the environment, which gets me to the last topic for this section. Most of us have an idea of what it might mean to say that one loves nature – the reference is to some desirable special inner state achieved in communion with some aesthetically or spiritually satisfying environment, often understood as a pristine place uncontaminated by man. Haraway’s analysis, in contrast, suggests we think not of detached contemplation but of different modes of performative engagement with the environment, and here we can reconnect to the line of thought developed earlier. As I said, the posthumanist perspective in general invites a classification of its objects, as resistant to or in resonance with the posthumanist ontology, and LisaAsplen has analysed how this goes in environmental management (Asplen, forthcoming). Environmental

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management has typically operated in a command-and-control mode, in which managers, like the Army Corps of Engineers, decide what the environment should look like and re-engineer it accordingly. Over the past century or so, however, it has slowly become apparent that, as in the case of the Mississippi, this never works. The upshot of engineering interventions is never quite the expected one. And thus new approaches to environmental management have begun to appear, including ‘adaptive management’ and ‘ecological restoration’, which feature a more experimental approach that seeks, in Haraway’s terms, to be sensitive to what the environment wants to do and to latch onto that, rather than imposing some a priori blueprint.15 Adaptive environmental management thus, though it feels strange to write this, manifests Haraway’s performative definition of love, now in relation to nature in general rather than to dogs in particular, and, at the same time, resonates ontologically with the posthuman approach to cultural analysis – it adds another element to the posthuman cultural assemblage I have been building up in preceding sections.

POLITICS The last topic for this chapter is the politics of posthumanist STS. Historically, the branches of STS reviewed here grew up apolitically. The aim was to describe the world, not to change it.16 But the description of scientific practice and culture turned out to be a radical ontological redescription of the world, challenging not just the ontology of the mainstream sciences but also that of modern common sense – and surely something equally radical should follow from this for how we conduct ourselves in the world. In this section I want to review the ways in which Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour have pursued this thought and to add some thoughts of my own. Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (more so than the Companion Species Manifesto) is modelled on Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, and displays the same combination of critique of an existing state of the world

with a vision of the future. As far as critique is concerned, Haraway evinces, here and throughout her writings, her sympathies for both Marxist and feminist analyses. Through the figure of the cyborg, however, she denies herself any essentialist vision of humanity that could ground a salvational political project, and, in line with the ontological awareness of becoming, she concludes her Manifesto with a discussion of literature and science fiction, as sketching possible futures very different from our present that we might openendedly explore. The posthumanist aspect of her politics is thus what one might call a politics of experiment or a politics of the imagination. All that we can do is try doing things differently and see how they work out, against the backdrop of present class and gender oppressions. There is a lack of specificity here, compared with Marx and Engels, but at least Haraway reminds us that we are not stuck forever in the space of patriarchal capital; capital is not natural; we can try arranging our affairs differently and there is no guarantee that we will fail. We could describe Haraway’s posthumanist politics as a sub-politics, a frame in which any conventional politics might be situated, and Bruno Latour has gone furthest in specifying a vision of what that subpolitics might look like (without, it should be noted, any trace of Haraway’s socialist-feminist sensitivities). Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1993) is the ur-text. In Never Modern, Latour sketches out his big story of modernity as a historical epoch in which (1) impure posthuman, decentred, technoscientific hybrids and imbroglios proliferate at a speed never before known, while (2) their existence is denied or made somehow unrecognizable (by the tendency of the modern disciplines, for example, to purify their subject matters into the solely human or the solely nonhuman). Latour recognizes the productivity of modernity – its awesome scientific, technological and material achievements – but, at the same time, he regards the proliferation of environmental and ecological crises as an indicator that it is time for modernity to end. Nature can no longer function as an infinite resource for

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our activities, nor as an infinite sink for their unintended consequences. We have reached a state in which, in all sorts of ways, the fates of humanity and the planet have become visibly bound up together, and we need to recognize this. We need to stop being modern and to become nonmodern (as we were before, but now in a way appropriate to the twenty-first century). Thus the underlying thrust of Latour’s subpolitics, which he began to spell out in the last few pages of Never Modern in his notion of a Parliament of Things, a convocation in which things as well as people have a voice in deciding how we should live together. The question arises, of course, of just how mute things can speak, but Latour defuses this problem with his notion of the spokesman. In contemporary politics very few humans can, in fact, speak – most of us delegate our voices to elected representatives, supposed, at least, to be answerable back to us. And things can have their spokesmen too – including, but not limited to, scientists. Latour’s posthuman subpolitics thus hinges on somehow bringing the sciences explicitly into the political arena. In Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004), Latour spells this vision out in detail, and there his rhetoric flows in the opposite direction. We moderns have made an epistemological mistake in imagining that the sciences give us access to unvarnished truths of nature which must be respected whether we like it or not, and we accordingly have ceded to the sciences too much political authority – we let the ‘laws’ of science dictate how we should go on in the world, which should properly be the topic of genuinely political debate.17 ‘Bringing the sciences into democracy’ thus means both explicitly entraining scientists in political debates and recognizing that we, including scientists, never have access to unvarnished nature – that political ontology is an ontology of human/nonhuman hybrids. Politics should then be explicitly about these hybrids: states of the nonhuman world and states of the human world as parts of the same assemblage. Questions of how this might be accomplished

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in practice occupy much of Politics of Nature. Latour wants natural scientists, politicians, economists, moralists, bureaucrats, administrators, the populace, even, almost as an afterthought, social scientists, all to engage with one another on a level playing-field in the political process. This is his elaborated vision of what a Parliament of Things might look like. Politics of Nature is the most worked-out vision of how posthumanist STS might play back into the world at large as subpolitics. It would be extremely interesting to see what happened if anyone were to attempt to put the vision into practice, and the prospect is not unimaginable. The book is written in a very non-Latourian style, plodding and unspectacular, as if designed to appeal to bureaucrats in Brussels.18 But I can close with one comment. From Never Modern onwards, Latour’s writings portray modernity as a state of mind: the West found a way to proliferate human/nonhuman hybrids without thinking about them. Political ecology therefore aims to readjust our thinking. We have simply to ratify what we have always done, provided we reconsider our past, provided that we understand retrospectively to what extent we have never been modern, and provided that we rejoin the two halves of the symbol broken by Hobbes and Boyle as a sign of recognition. Half of our politics is constructed in science and technology. The other half of Nature is constructed in societies. Let us patch the two back together, and the political task can begin again. Is it asking too little to ratify in public what is already happening? (Latour, 1993: p. 144, emphases added)

Perhaps Latour is asking for too little. From a posthumanist perspective, it is implausible to cast the emergence of modernity as an event solely in the history of thought. In principle and historically, it is more plausible to think of it as an event in the history of agency. Modernity can be characterized by a kind of practical dualism – the opening up of a visible gap between people and things in the growing presence of what I call free-standing machines (e.g. cannon, steam engines) – machines with their own agency, not reducible to adjuncts or

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delegates of human agency (Pickering, 2001). If modernity is a state of mind, it is a state of mind that has grown over the last few centuries in a world of scientific and technological and engineering achievements that speak to us constantly of a separation of the human and the nonhuman, and of enduring structures behind the flux of appearances. The material world we inhabit is a modern one, and if we want to undermine modernity as a state of mind, a few scholarly books, however eloquent, are hardly likely to do the job. We have to build some sort of counter-world in which another kind of ontological imagination can flourish. That is why I am so interested in the ontological assemblage that I have begun to trace out above, the assemblage that includes specific sciences, technologies and forms of engineering, as well as the arts and entertainment, and all sorts of other elements too, resonating with one another and with posthumanist STS (Pickering, forthcoming). The work of connecting the elements of this assemblage, thematizing its ontological peculiarity and fostering its growth, might be a material-scientific-technological-artisticetc. counterpart to Latour’s political ecology, in creating a lived world that could challenge the hegemony of modernity (without necessarily obliterating the latter). This is an image of a nomadic (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), fully posthumanist subpolitics, not limited to a new way of thinking. I said earlier that posthumanist STS is an open-ended project, so I will not attempt any unitary summing up. We have been for a walk in the garden, looking at some of the strange and interesting plants and flowers that grow there. No doubt there are others that I failed to point out, and new ones will spring up next year. The admission fee is to leave behind the ambition of modern science to penetrate the veil of appearances; the visible is beautiful enough.

NOTES 1 Writing this chapter has brought home to me what a lively and diverse field STS is. I can by no

means do justice to the literature that I know well and I have to acknowledge that there are important strands of the literature that I do not know well enough to write about. What follows is therefore very much structured by where I stand in STS and how I got there; other people would have written this chapter very differently. I must note, for example, that I cannot do justice to important contributions to STS from both feminist studies and cultural studies, nor to an impressive literature in the cultural history of science associated with the names of senior scholars such as Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, Simon Schaffer and Norton Wise. Rouse (1993) is a review of what he calls ‘cultural studies of scientific knowledge’. For an overview of current research in STS one might look at the contents of the two leading journals, Social Studies of Science and Science, Technology & Human Values, and Biagioli (1999) is a valuable collection of canonical essays. 2 Some key works: Latour and Woolgar (1986 [1979]), Knorr Cetina (1981), Lynch (1985), Pickering (1984), Gooding, Pinch and Schaffer (1989), Fleck (1979 [1935]), Kuhn (1970 [1962]), Feyerabend (1993 [1975]), Hacking (1983). In making a simple distinction between humanist and posthumanist approaches to STS I could be accused of dichotomizing, and with some justification. I can, however, make a couple of remarks in my own defence. First, beyond the chicken debate one can follow a pattern of critical (and often nasty) exchanges between humanists and posthumanists through the science studies and sociological literature, including Lynch (1992) vs. Bloor (1992), Bloor (1999) vs. Latour (1999), Fuller vs. Latour (Barron 2003), Gingras (1997) vs. Pickering (1999), Breslau (2000) vs. Pickering (2000) and Harwood (2005) vs. Pickering (2005b). See also the critique of the sociology of scientific knowledge in Pickering (1995a) and Jones (1996) as a response. Second, the object of this chapter is not to be even-handed; it is to examine only one pole of the ‘dichotomy’ (and I will not exaggerate the unity of this pole). 3 Canonical works in humanist STS would include Barnes (1974), Bloor (1991 [1976]), the essays collected in Collins (1992 [1985]), Shapin (1979, 1982) and Bijker, Hughes and Pinch (1987). More recently, see Barnes, Bloor and Henry (1996), Collins (2004) and Collins and Pinch (1993). 4 I do not claim that the material, social and conceptual are always distinguishable. Many elements that fall under the heading of culture as used here have an irreducibly hybrid structure – think of buildings, for example. 5 Hence Latour’s (1987) injunction to ‘follow scientists around’. 6 It is worth emphasizing that STS authors have found no use for a quasi-biological centring on ‘memes’ as the cultural equivalent of genes. 7 De Landa (2002) closes the loop between science and philosophy in a fascinating reading of aspects

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of Deleuze’s philosophy in terms of the sciences of dynamical systems and fractal mathematics. 8 Traweek (1988) is an earlier book-length study of the culture of high-energy physics. 9 The notion of distributed cognition refers to situations in which the production and use of knowledge is distributed in a decentred fashion over a field of humans and instruments. See Hutchins (1995) for the classic example of navigating a US warship. 10 For sophisticated reflections on the form of the Science Wars, see Smith (1997). For an emollient last word on the Science Wars from humanist STS and access to the earlier literature, see Labinger and Collins (2001). 11 For more on this theme from a variety of perspectives including both humanist and posthumanist STS, see the essays collected in Klein (ed., 2005). 12 I could note that whenever STS crosses the terrain of management and planning, Foucault’s work on discipline and governmentality is often invoked and elaborated in significant ways. Of the works discussed here, see Coppin (2003), Haraway (2003) and Pickering (2005a). See also, for example, Graham (1998) on scientific management, Guzik (forthcoming) on police tactics in managing the agency of offenders, and Miller and O’Leary (1994) on the reorganization of the factory as a calculable space. 13 Goldman and Schurman (2000) is a review of the state of play in environmental sociology that points towards a genuinely posthumanist approach. 14 The story does not end here. The ‘lagoons’ just mentioned constitute a massive biohazard which returns to the human realm beyond the confinement facility as an organizing centre for oppositional social movements, shifts in the law and so on. 15 See Marick (under review) for a similar contrast in approaches to writing computer software. More generally, computer science and work on information technology increasingly displays a reflexive posthumanism, See, for example, Neff and Stark (2004). 16 This apolitical character is partly an artefact of my genealogy of STS. Feminist and cultural studies of science and technology, in contrast, have an overtly political edge, though often a humanist one. I am concerned here with posthumanist politics. 17 One might wonder, of course, whether this observation is empirically adequate. Did science tell the Americans to bomb the Afghanis and Iraqis, for example, and to occupy their countries? Probably not. Latour perhaps addresses this in his distinction between ‘civilized’ and ‘barbaric’ forms of politics – the former describing his vision of how politics should be conducted (which has clear affinities with the bureaucratic ‘due process’ of the EU Parliament), and the latter pretty obviously referring to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. 18 We should note another axis of subpolitical intervention by Latour in collaboration with Peter Weibel, the organization of two public exhibitions at

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the Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe designed to contrast humanist and posthumanist politics. On the first of these, held in 2002, see Latour and Weibel (2002). On the second, in 2005 – Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy – see makingthingspublic.zkm.de.

REFERENCES Asplen, L. (forthcoming) ‘Acting in an open-ended world: nature, culture, and becoming in environmental management’, to appear in A. Pickering and K. Guzik (eds), The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barnes, B. (1974) Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Barnes, B., Bloor, D. and Henry, J. (1996) Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barron (ed.) (2003) ‘A strong distinction between humans and non-humans is no longer required for research purposes: a debate between Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller’, History of the Human Sciences, 16: 77–99. Biagioli, M. (ed.) (1999) The Science Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. Bijker, W.E., Hughes, T.P. and Pinch, T.J. (eds) (1987) The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bloor, D. (1991) Knowledge and Social Imagery. 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1st edn, 1976.) Bloor, D. (1992) ‘Left and right Wittgensteinians’, in Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 266–282. Bloor, D. (1999) ‘Anti-Latour’ and ‘Reply to Bruno Latour’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 30A: 81–112; 131–136. Breslau, D. (2000) ‘Sociology after humanism: a lesson from contemporary science studies’, Sociological Theory, 18: 289–307. Callon, M. (1986) ‘Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay’, in J. Law (ed.), ‘Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge?’ Sociological Review Monograph 32. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 196–233. Callon, M. (ed.) (1998) Laws of the Market. Oxford: Blackwell. Callon, M. and Latour, B. (1992) ‘Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley’, in Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice

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and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 343–368. Collins, H.M. (1992) Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice. 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1st edn, 1985.) Collins, H.M. (2004) Gravity’s Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Collins, H.M. and Pinch, T.J. (1993) The Golem: What You Should Know about Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, H.M. and Yearley, S. (1992) ‘Epistemological Chicken’ and ‘Journey into Space’, in Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 301–326, 369–389. Coppin, D. (2002) Capitalist Pigs: Large-Scale Swine Facilities and the Mutual Construction of Nature and Society. PhD dissertation. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, unpublished. Coppin, D. (2003) ‘Foucauldian hog futures: The birth of mega-hog farms’, Sociological Quarterly, 44: 597–616. Coppin, D. (forthcoming) ‘Crate and mangle: questions of agency in confinement livestock facilities’, in A. Pickering and K. Guzik (eds), The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cussins, C.T. (1999) ‘Confessions of a bioterrorist: subject position and reproductive technologies’, in S. Squiers and E. A. Kaplan (eds), Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction. Rutgers University Press, pp. 189–219. De Landa, M. (2002) Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Continuum Books: London. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. (1987) Dialogues. New York: Columbia University Press. Dupré, J. (1993) The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Durkheim, E. (1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: The Free Press. (1st edn, 1912.) Durkheim, E. and Mauss, M. (1963) Primitive Classification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1st edn,1903.) Elichirigoity, F. (1999) Planet Management: Limits to Growth, Computer Simulation, and the Emergence of Global Spaces. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Eno, B. (2003) ‘An interview with Brian Eno’, in D. Whittaker, Stafford Beer: A Personal Memoir. Charlbury, Oxon: Wavestone Press, pp. 53–63.

Feyerabend, P.K. (1993) Against Method. 3rd edn. New York: Verso. (1st edn, 1975.) Fine, A. (1986) ‘The natural ontological attitude’, in Fine, The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism and the Quantum Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 112–135. Fine, A. (1996) ‘Science made up: constructivist sociology of scientific knowledge’, in P. Galison and D. Stump (eds), The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 231–254. Fleck, L. (1979) Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1st edn, 1935.) Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Franklin, A. (forthcoming) ‘A choreography of fire: a posthumanist account of Australians and Eucalypts’, to appear in A. Pickering and K. Guzik (eds), The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Galison, P. (1997) Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Giere, R.N. (1993) ‘Science and technology studies: prospects for an enlightened postmodern synthesis’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 18: 102–112. Gingras, Y. (1997) ‘The new dialectics of nature’, Social Studies of Science, 27: 317–334. Goldman, M. and Schurman, R. (2000) ‘Closing the “Great Divide”: new social theory on society and nature’, Annual Reviews of Sociology, 26: 563–584. Gomart, E. and Hennion, A. (1999) ‘A sociology of attachment: music amateurs, drug users’, in J. Law and J. Hassard (eds), Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 220–247. Gooding, D., Pinch, T.J. and Schaffer, S. (eds) (1989) The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graham, L. (1998) Managing on Her Own: Dr. Lillian Gilbreth and Women’s Work in the Interwar Era. Norcross, GA: Engineering and Management Press. Gross, P.R. and Levitt, N. (1994) Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Guzik, K. (forthcoming) ‘Soul collectors: Police officers and the capture of domestic batterers under pro-arrest domestic violence policing’, in A. Pickering and K. Guzik (eds), The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hacking, I. (1983) Representing and Intervening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Haraway, D. (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D. (2004) ‘A manifesto for Cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review, 80, 65–107. Reprinted in (2003) Haraway, The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 7–45. (1st edn, 1985.) Harwood, J. (2005) ‘Comments on Andy Pickering’s Paper’, Perspectives on Science, 13: 406–415. Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hutchins, E. (1995) Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. James. W. (1978) Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (previous edns, 1907; 1909.) Jones, M.-P. (1996) ‘Posthuman Agency: Between Theoretical Traditions’, Sociological Theory, 14: 290–309. Kim, J. (2005) Hybrid Modernity: The Scientific Construction of Korean Medicine in a Global Age, PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, unpublished. Kim, J. (2006) ‘Beyond paradigm: making transcultural connections in a scientific translation of acupuncture’, Social Science and Medicine, 62: 2960–2972. Klein, U. (2005) ‘Technoscience avant la lettre’, Perspectives on Science, 13: 226–266. Klein, U. (ed.) (2005) ‘Technoscientific productivity’, special issue Perspectives on Science, 13(2–3). Knorr Cetina, K. (1981) The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford and New York: Pergamon. Knorr Cetina, K. (1999) Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Knorr Cetina, K. and Preda, A. (eds) (2005) The Sociology of Financial Markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kuhn, T.S. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1st edn, 1962.) Labinger, J.A. and Collins, H. (eds) (2001) The One Culture? A Conversation about Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, B. (1983) ‘Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world’, in K.D. Knorr Cetina and M. Mulkay (eds), Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science. Beverly Hills: Sage, pp. 141–170. Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Latour, B. (1988) The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1999) ‘For David Bloor … and beyond: A Reply to David Bloor’s “Anti-Latour”’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 30A: 113–129. Latour, B. (2004) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. and Weibel, P. (eds) (2002) Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1986) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (1st edn, 1979.) Lynch, M. (1985) Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science: A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lynch, M. (1992) ‘Extending Wittgenstein: the pivotal move from epistemology to the sociology of science’ and ‘From the “will to theory” to the discursive collage: reply to Bloor’, in Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 215–265; 283–306. Mannheim, K. (1936) Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Marick, B. (under review) ‘A manglish way of working: agile software development’, in A. Pickering and K. Guzik (eds), The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). MacKenzie, D. (2006) An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McPhee, J. (1989) ‘Atchafalaya’, in The Control of Nature. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, pp. 3–92. McSwain, R. (2002) ‘The social reconstruction of a reverse salient in electrical guitar technologies: noise, the solid body, and Jimi Hendrix’, in H.-J. Braun (ed.), Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 186–198. Miller, P. and O’Leary, T. (1994) ‘Accounting, “economic citizenship” and the spatial reordering of manufacture’, Accounting, Organizations and Society, 19: 15–43. Neff, G. and Stark, D. (2004) ‘Permanently beta: responsive organization in the Internet era’, in P.N. Howard and S. Jones (eds), Society Online: The Internet in Context. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Pickering, A. (1984) Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pickering, A. (ed.) (1992) Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pickering, A. (1995a) The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pickering, A. (1995b) ‘Cyborg history and the World War II regime’, Perspectives on Science, 3: 1–48. Pickering, A. (1997a) ‘Time and a theory of the visible’, Human Studies, 20: 325–333. Pickering, A. (1997b) ‘History of economics and the history of agency’, in J. Henderson (ed.), The State of the History of Economics: Proceedings of the History of Economics Society. London: Routledge, pp. 6–18. Pickering, A. (1999) ‘In the land of the blind … thoughts on Gingras’, Social Studies of Science, 29: 307–311. Pickering, A. (2000) ‘The objects of sociology: a response to Breslau’s “Sociology after Humanism”’, Sociological Theory, 18: 306–314. Pickering, A. (2001) ‘Science as alchemy’, in J.W. Scott and D. Keates (eds), Schools of Thought: Twenty-five Years of Interpretive Social Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 194–206. Pickering, A. (2002) ‘Cybernetics and the Mangle: Ashby, Beer and Pask’, Social Studies of Science, 32: 413–437. Pickering, A. (2005a) ‘Decentring sociology: synthetic dyes and social theory’, in U. Klein (ed.), ‘Technoscientific Productivity’, Perspectives on Science, 13: 352–405. Pickering, A. (2005b) ‘From dyes to Iraq: a reply to Jonathan Harwood’, Perspectives on Science, 13: 416–425. Pickering, A. (2005c) ‘A gallery of monsters: Cybernetics and self-organisation, 1940–1970’, in S. Franchi and G. Güzeldere (eds), Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds: Artificial Intelligence from Automata to Cyborgs. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 229–245. Pickering, A. (2006) ‘Ontologisches Theater: Gordon Pask, Kybernetik und die Künste’ [‘Science as Theatre: Gordon Pask, Cybernetics and the Arts’], in H. Schramm, L. Schwarte and J. Lazardzig (eds), Spektakuläre Experimente: Praktiken der Evidenzproduktion im 17. Jahrhundert. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 454–476. To appear with revisions in English in Cybernetics & Human Knowing. Pickering, A. (forthcoming) ‘New ontologies’, to appear in A. Pickering and K. Guzik (eds), The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Pinch, T.J. and Bijker, W. (1984) ‘The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other’, Social Studies of Science, 14, 399–441, shortened and updated in Bijker, Hughes and Pinch (eds) (1987) The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, pp. 17–50. Pinch, T. and Trocco, F. (2002) Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesiser. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rheinberger, H.J. (1997) Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesising Proteins in the Laboratory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rouse, J. (1993) ‘What are cultural studies of scientific knowledge?’, Configurations, 1: 57–94. Scheid, V. (2002) Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schivelbusch, W. (1986) The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shapin, S. (1979) ‘The politics of observation: cerebral anatomy and social interests in the Edinburgh phrenology disputes’, in R. Wallis (ed.), On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge. Sociological Review Monograph 27. University of Keele, pp. 139–178. Shapin, S. (1982) ‘History of science and its sociological reconstructions’, History of Science, 20: 157–211. Smith, B.H. (1997) Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Star, S.L. (1991) ‘Power, technology and the phenomenology of conventions: on being allergic to onions’, in J. Law (ed.), A Sociology of Monsters? Power, Technology and the Modern World. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 27–57. Star, S.L. and Griesemer, J.R. (1989) ‘Institutional Ecology, “translations” and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology’, Social Studies of Science, 19: 387–420. Thompson, E.P. (1963) The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Traweek, S. (1988) Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Whitehead, A.N. (1926) Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolfe, B. (1952) Limbo. New York: Random House.

PART II

Current Issues

INTRODUCTION The second section of this Handbook moves from disciplines to cross-disciplinary themes. Here the emphasis shifts to a series of issues to do with large-scale forms of organization of the social world (the nation, modernity, globalization); the relation of indigenous peoples to modernity; structural determinants of social being such as property rights and forms of economic calculation; dimensions of social identity, including class, ethnicity and gender; and finally the industrial, technological and institutional dimensions of cultural processes. Put like this, many of these issues seem, on the face of it, not to be primarily ‘cultural’; yet each of these chapters develops in detail an account of the crucial role played by cultural factors in the formation of the structures and categories of social being. A clear example of this centrality of the cultural has to do with the way the nation state has been understood and indeed brought into being in relation to a shared imaginary of belonging and exclusion, built around shared ethnic, religious and linguistic traditions and a common past. David McCrone explores a way of thinking about nation states that sees the world as composed of a mosaic of territorially bounded cultures constructed around these common traditions. Alternatively, nations can be understood as cultural constructions rather than as ‘cultures’ in their own right: imagined

but not imaginary entities. Contemporary theory differs largely in the degree of weight it gives to cultural factors in the constitution of nations: for Gellner, nations are above all mechanisms of cultural integration, working through a number of systems but particularly the education system to bind citizens to the polity and to cast inequality as a matter of individual merit rather than group disadvantage. ‘Ethnicist’ theorists such as Smith criticize ‘modernist’ theorists such as Gellner for overrating the role of structural features (capitalism, bureaucracy, class) at the expense of the symbolic dimensions of ethnicity, understood as a discourse of othering that forms the raw material of politics. In the final section of this chapter McCrone explores the formative role of the cultural coordinates of time and space, working as rich metaphors of belonging and conflict. Joel Kahn’s chapter on ‘Culture and Modernities’poses the question of the cultural embedding of socio-economic structures. Rather than a singular modernity (that of capitalism, for example), much contemporary theory posits a multiplicity of alternative modernities corresponding to the different ways in which the world’s diverse cultures shape invariant structures to their own ends. This thesis picks up on the classic anthropological model of a plurality of relatively self-contained cultures, here defined primarily in national terms, and it takes up the critique

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within anthropology of nineteenth-century liberal evolutionism, with its assumption that Europe is the driving force of a progressive world history. This model, transposed from anthropology into theories of modernization and globalization, repeats a relativism (each culture is to be understood only in its own terms) that has become problematic. Kahn explores the modernization of Malaysia in order to ask whether it constitutes a genuinely alternative modernity. What he finds is that a present modernity of the kind Malaysia seems to be entering from its ‘pre-modern’ past is bound up with a number of older ‘modernities’: that of British colonial rule, or that of certain reformist currents in Islam; and conversely, he argues, Asia is always-already caught up in a modernity that we mistakenly characterize as Western. Diana Crane investigates some of the key questions addressed in the first two chapters in her chapter on globalization: questions about the nature of modernity and about the role of the nation state in a global order. She distinguishes three general models of globalization. The first has to do with deregulated flows of capital and goods between nation states, and it addresses itself to questions of cultural imperialism and cultural hegemony, to the relation between the global and the local, and to models of the clash of civilizations. The second, associated particularly with the work of Castells, is concerned with globalized networks and with cultural flows that transcend the nation state; key metaphors are that of the global village and of the hybridization of global cultures. The third is concerned with the development of a global civic order, often associated with NGOs, and it has a central focus on questions of the nature and viability of the global public sphere. These political questions, which go to the possibility of the survival or even enhancement of democratic participation in a world of highly mediated communication, are taken up in several subsequent chapters. Christopher Pinney takes up a similar question to the one Joel Kahn addresses, positing that there is no single form or experience of colonialism, nor a singular set

of cultural forms associated with it. Analysing the cultural technologies that accompany colonialism (the colonial gaze and the forms of knowledge associated with it; constructions of caste or race that help form governable populations), he contrasts a set of ‘strong’ versions of these technologies (such as the work of Edward Said or Bernard Cohn) with accounts of the ambivalence of the colonial presence, in which – to take Homi Bhabha’s example – the ‘English book’ is fractured in its dissemination and translation into the cultures of the colonized. Like Kahn, Pinney asks about the ways in which Europe was shaped by the experience of empire; and he examines the work of a number of visual artists, many of them indigenous, in order to help conceptualize that experience from the perspectives of both colonizer and colonized, and so to reinforce the notion of the heterogeneity of colonialisms. Tim Rowse seeks to problematize the category of the indigenous itself, in particular as it is constituted in relation to projects of development. The recognition of cultural difference in the modernization process derives from an Enlightenment universalism which comes to take the form of the ‘protection’ of indigenous peoples under protocols developed by the League of Nations, the United Nations, the World Bank, the ILO and others. ‘Indigenous’ thus becomes a key term in discourses of labour regulation and economic modernization. Rowse explores three forms of exchange through which the ‘cultural survival’ of indigenous people is negotiated: exchange of labour power and of art, and political exchange. Each of these is a dimension of the cultural constitution of indigeneity, and each sets up a relation between the immanent temporalities of indigenous people and the temporality of development. John Frow looks at the changing constitution of property and the increasing integration of cultural materials into property relations. This process seems to go against the grain of the traditional exemption of cultural objects from property rights, but in fact there is a long history of ownership either of material goods such as books or pictures, or of the

CURRENT ISSUES

underlying level of organization from which those goods are generated. All of the culture industries are underpinned by intellectual property rights, and terms from the vocabulary of cultural creation (author, work, creation, expression) are central to intellectual property law. Increasingly, the cultures of groups are coming to be seen as available for ownership in the same way as other cultural material; these may take the form of items of national heritage (such as the Elgin marbles), or of ancestral remains, or of expressions of indigenous cultures. The chapter identifies some problems with the latter: it depends upon a notion of homogeneous, bounded cultures with little contact with or influence from other cultures; it freezes tradition in time; and it exoticizes cultural difference. The economy is often seen as the obverse of culture: a realm of hard calculation rather than (and often in contradiction with) social relationships. Yet this binary points to a mutual constitution of these two categories. Timothy Mitchell seeks to shift the question of the relation between economy and culture (or economy and society) to that of the processes by which an entity that we designate as ‘the economy’ came into being. Arguing that prior to the twentieth century the term ‘economy’ refers to methods of government rather than a manipulable object, Mitchell posits that the economy as a distinct sphere correlated with distinctive forms of knowledge emerges only in the mid-twentieth century, and indeed is in part constituted by those forms of knowledge and the procedures of calculation they made possible. Economics is (perhaps like many others) a performative discipline. This perspective allows him then to reframe a set of traditional questions about the embedding and the disembedding of the economy by arguing that both ‘culturalist’ and ‘structuralist’ perspectives rely upon a normative model in which social actors are understood as rational and goal-seeking human beings. An alternative is offered by actor network theory, which seeks to account for sociotechnical structures where the ‘actors’ are mixes of persons, information, capital, legal frameworks, material things,

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technology, politics, and so on, and which describes processes of construction rather than large abstract objects such as ‘economy’ and ‘culture’. The following four chapters deal with different dimensions of personal identity. Mike Savage maps the rise of reflexive class identities, shaped not through direct identification but through a situation of the self in relation to class categories. This process, he argues, mirrors a shift from ‘depth’ models of class to ‘surface’ models which posit the fluidity of class forms and see them as bound up with classification processes. Savage identifies three main taxonomic models: a liberal model, which distinguishes agents, for purposes of governance, by rank, status, hierarchy, class, ethnicity, race, gender and so on; a model of political agency, in which populist or middle-class identities are linked to political mobilization, and where culture plays an increasing role in theorizing the ‘problematic of the proletariat’; and a third model which has to do with the role of class in the jurisdiction of academic disciplines. Just as Mitchell posits a close relation between the economy and the discipline of economics, Savage points to the increasing centrality of processes of classification to the making of class identities, and an increased reflexivity reflecting the role of sociological taxonomies in popular discourses such as those of marketing. Multiculturalism has become a central, and highly politicized term in contemporary political discourse, with both a normative and a performative force. Ghassan Hage argues that the concept, and the policy it embodies, was never a matter of deliberate choice but rather reflects and reinforces a process of inexorable social transformation in which the cultural coherence of nation states and, thus, of their power to nationalize culture, is progressively weakened in the postwar period. Although it is policy by default, multiculturalism does bring about certain real changes such as the formation of new modes of subjectivity involving changed attitudes to cultural difference. Its conditions of possibility are what Hage calls

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a ‘relaxed nationalism’, cosmopolitanism, and a sociologically informed sense of social justice. Multiculturalism differs from cultural pluralism in giving expression to a governmental desire for cohesion-withdifference, and it expresses the integrative role that culture has come to play since the 1990s, to some extent replacing the integrative role of the national economy. It is this heightened role of culture that gives rise to the culture wars of the same period, and to the heightened tensions surrounding a religious Islam that understands itself (or is perceived as understanding itself) in transcendental terms. Simon Clarke asks whether personal identity is primarily a matter of ascription or of experience. He explores this question by way of Erving Goffman’s work on the shaping of the self through self-presentations and a continuous ‘profiling’ of selfhood, and Foucault’s analysis of the shaping of the self in relation to powerful discourses of expertise. Personal identity, Clarke argues, is most strongly formed in relation to an Other of the self, and he uses the work of Fanon and Zizek to foreground the emotional experience of this relation to the Other. Clarke concludes by examining Bauman’s theorization of the Stranger, a category which at once reinforces and complicates social identity. Elspeth Probyn and Gilbert Caluya’s essay on sex and sexualities describes the problems they and many others find with the common-sense distinction (once, of course, a conceptual break-through for feminism) between biological sex and cultural gender. ‘Sex’, they argue, is a more fluid and less definite trait than this distinction allows for, a continuum rather than a binary. The questions they ask are situated within a post-structuralist problematic that analyses both sex and gender as discursive constructs, predicated on assumptions of normality and deviance and imbricated with power and knowledge. In Joan Scott’s words, ‘gender is the knowledge that establishes meanings for bodily differences’, and such taxonomic knowledges are never innocent. Similarly, in Judith Butler’s work gender identity is understood as being performatively constituted

by its expressions; it is a practice, not a state. In Foucault’s late writings, finally, sexuality is treated as a component of the ‘care of the self’; this understanding feeds into the contemporary centrality of sex and sexuality to an ‘everyday ethics of living’, as well as to what Giddens thinks of as the plasticity of contemporary sexuality. Probyn and Caluya’s paper exemplifies some of these issues through a reading of a series of interviews with school-age girls which shows them negotiating their sexuality under uncertain and often pressured conditions. With David Hesmondhalgh’s chapter and the two that follow it we turn to the institutional and industrial dimension of culture. The concept of the culture industry enters the theoretical mainstream in a chapter of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), where it had an essentially negative cast: culture and industry form an oxymoron spelled out in the chapter subtitle, ‘Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. Later writers develop a less normative account of the culture industries: Bernard Miège and Nicholas Garnham develop a sociology of cultural production around the concept, and a number of American writers use it as the basis of a political economy of culture. An important outcome of these theoretical developments is an account of the economic logic of cultural production. Like all information products, cultural goods are costly and risky to develop, but expensive prototypes can then be reproduced indefinitely at minimal cost. Since information, unlike material goods, is not exhausted in consumption, it needs to be made scarce in order to be treated as a profitable resource; information and cultural industries thus use strategies such as the control of release schedules and copyright to impose a scarcity which is not inherent in the products themselves. This logic of cultural production has policy implications: what kind of balance should government and industry seek between public access to cultural goods and private reward; and what are the associated benefits of cultural production? Policy emphasis in the 1970s and 1980s tended to fall on the side of public access

CURRENT ISSUES

and audience development; from the 1990s it tended to emphasize urban regeneration and individual entrepreneurialism, and these emphases, desmondhalgh argues, are carried over in the ‘creative industries’ approach which he sees as sharing many of the tenets of neoliberalism. The concept of cultural technologies – the subject of Celia Lury’s chapter – poses the question of the relation of the human to the technological, and of the distinctness of these categories. This is a question about whether there is a distinctively human way of being, defined by culture and external to the technology used by humans. It is also a question about the social shaping of technology, and of the ways meanings relate to the technologically structured medium in which they are expressed. One kind of answer to these questions is given in Raymond Williams’ humanist critique of technological determinism and determinacy; another in theories of the cinematic apparatus, which approach it in terms of the modes of subject formation it enables; another again in McLuhan’s account of the way technology becomes a part of the human, where technologies are seen as translation devices which transform us (just as Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’ do in their interplay with power and knowledge). Two more detailed and historically specific analyses of apparatuses of subject formation are Jonathan Crary’s theorization of the workings of nineteenth-century technologies of vision, and Friedrich Kittler’s account of discourse networks grounded in cultural technologies such as writing. Simondon’s work on the way technology constitutes the entities (technology and nature, technology

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and society) that it at once connects and separates has been seminal for these questions, as more recently has the methodological determination in the work of Callon, Latour and others not to work with an a priori distinction between human and non-human agents. Tiziana Terranova raises many of these issues in a different context. Both new media (the complex of media built on digital platforms) and cyberculture (the cultural realm emerging from digital science and technologies) problematize the relation of the human to the machine, of nature to culture, since within a cybernetic framework these two poles are not ontologically distinct. Indeed, it is arguable that cyberspace represents something like a new ontological dimension – ‘a groundless foundation of social experience’, a reality that is shot through with virtuality. This is the vision expressed in cyberpunk fiction. At the same time, the technical basis of the Internet as a distributed network opens up a logic of the free flow of information, and this logic has two kinds of consequence: on the one hand it sets up a tension with intellectual property law and with commercial uses of the Net, and on the other it raises fundamental questions about the relation between information and democracy. Does the Internet represent a new kind of public sphere, and can it operate without the distortions that Habermas saw informing the mass-mediated public sphere? Many accounts see the development of cyberspace as a democratizing force, but it can also be read as an expression of the globalization of capital, as an elaboration of the category of immaterial labour, or even as a kind of collective human intelligence.

15 Culture and Nation David McCrone

INTRODUCTION Culture and nation are inextricably linked. For the social scientist, that is both an advantage and a disadvantage. On the one hand, nations are frequently construed as being culturally homogeneous groupings which, as often as not, are territorially defined such that its members believe they have the right of political self-determination; hence, the (con)fusion of nation and state. On the other hand, much of the academic writing on nations and nationalism focuses on the lack of fit between culture and nation, even to the point of questioning the validity of the concept ‘nation’ itself. Conventionally, the culture-nation nexus becomes a takenfor-granted one such that the world can be construed as dividing into self-defining ‘national cultures’ which are then mapped on to political arrangements which we call states. In Ernest Gellner’s words, nationalism is ‘a political principle, which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent’ (Gellner, 1983: p. 22). Although it is true that it is in the interests of nationalists to assert the fit between culture and nation in a particular territory – a culturally distinct and

homogeneous people have the right to govern themselves – it follows from the specific case that they see the world as one giant jigsaw puzzle of cultural and political entities for which there is a ‘natural’ solution, and that conflict arises because the working out of this solution is blocked. Deconstructing nation (and culture) has tended to be the raison d’être of nationalism studies, to show that there is nothing ‘natural’, still less God-given, about nations, but, rather, they are cultural constructions which serve material interests, and have virtually no analytical value other than as ideological artefacts. This chapter will argue for a middle way, that one should neither accept nations and cultures as given, nor treat nations as beyond social definition, as belonging purely to the realm of rhetoric. In short, we need to treat ‘nation’ as a ‘thinkable entity’, to borrow Timothy Mitchell’s useful term elsewhere in this volume. In this chapter, we will explore the culture-nation nexus with regard to the key debates about the origins of nations and the development of nationalism as a political ideology. In particular, we will explore how conceptions of culture and ethnicity are constructed and

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mobilized around nationality, with social and political consequences of inclusion and exclusion. Finally, the chapter examines how nations operate in time (history) and place (geography) such that ‘nationals’ are deemed to be ‘tomorrow’s ancestors’1 linking past, present and future.

DEFINING THE NATION The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘nation’ as: I. A people or group of peoples; a political state. 1. a. A large aggregate of communities and individuals united by factors such as common descent, language, culture, history, or occupation of the same territory, so as to form a distinct people. Now also: such a people forming a political state; a political state. (In early use also in pl.: a country.) In early examples notions of race and common descent predominate. In later use notions of territory, political unity, and independence are more prominent, although some writers still make a pointed distinction between nation and state. Cf. NATION-STATE n.

It is worth teasing out the key aspects of this definition, not because it provides a definitive answer to what a nation is, but because it helps to distil the elements emerging out of debate. In the first place, nations are deemed to be large rather than small communities such that, unlike a small village, people cannot know each other. Neither is a nation a large city or region where there is minimal attempt to mobilize around perceived shared characteristics other than residence. In short, sharing a territory is a necessary but not a sufficient characteristic of the nation. To be sure, there have been socio-political attempts to mobilize on a non-territorial basis – the ‘Black nation’ or ‘the nation of Islam’, for example – but the lack of geographical propinquity tends to be a significant handicap. The compilers of the dictionary definition point to the importance of shared language and culture, common history and descent, as well as common residence as the bases of distinctness. Usually, at least one of these factors needs to be present, even if they are subject to considerable cultural construction

after the event. The final aspect of the definition which is worth highlighting is the distinction between ‘notions of race and common descent’ – what we might call ‘ethnic’ aspects – and ‘notions of territory, political unity, and independence’– that is, ‘civic’ones. This distinction between ethnic and civic has been a central one in studies of nationalism, one which has both positive and negative implications. In 1945, Hans Kohn laid down the distinction which has both ideological and analytical significance. ‘Western’ nationalism arose, according to Kohn, in countries such as England, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the USA as a response to the formation of the modern state. It was essentially political and territorial; the cultural nation coincided with the political territory governed by the state. Citizens were in essence members of the nation. On the other hand, ‘Eastern’ forms of nationalism (beginning significantly with Germany) allowed for no such correspondence. In central and eastern Europe and in Asia the frontiers of existing states and ethnic identity rarely coincided. Nationalism became largely a means of disrupting rather than reinforcing state boundaries, and sought to redraw them in line with ethnic demands. Hence, nationalism in the West was mainly political – people were defined as ‘citizens’; in the East it was cultural – people were ‘the folk’. The Eastern form, according to Kohn, ‘extolled the primitive and ancient depth and peculiarities of its traditions in contrast to Western nationalism and to universal standards’(Kohn, 1994: p. 164). In the West, nationalism had its origins in concepts of individual liberty and rational cosmopolitanism, whereas Eastern nationalism ‘lacked self-assurance’, had an ‘inferiority complex’ compensated for ‘by over-emphasis and over-confidence’. Kohn’s account seemed to square with the view that German nationalism with its influence of Herder’s romanticism had to be replaced by something more rational and Western. Kohn’s account has been long-lasting and dominant in the second half of the twentieth century. In recent years, much of the debate has turned on distinctions between

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‘civic/territorial’ forms of nationalism (good) and ‘ethnic/cultural’ forms (bad). Plamenatz (1976), for example, distinguished between the rise of ‘Western’ nationalism (in Germany and Italy) among those who felt themselves to be at a disadvantage, but who nevertheless were ‘equipped culturally’ in ways that favoured success and excellence; and ‘Eastern’nationalism (among Slavs, in Africa, Asia and Latin America) which emerged among those recently drawn into an alien civilization and whose culture was not adapted to new conditions, and which was frequently illiberal (Plamenatz, 1976). The resurrection of what Gellner called the ‘dark gods’ theory of nationalism from the 1980s owes much to the fear in Western cosmopolitan circles that the Pandora’s box of ethnic irrationalism has been reopened. The vocabulary used was frequently that of tribal feeling, kinship, religion, cultural traditions, attachment to land – all implying that nationalism belongs properly to pre-modern social formations, and that once the forces of modernism and consumerism get to work, all that will vanish. Nationalism is caricatured as ‘thinking with the blood’, and has drawn the ire of cosmopolitan intellectuals. Eric Hobsbawm, for example, has judged that ‘the characteristic nationalist movements of the late twentieth century are essentially negative, or rather divisive’ (Hobsbawn, 1990: p. 164). Even much pronationalist opinion in the West (such as in Scotland or Catalunya) goes out of its way to stress how theirs is of the non-racist, nonthreatening, civic variety, while not denying the ‘ethnic’ character of nationalism elsewhere, thereby accepting that nationalism can be divided into good (civic) and bad (ethnic) forms. Such is the power of orthodoxy. Orthodoxy about nations and nationalism is especially powerful in so far as those who are in possession of it often deny that it exists at all; hence, the saying: I am patriotic, but you are nationalistic. In this context, ‘nationalism’ is something others are accused of, whereas one’s feeling for the nation is deemed a patriotic – and harmless – sentiment. That should alert us to the hazards of speaking about nationalism; it

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is fraught with value-judgements even more complex than the simple distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism. There are many manifestations, from the classical nineteenthcentury European state-making form, to the emergence of ‘liberation’ nationalism in the twentieth, to the rise of ‘neo-nationalist’ forms in advanced industrial societies in the late twentieth century, to say nothing of the harnessing of nationalism by post-communist societies and by economically developing states around the world. To imply that there is a single form of nationalism, and that somehow it was ‘over’ because it had served its purpose in the West during the Great Transformation of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries when modern states were made, cannot be correct. Nationalism is a particularly flexible ideology which has the capacity to mutate into many variants. Neither is there a single trajectory which all societies and nations have to follow. We also have to be careful how we use concepts such as civic and ethnic. In his work on India, for example, Chatterjee (1986, 1996) argues that anti-colonial nationalism first created its own domain of cultural sovereignty within the colonial society even before it began its struggle with the imperial power. It did this by dividing the world into material/secular and cultural/spiritual domains, and in such a way that the West was dominant in the former, and anti-colonial nationalism in the latter, in which, crucially, the essential marks of cultural identity were to be found. In this way anti-colonial nationalism was empowered, and refused to allow the imperial power to penetrate its own inner world. Chatterjee is arguing that anti-colonial nationalism had as its essence an inner, ethnic and ‘spiritual’form into which it could retreat and out of which it could sally to attack. What we are seeing here is some complex and nuanced understandings of ‘nation’ and nationalism.

WHAT IS A NATION? Let us explore with more precision how the term ‘nation’ itself emerged. Adrian Hastings

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argues that the English language is a good place to find early use of the term. In particular, he observes: ‘the English Bible, it is not exaggerated to claim, has ensured a standard use of the word “nation” from the fourteenth to the twentieth century’ (Hastings, 1997: p. 16). In particular, the Latin Vulgate translation of the bible, the most pervasive influence in medieval Europe, translated the Greek term ‘ethnos’ into the Latin ‘natio’, and thence into English as ‘nacioun’, so that from the Middle Ages, he argues, nation was the equivalent of ‘gens’, the sense of a people distinct by language, laws, habits, modes of judgement and customs. Hastings concludes: Nations grow out of ethnicities, out of wars and religious divisions, out of the emergence of literatures and nationalist propaganda and administrative pressures, but they do so bit by bit, so that at a given point of time, one cannot often simply say ‘this is a nation’ or ‘this is not’. (Hastings, 1997: 25–26)

Taken together, the definitions of nation point to language, culture, habits and customs, history, common territory, laws and even political and administrative coherence as the common criteria of nations. We search in vain, however, for what might be called the objective correlates which all nations have in common, be it language, religion, laws, customs and so on. In other words, there is no single cultural marker which all nations share. Some are defined, strictly self-defined, by one or more of these cultural markers. Even where there appears to be co-terminosity between a language and a people, there is more than meets the eye. We can, for example, find instances where ‘a people’ are self-defined by a shared language or even a common religion, but these need not be unique to them. The Danes speak Danish, the French, French, and the Germans, German, but we also know that these ‘national’ languages were subject to considerable manipulation and selection in their historical developments in order to achieve such national status. We also know that new states in the twentieth century such as Norway and Israel made strategic decisions concerning what the national language would be; in the case of Norway, bokmål (book

language) and landsmål (country language, also known as nynorsk) are in operation. Eriksen (1993a: p. 102) makes the point that in the late nineteenth century, it was the Norwegian urban middle classes, not the peasants, who selected aspects of peasant culture to elevate to ‘national’ status. Hebrew (rather than Yiddish) was the language chosen by Zionists as the language in Jewish schools, and became the official language of Israel when it was established in 1948. Quite coincidentally, it was the Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich (1945: p. 13) who observed that ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy’, to make the point that there is nothing ‘natural’ about official languages, which, of course become ‘naturalized’ on the basis of the social and political power behind them. To take another example, this time from Asia, the post-colonial state of Indonesia adopted Bahasa (Bahasa Indonesia means literally the Indonesian language), based on the Malay dialect, as the language of the nation because it was not the statistically dominant language like Javanese and Sundanese, but a second language. As Keane comments: ‘Unlike that first language, it is commonly spoken of as needing purposeful manipulation, to be “developed”, “modernized”, and made into a cosmopolitan literary vehicle’ (Keane, 2003: p. 505). In other words, being the property of no ethnic group, the language and, by implication, Indonesia are open to everyone. Indeed, having a single, uniform ‘national’ language is the exception rather than the rule. David Laitin (1992) has shown, for example, that language repertoires in Africa are complex in the context of statebuilding. Citizens need to have a knowledge of a European language to use in state bureaucracy and education; a national language for purposes of state-building; and a vernacular language for use in the home region. The question ‘what is a nation?’ has a particular resonance in nationalism studies. The scholar Ernest Renan gave a famous lecture with that title in 1882. Rather than focus on self-evident nations such as France, England, Italy and Spain, Renan was more

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interested in problematic cases: why Holland, and not Hannover; why Switzerland with its three languages, three religions and three or four ‘races’; why Austria, not a nation, but a state. Renan examined the putative ‘objective’ bases of nations. As for ‘race’, it was plain to him that in modern nations, blood is mixed whereas in the tribes and cities of antiquity it was not, or at least far less so. Renan ridiculed the blood definition: ‘one’ does not have the right to go through the world fingering people’s skulls and taking them by the throat saying: ‘You are of our blood; you belong to us!’ (Eley and Suny, 1996: p. 49). Just as race cannot define nations, neither, in his view, could language, religion, physical or material interests. Language, for example, ‘invites people to write, but it does not force them to do so’ (ibid.: p. 50). There are nations which speak the same language as their oppressors. Liberation movements in Latin America had, for instance, little difficulty in using Spanish as a linguistic means of mobilizing their populations (Williamson, 1992), and English was the main language of nationalism in India and Ireland, despite indigenous attempts to elevate and mobilize ‘native’ languages to national status. Max Weber observed that many states have more than one language group, and a common language is often insufficient to sustain a sense of national identity (Weber, 1978: pp. 395–396). Neither can religion supply a sufficient basis for nationalism despite its ideological power, and the powerful ways in which modern nationalism appeals to what Hayes called a ‘religious sense’ (Hayes, 1960). Despite this, there is no simple mapping of God onto nation, although there is no shortage of claims to be God’s ‘chosen people’, including medieval England, Israel and South Africa to name but three. The major world religions such as Christianity and Islam themselves are no barrier to being ‘nationalized’.2 Modern Israel would seem to be an instance of a self-defined religious nation, but there are more Jews living outside Israel than within it, and religious Jews are a minority in the state of Israel (Edelman, 2000).

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Renan ruled out defining nations simply in terms of material, socio-economic factors. Nations are not defined, for example, by national markets. While material and economic interests cannot be ignored, there is more to nationalism than this. To echo Chateaubriand’s comment: ‘Men do not allow themselves to be killed for their interests; they allow themselves to be killed for their passions’ (quoted in Connor, 1994: p. 206). Finally, while geography – rivers, mountains, soil – matters, geo-politics ignores the fact that the nation ‘is a spiritual family not a group determined by the shape of the earth’ (Renan, in Eley and Suny, 1996: p. 52). In fact, it is imagined geography, remembered landscapes, which have greater potency in constructing nations than actual topography, as we shall see later in this chapter (Schama, 1996). So, what does Renan require of a nation? To him, the nation is in essence a ‘soul’, a spiritual principle, a kind of moral conscience. He concludes: ‘A nation is therefore a largescale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those one is prepared to make in the future’ (ibid.: p. 53). Renan’s lecture had a clear purpose; he was making a political statement, rather than simply an academic one. A French liberal nationalist, he was horrified at the defeat of France and the way Alsace-Lorraine had been annexed by Prussia in 1871 on the grounds that it was ‘objectively’ part of the Reich. By invoking the ‘soul’, Renan was pointing out that diktats do not nations make, but that people’s day-to-day commitment to the territory in which they are governed is essential – what he memorably referred to as the ‘daily plebiscite’ of the nation’s existence: ‘a great aggregation of men (sic) with a healthy spirit and warmth of heart, creates a moral conscience which is called a nation’ (ibid.: p. 53). The language of ‘the soul’ may not resonate much with the secular world of the twenty-first century, but Renan’s discourse on the nation is remarkably close to that of Benedict Anderson’s a century later. Like Renan, Anderson took a ‘spiritual’ or rather a

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transcendental view of these things. His point of departure is: that nationality, or as one might prefer to put it in view of that word’s multiple significations, nationness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts of a particular kind. To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy. (Anderson, 1996: p. 4)

In essence, says Anderson, the nation is an imagined political community, with the following characteristics (ibid.: pp. 6–7). • ‘It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.’ • ‘The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.’ • ‘It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely ordained hierarchical dynastic realm.’ • ‘… it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.’

Anderson’s point is that the nation is ‘imagined’ not ‘imaginary’. He rebukes Ernest Gellner for his famous line that ‘nationalism is not the awakening of nations to selfconsciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist’(Gellner, 1964: p. 169). Anderson points out here that Gellner confuses ‘invention’with ‘fabrication’and ‘falsity’rather than ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’; to underscore the point, that the nation is imagined rather than imaginary. This is an important but easily overlooked point. Gellner was taking a characteristically obtuse position to make a point: that the existence of nations was predicated on the political ideology of nationalism, and that, if anything, the latter created the former rather than the other way round. In criticism of Anderson, one might say that he does

not develop the ways in which this process of ‘imagining’ is carried out and sustained. For example, we do not have much difficulty showing that the fons et origo of a nation is false, but it is quite another matter to trace the institutional mechanisms which sustain and shape the belief in a people’s distinctiveness.

NATIONS AND MODERNITY Writing on nationalism has been largely shaped by two interrelated debates: ethnic versus civic bases of nationalism; and whether nations should be treated as modern rather than pre-modern formations. This latter debate is sometimes construed as between ‘primordialists’ versus ‘modernists’, sometimes as ‘essentialists’ versus ‘instrumentalists’. This is a debate about the origins of nationalist sentiments. Put simply, primordialists argue that nations are the expressions of distinctive cultures embedded in human nature and history, although there are few academic writers these days who would follow Herder, Fichte and the German Romantics. Modernists are much more in the ascendant today, arguing that nationalism is a political and cultural ideology of modernity, in the transformation of societies both economically and politically, most obviously in the modern state. They argue that there are major discontinuities between modern and pre-modern nations with regard to: • nationalism as a modern, secular religion for the modern state, deriving its legitimacy from the will of the people rather than the will of God; • the marrying up of political, economic and cultural boundaries in a post-imperial age; • the assumed coincidence, as a result, of nation and state, quintessentially as ‘nation-state’, the fusion of culture and constitution; • the role of what Anderson called ‘print capitalism’, most obviously newspapers, using vernacular languages, in signing up citizens to the common agenda of the nation; • the way modern societies require high economic and cultural integration, while having high rates of social mobility and social inequality.

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The last point in particular was championed by Ernest Gellner, who argued that the conundrum was resolved by the fact that inequalities are individualized and class-based rather than attaching to significant and abiding cultural inequalities associated with ethnicity. The challenge of social inequality to the cohesion of the state comes in situations where an ethnic division of labour emerges rather than where individualized social inequality occurs. This is because, in market societies, there is far more opportunity to individualize inequality and explain broad class patterns in terms of the merits and failings of individuals rather than social groups. On the other hand, Gellner argues, where inequality maps onto ethnicity, there is a far greater challenge to the system because one can argue that one suffers because of one’s race, religion, language group and so on, rather than one’s individualized failings. Gellner’s particular contribution was to show that far from nationalism being some kind of deviant cultural throwback espoused by those left behind by the tide of history, it is the normal modern condition of binding citizens to the state. Gellner built a theory of nationalism on the basis that ‘every man is a clerc’ (Gellner, 1973: p. 10), that people are bound into the state by minimal education. He observes: ‘At the base of the modern social order stands not the executioner but the professor. Not the guillotine, but the (aptly named) doctorat d’état is the main tool and symbol of state power. The monopoly of legitimate education is now more important, more central than is the monopoly of legitimate violence’ (Gellner, 1983: p. 34). This results from the mobile diversification required of the complex division of labour; a shared common minimal culture (including literacy and numeracy); and the agency of an elaborate education system. The range within which mobility is feasible is the range of culture and language, reflected in the common educational system. These culturally imposed limits of mobility generate in turn the limits of loyalty, and thus the ‘nation’ begins to operate. As Gellner points out: ‘nationalism is basically

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a movement which conceives the natural object of human loyalty to be a fairly large anonymous unit defined by shared language and culture’ (Gellner, 1973: p. 11). The key to understanding nationalism lies in the relationship between culture and structure, and especially the inverse relationship between the two. On the one hand, in a highly structured (primitive) society, there is no incompatibility between culture and structure, one reinforcing the other. On the other hand, in modern societies, ‘culture does not so much underline structure: rather, it replaces it’ (Gellner, 1964: p. 155). What Gellner meant by this was that in modern society our citizenship is something we carry actively and directly: it is not laid down for us by prior membership of a group. If a man is not firmly set in a social niche, whose relationship as it were endows him with his identity, he is obliged to carry his identity with him, in his whole style of conduct and expression: in other words, his ‘culture’ becomes his identity. And the classification of men by ‘culture’ is of course the classification by ‘nationality’. It is for this reason that it now seems inherent, in the very nature of things, that to be human means to have some nationality’. (Gellner, 1964: p. 157)

Gellner’s theory of nationalism rests on the view that modern society – as industrial society – generates precisely the conditions within which nationalism flourishes. It requires an unprecedented division of labour, which is premised on the need for people to be able and willing to move from one occupational position to another, across generations but also in their own lifetime. To do this, ‘they need a shared culture, and a literate sophisticated high culture at that. It obliges them to be able to communicate contextlessly and with precision with all comers, in face-toface ephemeral contacts, but also through abstract means of communication’ (Gellner, 1983: p. 141). High literate culture requires to be defended and promoted by the state, because only it is able to deploy the resources and establish and maintain the education system. The state is therefore coterminous with civil society, and nationalism is the civic religion of the state. Because industrial high

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culture is no longer sustained by a church and expressed through a faith, it has to be sustained as a culture in a deliberate and explicit manner, and that, Gellner argues, is the function of nationalism. In modern society, ‘one’s prime loyalty is to the medium of our literacy, and to its political protector [the state]. The equal access of believers to God eventually became access of unbelievers to education and culture’ (Gellner, 1983: p. 142). Gellner’s is the clearest account of the ‘modernist’ position, and as such is subject to criticism. In the first place, it seems overly dependent on a particular characterization of ‘modern’ society as an integrated, selfcontained organism, without taking sufficient cognizance of processes of globalization which erode the supremacy of the state. Secondly, there is a linear quality to his theory, in so far as the processes of modernization and nationalism are intertwined, that once the appropriate stage of development had been reached, the ‘nation’, in the form of the state, had been achieved. This makes it difficult to explain why, in thoroughgoing and longstanding ‘modern’ states such as Britain and France, new forms of nationalism have emerged, for example, in Scotland, Wales and Brittany (McDonald, 1989). If the integrative process was so complete to begin with, why did it appear to unravel long after the state had been made? Why should so-called ‘stateless nations’(Guibernau, 1999) emerge in this way unless we treat nationalism as a much more fluid and incomplete concept than theorists of modernization do? The most influential critic of the modernist perspective is Anthony Smith (1988), who, while rejecting primordialism, argues that nations to all intents and purposes predate modernity. Smith identifies the set of myths, symbols and cultural practices – what he calls the ‘ethnie’ – as the key to making the modern nation. The nation is an ethno-cultural community shaped by a common myth of origins, a sense of common history and way of life. Having a territory, an economy, an education system and a legal code are not enough in themselves. Nations require passions, not merely interests, and the links

with religion are obvious. Smith observes: ‘To belong to a “community of history and destiny” has become for many people a surrogate for religious faith, over and above any individual worldly ends that the collective action it inspires may serve’ (ibid: p. 12). Above all, it is the sense of a common past, and a shared destiny, which is the ideological motor driving the modern state forward. How else is it possible to persuade more people to die for it in wartime, more or less willingly, than at any other time in history? Smith argues that while there may be differences between modern and older ethnies, these are differences of degree not of kind. In short, Smith and other ‘ethnicists’ such as Armstrong (1982) argue that the myth of the ‘modern’ nation greatly exaggerates the impact of modern conditions of industry, capitalism and bureaucracy in shaping the modern state. Modernism fails to locate the nation in a historical sequence of cultural shaping, and hence overdraws the distinction between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, and frequently misses the deep roots which nations have in an ethnic substratum. Smith’s key contribution to the debate relates to his concept of ‘ethnie’, or ethnic communities, although there is no single English-language equivalent to the French term derived from ‘ethnos’ in Greek. Smith (2004: p. 185) identifies ethnie as having six key characteristics: • a common name for the unit of population included; • a set of myths of common origins and descent for that population; • some common historical memories of things experienced together; • a common ‘historic territory’ or ‘homeland’, or an association with one; • one or more elements of common culture – language, customs or religion; • a sense of solidarity among most members of the community.

What each of these characteristics shares is the assumption of commonality, and that there is cultural continuity over time and place. In the

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first place, the common name, the ethnonym, need not be singular or territorial. Knowing that place is called ‘Norway’or ‘England’says very little about the continuity of meaning of the ethnonym over many centuries. Similarly, there may be other non-territorial labels (such as Muslim or Catholic) to which people give allegiance. There are many historical examples of religious persecution on the grounds of the ‘treasonous’ affiliation of some groups to other states or other-worldly powers – Catholics in post-Reformation England, or Shia Muslims in some Middle Eastern states. Second, myths of origin are not invariably ethnic, and are frequently subject to rationalization and reconstruction to suit the conditions of modern times. For example, Serbian ‘remembering’ of the slaughter on the Field of Blackbirds in Kosovo in the fourteenth century is in essence assembling a foundation myth, just as, in the same century, the Scottish victory over the English army at Bannockburn in 1314 speaks to modern conditions of nationalism.3 The process whereby origin myths are made can involve forgetting as well as remembering. In his 1886 essay, Renan observed that ‘tout citoyen français doit avoir oublié la Saint-Barthelemy, les massacres du Midi au XIIIe siécle’. In other words, every French person is being actively reminded of a series of antique slaughters which have become family history. The nation’s narrative requires that one actively forgets as well as actively remembers. The people are not simply historical objects or events, passive parts of the body politic, but also subjects of ‘a process of signification that must erase any prior or original presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principle of the people as that continual process by which the national life is redeemed and signified as a repeating and reproductive process’ (Bhabha, 1990: p. 297). Third, while shared historical memories matter, they can be conjured up relatively easily out of the narratives of the very recent past. Thomas Eriksen, for example, points out that German occupation of Norway in World War II has greater resonance for Norwegians than fourteenth-century tragic narratives (Eriksen, 2004: p. 54).

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As for common culture, one must ask – how much is enough? Simply asserting its importance tells us little about the degree of importance, still less how different cultural markers compete and play out in reality, and in different contexts for different people. Finally, assuming a sense of solidarity among members is to take its basis as relatively fixed and unchanging through time and place, to say nothing of competing senses of solidarity such as religion, ethnicity, social class and language. In short, comments Eriksen, ‘(T)he concept of the ethnie seems too rigid, and too bound up with la longue durée and native ideas of bloodlines, to accommodate the entire range of functioning imagined communities’ (ibid.: p. 56). Eriksen himself argues for a further two dimensions of national identity. The first is interpersonal networks which may (or may not) cut across ethnic boundaries with considerable effect upon shared sentiment. Interacting systematically with other people reinforces one’s commitment to and shared understandings with them, as well as building up a sense of who one is not. Relatedly, the second is the notion of ‘other’, what Eriksen calls ‘contrasting’: in his words, ‘(W)e are not only because we have something in common, but perhaps chiefly because we are not them’ (ibid.: p. 57). In essence, both the modernist and the ethnicist positions have strengths and weaknesses. The modernists are able to show how the ideologies of nationalism connect with processes of social and economic change, and especially with the political and material interests generated by ‘modernization’. Its weaknesses are that it does not handle cultural matters well, being too reductionist in its approach. It is also fairly crude in its working definition of ‘culture’. One would want, for example, to include the institutional carriers of culture (such as the education system) which also have their own capacity to shape beliefs and values. In other words, culture is about the ways we carry ourselves,4 how we go about our everyday business, rather than cultural content per se. Second, the modernist focus on the key transformation to industrial capitalist society makes it less

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able to handle what we might call post- or late-modern expressions of nationalism. In other words, how are we to account for postindustrial forms of nationalism in the twentyfirst century? These seem to have much more to do with the attrition of power by the conventional national state, both upwards (to bodies such as the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank), and downwards to sub-state nations (such as Scotland, Catalunya and Flanders and, in Canada, Québec) which are able to mobilize considerable cultural and political capital to assert high degrees of constitutional autonomy (McCrone, 1998). The so-called ‘stateless nations’ are less stateless than under-stated insofar as they are already likely to have social and political institutions (even assemblies and parliaments) on which they can build separation from the bigger states to which they belong, even if what they seek is greater autonomism rather than outright separatism (Seymour, 2004). On the other hand, the strength of the ethnicist argument is that it is able to trace the cultural dimensions of nationalism, especially the ways in which the mythical past or ethnie is mobilized. This is important because of the undoubted emotional power of the ‘nation’s’ history, something which the modernist accounts tend to play down or dismiss. On the other hand, ethnicists have to struggle with the undoubted discontinuities between the past and the present.

MOBILIZING CULTURE As we have seen, the concept of ‘nation’ is closely bound up with that of culture. Eriksen observes that despite the congruence between theories of nationalism, such as those by Gellner and Anderson, and anthropological theories of ethnicity, the two bodies of writing have developed independently of each other (Eriksen, 1993a: p. 100). Both stress that ethnic and national identities should be treated as social and cultural constructions, rather than as ‘natural’, as well as pointing out that there is no one-to-one correspondence

between ethnicity and culture. The point is that in practice they are usually jumbled up. While ethnicity is frequently used to refer to minority groups and ‘race’ relations (powerful minorities such as English-born people in Scotland or Canada are rarely thought of, especially by themselves, as ‘ethnic minorities’), social anthropologists use it to refer to relationships between groups which consider themselves and are regarded by others as culturally distinctive. Powerful groups are not defined as ‘ethnic’, and Digby Baltzell’s famous WASPs – white anglo-saxon Protestants – were the implicit ‘us’ against which the explicit ‘them’ were defined.As Michael Banton observed, WASPs are ‘minus-one’ ethnics, for ‘members of that group perceive themselves not as ethnic but as setting the standard by which others are to be judged’ (1983: p. 65). In other words, ‘ethnics’ are ‘not-us’, but others who are different and usually inferior in key respects. Racial and ‘ethnic’ categories are frequently embedded in conceptions of nationality. In the words of the title of the classic study by Paul Gilroy (1987), There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. In other words, there is an implicit ‘whiteness’in being British (Modood, 2005). The writer Caryl Phillips, who was born in St Kitts in the Caribbean, brought up in working-class Leeds in England, and subsequently living in the USA, has spoken tellingly of his experience of looking like a foreigner in Britain while speaking like a native, whereas in the USA he looks like a native, and sounds like a foreigner (Phillips, 2004). This kind of typification is especially interesting in so-called settler societies such as Australia, Canada and even the early American colonies, where incoming settlers face in two directions: towards the native peoples over whom they wield considerable power of all sorts, and towards the ‘home’ country with whom they have an ambivalent relationship. In the case of the old British Dominions such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, there was disinclination to define themselves over against the ‘mother

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country’ (itself an interesting and genderloaded term if ever there was one) until relatively late in the history of settlement. Alongside (almost despite) the rhetoric of new national citizenship lay a social and cultural hierarchy of ethnicity with white anglo-saxon (or anglo-celtic in the case of the old British Dominions) protestants at the top of the tree, and other European groups further down, with indigenous peoples at the bottom (Hage, 1998). Settler nationalism is confronted with identity dilemmas in relation to indigenous peoples. On the one hand and in the first instance, it has to do with asserting power over native peoples, as well as incorporating aspects of their cultures into new forms of national identity (Moran, 2002). Talk of ‘mosaics’ (Canada) or ‘melting pots’ (USA) is a way of handling ethnic differences in settler societies. The case of the USA is especially interesting in so far as Benedict Anderson cleverly spotted the fact that ‘creole’ states were the progenitors of modern nationalism, caught as they were between indigenous ‘native’ peoples and ‘the people who shared a common language and common descent against whom they fought’ (Anderson, 1996: p. 47). Creole nationalism, he argues, was foundational because it conveyed the contradictory condition of ‘being between’. The modern usage of the terms ethnicity, ethnic and so on has a linguistic history. The word ‘ethnic’ is from the ancient Greek word ‘ethnikos’, meaning a pagan or a heathen.‘Ta ethne’ meant ‘foreigners’, and the term found its way into descriptions of non-chosen people, outsiders, like nonJews (amamim – Greenfeld, 1992: p. 4), or later non-Christians. On the Roman side, the term ‘natio’, meaning a breed, a stock or race, usually referred to foreigners as opposed to citizens (of Rome), who were ‘civilized’ or organized people. Only later did ‘nation’ come to mean a distinct group of people characterized by common descent, language or history. The language of ethnicity, as Anthony Cohen points out, ‘refers to a decision people make to depict themselves or others symbolically as the bearers of a certain

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cultural identity’ (Cohen, 1993: p. 197). Ethnicity has to do with the politicization of culture. Instead of treating ‘culture’ as signifying objective and distinctive traits, it represents an important resource in struggles for recognition and, ultimately, power. If ethnicity is a potent factor in the rise and mobilization of nationalism, so too is gender, though perhaps less obviously so. Women’s relationship to nationalism is doubly engendered. In much of the so-called Third World, women and men were given the franchise together, so that citizenship, nationality and gender are more obviously connected than in the West, where citizenship rights were (male) gendered from the outset (Walby, 1996). Nevertheless, women have been largely invisible from accounts of ‘liberation’ struggles, despite the fact that they are intimately connected to nationalism as biological reproducers of ‘the nation’and as social reproducers of national groupings, as active transmitters of national culture, as symbolic signifiers of national difference (most commonly caricaturing the nation as female, as mother), and in early stages as active participants in national liberation struggles (Yuval-Davis, 1993). The language of ‘motherland’, of ‘family of the nation’, of ‘blood and lineage’situates women at the heart of national symbolism (see, for example, Delaney’s study of Turkey, 1991). That is why rape is a common weapon of war: women are constructed as the safeguards of nationality, and sexual assault is aimed at the community as a whole, as in the Balkans conflict of the 1990s (Jones, 2000), and the ethnic slaughters in Rwanda in the mid-1990s (Prunier, 1995). Contaminating the blood lines is a key feature of warfare. Depicting oneself as different is a key stage in the battle for cultural and political power. Thus, the Czech scholar Miroslav Hroch (1985) observed that national movements tended to follow three phases. In the first phase, activists are involved in small-scale scholarly enquiry into the cultural basis of the nation. This involves collecting linguistic, folkloric, historic and social fragments and distilling them into a semblance of a national culture. This was in essence a phase of cultural

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nationalism, and few sought to translate that into a set of political demands. It was the concern of a small number of people on the fringes. The second phase involved a new range of activists seeking to win over as many of the same ethnic group as possible with a view to ‘awakening’ the nation from its slumbers, at first meeting with little success, but progressively more. In the final phase, a large part of the population – a mass movement – highlights its national identity, and seeks political statehood as a means of expressing the national will. In its highest form, this expression feeds through into all the political parties, who thereby make implicit their national programmes. Classically, in this model, it is the role of intellectuals to gather up and re-interpret the raw cultural materials and re-present them as the soul, the essence, of the nation, brought to full expression only through achieving full and independent statehood. One can then see how ‘culture’ was worked upon to give expression in political terms. It is impossible to separate out the political from the non-political aspects of culture. Being able to show that ‘we’ who have something in common are not ‘them’ – who do not – is the building block for building nations. This is a key point in the social anthropology of ethnicity, namely, that there is little or nothing inherent about cultural differences, but that they always occur vis-à-vis an other.

UNDERSTANDING ETHNICITY One of the most significant writers in this regard was the Norwegian Fredrick Barth, whose paper ‘Ethnic groups and boundaries’ is among the most important in the literature on the subject. Barth (1981) took issue with conventional wisdom: We are led to imagine each group developing its cultural and social form in relative isolation, mainly in response to local ecologic factors, through a history of adaptation by invention and selective borrowing. This history has produced a world of separate peoples, each with their own culture and each organised in a society which can legitimately be isolated for description as an island to itself. (Barth, 1981: p. 200)

The point here is that nationalism mobilizes not the objective and longstanding differences in ethnicity, but those which actors deem to be salient. In other words, cultural differences such as language, religion, even skin colour, are not primary and definitional characteristics, but are social identifiers which are the result, the product, of struggles in the first place. Being able to show that there is ethnic homogeneity in a given territory – or, rather, that people living there believe themselves to be homogeneous – is the outcome of political and social processes, not their cause. Writers on the Balkans in the 1990s, for example, told how neighbours who lived in a fair degree of harmony for decades, even centuries, suddenly developed great hatred for each other on the grounds that they were Serb, or Bosnian or Croat (Silber and Little, 1995). How could it be that neighbours would start killing each other, when they had lived peacefully together for a considerable time? Patently, such fear and loathing could not be explained in terms of longstanding and deep-seated ethnic rivalries. Rather, it was a question of remembering, constructing and activating even small social and cultural differences in a rapidly changed political context in a collapsing Yugoslav state. The horrors of the killing fields of Rwanda in the mid-1990s are a good instance of the politicization of cultural differences (Prunier, 1995). The Tutsi minority (between 8 and 14 per cent of the population at the time of the genocide) had been given disproportionate power by the Belgian colonists who had governed the country until 1962, whose system of identity-card classification of the population into Tutsi and Hutu had survived their departure, with awful consequences, allowing Tutsis to be easily identified by those who perpetrated genocide. Once more, small or even manufactured cultural differences had untold consequences. The point to be made is not that there is something inherent in these differences, but that they become the cultural markers in a complex process of identification and politicization. How, then, are we to understand ethnic differences of this sort? To revert to

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Barth: ‘To the extent that actors use ethnic identities to categorize themselves and others for purposes of interaction, they form ethnic groups in this organizational sense’ (Barth, 1981: pp. 202–203). The key point here is that there is no one-to-one relationship between ethnicity and cultural identifiers. What matters, rather, is which identifiers key actors regard as significant, for which purposes, and under which conditions. Barth continues: ‘some cultural factors are used by the actors as signals and emblems of differences, others are ignored, and in some relationships radical differences are played down and denied’ (Barth, 1981: p. 203). Related to the variation in the potency of cultural markers is the issue of boundaries. It is the social boundary which defines the group in question, not the cultural stuff which the boundary contains. Where social interaction is defined as taking place within or across these boundaries, then the group’s identity will be maintained, reinforced or dissipated. It will not be necessary for the cultural content of two adjacent groups to alter significantly – indeed, they may objectively grow more similar. What matters is the interaction across a meaningful social boundary (geographical, social and cultural), which may in turn weaken or strengthen. What matters sociologically, however, is how they define themselves vis-à-vis each other. Again, before the outbreak of the Balkans war in 1991, it was supposed that the different peoples of the region living quite literally side-by-side had nothing to fight about. As Eriksen observes: Ethnic boundaries, dormant for decades, were activated; presumed cultural differences which had been irrelevant for two generations were suddenly ‘remembered’ and invoked as proof that it was impossible for the two groups to live side by side. It is only when they make a difference that cultural differences are important in the creation of ethnic boundaries. (Eriksen, 1993a: p. 39)

Barth advocates a relational and processual approach to ethnicity; a group’s culture may change without removing the ethnic boundary, and groups may become culturally more similar at the same time as the boundaries are strengthened.

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Despite Barth’s relational and processual approach to ethnicity, he has been criticized for treating ethnicity as having an imperative, primordial status (Eriksen, 1993a). In other words, Barth’s treatment of ethnic categories as organizational vessels, as more-or-less constants which can be called upon as and when necessary, means that they appear to become a priori categorical ascriptions of a static quality (Eriksen, 1993a: pp. 54–55). What is called Barth’s ‘transactionalism’ means that ethnic groups are treated as units of ascription where social boundaries ensure the persistence of the group. This implies a degree of fixity about the boundaries (and hence of bounded ethnic identities), and possibly underplays variations in types of and conditions for ethnic allegiances. Anthony Cohen observes that Barth’s view also rests on the assumption that ethnicity is simply generalized to group members – as bearers of a given ethnic identity – without being implicated in their own self-perceptions (Cohen, 1996: p. 120). Hence, although Barth adopts a subjectivist view of identity, self-consciousness is actually down-played, as is the importance of the symbolic expression of identity. Treating ethnicity as largely a tactical identity patrolled by cultural border guards underplays the selfconscious and symbolic expression which people themselves actively negotiate, or at least play a major part in. While Barth does not specify the cultural and social mechanisms whereby individuals play this part, he is at pains not to reify cultural boundaries, but to stress the subtle ways they operate. Let us take stock of our argument. In the first place, we have seen that the concept of ‘nation’ does not have an a priori existence; it does not give rise in some abstract and inevitable way to making a state. That is probably to overstate the case in the sense that one cannot have (political) bricks without any cultural straw whatsoever, but it is to remind us that it is the politicization process which is the key to action. In the second place, if one accepts the broad strictures of Barth’s argument, cultural distinctiveness resides in political action, defined at the boundaries of that action rather than growing

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outwards from the core in some seamless way. When culture and nation come together as a state-making project, some have argued that, as far as possible, the political project should be culture-free so as to prevent cultural capture by powerful groups. Hence, Jürgen Habermas (1996) has argued for ‘Verfassungspatriotismus’, constitutional patriotism as a device for protecting civil society from the possible depradations of the political realm. On the other hand, Dominique Schnapper asks: ‘Would a purely civic society, founded on abstract principles, have the strength to control passions born from allegiance to ethnic and religious groups?’ (1997: p. 211). Neither should we be fooled into thinking that modern societies and states, especially in the West, are somehow culture-light because of their reliance on administration and bureaucracy. Michael Herzfeld has pointed out that modern bureaucratically regulated societies are no more ‘rational’ or less ‘symbolic’ than ‘traditional’ societies. Bureaucratic practices rely heavily on symbols and language replete with moral boundaries between insiders and outsiders (Herzfeld, 1992). European nationalism, he argues, is a ‘secular theodicy’ which resembles religion in that both imply a transcendent status: ‘Just as nationalism can be viewed as religion, bureaucratic actions are its most commonplace rituals’ (ibid: p. 37). Adam Seligman has also made this point in his critique of ‘civic republicanism’ with its implication that morality is a public, communal enterprise, the outcome of the ‘general will’ which clearly has illiberal consequences (Seligman, 1995). In short, the distinction between ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ forms of nationalism should be treated with considerable caution, given that it operates far more at the normative than the analytical level. ‘Culture’ does not refer to linguistic, folkloric, historic differences which are inherent and fixed, but to those markers which can be identified and mobilized according to social and political circumstances. If one cannot make constitutional bricks without any straw whatsoever, then it is remarkable how much can be made with a modicum of cultural difference however

imagined or invented. The task in the final section of the chapter is to explore some of the ways this is done in space and in time, in geography and in history. In other words, we are dealing here with the metaphors of space and time rather than space and time themselves.

ROUTES AND ROOTS: NATIONS IN PLACE AND TIME At the heart of defining the nation is its geography and its history; its territory and its narrative. Why are these so central? On the one hand, nations are ‘placed’; they derive their identity from their frontiers and boundaries. To be sure, it is not as simple as that, given that many ‘nationals’ these days may live outside the ‘homeland’(that itself is a resonant term; the familial and the national as one).5 Be that as it may, the sense of belonging to another place while living somewhere else is very powerful. Rogers Brubaker (1996) has pointed up the complexity of national belongingness in central Europe. He argues that it is important to decouple the study of nationhood and nation-ness from the study of nations as substantial entities, collectivities and communities. His focus is on ‘nationness’ as a conceptual variable. ‘We should not ask “what is a nation”, but rather: how is nationhood as a political and cultural form institutionalized within and among states?’ (Brubaker, 1996: p. 16). The key to understanding nation-ness in post-communist countries, Brubaker argues, is that they contain distinct sets of mutually antagonistic nationalisms, reflecting the complex history of eastern and central Europe. Brubaker argues that in addition to ‘national minorities’ located within a single state, there is also ‘nationalizing’nationalism which is promoted on a territorial basis by the newly independent or reconfigured state, on the one hand, and on the other, the nationalism of ‘external national homelands’. The key distinction (and conflict) is often between the latter two conceptions, that is, nationalizing nationalism, and homeland nationalism. The former, most

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readily recognized by Westerners, derives from the expectation that residents within the territory of a state share its common identity of citizenship. The latter focuses on the shared ethnic identity (reflected most obviously in language, religion etc.) of peoples who are distributed across states. Hence, there will be (ethnic) Hungarians who are citizens of Romania, and vice versa. The Western assumption that people’s ‘national’ identity is with the territorial state in which they live and to no other (except in a residual way) is of little help here. In fact, there is likely to be a triadic confrontation between national minorities, nationalizing states, and external national homelands. National minorities are to be understood not as unitary groups but ‘in terms of the field of differentiated and competitive positions or stances adopted by different organizations, parties, movements, or individual political entrepreneurs, each seeking to “represent” the minority to its own putative members, to the host state, or to the outside world, each seeking to monopolize the legitimate representation of the group’ (Brubaker, 1996: p. 61). Brubaker prefers the term ‘nationalizing state’ to ‘nationstate’ because it does not presuppose ethnic homogeneity, nor imply that it has reached its final shape. He proposes that we think of a national minority not as a fixed entity or a unitary group but as a field of differentiated and competitive positions or stances adopted by different organizations to ‘represent’ the minority to the outside world (ibid.: 61). The ‘external national homeland’ is a dynamic political stance with shared associations and orientations rather than a distinct thing. In many regards, the exception proves the rule. The tensions which such complex axes of belonging generate are the very result of the conventional notion that peoples and nations should correspond within unique territories. Anything which does not ‘fit’ is judged abnormal and anomalous. Enormous emotional power is vested in place, and nowhere more significantly than at the borders and frontiers. ‘Debateable lands’ frequently demarcate the boundaries of a people. For example, in the

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former Yugoslav state, the word Krajina – from the Serbo-Croat kraj or edge refers to the region Vojna Krajina, literally military frontier (Silber and Little, 1995). This was the major geo-political fault-line between east and west, Christian and Muslim, and, to keep the volcanic metaphor, the one which saw the eruption of the politico-cultural tectonic plates in the fall of Yugoslavia. There the tensions, as well as the aspirations, were strongest and most volatile. It is not, however, that the former Yugoslavia is exceptional in this regard, for border areas are often invested with power and meaning, as well as a fierce sense of identity, which the ‘core’ may well not have because it is, quite literally, not on the front-line. We are familiar enough with territorial disputes over ‘national’ land, where the significance of the ‘soil’ is sacred. The Serbian legend that the soil of Serbia is that on which any Serbian blood has been spilled is merely an exaggerated version of this. Benedict Anderson’s comment about mapping colonial territory also has lessons for ‘home’. He points out that the map is to space what the clock is to time – a form of representation laden with power implications. We have naturalized these devices so that maps and clocks are place and time rather than their representation. Maps depict ‘property spaces’or sovereignties in which the power order is implicit but nevertheless clear. For example, as the geographer Peter Taylor (1993) has pointed out, the language used to describe England is as follows: the core is ‘the home counties’, and the peripheries are ‘the north’, the ‘west country’, the ‘midlands’ (not the ‘centre’ of power, of course), and so on. This power map correlates clearly with the distribution of royal establishments, so that few exist on the periphery. Power is implicitly centred by such devices. Anderson (1996) comments on the mental power of the map as logo, as a pure sign of the country in its outline. ‘In its shape, the map entered an infinitely reproducible series, available for transfer to posters, official seals, letterheads, magazines and textbook covers, table cloths and hotel walls. Instantly recognizable, everywhere visible,

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the logo-map penetrated deep into the popular imagination, forming a powerful emblem for the anti-colonial nationalism being born’ (1996: p. 175). While Anderson gives the examples of the Third World, there are some anomalies which are worth thinking about. We have little trouble ‘imagining’ France, Italy, Spain (though usually incorrectly equating it with the Iberian peninsula), and Germany has had to be redrawn after unification between East and West. ‘Britain’ is imaginable only in a fuzzy way – does it include Northern Ireland or not (usually not), whereas ‘Ireland’ is the island rather than the territory of the republic. ‘Scotland’ is a familiar logo representing as it does a northern peninsula, but ‘England’

is largely conspicuous by its representational absence except in its incorrect manifestation as the British island (an error deliberately compounded by Shakespeare with his comment about it being set in a silver sea: he was reinforcing the point of English ownership of this island). It is unlikely that many of its current nationals would easily recognize England from its strict geographical outline alone. The historian Simon Schama (1996) argued that national identity would lose much of its ‘ferocious enchantment’ without the mystique of a particular landscape tradition: ‘its topography mapped, elaborated, and enriched as a homeland’ (1996: p. 15). This process may involve taking liberties with landscape.

National Library of Scotland. Frederick Rose. John Bull et ses amis. 1900

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Schama reminds us that the engravings by the eighteenth century artist Paul Sandby of a view in Strathtay in Scotland showed a marked increase in the elevation of the mountains between 1747 and 1780 to conform with expectations of what mountains should be like. Imagining the nation implies that it has a picture, an image, and Schama argues that landscapes are culture before they are nature, that they are constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock. German culture was seen as rooted in its native soil, and such a vision drove Herder, the romantic nationalist, to view the essence of the nation as organically rooted in the topography, customs and communities of the local native tradition (Schama, 1996: p. 102). Germania – forest – contrasted with Roma – city, with the forests the home of Gemeinschaft. Indeed, forestry became as a result a serious academic and scientific discipline, helping to define Deutschtum – Germanness. This obsession with the forest patently influenced German romantic nationalism, but also those on the Left such as Walter Benjamin. Both had shared contempt for bourgeois urban materialism (Schama, 1996: p. 117). ‘Germanentum’, the idea of a biologically pure race, meant that German racial and national distinctiveness were attributed to its woodland heritage. The English, says Schama, are not immune from this. The mythic memory of ‘greenwood freedom’ was prime material for nineteenthcentury novels, including Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe in which Anglo-Saxon rural liberties were contrasted with Norman tyranny. The woodland was deemed the locale of liberty, despite the fact that by 1066 only 15 per cent of England was wooded (Schama, 1996: p. 142). Nevertheless, ‘The forest as the opposite of court, town and village – the sylvan remnant of arcady, or what Shakespeare called the “golden world” – was an idea that would lodge tenaciously in the poetic and pious imagination’(Schama, 1996: p. 142). Into or out of this world came figures such as Robin Hood, ‘an elegy for a world of liberty and justice that had never existed’ (Schama, 1996: p. 149). The popularization of these tales came precisely at

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the time (in the late sixteenth century) when the woodlands were being pressed into service for ship-building. These were being cut down as the governments played the panegyric for the greenwood, and as the royal forests were being treated as early industrial resources. The language of Hearts of Oak was used to connect both trees and ships. What is interesting about this English narrative is that it runs across what MacDougall (1982) calls the ‘racial myth’ of English history. Celebrating the freedom of Anglo-Saxon England vis-à-vis Norman despotism and order is an old and continuing motif. He argues that the myth arose in the sixteenth century in response to complex religious and political needs, and matured over the next three centuries in step with England’s imperial status. The myth incorporated a Teutonic element, and had four postulates: that German peoples as a result of unmixed origins and their universal civilizing mission were inherently superior to others; that the English were mainly of German origins, and their history begins with the landings of Hengist and Horsa in Kent in ad 449; that the qualities of English political and religious institutions, the freest in the world, derived from its Germanic forebears; and finally, that the English, more than other Germanic peoples, represent the traditional genius of their ancestors, and so have a special burden of leadership in the world community. The map also helped to shape the ‘grammar’ of post-colonial states. The mercatorian map which European colonizers used to divide up the surface of the globe into parallel lines of longitude and latitude replaced other ways of understanding space. The mercatorian map happens to over-emphasize the size of the colonizing countries, and under-emphasizes that of the colonized. This was not a deliberate strategy, but a function of the mathematics of projecting a sphere onto a plane, but it became a convenient representation of political power and difference. (Other versions of maps such as the Phillips projection which preserves area not distance are less useful in this political respect.) In general, a map is to space what the clock is to time, namely the essence of the

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thing rather than simply a way of representing it. (Indeed, we speak of the clock ‘charting’ time.) So powerful, in fact, is the map that what was originally a map ‘for’ has become a map ‘of’, even though it actually never ceased to be a map ‘for’ – that is, a purpose of – defining and charting systems of power. This was especially important as a rallying emblem for subordinate groups. For dominant ones it was often enough to colour the territory an appropriate colour (pink-red for the British imperial territories, purple-blue for the French ones). There is an irony that as these colonial territories have been lost, so the capacity of the core to ‘map’ itself becomes increasingly problematic. In the ‘British’ Isles, for example, the geography (the archipelago of islands) does not map onto sovereignty (two states – the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland). How many, for example, would recognize a map of England without Scotland to the north and Wales to the west? While the inhabitants of these ‘Celtic’ countries would have little problem in recognizing the relevant map-logos, the ambiguity and confusion about ‘England’ is represented in and compounded by its lack of a recognizable map-identity. If place matters culturally, what of time? In Homi Bhabha’s useful phrase, nations are like ‘narratives’ which tell themselves and others stories about who they are and where they have come from. History and the nation are inseparable. To recapitulate Anderson’s description: ‘the idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation which is also conceived as a social community moving steadily down (or up) history’ (Anderson, 1996: p. 26). The point about this mobilization of history is that it is an exercise in legitimation; it is not to be taken as a history lesson in the sense that it is an accurate account of the past (although its authors clearly intend this to be the case). We might characterize it as ‘myth-history’ in the sense that it sets out to celebrate identity and associated values, and to describe and explain the world in which such identity and

values are experienced. No amount (or at least not much) cold water can be poured over the ‘facts’as presented in an attempt to wash them away with an accurate history. Just as there is no such thing as ‘real’ traditions as opposed to invented ones – all are invented, constructed, in Anderson’s word, imagined – so tradition is an appeal to the present not the past. Karl Marx recognized this in his celebrated comment in the 18th Brumaire: and just as when they seemed engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to prevent the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and borrowed language. (Marx, 1959: p. 320)

The point Marx was making here is that inventing traditions is most often done precisely at the moment when change is being fostered, at the point at which it is necessary to mobilize the past as justification for going forward in a new direction. To present the future as a radical break with the past is difficult and dangerous, and while revolutionary regimes sometimes succeed in so doing, they frequently have to call up national, historic ghosts when it is necessary. Stuart Hall (1996) has pointed to the significance of ‘discursive strategies’ in the telling of national cultures. The ‘narrative’ of the nation is told and retold through national histories, literatures, the media and popular culture, which together provide a set of stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, historical events, national symbols and rituals. Through these stories national identity is presented as primordial, essential, unified and continuous. People of the late twentieth century are linked in a linear fashion with those of the distant past, even those, like fourteenth-century peasants in the case of the Hollywood movie ‘Braveheart’, with whom they manifestly would have little in common. To borrow the words of the English novelist L.P. Hartley, the past is a foreign country. The national ‘story’ usually contains a foundation myth, a story which locates the origin of the

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nation in mythic time, and which provides an alternative history or counter-narrative predating ruptures or dispossessions. Becoming ‘a nation again’is to evoke a future imaginable throughout the past. This nation is thought of as containing a pure, original people or folk. This is what Anthony Smith tried to capture in his concept of ‘ethnie’, in which the myth of a common ancestry and shared historical memories are key elements. ‘The sense of “whence we came” is central to the definition of “who we are” ’ (1991: p. 22). Similarly, actual history is often forgotten in favour of a foundational legend. Hence, the nineteenth century liberation struggle in Greece claimed their legend of antiquity, as the founders of democracy who could not possibly be denied what they themselves had bequeathed to the rest of the world (Herzfeld, 1992). In like manner, claiming to be ‘God’s chosen people’ is a common-enough feature of many ethnic/national groups for whom it cannot all be true (unless more than one God is imagined or s/he is promiscuous with favours). Hence, Jews, Muslims and denominations of Christians from Poles (Catholic) to Scots (Presbyterian) to English (Protestant) are able to identify themselves in this favourable light, especially vis-à-vis ‘Godless’ nations who may have superior force but not God on their side. None of this is, of course, enough without a priesthood, religious or secular, which is able to read the appropriate runes, and to pronounce on the uniqueness of the nation. The intelligentsia provide the successors to the ecclesiastical priesthood. In Smith’s words: ‘Instead of being merely a chosen vessel of religious salvation and a passive recipient of divine ordinance, the “people” now become the source of salvation and the saints and sages of old become manifestations of the people’s national genius’ (Smith, 1991: p. 64). The role of the intelligentsia is to furnish ‘maps’ of the community, its history, destiny and place, as well as to furnish ‘moralities’ to inspire the public virtues expressing the national character. The nation’s narrative, to borrow Bhabha’s phrase, and echoing Renan, involves actively forgetting as well as actively remembering.

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The people are not simply historical objects or events, passive parts of the body politic, but also subjects of ‘a process of signification that must erase any prior or original presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principle of the people as that continual process by which the national life is redeemed and signified as a repeating and reproductive process’(Bhabha, 1990: p. 297). History is not the dead weight of the past on the present, but the very means whereby identity is shaped in an active and ongoing fashioning.

CONCLUSION Few concepts in social science are as contested as nation and nationalism. For many, the nation is entirely an ideological construction with little or no ‘objective’ basis in social reality, at the mercy of material and political interests to prey on the emotions of the unsuspecting and gullible. In this chapter, however, we have seen that nationalism takes many forms, and is in no sense ‘over’, either as a political ideology making nations and states, or as one able to mobilize strong emotions. It lends itself to left-wing as well as right-wing, progressive as well as reactionary constructions; it enables existing states to bind citizens to it, as well as creating and sustaining movements wishing to secede from states as they are. Globalization has not spelled the demise of nationalism; rather, it generates conditions which make it more possible as so-called nation-states are pulled in two directions, upwards to supra-state governance, as well as downwards to substate autonomism (Mann, 1997). In Daniel Bell’s words: the nation-state has become ‘too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems of life’ (quoted in McGrew, 1992: p. 87). Nationalism is the expression of a new identity-politics of the twenty-first century, encapsulating culture defence, challenges for more of the world’s resources, as well as appealing to new forms of collective and individual identity. Culture provides the raw materials for nationalism as well as being inextricably shaped and

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defined by it. The vocabulary of nations and nationalism provides a key language for understanding social and political processes of our century.

NOTES 1 The phrase ’tomorrow’s ancestors’ was used by the Government of Québec in 1995 in its Bill to parliament. 2 One might note in passing that England provides an unusual example of a ‘national’ church (‘The Church of England’), given that it was founded by Henry VIII as English head of state in his dispute with the Papacy over his wish to divorce his wife, and to this day the reigning monarch is its titular head. 3 This process was aided by the Hollywood movie ‘Braveheart’, in which Mel Gibson played the patriot William Wallace. The film also owed more to the Hollywood genre of good versus bad than to historical accuracy of the period in which the battle took place. 4 In his opening speech to the Scottish Parliament in 1999, the late Donald Dewar, the First Minister, spoke of ‘who we are and how we carry ourselves’. 5 See the doggerel quoted in Kate Fox’s book Watching the English (2004): ‘The Germans live in Germany, the Romans live in Rome. The Turkeys live in Turkey, and the English live at home’.

REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1996) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edn. London: Verso. Armstrong, J. (1982) Nations before Nationalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Banton, M. (1983) Racial and Ethnic Competition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barth, F. (1981) ‘Ethnic groups and boundaries’, in Process and Form in Social Life: Selected Essays of Fredrik Barth: vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bhabha, H. (ed.) (1990) Narrating the Nation. London: Routledge. Brubaker, R. (1996) Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chatterjee, P. (1986) Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. London: Zed. Chatterjee, P. (1996) ‘Whose imagined community?’, in G. Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation. London: Verso Books.

Cohen, A.P. (1993) ‘Culture as identity’, New Literary History, 24(1). Cohen, A.P. (1996) ‘Personal nationalism: a Scottish view of some rites, rights and wrongs’, American Ethnologist, 23(4). Connor, W. (1994) Ethnonationalism: the Quest for Understanding. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Delaney, C. (1991) The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in a Turkish Village Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Edelman, M. (2000) ‘A portion of animosity: the politics of the disestablishment of religion in Israel’, Israel Studies, 5(1): 204–227. Eley, G. and Suny, R.G. (1996) ‘Introduction: from the moment of social history to the work of cultural representation’, in G. Eley and R.G. Suny (eds), Becoming National. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eriksen, T.H. (1993a) Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto Press. Eriksen, T.H. (1993b) ‘Formal and informal nationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 16(1). Eriksen, T.H. (2004) ‘Place, kinship and the case for nonethnic nations’, Nations and Nationalism, 10(1–2): 49–62. Fox, K. (2004) Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Gellner, E. (1964) ‘Nationalism’, in Thought and Change. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Gellner, E. (1973) ‘Scale and Nation’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 3. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gellner, E. (1996) ‘Reply: do nations have navels?’, Nations and Nationalism, 2(3). Gilroy, P. (1987) There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. London: Routledge. Greenfeld, L. (1992) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Guibernau, M. (1999) Nations without States. Cambridge, Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1996) ‘National unification and popular sovereignty’, New Left Review, 219. Hage, G. (1998) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto Press. Hall, S. (1996) ‘Ethnicity: identity and difference’, in G. Eley and R.G. Suny (eds), Becoming National. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hastings, A. (1997) The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hayes, C. (1960) Nationalism: a Religion. New York: Macmillan.

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Herzfeld, M. (1992) The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Oxford: Berg. Hobsbawm, E.J. (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth and Reality. Cambridge University Press. Hroch, M. (1985) Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, A. (2000) ‘Gendercide and genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2(2): 185–211. Keane, W. (2003) ‘Public speaking: on Indonesian as the language of the nation’, Public Culture, 15(3): 503–530. Kohn, H. (1945) The Idea of Nationalism: a Study of its Origins and Background. London: Macmillan; (extract reprinted (1994) ‘Western and Eastern Nationalisms’, in J. Hutchinson and A.D. Smith (eds), Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) Laitin, D. (1992) Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCrone, D. (1998) The Sociology of Nationalism: Tomorrow’s Ancestors. London: Routledge. McDonald, M. (1989) We are Not French! Language, Culture and Identity in Brittany. London: Routledge. MacDougall, H. (1982) Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons and Anglo-Saxons. Montreal: Harvest House. McGrew, A. (1992) ‘A global society?’, in S. Hall et al. (eds), Modernity and its Futures. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mann, M. (1997) ‘Has globalization ended the rise and rise of the nation-state?’, Review of International Political Economy, 4(3). Marx, K. (1959) ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in L. Feuer (ed.), Marx and Engels: Basic Writings in Politics and Philosophy. New York: Doubleday. Melucci, A. (1989) Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society. London: Hutchinson Radius. Modood, T. (2005) Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Moran, A. (2002) ‘The psychodynamics of Australian settler-nationalism: assimilating or reconciling with the Aborigines?’, Political Psychology, 2(4): 667–701.

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Plamenatz, J. (1976) ‘Two types of nationalism’, in E. Kamenka (ed.), Nationalism: the Nature and Evolution of an Idea. London: Edward Arnold. Phillips, C. (2004) ‘Necessary journeys’, The Guardian, 11th December. Prunier, G. (1995) The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. New York: University of Columbia Press. Québec, Government of (1995) Bill Respecting the Future of Québec, including the Declaration of Sovereignty and the Agreement of June 12, 1995. National Assembly, first session, 35th legislature. Renan, E. (1996) ‘What is a nation?’, in G. Eley and R.G. Suny (eds), Becoming National. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 42–55. (1st edn, 1882.) Schama, S. (1996) Landscape and Memory. London: Fontana Press. Schnapper, D. (1997) ‘The European debate on citizenship’, Daedalus, 126: 3. Seligman, A. (1995) ‘Animadversions upon civil society and civic virtue in the last decade of the 20th century’, in J. Hall (ed.), Civil Society. London: Polity. Seymour, M. (ed.) (2004) The Fate of the Nation State. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Silber, L. and Little, A. (1995) The Death of Yugoslavia. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Smith, A. (1988) ‘The myth of the “modern nation” and the myths of nations’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 11 (1). Smith, A. (1991) National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Smith, A. (1996) ‘Opening statement: nations and their pasts’, Nations and Nationalism, 2(3). Smith, A. (2004) ‘History and national destiny: responses and clarifications’, Nations and Nationalism, 10(1–2): 195–209. Taylor, P. (1993) ‘The meaning of the North: England’s “foreign country” within?’ Political Geography, 12(2). Yuval-Davis, N. (1993) ‘Gender and nation’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 16(4). Walby, S. (1996) ‘Woman and nation’, in G. Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation. London: Verso Books. Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weinreich, M. (1945) ‘YIVO and the problems of our time’, Yivo-bleter, 25(1). Williamson, E. (1992) The Penguin History of Latin America. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books.

16 Culture and Modernities1 Joel S. Kahn

From the beginning, the number one problem of modern social science has been modernity itself . . . In our day the problem needs to be posed from a new angle: Is there a single phenomenon here, or do we need to speak of ‘multiple modernities’, the plural reflecting the fact that other nonWestern cultures have modernized in their own way and cannot properly be understood if we try to grasp them in a general theory that was designed originally with the Western case in mind . . . This book explores the hypothesis that we can throw some light on both the original and the contemporary issues about modernity if we can come to a clearer definition of the selfunderstandings that have been constitutive of it. (Taylor, 2004: p. 1) When I was a child growing up in a predominantly Chinese city in Malaysia, it seemed as though we were always trying to catch up with the West, represented first by Great Britain and later by the United States. Although Malaysia gained independence from the British in 1957 (and became Malaysia in 1962), British-type education and the mass media constructed our worlds as failed replicas of the modern West. This colonial effect of trying to learn from and imitate the global centre has been a preoccupation of post-colonial elites seeking to articulate a destiny that is a mixed set of western and Asian interests. Now a resident in the United States, my annual visits to South-east Asia intensify my awareness that an alternative vision of the future is being articulated, an increasingly autonomous definition of modernity

that is differentiated from that in the West. (Ong, 1996: p. 60)2

It is interesting, even curious, that precisely at a time when a renewed preoccupation with the modern is all around us the language of culture and the search for meaning, often held to be antithetical to modernism, are equally pervasive in most areas of social life. It has apparently become impossible to think of modernity these days in other than cultural terms. The illusion that we could get to the core of the so-called modern condition through a sort of deculturalizing manoeuvre has been widely rejected as it is increasingly argued that it is now possible to tie culture and modernity together, giving rise among other things to a new conceptual cocktail, namely that of a multiplicity of culturally distinctive modernities. It is no accident then that according to both Charles Taylor, Canadian philosopher and critical theorist, and Aihwa Ong, Malaysianborn, American-based anthropologist, we should now be prepared to speak of modernity in the plural. For Taylor this is because non-Western ‘cultures’ ‘have modernized in their own way’, while according to Ong it is because in places like Malaysia

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‘an increasingly autonomous definition of modernity’ is being articulated. Although perhaps surprisingly it is the philosopher and not the anthropologist who employs the word culture in its classical anthropological sense to refer to differentiated, spatially bounded and hence more or less distinctive sets of beliefs and practices, both philosopher and anthropologist also base their appeals unequivocally on references to culture in the sense of meaningmaking or meaningful activity or behaviour. Consequently, for Taylor acknowledging the plurality of modernity follows from the recognition that Western modernity is as much a modernist mode of ‘self-understanding’ (a ‘social imaginary’) as it is a change of objective historical circumstance, and as such only one of a number of such modes. Similarly, for Ong accepting the existence of an alternative modernity in the Malaysian context follows from the discovery that an autonomous (self-) ‘definition’ of modernity can take shape outside the West, a definition according to which Malaysia’s modernity is no longer a failed replica of the West’s, but a fully fledged alternative to it. In their separate encounters with ‘culture’ in both senses of the term, then, Taylor and Ong are both prompted to engage in a project that occupies an increasing number of contemporary social scientists: to theorize diverse, alternative and/or multiple modernities.3 This turn to culture in contemporary theories of modernity takes a somewhat different form in the writings of critical theorists such as Peter Wagner who have criticized the classical conception of a pure ‘disembedded’ modernity. In an article on the image of America in European social theory (Wagner, 1999), Wagner argues that modernist theory has tended to represent America precisely as such a sphere of ‘pure modernity’. But, as Wagner argues, all such approaches: have in common . . . a double intellectual move. They first withdraw from the treacherous wealth of sensations that come from the socio-historical world to establish what they hold to be those very few indubitable assumptions from which theorizing can safely proceed. And subsequently,

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they reconstruct an entire world from these very few assumptions. Their proponents tend to think that the first move decontaminates understanding, any arbitrary and contingent aspects being removed. And that the second move creates a pure image of the world, of scientific and/or philosophical validity from which then further conclusions, including practical ones, can be drawn. (Whatever dissonance there may be between sensations and this image will then be treated as the secondary problem of the relation between theory and empirical observation.) (Wagner, 1999: p. 43)

Such an operation is bound to fail, Wagner maintains, because concepts such as autonomy and rationality, so central to the modernist interpretation of the world are never pure, or merely procedural and formal, never devoid of substance. As a consequence, they cannot mark any unquestionable beginning, and doubts can be raised about any world that is erected in their foundations, that is, about the consequent second move. (Wagner, 1999: p. 43)

Although Bruno Latour is not directly concerned with the issue of multiple modernities and modernism outside the West, his provocative contention that ‘we have never been modern’ is also pertinent (Latour, 1993). Developed mainly in relation to his anthropology of modern science, Latour’s idea that in a sense ‘[m]odernity has never begun’ corresponds closely with Wagner’s contention that modernity cannot be understood as some sort of pure, disembedded process uncontaminated by the particularities of history, culture and space. For Latour, modernity’s ‘work of purification’ and rationalist ‘civilizing’ directed at everything it deems extraneous and perverse contradicts the fact that the modern has in a sense ‘never been modern’ precisely because it has always been contaminated by the very ‘hybrids’, ‘imbroglios’, ‘networks’ and ‘mediations’ that it generates. Latour emphasizes how much the modern world is actually characterized by internal contradictions and inconsistencies, by the lack of a pure, singular trajectory, by the failure to build neatly compartmentalized and differentiated spheres, and by a gross misrecognition of its own internal diversity. In such a world, there is no longer any room for puristic

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illusions about the nature and premises of our modern ‘Constitution’. We must confront the internal composition of our externalities, and perhaps accept that our modernist identities are a great deal more contingent, fragile and particularistic than we are willing to admit. To understand modernity as always ‘contaminated’ by/embedded in culture is to go against the Western quest for universal principles by which we must all live, and to accept that precisely because our own meanings of the modern are particularistic, they may also be exclusionary, even racist, however well-intentioned. Why should a ‘turn to culture’ lead us down a path of pluralizing and multiplying modernity? And is it a wise or at least a fruitful path to follow? According to at least one prominent theorist of modernity all such talk of ‘alternative’ modernities must be rejected since it implies, misleadingly, that whatever one dislikes about the ‘Anglo-Saxon model … including the subaltern position that it leaves you in, can be effaced by the reassuring and “cultural” notion that you can fashion your own modernity differently. . . .’ Might it be better to retain the other fundamental, and singular, meaning of modernity instead, ‘which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself’? (Jameson, 2002: p. 12; also Dirlik, 2003). This is the central issue with which this chapter will be concerned. But dealing with it adequately involves an assessment of the ways in which classical social theoretic constructions of the modern world did and did not engage with culture and difference. This in turn leads to an appraisal both of the attempt to construct an understanding of the spatial and temporal diversity that continues to exist at the heart of the modern world in cultural terms, and of recent attempts to theorize the culture in modernity. Do these somewhat different encounters between ‘culture’ and ‘modernity’ make more sense of contemporary patterns of modernization in both the West and the non-West? Attempting to answer this question is the task of this chapter.

MODERNITY AND CULTURE IN CLASSICAL SOCIAL THEORY Charles Taylor and Benjamin Lee have maintained that ‘the dominant theories of modernity over the last two centuries [have been] of the acultural sort [and as such] they tend to prejudge the case against diversity, and too easily conclude to (sic) a future of greater and greater uniformity across cultures’. An acultural theory they define as one ‘that describes [modern] transformations in terms of some culture-neutral operation. By this we mean an operation which is not defined in terms of specific cultures it carries us from and to, but is rather seen as of a type which any traditional culture could undergo’ (Taylor and Lee, nd: p. 11). This points to the fact that the recent cultural turn in modernist theory responds to two kinds of critique of classical social theory, the one hermeneutic, and the other anthropological/postcolonial. According to the former, classical social theory is flawed by its objectivist tendencies; that is by its overwhelming focus on institutions and social structures to the exclusion of the meaningful dimension of human social life. It is this perceived weakness of classical theories of modernity to which Taylor’s focus on the cultural meanings of modernity, what he calls modern ‘social imaginaries’, is meant to be a response. In this respect, he writes that [i]f we define modernity in terms of certain institutional changes, such as the spread of the modern bureaucratic state, market economies, science, and technology, it is easy to go on nourishing the illusion that modernity is a single process destined to occur everywhere in the same forms, ultimately bringing convergence and uniformity to our world. (Taylor, 2004: p. 195)

This would make it impossible to comprehend not only the imaginarian energies that flow into the modernist ‘particularities’ of our world, but also paradoxically the very structural categories that an objectivist gaze would favour above all else. This could not be otherwise because, as Taylor points out, such an approach would remain totally blind to the ‘different [cultural] ways of erecting

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and animating the institutional forms’ that are obviously such an intrinsically important part of our lives (Taylor, 2004: p. 195). For Ong what makes contemporary Malaysia the site of an alternative modernity is the fact that Malaysia has experienced a ‘cultural’ transformation marked by the emergence there not so much of modern structures and institutions, whatever those might be, but of a modern sensibility – in her terms an ‘articulation’ of ‘an alternative vision of the future . . . an increasingly autonomous definition of modernity that is differentiated from that in the West’. At the same time Taylor and Ong, together with many other advocates of a pluralization of modernity, are also responding to the accusation that classical theories of modernity are effectively ‘ethnocentric’/‘Eurocentric’ because in the divergences between Western and non-Western modernities they saw evidence of a kind of perversity in the latter. As such, classical social theory, it is argued, is by its nature racially and/or culturally exclusionary, a result of a failure to appreciate other cultures in their own terms, and of privileging the West (of which the non-West can then be only at best a flawed replica). As a generation of postcolonial theorists have argued, the historicist presuppositions of classical social theory generate a tendency to cast difference in an evolutionary mould, such that the non-West inevitably becomes ‘not yet modern’,4 thereby to some extent reprising an earlier relativizing anthropological critique of social evolutionism. Deploying a concept of culture in the anthropological sense to frame a discourse of alternative modernities is supposed to provide a corrective to the exclusionary, triumphalist and hence imperial tendencies of social evolutionary discourse. It is interesting to note in this regard that the culturalist critique of classical modernist theorizing parallels in significant ways the so-called postmodern critique of modernist metanarratives. For both perpetuate a view of a more or less homogeneous mode of modernist social theorizing which is triumphalist, Eurocentric and historicist. It is almost as though all classical social theorists

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were in effect ‘social Darwinists’, to use a much-favoured term of abuse. In response, postcolonials and postmoderns alike claim to bring us onto new terrains outside ‘Western’ modernity – the former to the terrain of a heretofore suppressed ‘subaltern’ culture, the latter to that of an entirely new age of postmodernity – from which a genuinely independent critique of modernity may be launched.5 It may well be that the tendency to treat all of Western/modern thought as though it consisted of just so many variations on what might be called liberal, techno-instrumental evolutionism is a response not so much to the classical sociological heritage tout court as to the resurrection of at least some of the key elements of liberal social evolutionary doctrine from the mid-twentieth century in the guise of developmentalism. It is no accident that for most of its advocates, the theory of multiple modernization is framed as an explicit alternative to a discourse on ‘development’ that has its roots in postwar America and that gave birth to what has been called – by its critics perhaps more often than by its advocates – ‘modernization theory’. Even here, of course, there were significant differences in the way in which liberal social theory conceptualizes development. But there is little doubt that liberal versions of the developmentalist paradigm tended to portray successful ‘development’ as a singular, universal (hence acultural) and largely technical process that more or less replicates the earlier (idealized) experience of the West, at the same time therefore denying the integrity of non-Western cultures (and hence non-Western trajectories of modernization).6 This so-called modernization theory represented a resurrection of certain of the key assumptions of nineteenth-century social evolutionism. Certainly, anthropology in the Anglophone world in the second half of the nineteenth century – referring to the work of anthropologists such as Tylor and, somewhat later, James Frazer in Britain and Morgan in the USA – was concerned with the long-term developmental trajectory of modern/Western society and tended to be

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characterized by one or more of the following assumptions7 : 1 That human history was much longer than had been previously assumed when biblical accounts of creation were used to date the creation of Man. 2 That human history is a more or less unitary process and that it is largely ‘progressive’. In other words, as is indicated by the way most Victorian anthropologists placed their faith in monogenesis, there were no separate creations of humans (as so-called polygenists believed), and most social development was from bad to good, from worse to better (contra those who believed that the so-called ‘primitive races’ were initially created the equal of civilized nations, but experienced some kind of degeneration). 3 That social change and, hence, modernization take place through various stages of development: typically, following Montesquieu, these are labelled savagery to barbarism to civilization. 4 That the onset of each stage is marked by some single development from which other things flow. For some, like Morgan, the stages were defined primarily by technological change (e.g. discovery of pottery-making, iron-working, agriculture etc.); for others (following the Scottish political economists) by shifts in mode of subsistence (e.g. hunting, pastoralism, agriculture, industry); and for others still by intellectual/cultural shifts (e.g. Frazer – magic, religion, science). 5 That this civilizational process can be cast in evolutionary terms, following, often rather loosely, Darwin’s theory of organic evolution or more frequently the so-called social evolutionism of Herbert Spencer, in which ‘advance’ is marked by increased adaptiveness (understood largely in technical terms), itself made possible by increased social differentiation or ‘complexity’ (and hence also individuation). 6 Finally, that a study of this civilizational process is the proper task of ‘anthropology’ understood in that broad sense, derived from its Greek roots as the study of, or discourse on, or the science of Man (sic). As a result, through the eighteenth century, and perhaps through a good deal of the nineteenth as well, no one argued seriously that the study of humanity and the evolution of modern civilization was anything but a unitary enterprise; this science of humanity did not suggest any obvious disciplinary divisions. What we now would call liberal political economy, sociology, anthropology, history, political science, psychology, etc. all shared broadly in this project.

Informed by these assumptions, liberal social evolutionism can with hindsight be seen to have been highly ethnocentric or Eurocentric to the extent that it placed Western/European societies at the apex of the evolutionary ladder, and saw ‘modernity’ (their preferred term was ‘civilization’) to be a more or less singular phenomenon. Moreover, it cannot be said that questions of modern meaning were at the centre of the evolutionist project. But it is not at all clear that nineteenth-century ‘theories of modernity’ were all as unambivalently triumphalist about the Western historical trajectory, as Eurocentric/ethnocentric when it came to other cultures/civilizations, or as inattentive to matters of cultural meaning as were liberal social evolutionism. What was the role of ‘culture’ in classical sociological theories of modernity? In fact, classical social theorists, of course, construed modernity in a diversity of ways and this is not the place for an extended investigation of the classical sociological tradition. Suffice it instead to consider two of what, according to Oomen, were the ‘four main axes around which the notion of modernity was articulated [in classical sociology]. These are structural differentiation, rationalization, the history-making project and modern life’.8 Characterizing modernization as structural differentiation, according to Oomen, is linked to an image of modernity as a dynamic of societal transformation variously conceptualized as a movement from simple to complex, tradition to modernity, community to society, sacred to secular, status to contract, folk/rural to urban, to list a few. The mechanisms involved in this transformation are believed to be (a) occupational differentiation and the consequent elaboration of division of labour, (b) diversification and the attendant heterogenity and (c) plurality and the gradual evolving of a complex social network and interdependence in the place of the traditional cradle-to-grave arrangement. (Oommen, n.p.)

Alternatively, the view that modernity is first and foremost a process of rationalization sees it as a process bound up with disenchantment of the world, its demystification. Accordingly, unforeseeable forces no longer interfere in social affairs,

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it is argued. The ‘good’ is defined less and less in relation to God, but more and more in relation to functioning society. In this rendition of modernity, reason and reality are isomorphic. Understandably, the rationalization process results in increasing fit between means and ends, it is believed. Science and technology, rather than religion or magic become crucial. In this vein of thinking, capitalism is the embodiment of rationality and modern capitalism has its essence in rationality. (Oommen, nd)

While Oommen identifies each of these four axes with a single theorist – Durkheim, Weber, Marx and Simmel respectively – in fact it is probably better to see each as a longer-term tendency or stream in social philosophy going back at least to the European Enlightenment. In particular, the notions of ‘modernity as differentiation’ and ‘modernity as rationalization’ both have their roots in ideas articulated in late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century utilitarian philosophy and political economy. The image of modernity as a process of techno-instrumental ‘advance’ coupled with social differentiation builds upon ideas about the division of labour first developed in the writings of Adam Smith and his contemporaries, along with the classical liberal discourse on the emancipation of the individual. Reworked and historicized within Herbert Spencer’s doctrine of social evolution, the increasing complexification of the social division of labour became coterminous with the emergence of a society of differentiated individuals, Spencer’s liberal vision of the end of history. Durkheim admittedly took over much of the Spencerian schema, equating modernity with a state of advanced social differentiation that he termed ‘organic solidarity’. But he was far less sanguine about both the desirability and the long-term viability of a society held together only by the structural interdependence of anomic individuals. If then Durkheim is taken to be a representative of that tradition in sociology that construes modernity as a process of structural differentiation, he was at the same time a critic of liberal modernity à la Herbert Spencer precisely because of its failure to attend to the question of the moral order, effectively the

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cultural glue that might bind together a fully differentiated social order. Neither was Weber’s account of modernization as rationalization forged in the absence of concern with matters of culture and meaning, nor was he any less ambivalent than Durkheim about the desirability of the modern condition.9 Weber’s central concern with the phenomenon of modern rationality originated in a critique of political economy that had been developed by earlier generations of so-called historical economists in Germany. Taking issue with the ‘anthropological’ presuppositions of the Scottish political economists, these theorists argued that man’s ‘propensity to truck and barter’ was not innate, but specific to the capitalist age, thus linking the rise to dominance of homo oeconomicus with the birth of the modern epoch. While at one level, then, modern rationalization might be seen to be a universal and, hence, acultural process, at least in certain contexts it looks as though it was itself the particular form of modern culture. Moreover, all those associated with the so-called historical school of economics were at best ambivalent about, and most were openly hostile to, a society within which instrumental rationality was dominant.10 Not surprisingly, then, like his intellectual predecessors – and also like his contemporary Werner Sombart, albeit in a different way – Weber, as is the case with Durkheim, was a critic of modernity so defined, seeing rationalization as potentially also a destroyer of meaning. In their somewhat different ways, then, the classical sociologies of modernity associated with the names of Durkheim and Weber respectively were far from wholehearted in their celebration of civilization/modernity, nor neglectful of what at least we would now call the cultural dimensions and predicaments of modern life. If they did in fact portray liberal/capitalist modernization as an acultural process of structural differentiation or rationalization, they did so as much as critics as advocates of it.11 The problem with both trends in the classical discourse on modernity consequently cannot be that they completely failed to

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engage with the phenomenon of culture, at least in its sense as the meaningful dimensions of human institutions and behaviour, or that they were unambivalently triumphalist about the rise of modernity and the West – and hence dismissive of alternative ‘cultures’. All this is not to deny the originality of the more recent encounter between ‘culture’ and ‘modernity’. It is certainly true that classical modernist social theorists failed to deploy a relativistic concept of culture in the anthropological sense – hardly surprising given that such a concept did not yet exist. After all ‘culture’in this sense, like modernity, is as much a way of looking at the world as it is an objective property of it, and the casting of human difference in the mould of ‘cultural diversity’ is strictly speaking a twentieth-century invention. Moreover, classical social theory tended by and large to cling to a unidimensional view of modernity, which meant among other things that they largely failed to locate competing cultural tendencies (including their own critical take on modernity) within it. By failing to locate critical cultural currents, including their own critiques of techno-instrumental modernism, within modernity, classical social theorists – like twentieth-century anthropological, postmodern and postcolonial critics of so-called modernist metanarratives – also failed to produce a cultural account of modernity when the term is used in its other sense. It is therefore important to consider whether a more relativistic/anthropological concept of culture, together with a multidimensional view of the culture of or in modernity, do provide the kind of correctives to classical social theorizing of modernity advocated in the work of more recent theorists of multiple modernities.

THE TURN TO ‘CULTURE’ IN THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SENSE The discipline of social and cultural anthropology, which came to maturity in the decades between the World Wars in France, Britain

and the USA, is generally credited with the invention of that modern concept of culture that constructs human diversity as cultural difference. Although certainly influenced by the nineteenth-century evolutionist paradigm, twentieth-century anthropologists parted company with social evolutionism in a number of significant ways. Following Stocking we can suggest that twentiethcentury anthropologists developed a view of a more or less unified discipline characterized by (1) the study of small-scale ‘exotic’ cultures and societies; (2) by means of techniques of participant observation; (3) in which these exotic cultures and societies are treated relativistically and holistically; and (4) in which generalizations are arrived at by means of processes of induction based firmly on the findings of individual ethnographies (Stocking, 1995a; see also Kuper, 1999). And it was particularly in the USA, with the work of Franz Boas and his followers, that anthropologists came to construct an image of a world as a mosaic of more or less separate, distinctive and bounded ‘other cultures’, although in doing so they built on a longer-standing romantic or, more accurately, ‘expressivist’ critique of Enlightenment instrumentalism, and as such were part of a broader modernist movement in the social sciences, the humanities, literature and the arts that involved among other things a renewed appreciation, even celebration, of cultural otherness (see Marcus and Fisher, 1986; Kahn, 1995). Like postcolonial and multicultural theorists several decades later, the early cultural anthropologists in the USA rejected the ethnocentrism of the social evolutionists, together with the view that other cultures were merely flawed replicas of Western culture, arguing instead that other cultures should be studied and analysed in their own terms rather than being viewed through the lens of ‘Western’ cultural presuppositions – an approach that was sometimes called ‘cultural relativism’. Stocking has captured this shift succinctly when he points out that the main difference between nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropology was that the former thought of

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culture or civilization only in the singular, while Boas and his followers were the first to think of cultures as holistic ‘ways of life’ in the plural (Stocking, 1968). As we have seen, recent attempts to construct a plurality of modernities draw rather heavily on this anthropological tradition. Taylor and Lee, as we have noted for example, want to produce an understanding of modernity, leaning on a use of the word ‘culture’ which is analogous to the sense it often has in anthropology. We are evoking the picture of a plurality of human cultures, each of which has a language and a set of practices which define specific understandings of personhood, social relations, states of mind/soul, goods and bads, virtues and vices, and the like. These languages are often mutually untranslatable. (Taylor and Lee, nd: p.10)

The publishers of an influential book titled Reflections on Multiple Modernities (Sachsenmaier et al., 2002) describe the term as ‘academic shorthand to describe a world with culturally diverse and universal elements … that is, a world with a multiplicity of cultures, but common modern economic and political features’.12 As this suggests, theorizing a multiplicity of modernities generally also involves the assumption that in one way or another modern practices, institutions, behaviours are introduced from the outside, usually by European colonial regimes, and only then ‘hybridized’ or ‘indigenized’ in interaction with (preexisting) non-Western ‘cultures’, the course of non-Western modernity thereby diverging from the Western trajectory in significant ways. Consider how Taylor reminds us that, even though we should ‘finally get over seeing modernity as a single process of which Europe is the paradigm’ and that ‘at the end of the day’ European modernity is only ‘one among many, a province of the multiform world’, we should, to use his words, ‘understand the European model as the first, certainly’ and ‘as the object of some creative imitation, naturally’ (Taylor, 2004: p. 196). Consider also how Eisenstadt informs us that ‘the idea of modernity presumes’that ‘Western patterns of modernity are not the only “authentic”’

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ones, ‘though they enjoy historical precedence and continue to be a basic reference point for others’ (Eisenstadt, 2000: pp. 2–3). Again, it is interesting how Cristóbal Marín explains things along these same lines when he explains that ‘it is necessary to emphasize that one of the fundamental features of modernity is its globalization. Thus, although modernity has its origins in Western Europe, the process of diffusion and re-appropriation of modern ideas and institutions has been engendering diverse types of social configurations of modernity in different parts of the world, such as a Latin American modernity’ (Marin, 1994: p. 106). Similarly, Mayfair Yang’s work on Chinese modernity examines the intricate networks of personalized relationships and informalized practices associated with the phenomenon of guanxi/guanxixue in China as a way of gaining ‘a window on’ the formation of modernity in that country, a modernity that differs in many respects from the Western version (Yang, 1994). Guanxi relationships, ideas and practices have recently (re)emerged in the Chinese context, becoming increasingly widespread and influential. Yang argues that these form a sort of ‘gift economy’ that is located within (and is just as much constitutive of) the modernity that has emerged in socialist China. Modernity can, writes Yang: be spoken of in the singular because it issues from the Western Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. But when the force of modernity impinges on and interacts with hitherto more discrete cultural or political-economic zones, it produces not one form but many … For a long time, the West has ceased to be the only site of modernity or the only generator of the types of power found in modernity. Modernity in China was triggered by western and Japanese imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. [But i]t gave rise to, and its direct impact was diffused and overtaken by, new social forces that were a complicated mixture of native and imported elements … (Yang 1994: pp. 37–38)

But it needs to be recognized that turning a classical anthropological concept to the task of theorizing a plurality of differently indigenized modernities in this way is by no

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means as straightforward as it might seem, since the image of a world made up of a diversity of more or less discrete ‘other cultures’ that underpins the Boasian paradigm is, at the very least, a problematic one. On the one hand, a significant number of classical anthropologists (particularly in Britain where apparently the strength of small ‘l’ liberal thought made most British anthropologists suspicious of what they tended to see as ‘reified’ supra-individual concepts such as culture) were never convinced of the merits of the Boasian concept of culture in the first place. On the other hand, over the last couple of decades the idea of more or less homogeneous, discrete and spatially bounded ‘other cultures’ has fallen out of favour in the discipline of anthropology, the result of at least two telling critiques of the Boasian project. First, what has sometimes been termed the ‘reflexive’ turn in anthropology gave rise to the sense that cultural otherness was, to put it bluntly, an anthropological construction, a sense that arose out of the recognition of the role of the anthropologist – and hence also the textual cum discursive practices of the modern/Western culture that gave birth to anthropology in the first place – in the production of knowledge of cultural otherness. Anthropological knowledge of other cultures is then no longer so easily assumed merely to be the unmediated representation of genuine cultural alterity out there in the world.13 Second and perhaps more tellingly, there have been numerous criticisms of the ‘essentialism’ of the classical model, in which it is increasingly argued that cultures in the world are not the neatly bounded, territorially discrete entities of Boasian discourse, but in fact overlapping, hybrid, contested, spatially dispersed, even deterritorialized, mutually constitutive phenomena.14 If these criticisms are accepted, then it is not so easily argued that there are genuine ‘other cultures’ out there in the modern world, or even that there ever were. At the very least it problematizes all representation or knowledge of genuine cultural alterity inside modern thought. And if this is the case, there are obstacles to theorizing (multiple) modernities

on the basis of the classical anthropological discourse on cultural diversity. But before looking at how such obstacles might be overcome, it is necessary now to turn to the encounter between modernity and culture in the other sense of the term, by asking how it is possible to theorize modernist culture or what one might call the culture in modernity.

CULTURE, MODERNITY AND MEANING Summarizing the somewhat diverse revisionary trends in recent critical theories of modernity, Johann Arnason writes that they have led to an encounter with ‘culture’ in another sense of the term. He suggests that the new approaches have resulted in an: understanding of modernity as a loosely structured constellation rather than a system, and … a stronger emphasis on the role of cultural premises and orientations in the formation of different versions [of modernity] within a flexible but not amorphous framework. (Arnason, 2000: p. 65)

Of particular interest here is the emphasis on the distinctiveness of modern ‘cultural premises and orientations’ found in critical theory. Peter Wagner captures this sense of modernity as specifiable cultural process, culture now understood in the sense of meaningful action, when he describes modernist social theorists in the twentieth century as those who build on ‘the double notion of autonomy and rationality’ (Wagner, 1999). To quote Arnason once again: One of the most important – but not yet fully explored – implications of this culturalist and pluralist view has to do with the recognition of conflict as inherent and essential to modernity . . . the most sustained and interesting variation on this theme – pioneered by Max Weber and developed most recently by Cornelius Castoriadis and Alain Touraine – stresses the conflict between two equally basic cultural premises: on the one hand, the vision of infinitely expanding rational mastery; on the other hand, the individual and collective aspiration to autonomy and creativity . . . On this view, the cultural orientations characteristic of modernity are embodied in institutions, but not reducible to them . . . [they] are mutable enough to translate

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into different institutional patterns, and at the same time sufficiently autonomous to transcend all existing institutions and allow the construction of critical alternatives as well as utopian projections. (Arnason, 2000: p. 65)

The ‘discovery’ of culture in this sense by critical theory has two significant implications for the understanding of modernity. First in response to anti-positivist trends in social theory more broadly, it shifts from an objective to a subjective emphasis. The consequence is a view that puts meaning at the core of our understanding of what it is to be modern so that modernity becomes as much a set of cultural meanings as a set of supposedly objective historical processes. Here modernity is seen as inseparable from the modern imaginaries that make it possible, to adopt the term used by Castoriadis before Taylor took it up. Modernity in other words, and contra Habermas, cannot in any simple sense be said to pre-exist a modern imaginary which constructs modernity as much as modernity provides the conditions for its emergence. But more than this, as Arnason argues, modernity is now seen to be a product of contradictory or conflicting cultural processes, and this marks a significant break with liberal narratives of modernization (as well as those of many of their critics) that tend to construct modernity as a single cultural movement. Such single-logic notions of cultural modernization are extremely problematic. They are completely unable to produce a theory of modern culture, understood as the meanings and performative values of actual people living under modern conditions. At the same time, single-logic accounts of cultural modernization fail to provide for the possibility of modernist theory itself. How is it possible for the theorist to see modern rationalization or structural differentiation as a loss of meaning, when everyone else is a slave to modern instrumental reason? The ‘solution’, a solution as we have seen advocated by recent critical theories of modernity, is to count the critique in, as it were. That is, current attempts to theorize the culture in modernity have involved treating,

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for example, Weber’s critique of modern rationalization or Durkheim’s ambivalence about the state of organic solidarity as internal to (a culture of) modernity, thereby rejecting single-logic notions of cultural modernization as only about either ‘liberty’ or ‘discipline’, but never both (see Wagner, 1994). Only in this way, it is suggested, can a genuinely reflexive modernism be conceived. However, it needs to be asked whether counting the critique of modern rationalization or individuation in, as it were, produces a satisfactory approach to the problem of what I am calling the culture in modernity. For, at least in the critical theory tradition, the most frequently cited examples of authentic modern subjectivity take the form of what I have elsewhere called exemplary modernism (Kahn, 2001). The exemplary status of modernist discourse is assured because modernists are able to see both the instrumental and expressive sides of the ‘project’ of modernity, both its potential for exploitation/oppression/even genocide, and its emancipatory possibilities. It is precisely this ability to think its way out of modernity, as it were, and hence the ambivalence to modernity of modernism in the aesthetic/philosophical sense, that provides critical theorists with their exemplar. By exemplary modernism, therefore, I refer to the tendency to describe as modern or modernist only those prominent artists and intellectuals whose work interrogates the modern but, in recognizing its contingent status, also draws on positive trends within modernity in ways admired to a greater or lesser extent by critical theorists. Exemplary modernism provides critical theory with the only source of an authentic modern subjectivity, and hence the underpinning in modernity itself for their own critical discourse on the modern. The philosophies of Kant, Hegel and Marx, the writing of Baudelaire, the ambivalent sociology of modernity of Max Weber, to say nothing of course of the modern arts, have all been proposed as such modernist exemplars (see for example Smart, 1990: p. 17). Presumably other visions or understandings of modernity, including the ‘bourgeois’ vision

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mentioned by Smart, are not exemplary because, unlike those of modernism, they are in one way or another infected or, to use Habermas’s term, ‘colonized by’ instrumental reason. Only authentic, i.e. exemplary, modernism pursues the emancipatory project of modernity through communicative rationality, the pursuit of autonomy, etc., all because it is able to recognize that the modern condition is contingent. It is clear then that exemplary modernism is a description of the sensibility of an aesthetic and philosophical avant garde. Exemplary modernists are modern avant la lettre as it were – only when everyone else catches up with them will the project of modernity, presumably, be complete. Yet exemplary modernism is very far from providing us with a true theory of modern culture except in the normative sense. It is a discursive disposition specific to high intellectual and artistic circles. It is in no way a theory of the subjectivity of people living in modern society and experiencing modern transformations. Those outside the narrow circles of the aesthetic and philosophical elite are, one must assume, incapable of interrogating the modern condition. They presumably are either culturally traditional (premodern) in Weber’s sense, or else captives of the rationalizing tendencies of modern instrumentalism, unable to see these as anything but the natural and inevitable givens of human existence. They are, in other words, without culture and reflexivity altogether. They can become culturally modern only through the advanced thought of the vanguard. Like the Marxian notion of false consciousness, exemplary modernism provides us with no insights into the cultural and hence reflexive dimensions of modernity at all, except insofar as the culture of the modern masses is thought to be spoken by exemplary moderns such as Kant, Hegel or Baudelaire, or, as in the recent work of Taylor, we are to assume culture or meaning-making always flow downwards from intellectual/aesthetic elites to the ‘masses’. However, the tendency to interrogate, criticize and build upon the modern, and perhaps unlock some of its

emancipatory potentialities, is not restricted to such rarefied levels, but does manifest itself more broadly in other areas of social life, involving a variety of other social actors and activities. As explained above, high intellectuals have usually dismissed more ‘popular’ imaginarian stirrings as irrelevant, lacking in theoretical rigour, and so on. But if we are serious about understanding modernity/modernities, this elitist position becomes only a hindrance. It is ironic that modernist theory has chosen to focus on the period of high modernism associated with the emergence of an aesthetic and intellectual avant garde, when this was precisely the time when far more widespread ‘popular’ modernisms were also taking root thanks to the changes wrought by social, political and cultural modernization – the creation of modern national (and imperial) publics, advances in communication technologies, the birth of the modern culture industries, the rise of what could be called social movements and civil society groups and the beginnings of a ‘massification’ of commerce, political enfranchisement and consumption. Here individuals and groups who were in general neither members of the philosophical, aesthetic or political elites nor members of the new proletariat or underclasses were creating new modern imaginaries. Their role in reworking the modernist meanings and texts of the elites, on the one hand, and constructing meanings for the masses, on the other, was of pivotal importance in the emergence of the broad modernist sensibility that I have called popular modernism (see Kahn, 2001). Popular modernism cannot and should not be seen prima facie as merely traditional or lacking a critical edge, nor as a substandard version of the more sophisticated exemplary modernism that I described above. Whether we like it or not, popular modernism is as likely to interrogate modernity, to recognize its fleeting and contingent nature, to see its contradictions, to manifest a profound ambivalence towards it, as is high modernism. Even a cursory glance at the broader discursive and imagistic landscapes of the

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modern world would show that popular critiques of modernity are not just possible, but in fact have been extremely pervasive, often precisely during periods that also witnessed the flowering of high modernism in the arts and philosophy.15 There is no reason to presume either that these popular discourses were merely the result of a ‘trickle down’ of ideas from modernist avant garde circles, or that the gurus of ‘high culture’ were merely acting as spokespersons for an inarticulate mass. Besides, as the recent work of researchers such as Yoshino demonstrates, the popular consumption of symbols, visions and identities produced by political, economic and intellectual elites often generates quite different meanings and outcomes from the ones intended by their creators. It needs to be stressed here that in advocating a focus on popular modernism, I am not arguing for some form of subalternism, that is, for the conceit, prevalent in recent years among some critics of modernity, that the analyst has privileged access to mass consciousness or the pre-existing subjective world of people who stand in a position of alterity vis-à-vis modernity.16 When I speak here of the popular modernism constituted through, for instance, the modern entertainment industry, social movements or popular forms of novels and other print media, I do not assume that it somehow merely reflects the deep subjective pre-existing cultural meanings of ‘the masses’. Modern cultural industries and social movements, among others, are instead what might be called middle-level discursive formations. They are the arenas in which popular meanings and performances of the modern condition, together with a popular tendency to interrogate modernity, have been constructed and reconstructed since the time of the establishment of mature modernity.17 Furthermore, popular modernism may help us to dispel the implicit essentialism found in much of the multiple-modernities literature, as it forces us to engage head on with the concrete and particularistic ‘contaminations’ that are part of modernity everywhere, with the so-called ‘alternative’ patterns of the modern world.

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MALAYSIAN MODERNIZATION Malaysia would seem an apt place in which to evaluate the possibility of an alternative to Western modernity, being the site both of significant economic ‘development’ in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century18 and, as Ong reminds us, of new modernist imaginaries in which the possibility of an autonomous, non-Western trajectory of modernization has been strongly articulated by elites, and increasingly in society more broadly. Has Malaysia found a distinctive path to the modern and indeed to the postmodern? The rapid development of a number of Asia-Pacific economies in the last 20 years of the twentieth century, and the subsequent collapse of Asian currencies and the cracks that subsequently opened up in political regimes throughout the region, breathed new life into old arguments about whether Asia was, or was not, radically different from ‘the West’. One detects a certain hidden pleasure in the West in initial reactions to the so-called Asian economic crisis of late 1997 when influential observers across the political spectrum read the indicators of economic collapse as evidence that Asian modernization, however exceptional it may have been, was now firmly back on a more recognizable (at least to Westerners) developmental trajectory. Never mind that up to the onset of the crisis, key Western observers were remarking on the efficient ways in which Asian regimes were managing their economies. Now unfavourable comments on such practices of ‘Asian’ economic management, along with declarations that the region is now (or should soon be) back on the straight and narrow road to the modern already pioneered in the West, are commonplace. The crisis shows that ‘in the long run you need openness and accountability to have sustainable growth’, characteristics, it is implied, of Western rather than Asian patterns of modernization. Francis Fukuyama concluded that the 1997 crises would end up puncturing the idea of Asian exceptionalism, that the ‘laws of economics have not been

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suspended in Asia’. Going further an influential American journalist asserted that the crisis would ‘finally lay to rest this unquestioning worship of Asian values … capitalism in its freewheeling, AngloSaxon variety is coming into its own’ (cited in Milner, 2000). As these critiques show Malaysia has become prominent – or notorious, depending upon one’s point of view – in turn-of-thecentury debates over Asian exceptionalism, due in no small part to the propensity of Malaysia’s longest-serving and charismatic Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, to air his views in the global media on, at different times, Asian, Malaysian, Malay, Islamic exceptionalism and the distinctiveness of what he called ‘Asian values’. During his only recently concluded Prime Ministership, Dr Mahathir clearly enjoyed his role as the Asian leader Westerners most like to hate, arguing since assuming office in 1981 that Asian societies in general, and Malaysia in particular, had achieved their economic successes in the face of strong Western opposition, and that in so doing they had relied on distinctively Asian values and traditions. These were typically said to include: strong attachment to family and community, a refusal of the Western separation between religious and civic/secular spheres of life, and, certainly fortuitously from Mahathir’s point of view, a widespread acceptance of strong and stable government, with notions of citizenship that entailed loyalty to political elites and responsibility as much, if not more, than ‘rights’.19 Local versions of the arguments in favour of Asian exceptionalism sometimes took the form of a postcolonial cultural project, though given that they were frequently embedded in the discourse of authoritarian political elites, perhaps not the same as that envisaged by postcolonial theorists in the West. While the Asian Values discourse has lost some of its momentum since the 1997 crisis, Mahathir remained unrepentant, even accusing the West of manipulating world money flows to provoke the crisis in the first place. The deployment of Asian Values discourse through the Asian boom years of the 1990s

was significant for, among other things, the placing of women, gender relations and a version of the family at the centre of political debates around the future of the ‘nation’, society, relations between East and West and of civilization itself. As such, it has returned in the re-invocation of a Clash of Civilizations since September 11, 2001, reminding us that the perception of radical gaps between cultures and civilizations can be as prominent in the non-West as it is in the West.20 Certainly momentous socio-political and cultural changes have taken place in Malaysia more or less since I first travelled to the region to begin anthropological research, first among Minangkabau villagers in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra in the early 1970s, and then among the Malays in the west-coast Malaysian state of Negeri Sembilan several years later. In the years since that time – and as a result of changes in Malaysian society that took place in the wake of the Kuala Lumpur riots of 1969, the implementation of the so-called New Economic Policy, and the radical modernization policies instituted during the Prime Ministership of Mahathir Mohamad – I have witnessed nothing less than the disappearance of ‘my’ Malaysian ‘object of study’ – a Malay peasant village in Rembau district – as its residents and their children gradually abandoned rice cultivation, fruit harvesting and rubber tapping, many moving more or less permanently into towns and cities in the process. This took place in the context of an almost total overhaul of the broader Malaysian economic, social and political landscape, marked by a rapid growth of the manufacturing sector stimulated by a relatively large inflow of direct foreign investment21 and the mushrooming of factories and small and medium-scale manufacturing facilities in free trade zones and industrial parks up and down the country; the expansion in scope and powers of the state (and particularly of its executive arm) together with the onward march of bureaucratic rationalization; the deepening support for and rationalization of the major world religions (Islam, Christianity, Buddhism) with significant numbers of adherents in the country;22

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the rapid growth not just of cities but of modern urban landscapes of office towers, hotels and condominiums in the Klang valley and in regional centres such as Penang, Johore and Pahang; the mushrooming of housing estates on the fringes of all of Malaysia’s urban centres; the sprouting of shopping centres, malls, restaurants and multinational fast-food outlets in city centres and suburban fringes; the construction of highways, toll roads and bridges and the rapid growth in car ownership and accompanying traffic snarls; the expansion of banking, share trading and consumer credit; the growth of all branches of the media, the popular entertainment industries and cyberculture; a rapid expansion of tourism, theme parks, entertainment complexes and of leisure centres; all of this accompanied by greatly increased levels of pollution and environmental degradation. But if by most definitions Malaysia has modernized over the last few decades, it is also true to say that when viewed through the lens of the (idealized) path of Western modernization constructed particularly in the discourse of liberal evolutionism, Malaysian modernity appears flawed in a large number of ways. Measured against the yardstick provided by classical liberal models of modernity, Malaysia will always be found wanting: modern perhaps, but incompletely modern at best. Malaysia is a modern state, but one which appears deficient because of the absence of full democracy. Malaysia has a rational bureaucracy, but also seems to be plagued by the presence of elements of a pre-modern political order in which the system of government was coterminous with personalized ties between patrons and clients. Malaysia is clearly a capitalist economy, yet the persistence of ‘cronyism’ suggests it still has some way to go before it meets the standards of efficiency expected of a full market economy. A ‘modern’ separation between church and state has developed, but the penetration of Islam into the public sphere suggests that the separation is somehow incomplete. Malaysia appears to be characterized by an incomplete separation of public and private (however defined), and

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a failure of differentiation of economic and political spheres. Malaysian society is urbanized, but substantial peasantries and tribal populations seem to ‘survive’ in ‘remote’ regions. While the Malaysian state may seek to impose a universal understanding of citizenship, racial identification and antagonism remain strong. In significant ways, then, when we employ an earlier ‘acultural’ concept of modernity, Malaysia seems to remain other to the modern in significant ways, forcing us back into the language of classical social theory in which otherness was constituted as historically anterior to, and as a result an incomplete or immature version of, the modern/civilized self. Yet taking ‘culture’ – in both the anthropological and meaning-making senses of the term – on board, allows us to see in the economic, political, social and discursive transformations that have taken place over the last few decades evidence of a Malaysian modernity that is not merely a flawed replica of the West’s, but instead a genuine alternative to it. But is this integration of Malaysia into the modernist fold merely a semantic sleight of hand? One must ask about the implications of the assertion that what we have in contemporary Malaysia is indeed the reworking or indigenization of a Western process of both institutional and discursive transformation within the context of a pre-existing non-Western and, by implication, non-modern culture that inflects these processes in distinctive ways. For as we have noted, in most attempts to theorize a multiplicity of modernities it is argued that in one way or another modern practices, institutions, behaviours are introduced into the non-West from the outside, usually through European colonial regimes, only then to be ‘hybridized’ or ‘indigenized’ through interaction with (pre-existing) nonWestern ‘cultures’. And yet as narrators of Malaysian modernity, we find that ‘we cannot not periodize’, to adopt the somewhat peculiar phrasing employed by Fredric Jameson in his ‘first maxim of modernity’. Moreover, once we

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do begin to sketch in a premodern baseline against which to specify modern change, the consciousness of a break or rupture with a past gives way in turn to the awareness of that past as a period in itself (Jameson, 2002: pp. 29–30). As a consequence, as soon as we ask about what it is that makes modern Malaysia unique with respect to its past, we move from the idea of a radical break with tradition and discover a past in its own right, in this case not of a timeless, premodern Eastern society into which an already fully formed Western modernity was inserted, but an earlier phase in the history of a modernizing global system of which Malaya was already a part. And it now appears to be developments in this earlier phase of Malay(si)an modernization, rather than some essentialized Malaysian ‘culture’, that accounts for the distinctive features of the Malaysian present.23 This may be illustrated by examining just two dimensions of the supposedly distinctively Malaysian version of modernity, namely the polity in which are combined both bureaucratic rationalization and cronyism, on the one hand, and the apparently ‘incomplete’ separation between church and state, on the other. In fact neither of these can be easily linked to Malaya’s premodern past or to a preexisting civilizational or cultural heritage. Instead, the former can be traced to the growth of rational bureaucratic rule beginning in the late nineteenth century with the imposition of British colonial advisers on ‘native’ rulers in the Federated Malay States, along with the functional links that developed in this period among colonial bureaucracy, Malay royalty and Western and Chinese economic elites. These provided the framework for the interpenetrating network of political and economic relations that later came to be labelled cronyism, which took on its contemporary form in the late colonial period with the rise of a coalition of the communalistic political parties (notably the United Malays National Organization, the Malayan Chinese Association and the Malayan Indian Congress) to which independence was ultimately delivered. Each was strongly shaped by patronage

and clientelism within the different ‘racial’ communities and by the exchange of political for economic favours between the politically dominant UMNO, and especially Chinese business interests who controlled the Malayan Chinese Association. The project of modernizing Islam in Malaysia, along with the centrality of religion in the political system, also has its roots in two rather separate developments in this period. On the one hand, although not an Islamic state either now or in the past, the colonial government can be credited with creating the system of state-controlled, bureaucratized Islam, under which the government religious bureaucracy took a close interest in the supposedly private religious behaviour of its Muslim subjects.24 On the other hand, this same period in the early twentieth century was also the time when new, modernist interpretations of Islam were being spread across the peninsula, brought mainly by immigrants from Sumatra who themselves had come under the influence of reformist trends emanating from the Middle East, and from Cairo in particular.25 In general the ‘modernists’ advocated: ijtihad (‘independent’ ‘rational investigation’ of the sources of Islam, individual interpretation based on personal knowledge of the Quran and the Sunna)26 over taqlid (‘emulation of the decisions of the founding imams, hence accepting authority and interpretation of the teacher’); openness to Western knowledge to the extent that it was not adjudged ‘hostile to Islam’27 (this was generally taken to mean openness to Western science and technology, but often hostility even amounting to a demonization of a ‘Western’ culture deemed secularist, materialist, nationalist and racist);28 and, finally, the need to return to the original texts of Islam, and to treat them as the literal word of God (hence ‘fundamentalism’). The latter characteristic of reformist ideology accounts for the generalized hostility of Muslim reformers, at least in Southeast Asia, to local culture/local tradition, which, to the extent that it is viewed as corrupting of the tenets of (originary) Islam, is seen as needing to be purged. In this sense movements

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for Islamic reform – indeed like other reform movements – can be seen to be disembedding projects, since they were (and remain today) dedicated to the purification of religious practice of all elements of its social and cultural context. As these examples show, recent processes of modernization in Malaysia bear the imprint less of a timeless civilizational or cultural heritage than of the ways in which processes of economic, political and cultural transformation were played out in an earlier phase of modernization. Nor are these processes separable from the global/imperial system within which they were embedded at the time. Does this mean we need to travel back to an even earlier period when Malaya was more clearly external to the modern arena in order to find the roots of Malaysia’s alternative modernity? Without denying that Malayan modernization has always taken place within particular, localized historical and cultural contexts, I would suggest that we would nonetheless never reach a point in the history of modernity – however we define it and no matter to which historical period we seek to trace its emergence – when Asia was not already present within it.29 Recent intellectual histories of Malaya have, for example, demonstrated the extent to which ideas about the shortcomings of traditional authority quite similar to those articulated by Enlightenment philosophers were also being articulated by an earlier generation of modernist Muslims in Southeast Asia, a Malayan example being the figure of Munshi Abdullah (see Milner, 1995). It can in fact be convincingly argued that Europe and Asia constituted a singular zone of interaction even in earlier periods (see Lieberman, 1999, 2003). There was, in short, no historical time when Europe was already modern and places such as Malaya premodern. Narrating Malay(si)an modernity can never take place outside a narrative of Western modernity. Equally narrating modernity in the West should never take place without recognizing that it was never merely Western. The relation between East and West is better understood as an interior relationship

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in the history of modernity, making the notion of multiple modernities as it has recently been framed problematic at best. I have used this Malaysian example to indicate that modernity is ‘contaminated’ by concrete and particularistic cultural and historical conditions not only in places outside the West, but implicitly also in the West itself. Far from assuming, as many theorists of multiple modernities have done, that the Western spaces of modernity have always and everywhere been governed by the pure operation of instrumental rationalism, impersonal market relations, a separation of economic and political spheres, and the rise of secularism, among others – which leads to the conclusion that where this is not the case we have to do with another modernity – the critique of abstract and universal visions of modernity that has been put forward by, for example, Wagner, and which I have tried to build on in my work, compels us to also engage with the modernizing trajectories of the West in a more concrete and particularistic way. Engaging with modernity becomes a question of producing an understanding of social and cultural transformation in particular parts of the world which is not framed in terms of a predetermined metanarrative of modernity which on closer examination does not even work for its place of origin, ‘the West’. This strategy should feed back into a new anthropology of the West, instead of only the non-West, forcing a rethinking of the vision of an abstract, universal condition called modernity and an engagement with the particular dimensions of modern existence which can be ‘specific’ but not template-like. If we are indeed prepared to go in this direction, then we will have to reconsider modernity, in both East and West, South and North, as part of a single historical process of modernization that was global from the outset.30

CULTURE, DIFFERENCE AND THE MODERN GLOBAL In the above I have been critical of certain aspects of recent attempts to pluralize

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modernity by ‘leaning on’ the classical anthropological concept of cultural pluralism, particularly in Asian contexts. Like the geographer Tim Bunnell, in his recent study of Malaysia’s so-called Multimedia Super Corridor – a modern ‘intelligent landscape’ under construction near the country’s bold new administrative capital in Putrajaya – I have been critical in particular of those who would posit ‘the existence of bounded, alternate (or “non-Western”) modernities’ either now or in the past. Like Bunnell I would urge new theorists of modernity to ‘resist [the] bounded typological packaging’ that tends to accompany much of the theorizing of multiple and alternative modernities (Bunnell, 2004: p. 5). And yet the multiple-modernities paradigm is meant among other things to engage with, and to a certain extent value, the diversity that continues to exist at the heart of the modern global system. Rejecting a notion of ‘bounded, alternative modernities’, should not be taken as an argument in favour of a return to monolithic conceptualizations of the modern project. This author shares with these theorists the sense that classical modernist theorizing did tend to trade away the possibility of more cosmopolitan encounters with modern human diversity for sterile and pared-back explanations that reduced everything to single, absolutist, allencompassing metanarratives. What should we make of the suspicion that reviving the narrative of modernity as a singular phenomenon will lead to the suppression or demonization of otherness? In my view this fear is based on the highly insidious assumption that once modernized, the other becomes incapable of culturebuilding and innovation, doomed merely to repeat the performances of modern life of countless generations of Westerners before them. Instead we might agree with Bunnell, who, having rejected the idea of a bounded ‘Malaysian modernity’, wants nonetheless to speak of a ‘multiplicity of experienced modernities … forged through shifting networked relations of interconnection which resist typological packaging – and which

therefore unsettle the very binary of West – the rest’ (2004, p. 5). Surely ‘Asian’ moderns are as capable of cultural and performative creativity as anyone else. That they have become enmeshed in processes of commodification and rationalization does not mean that they will lose all ability to construct creative responses to modern life. Can we not instead expect that ‘they’ might in fact come up with solutions to some of the worst dilemmas posed by earlier processes of modernization – violence, environmental destruction, deprivation, racial exclusion? Or must we continue to constitute them as exotic objects in a world that we ultimately control? Perhaps a more cosmopolitan sense of what it is to be modern might arise from a recognition of the full diversity of cultural currents and institutional forms thrown up in different locations and at different times in the history of the modern world. It may be that attention to the cultures of modernity understood in this way will, instead, provide us with utopias that are in fact achievable. That would be a very real contribution indeed.

NOTES 1 The research on Malaysia reported in this chapter was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council, and by the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, which awarded me a Visiting Professorship in 2004. Both are gratefully acknowledged here. I also benefited from research assistance from Francesco Formosa. 2 I am grateful to Tim Bunnell for drawing this passage to my attention. 3 See, among others, Arnason (2001), Eisenstadt (2001), Faubion (1993), Gaonkar (1999), Hefner (1998), Minichiello (1998), Mitchell, J. (2002), Mitchell, T. (2000), Rofel (1999), Sachsenmaier (2002), Taylor (2001), Wittrock (2000). 4 See for example Mehta (1997) [1990]. 5 This is not the place to engage in a lengthy critique of postmodern and postcolonial theorists, with whom I am in some sympathy anyway. Nevertheless, it should be noted that their criticisms of modernist narratives are not sufficiently self-reflexive, consequently falling themselves into the dreaded trap of essentialism, as David Scott points out (1999). Their attacks on past intellectual traditions tend to be couched too much in a presentist and indiscriminating approach as a result of which the modern world

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ends up looking very much like the puristic and normativistic entity that they criticize their intellectual opponents for constructing. 6 For a critique of developmentalism as disciplinizing discourse in Africa see Ferguson (1990). 7 For overviews of nineteenth-century social evolutionism see Burrow (1966), McGrane (1989), and especially George Stocking (1987, 1995a). 8 This is taken from an undated paper posted on the web by T.K. Oomen (see Oomen, nd.: n.p.). 9 Whatever else can be said of Weber’s work, it would be grossly incorrect and unfair to deny the centrality of the cultural dimension in it. As his interest in comparative historical sociology, cultural change, world religions and the uniqueness of modern European culture would attest to, cultural concerns were at the forefront of all his thinking. For an excellent discussion of the role of culture in Weber’s sociology, see Schroeder (1992). 10 For a more detailed consideration of the culturalist critiques of modern instrumental rationality articulated by the German historical school of economics see Kahn (1990). 11 For Durkheim see Durkheim (1984), Emirbayer (2003) and Turner (1993). For Weber see Weber (1930), Gerth and Wright Mills (1970), Schroeder (1992) and Swedberg (1999). For Sombart see Sombart (1962). 12 Taken from a brief overview of the project that led to the book that appeared on the web at www.bcg.com/this_is_bcg/strategy_institute_global strat_inst_our_work_modernities.jsp (accessed 11/01/2005). 13 The beginning of the so-called reflexive turn tends to be marked by the appearance of an influential book on ethnographic writing and hence the textuality of anthropological knowledge (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; see also Marcus and Cushman, 1982), although the evidence is that something like this 1980s critique of ethnographic realism had been bubbling away in the discipline for some time already by that time. 14 The literature here is vast. See Clifford (1988), various contributors to Fox (ed.) (1991), Kahn (1995), Appadurai (1996), and Hannerz (1996), among others. 15 For an interesting discussion of popular/commercial modernism in, for example, New York City see Taylor (1992). 16 For more detailed treatments of the problematic of subalternism, peasantism, pre-modern cultures, etc. see Kahn (1993, 1995). 17 This interest in ‘popular’ forms of modernism, of course, betrays my own background as an anthropologist. As I wrote in Modernity and Exclusion, my own attempt to understand the nature and consequences of modernity has ‘a different starting point, perhaps partly as a consequence of the fact that it is written by an anthropologist in search of an “ethnographic” – by which I mean embedded

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and popular – understanding of both modernity and modernism’ (Kahn, 2001: p. ix). 18 Malaysia, having recovered more rapidly than most Western economies from the economic recession of the early 1980s, experienced annual economic growth rates between 1985 and 1997 of over 8 per cent every year. The rate of growth in the manufacturing sector consistently exceeded GDP growth rates, and the share of manufacturing in total exports grew even more rapidly in the same period (see Jomo, 1997). 19 Born in 1925 in Alor Setar, Kedah, Mahathir joined the United Malays National Oganization (UMNO) at its foundation in 1946. He was centrally concerned along with other Malay nationalists with curbing the powers of the monarchy and the emancipation of women. His 1969 book, The Malay Dilemma, attacked colonialism, but was also very critical of ‘traditional’ Malay values, which he argued had to be set aside in favour of a culture more compatible with development. While therefore there are elements of Asian Values discourse in his earlier writings, the fullblown thesis about Asian exceptionalism comes rather later in his political career. An excellent intellectual biography is Khoo Boo Teik’s (Khoo, 1995). Mahathir’s pronouncements on so-called Asian values have taken a variety of forms, and are not necessarily always consistent or coherent (not unusual for a politician). A good source for many of his underlying ideas about the distinctiveness of Asian societies is in a book produced with a Japanese writer (see Mahathir and Ishihara, 1995, especially pp. 81–86). 20 These arguments for and against Asian exceptionalism are not particularly new. Indeed although they may now focus on Malaysia, just as earlier debates focused on Japan, China, the Muslim world, or India, it might be suggested that the debate has been central to modern thought and culture from its inception. 21 A significant contrast between the ‘second wave’ industrialization in Northeast and the ‘third wave’ industrialization in Southeast Asia has been the much greater role played by FDI in the latter. This has had a series of significant differentiating effects, one being that the new bourgeoisie in Southeast Asia has tended to be concentrated in the banking and financial sectors (manufacturing being mainly controlled by foreign companies). According to one of the most astute observers of the Malaysian political economy, the result was that in being forced to respond to the demands of Malaysian capital for greater financial liberalization, the country was opened up to increased possibility of capital flight, one of the main causes of the 1997 economic crisis (see Jomo, 2003). 22 For a discussion of religious ‘revival’ in Malaysia cast explicitly in Weberian terms, see Lee and Ackerman (1997). 23 For a more detailed discussion of earlier phases of Malay(si)an modernization see Kahn (2006).

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24 By far the best account of the modern colonial origins of Islamic bureaucratization is found in Yegar (1979). 25 For the spread of reformist/‘modernist’ Islam in peninsular Malaya from the early twentieth century, see Firdaus (1985). 26 It is sometimes suggested, then, that Islamic reformism is opposed to all forms of religious authority, it being up to the individual believer to decide on his/her own the meaning of the original texts. This, interestingly, was often a view expressed to me by Minangkabau villagers in the early 1970s. However, as is perhaps the case with all self-consciously ‘rationalist’ ideologies, reformism certainly does not do away with textual authority, since it is generally recognized that linguistic and religious expertise is required before one can produce ijtihad. Hence the important role of religious education/certification in the production of modernist authority. Nonetheless, as Eickelman points out, the new importance of the printing industry (embraced by modernists from early on), and hence the ‘textualization’ of Islam associated with Islamic reformism, does make it possible for the first time for people to have direct access to Islamic arguments without any intervening religious authority – making it at least potentially possible for the reader to exercise ‘authoritative immediacy’ (see Eickelman, 2000). For a somewhat different, far more critical (more Foucauldian) view of the changes in Islam wrought by print capitalism see Schulze (1987). 27 Laffan (2003, pp. 121–122). See also Taufik Abdullah (1971), Aziz Al-Azmeh (1993). 28 It is very important to stress the frequent presence of this occidentalizing/demonizing vision of the West within the discourse of so-called Islamic ‘modernism’, something that in part accounts for its radical anticolonial tendencies. However, it also renders problematic simplistic characterizations of Islamic reformism as straightforwardly ‘progressive’, even ‘democratic’, since frequently democracy is rejected by reformers precisely because it is considered to be part of a Western culture of secular materialism. 29 Recent intellectual histories of Malaya have, for example, demonstrated the extent to which ideas about the shortcomings of traditional authority quite similar to those articulated by Enlightenment philosophers were also being offered by an earlier generation of modernist Muslims in Southeast Asia, a Malayan example being the figure of Munshi Abdullah (see Milner, 1995). For the argument that Europe and Asia constituted a singular zone of interaction even in earlier periods see Lieberman (1999, 2003). Also, see Mitchell (2002). 30 Here the work of Harry Harootunian (2000a, 2000b) is of considerable relevance, as he is pursuing a similar project of problematizing the various ‘boundaries’ and categories characteristic of modern(ist) narratives and of examining certain intellectual-cultural

formations of modernity within a single framework. See also Miyoshi and Harootunian (2002).

REFERENCES Abdullah, T. (1971) Schools and Politics: the Kaum Muda Movement in West Sumatra (1927–1933). Ithaca, NY: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, Cornell University. Al-Azmeh, A. (1993) Islam and Modernities. London: Verso. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Arnason, J.P. (2000) ‘Communism and modernity’, Daedalus 129(1): 61–90. Arnason, J.P. (2001) ‘The multiplication of modernity’, in E. Ben-Rafael and Y. Sternberg (eds), Identity, Culture and Globalization. Leiden: Brill. Bunnell, T. (2004) Malaysia, Modernity and the Multimedia Super Corridor: A Critical Geography of Intelligent Landscapes. London and New York: Routledge Curzon. Burrow, J.W. (1966) Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clifford, J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.E. (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (a School of American Research advanced seminar). Berkeley: University of California Press. Dirlik, A. (2003) ‘Global modernity?: modernity in an age of global capitalism’, European Journal of Social Theory, 6(3): 275–292. Durkheim, E. (1984) The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press. Eickelman, D.F. (2000) ‘Islam and the languages of modernity’, Daedalus 129(1): 119–135. Eisenstadt, S.N. (2000) Multiple Modernities. Jerusalem: Truman Institute Reprints. (Reprinted from Daedalus, 129(1): 1–29.) Emirbayer, M. (2003) Emile Durkheim: Sociologist of Modernity. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Faubion, J. (1993) Modern Greek Lessons. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ferguson, J. (1990) The AntiPolitics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Firdaus Haji Abdullah (1985) Radical Malay Politics: Its Origins and Early Development. Petaling Jaya: Pelanduk Publications.

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Fox, R.G. (ed.) (1991) Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present . Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press: Distributed by the University of Washington Press. Gaonkar, D.P. (1999) ‘On alternative modernities’, Public Culture 11(1): 1–28. Gerth, H.H. and Wright Mills, C. (eds) (1970) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hannerz, U. (1996) Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. New York: Routledge. Harootunian, H.D. (2000a) History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Harootunian, H.D. (2000b) Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hefner, R. (1998) ‘Multiple Modernities: Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in a globalizing age’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 27: 83–104. Jameson, F. (2002) A Singular Modernity. London, New York: Verso. Jomo, K.S. (1997) Southeast Asia’s Misunderstood Miracle: Industrial Policy and Economic Development in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Jomo, K.S. (2003) ‘Introduction’, in K.S. Jomo (ed.), Southeast Asian Paper Tigers? From Miracle to Debacle and Beyond. London and New York: Routledge Curzon. Kahn, J.S. (1990) ‘Towards a History of the Critique of Economism: The 19th Century German Origins of the Ethnographer’s Dilemma’, Man (NS), 25: 108–128. Kahn, J.S. (1993) Constituting the Minagkabau: Peasants, Culture and Modernity in Colonial Indonesia. Providence, RI: Berg. Kahn, J.S. (1995) Culture, Multiculture, Postculture. London: Sage Kahn, J.S. (2001) Modernity and Exclusion. London: Sage Kahn, J.S. (2006) Other Malays: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World. Asian Studies Association of Australia in association with Singapore University Press (Singapore) and NIAS Press (Copenhagen) (published in the United States by University of Hawaii Press). Khoo Boo Teik (1995) Paradoxes of Mahathirism. Kuala Lumpur, New York: Oxford University Press. Kuper, A. (1999) Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laffan, M.F. (2003) Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds. London and New York: Routledge Curzon.

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Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf Lee, R.L.M. and Ackerman, S.E. (1997) Sacred Tensions: Modernity and Religious Transformations in Malaysia. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Lieberman, V. (ed.) (1999) Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c. 1830. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Lieberman, V. (2003) Strange Parallels : Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830. Vol. 1, Integration on the Mainland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Mahathir, M. and Shintaro Ishihara (1995) The Voice of Asia: Two Leaders Discuss the Coming Century. Tokyo: Kodansha International/Kinokuniya Marcus, G.E. and Cushman, D. (1982) ‘Ethnographies as texts’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 11: 25–69. Marcus, G.E. and Fischer, M.M.J. (1986) Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press Marín, C. (1994) ‘Modernity in the periphery: the Latin American Case’, Cultural Studies from Birmingham, (3): 77–111. Miyoshi, M. and Harootunian, H.D. (eds) (2002) Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McGrane, B. (1989) Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other. New York: Columbia University Press. Mehta, U. (1990) ‘Liberal strategies of exclusion’, reprinted in F. Cooper and A. Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press. (previous edn, 1997.) Milner, A.C. (1995) The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya: Contesting Nationalism and the Expansion of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milner, A. (2000) ‘What happened to “Asian Values”?’, in G. Siegel and D.S.G. Goodman (eds), Toward Recovery in Pacific Asia. London and New York: Routledge. Minichiello, S.A. (1998) Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy 1900–1930. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press Mitchell, J.P. (2002) ‘Modernity and the Mediterranean’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 12(1): 1–21. Mitchell, T. (ed.) (2000) Questions of Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ong, Aihwa (1996) ‘Anthropology, China and modernities: the geopolitics of cultural knowledge’, in H.L. Moore (ed.), The Future of Anthropological Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 60–92.

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Oommen, T.K. (nd) ‘Recognizing multiple modernities: a prelude to understanding globalization’. Retrieved January 11 2005 from http://members. tripod.com/∼csssjnu/oommen.html. Rofel, L. (1999) Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. Berkeley, Los Angles and London: University of California Press. Sachsenmaier, D., et al. (eds) (2002) Reflections on Multiple Modernities: European, Chinese and Other Interpretations. Leiden: Brill. Schroeder, R. (1992) Max Weber and the Sociology of Culture. London: Sage. Schulze, R. (1987) ‘Mass culture and Islamic cultural production in 19th century Middle East’, in G. Stauth and S. Zubaida (eds), Mass Culture, Popular Culture, and Social Life in the Middle East. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag; Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Scott, D. (1999) Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smart, B. (1990) ‘Modernity, postmodernity and the present’, in B.S. Turner (ed.), Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity. London: Sage. Sombart, W. (1962) The Jews and Modern Capitalism. New York: Collier Books. Stocking, G.W. Jr. (1968) Race, Culture and Evolution. New York: Free Press. Stocking, G.W. Jr. (1987) Victorian anthropology. New York: Free Press. Stocking, G.W. Jr. (1995a) After Tylor, British Social Anthropology 1888–1951. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Stocking, G.W. Jr. (1995b) ‘Delimiting anthropology’, Social Research, 62(4): 933–966. Swedberg, R. (ed.) (1999) Max Weber: Essays in Economic Sociology/Max Weber. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Taylor, C. (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Taylor, C. and Lee, B. (nd) ‘Multiple Modernities Project: Modernity and Difference’, Working Draft. Retrieved January 11 2005 from http://www.sas. upenn.edu/transcult/promad.html. Taylor, P. (2001) Fragments of the Present: Searching for Modernity in Vietnam’s South. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Taylor, W.R. (1992) In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York. New York: Oxford University Press. Turner, S.P. (1993) Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Moralist. London: Routledge. Wagner, P. (1994) A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline. London and New York: Routledge. Wagner, P. (1999) ‘The Resistance that modernity constantly provokes: Europe, America and Social Theory’, Thesis Eleven, 58: 35–58. Weber, M. (1930) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: G. Allen & Unwin. Weber, M. (1999) in R. Swedberg (ed.), Essays in Economic Sociology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wittrock, B. (2000) ‘Modernity: one, none or many? European origins and modernity as a global condition’, Daedalus, 129(1): 31–60. Yang, M.M. (1994) Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yegar, M. (1979) Islam and Islamic Institutions in British Malaya: Policy and Implementation. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, The Hebrew University. Yoshino, K. (ed.) (1999) Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism: Asian Experiences. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

17 Globalization and Cultural Flows/Networks Diana Crane

The phenomenon of globalization has been widely discussed in most social science disciplines (Robertson, 2001: p. 458)1 but, to date, nothing has appeared that corresponds to a general theory of globalization. There is considerable disagreement about the extent to which globalization has actually taken place in the economic, political and cultural realms. Held et al. (1999) identify three positions in this debate over globalization: the hyperglobalist, who argues that globalization is far advanced and predicts the immanent demise of nation states, the transformationalist, who argues that nation states are being irrevocably changed by globalization, and the sceptic, who asserts the continuing power and importance of the nation state. An example of the latter point of view is found in Hirst and Thompson (1999: chapter 1), who define an advanced stage of economic globalization (which they characterize as a myth that does not correspond to economic conditions at the present time) as one in which the international economy would be fully globalized such that ‘distinct national economies are subsumed and rearticulated

into the system by international processes and transactions’ (Hirst and Thomson, 1999: p. 10). Multinational companies with no specific national affiliations would be the major actors in such a system and would no longer be controlled or constrained by the policies of nation states (Hirst and Thompson, 1999; p. 11). Hirst and Thompson contrast this form of economic globalization with the form of economic globalization that they believe actually exists today, in which the international economy is characterized by exchanges between relatively distinct national economies and in which many types of economic phenomena are still determined by factors occurring at the national or regional levels. Multinational companies are increasingly important but retain their affiliations with national economies and are susceptible to control by the policies of nation states. Three different conceptions of the processes underlying globalization dominate the discussion of the topic at the present time. The first conception is associated with economics and characterizes globalization as

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being driven by neoliberal economic policies and practices that have been adopted by transnational and multinational corporations and by many nation states. The neoliberal agenda calls for ‘the liberalization of national markets, the deregulation of capital flows, the lifting of trade restrictions based on environmental or human rights concerns, and the strengthening of the rights of investors’ (Hamelink, 2002: p. 251). The neoliberal agenda is also being applied to culture as an economic good, proposing the elimination of restrictions on cultural imports and of regulations for protecting any form of national culture (Hamelink, 2002: p. 253). It favours global mergers and joint ventures among media companies that lead to control by a small number of companies over the content of media at the national level. The cultural equivalent of the neoliberal model of economic globalization perceives globalization as a process that is producing globally transmitted cultures which emanate from a hegemonic ‘centre’, consisting of a few dominant nations, and which reduce the cultural autonomy of less powerful countries that constitute a weak ‘periphery’. The second conception of globalization highlights the role of flows of information, media, people and technologies and the networks that transmit these flows, linking individuals, cities, states and regions. Held (quoted in Guibernau, 2001: p. 427) attempts to convey the essence of globalization when he states that globalization is a spatial phenomenon with the local and national at one end, and the (supranational) regional and global at the other. He claims: ‘It is about the stretching of connections, relations, and networks between human communities, an increase in the intensity of these, and a general speeding up of all these phenomena’. Beck (2003: p. 21) states this idea in a different way by stressing two concepts that are central to the process of globalization: interconnectedness (‘interdependencies, networks and flows’) and cosmopolitanization, by which he means the transnationalization of social structures and institutions. The latter is taking place as a result of ‘global fluids’(flows of information, symbols, money, education,

risks and people). In general, globalization connotes the increasing interconnectedness and interdependence of social, cultural and economic phenomena across national boundaries. Interconnectedness and interdependence are leading to increasing deterritorialization and integration of activities and practices originating in different countries and to a gradual decline in the power and influence of the nation state.2 The third conception of globalization views supranational space as being populated by thousands of international organizations which constitute in the aggregate a global civil society and may lead to global democracy in the future. These organizations are committed to a very different set of values from those implied in the first approach. The latter describes processes directed towards ‘globalization from above’ for the benefit of corporate and political elites. The third model refers to movements and organizations that are attempting to democratize globalization and to encourage ‘globalization from below’ (Falk, 1999). The first conception of globalization is that of a phenomenon being driven by both economic and cultural factors. The second and third conceptions place more emphasis on culture. In fact, the relationship between economic globalization and cultural globalization is reciprocal, in that cultural, political and social changes on the global level have facilitated economic globalization and have had equally important consequences. Hirst and Thompson (1999: p. 266) mention the importance of modern forms of communication (such as communication satellites and computer networks) as providing the basis for international cultures, both elite and popular, that are undermining the dominance of national cultures. In other words, in a discussion of globalization, it is difficult to separate economic from cultural, social and political issues. The emphasis in this chapter will be on cultural globalization, a term which is much less frequently used than economic globalization. The term will be defined broadly to include consumer, corporate, ethnic, media, political and scientific/technological cultures.3 Each of

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the approaches described above deals with different aspects of cultural globalization, as indicated by the lists of major concepts that are associated with each approach (see Table 17.1). In my discussion of these approaches, I will identify important empirical studies that speak to these issues and the major criticisms that have been directed towards them. All three types of approaches attempt in various ways to identify the characteristics and impact of supranational cultures. How and where are these cultures being created? What are their similarities and differences? These three approaches replace what is now generally viewed as an outmoded model of social and political relationships among actors on the global level, based on the notion of global society as consisting of the interactions among nation states. According to this model, nation states are autonomous actors, unless conquered by another nation state or subject to the latter’s sphere of influence. One of the few assumptions shared by most of the current models is that the social, political, cultural and economic boundaries of the nation state are exceedingly porous.

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In conclusion, I will consider the implications of various interpretations of cultural globalization for our image of the global world order. To what extent are these theoretical approaches compatible with a view of a global world as disorderly and chaotic or, alternatively, as one in which some sort of supra-national order is emerging or likely to emerge? I will also discuss prospects for the further development of these theories.

GLOBALIZATION AND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN NATION STATES The first type of approach examines globalization as a process that is leading to cultural domination by some nation states over others or to cultural conflicts between nations or groups of nation states.

Cultural imperialism/hegemony The best-known version of this approach postulates the development of cultural imperialism.

Table 17.1 Approaches to cultural globalization Type of approach: Primary focus Theories, hypotheses, concepts 1. Relationships between nation states

Nation states

1. Media imperialism: Americanization; Westernization; homogenization; hegemony; centre-periphery 2. Global-local influences: glocalization 3. Clash of civilizations

Networks

1. Global village 2. Hybridization 3. Typology of transnational or global connections: i. Transnational communities: e.g. migrants ii. Global communities: e.g. epistemic iii. Interpersonal networks: e.g. knowledge networks, corporate culture networks,migrant entrepreneurial networks iv. Inter-organizational networks: e.g. global city networks, multinational corporate interlocking directorate networks, advocacy networks,networks of networks

Major authors: Barber; Huntington 2. Transnational connections, flows

Major authors: Appadurai; Castells; McLuhan; Nederveen Pieterse 3. Conditions for global governance

Major authors: Falk; Meyers

Global society

1. Global civil society: transnational social movements; anti-globalization movement; International governmental organizations, International non-governmental organizations 2. Global democracy: world citizens; world polity

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This model emerged in the 1970s as part of a Marxist critique of advanced capitalist cultures, including their emphasis on consumerism and mass communication. Building on ideas from world-systems theory (Wallerstein, 1974), the theory argues that the global economic system is dominated by a core of advanced countries, while third world countries remain at the periphery of the system with little control over their economic and political development (Tomlinson, 1991: p. 37). The strong version of cultural imperialism theory refers to the imposition upon other countries of a particular nation’s beliefs, values, knowledge, behavioural norms and style of life (Salwen, 1991). Cultural imperialism is viewed as purposeful and intentional because it corresponds to the political interests of the USA and other powerful capitalist societies. The effects of this type of cultural domination, reflecting the attitudes and values of Western, particularly American, capitalist societies, are viewed as extremely pervasive and as leading to the homogenization of global culture.4 Although there is considerable controversy surrounding the evidence, the thesis that cultural imperialism occurs for political motives has been replaced by the theory that media imperialism, which has developed from global capitalism, is a more accurate description of this form of cultural globalization. A small number of media conglomerates based in a few countries (the USA, Germany, France and Great Britain) have steadily extended their control over the television, film, music and publishing industries. Kellner (1999: p. 243) states that mergers of major entertainment and information conglomerates have produced ‘the most extensive concentration and conglomeration of information and entertainment industries in history’. These developments have implications for the survival of national cultural industries whose cultural goods are often unable to compete with those that are distributed by international media conglomerates (Crane, 2002).5 Further insight into the nature of Western cultural hegemony comes from studies of the global art market. Using a variety of

indicators, Quemin (2006) shows that artists from the U.S. and a few European countries dominate the international art market. Artists from non-Western countries are able to compete in this market only if they reside in major art centres, such as New York and Berlin. Quemin (pp. 542–543) states: ‘the world of contemporary art clearly has a centre … both the market and the power of institutional certification are in the hands of western countries, and in particular, the richest of these countries’. Critics of the media imperialism thesis argue that the impact of Western global cultures is being offset by the development of regional cultures within global cultures. They claim that world television is not so much global as regional, representing shared communities of language and culture (Sinclair et al., 1996). The number of producers of media content and of countries producing such content is steadily increasing, contributing to the diversification of global culture.6 The importance of national cultures is supported by Boyd-Barrett’s (2000) examination of one ingredient of the global and national media system, the news agency, which exists at the global, regional and national levels. He argues that national news agencies perform important roles in constructing and maintaining a sense of national identity. Global and regional news agencies prioritize news about certain countries and regions, such as Europe and America, specifically news about elites, elite national institutions and governments. The image of the global world that these agencies convey is one that is constructed primarily on the basis of nation states. Boyd-Barrett says: The services that international news agencies provide to ‘retail’ media are primarily constituted by a mixture of ‘national’ news of different countries around the world and of news about the relationships between nation states or between significant players from different nation states. (Boyd-Barrett, 2000: p. 310)

However, news reports on television, rather than newspaper articles, have now become the major source of news for many people in most Western countries. The increasing

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power of international media conglomerates has led to a decline in competition among both local newspapers and local television channels. As a consequence, these outlets often reflect the political views of their owners and are able to restrict the range of political opinions available to media audiences (McChesney, 1999). By contrast, Curran and Park (2000: 14) blame the role of national ‘media-political complexes’ that shape political discourses in many countries. The idea of cultural hegemony as an outcome of media imperialism has been widely discussed in several different forms, including the Americanization of cultures of other nation states and the domination of American culture within global culture, the McDonaldization of economic cultures, and the Westernization of non-Western global cultures. Homogenization of national cultures is perceived as the likely outcome by those who emphasize the enormous impact of American culture or of globally transmitted cultures in the aggregate on the majority of nation states. High levels of cultural imports from America are associated with mass consumption, market capitalism and mass culture in the recipient countries. In spite of variations in behaviour and attitudes among social groups in both the USA and in other countries, Kuisel (2003) claims that American culture has remained identifiably American and, at least in France, a country he has studied intensively, has had a pervasive influence throughout the entire population. Furthermore, he argues that the phenomenon of cultural globalization was initiated by American exports of cultural products, which, until recently, dominated the global marketplace. Kuisel concludes that Americanization in the form of cultural exports influences the behaviour of those who consume them in other countries, the meanings they attribute to products, and their sense of their own identity. While it is relatively easy to measure levels of imports of cultural products, such as Hollywood films, television series, popular music and fast food, it is more difficult to show that high levels of such imports have had an

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impact on behaviour and values in specific countries. Does Americanization serve the interests of American business or does it, on the contrary, correspond to the needs and interests of the populations that import American cultural products? To what extent do populations in other countries serve as captive markets for standard American products or, alternatively, assimilate or domesticate them to fit their own needs and experiences? In a study of young Indian men who were heavy users of Western media, Derné (2005) found that the attitudes of these men toward gender and family arrangements were not influenced by Western ideas. He argues that ‘changes resulting from globalization are more likely to follow from changed structural realities than the introduction of new cultural meanings’ (Derné, 2005: p. 33). In contrast to Kuisel’s analysis of Americanization in Europe, Delanty (2003: p. 114) finds that ‘Japanese culture … has been highly subversive of Americanization’. He explains this outcome on the basis that, in general, Japanese culture and society have tended to adapt to foreign cultures without assimilating them. Americanization in Japan consisted primarily of its acceptance of popular consumer culture identified with America. It legitimized consumption but in a form that ‘affirmed existing identities rather than leading to the creation of new ones’ (Delanty, 2003: pp. 117–118). American popular consumer culture was rapidly replaced by Japan’s homeproduced consumer culture. Americanization encouraged the proliferation of consumer cultures that were specific to Japan, such as comics, pinball games and karaoke (Delanty, 2003: p. 119). Delanty argues that Americanization was essentially a superficial phenomenon in Japan because existing cognitive and normative structures shaped the project of Americanization, an argument that should be applied to the analysis of Americanization in other countries. The phenomenon of Westernization, another version of the cultural imperialism model, is more complex than it appears. Instead of Asian cultures being Westernized,

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Delanty (2003) and Iwabuchi (2002) argue that these cultures assimilate and transform elements of Western culture. The influence of Japanese popular culture has continued to increase in Asia. According to Delanty, this development ‘fundamentally challenges the notion of Americanization … Much of what is often called American culture in Asia is in fact Japanese culture’ (Delanty, 2003: p. 132). McDonaldization (Ritzer, 1998), the worldwide dissemination of a particular type of fast-food restaurant, is often interpreted as an example of American cultural hegemony. In fact, the success of these restaurants is more likely to be the result of a process in which the product is adapted to local conditions. This takes place through ‘global localization’ or ‘glocalization’, in which a globally disseminated product is altered in certain ways in order to fit the cultural outlook or tastes of people in a specific country or of members of a specific ethnic group within a country.

Global versus local A second theme in this category attempts to theorize the relationships between supra-national forces and social life at the ‘local’ level (for example, Giddens, 1990, and Robertson and Khondker, 1998; see also Robertson, 2001). Giddens (1990: p. 64) emphasizes the impact of global culture on local cultures rather than vice versa. He stresses the extent to which processes originating at great distances from a particular location may have enormous consequences for the social environment in that location. He sees these processes as leading to social and cultural change and to the increasing heterogeneity of local cultures. Beck (1999: p. 46) states: ‘The framework in which the meaning of the local has to establish itself has changed . . . local cultures can no longer be justified, shaped and renewed in seclusion from the rest of the world’ (Beck, 1999: p. 46). Other scholars who have examined the impact of global cultures on local cultures have attempted to explain why globalization

will not necessarily lead to homogenization of local culture. Global cultures must be adjusted to local conditions because external cultural influences are meaningful only if they can be integrated with local experience and cultural understandings. For example, global goods and global communications are being adapted to increasingly differentiated markets. This takes place through the process of ‘glocalization’. Iwabuchi (2002) discusses the ways in which Asian cultural producers take over Western cultural forms, such as soap operas or popular music, and use them to express ‘local’ meanings and preoccupations. Asian consumers use these cultural products in new ways and do not perceive themselves as being on the periphery of Western culture but as consuming new versions of that culture that are uniquely their own. In other words, global culture at the local level does not produce a clone of global culture but a new form of culture that represents the interaction of global culture with local culture. Studies of global cities (Ong, 2003; Sassen, 1991), which are centres of international financial activity and specialized services, indicate that they constitute nodes in global networks and exert considerable influence on the global economy. According to Sassen, the decline of the nation state has contributed to the increasing influence of transnational spaces, on the one hand, and global cities on the other. Loss of power at the national level, combined with the emergence of digital communication networks, has increased the influence of subnational spaces, particularly global cities. For example, global media cities are performing a major role in cultural integration on a global scale (Krätke, 2003). Cultural production for the media industry is concentrated in a relatively small number of cities, located primarily in Europe and to a lesser extent in America and in the rest of the world. The global media industry depends on the existence of ‘local anchoring points’, specifically, urban cultural production centres. Similarly, the creation and promotion of fashion are concentrated in a small number of global cities (such as London, New York,

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Milan, Paris and Tokyo) that continually exchange products, ideas and talent with one another (Breward and Gilbert, 2006). Huge ‘global city-regions’, which exist in both economically advanced and developing countries, act as dense nodes of economic and social activity and are beginning to function as major motors of the global economy (Scott, 2001: p. 4). Scott states that cityregions are locations ‘where globalization processes crystallize out on the geographic landscape’ (Scott, 2001: p. 7). In other words, they are active agents in the construction of globalization. While he accepts the importance of globalization with its image of a ‘borderless space of flows’, he argues that the new ‘regionalism’ is an equally important counterpart of globalization.

Conflicts between cultures and civilizations A third perspective that theorizes the effects of cultural globalization on nation states predicts cultural conflict between nation states as an outcome of globalization. Barber’s (1995) version of this thesis assumes that media imperialism has succeeded in producing a homogenous global culture, which he labels ‘McWorld’, incorporating the most prominent aspects of American popular culture, ranging from music to fast food and technology, including the Internet. He claims that this homogenous global culture is eliciting a highly negative response from national and religious traditions that represent ‘Jihad’ and which build on ‘parochial hatreds’. Jihad is pulling the world in the opposite direction, against interdependence and modernity, towards fragmentation and retribalization of cultures, primarily along religious lines. These tendencies are operating simultaneously and reinforcing one another. Barber argues that both McWorld and Jihad have negative consequences. Both undermine the nation state and its democratic institutions as well as civil society. Barber says: Jihad forges communities of blood rooted in exclusion and hatred, communities that slight democracy

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in favor of tyrannical paternalism or consensual tribalism. McWorld forges global markets rooted in consumption and profit, leaving to an untrustworthy, if not altogether fictitious, invisible hand issues of public interest and common good that once might have been nurtured by democratic citizenries and their watchful governments . . . Antithetical in every detail, Jihad and McWorld nonetheless conspire to undermine our hard-won (if only halfwon) civil liberties and the possibility of a global democratic future. (Barber, 1995: pp. 6–7)

Huntington’s (1996) thesis envisages a similar clash but conceptualizes it as a clash of civilizations, specifically Western versus nonWestern civilizations. Although he defines civilization as consisting of language, history, customs, institutions and subjective self-identification, he views religion as the most important element (Huntington, 1996: p. 47). Conflict between civilizations results from ethno-religious identities, particularly associated with differences between Western Christianity, on the one hand, and Islamic fundamentalist and Orthodox religions, on the other. Conflict also arises over disagreements concerning core political values associated with representative democracy. Huntington views a clash of civilizations as inevitable because members of different types of civilizations are increasingly in contact with one another, as a result of economic globalization and modern communications. Critics argue that neither Western nor non-Western civilizations are as homogenous and unified as Barber and Huntington claim. A recent study of cultural values in 75 countries, including nine predominantly Islamic societies, found much less evidence of divergent values than anticipated by the clash of civilizations thesis (Norris and Inglehart, 2002). Using the World Values Survey/European Values Survey, the study found considerable similarity in political values between respondents located in Western and in Islamic societies. Views expressed by members of these two types of societies differed primarily on issues of gender equality and sexual liberalization. The authors concluded: ‘The central values separating Islam and the West revolve far more centrally around

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Eros than Demos’(Norris and Inglehart, 2002: p. 237).

Assessment In this section, globalization has been examined as a process in which cultures or civilizations identified with nation states or subunits of nation states, such as global cities or global city-regions, have important consequences for other national actors. There is considerable controversy over the extent to which these national cultural ‘exports’ have hegemonic effects or, alternatively, whether these ‘global’cultures are actually modified or even transformed in important ways through contacts with local cultures in the recipient countries.

GLOBALIZATION AS CULTURAL FLOWS TRANSCENDING NATION STATES Scholars who use this type of approach attempt to theorize the characteristics and impacts of different types of cultural flows across nation states. One of the most influential proponents of this approach is Castells (1996), who emphasizes what he calls ‘a space of flows’, in which managerial and entrepreneurial elites function. This space of flows spans cities and continents (Ong, 2003: p. 155). Castells argues that networks, which he views as being non-hierarchical and conducive to innovation, constitute a basic form for the internal organization of business and for relationships between businesses. In the ‘network society’, the power or ‘space’ of flows (information, goods and finance) becomes the dominant factor as opposed to the flow of power (government, social stratification) in the ‘space of places’ that consists of territorially defined units or states. The ‘space of places’ dominated industrial societies but is less important in postindustrial societies. In contrast to a centre-periphery approach in which the source of cultural influences tends to be Western civilization while nonWestern and less developed countries are

viewed as being on the periphery – as the receivers of cultural influences – those who study cultural flows or cultural networks conceptualize the transmission process as a set of influences that are not necessarily originating in the same place or flowing in the same direction. Receivers may also be originators. In this type of model, cultural globalization corresponds to a network with no clearly defined centre or periphery (Appadurai, 1990). The effect of flows of culture, wealth and people (in which Appadurai includes media, technology, finance, ideologies and ethnicities) on recipient nations is more likely to be both cultural hybridization and homogenization. Appadurai claims that: ‘The central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization’ (Appadurai, 1990: p. 1). This suggests that neither process dominates but that both types of processes are taking place and need to be studied in greater depth. Robertson and Khondker (1998) argue that both global homogenization and global heterogeneity have become regular features of social life in much of the world. These types of approach raise the question of what is the ‘local’ in an era of globalization. Should the ‘local’ be equated with a specific geographical location? Are certain types of cultural practices spreading from one geographical location to another, as is assumed in the first type of approach, or do they have an existence that is independent of geographical locations? Tomlinson (2003) argues against a ‘territorial’ approach in favour of one that prioritizes the ‘deterritorialization’ of culture (Tomlinson, 2003: p. 50). Rejecting a geopolitical conception of cultural influences, he views certain types of cultural phenomena as having transcended their identification with national cultures and as having become forms of ‘global’ culture that are mediated in part through communications technologies.

Global village The earliest version of the second type of approach is the concept of the global village, which is based on the metaphor of a village

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to which the increasingly connected global sphere is thought to correspond. Marshall McLuhan (1964) was the first person to notice that, as a result of television and radio, people all over the world are exposed to the same information and images at the same time. Hence, he argued that we are living in a kind of global village in which national boundaries and differences in time and space have been erased. This metaphor has been extremely influential and is frequently used without reference to or probably even awareness of its source. Recently, the widespread dissemination of Internet use has led to renewed interest in this concept. Is the Internet creating a global village among users located in many different countries? On the basis of a study of Internet use in a suburban neighbourhood outside Toronto, Hampton (2002) argues that the Internet does not create a global village but simply increases the level of contact and support between individuals who were previously ‘just out of reach’ geographically. Studies of the development of the Internet in several countries in different parts of the world (Kogut, 2003) suggest that the millions of ‘small worlds’, which consist of friends and friends of friends who interact frequently with one another and which are linked to one another by ‘bridges’ consisting of the relatively small number of people who span clusters, are largely concentrated within national boundaries. Kogut concludes that, with respect to the Internet, ‘social networks and their institutions are geographically local and national’ (Kogut, 2003: p. 471).

Hybridization The hybridization thesis disputes the idea that globalization will produce a homogenous global culture and proposes instead that it will lead to increasing diversity of all forms of culture as a result of a process of hybridization which Nederveen Pieterse (1995) defines as ‘the ways in which forms become separated from existing practices and recombine with new forms in new practices’ (Nederveen Pieterse, 1995: p. 49).7 He states: ‘What globalization means in structural terms is the

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increase in available modes of organization’ (Nederveen Pieterse, 1995: p. 50). In addition to national, micro-regional, municipal and local forms of organization, there are now transnational, international and macroregional types of organization. The process of ‘hybridization’ can be observed in each of these modes of organization. In addition to an increase in multiculturalism as a result of globalization in which multiple ethnic identities exist in the same society, Nederveen Pieterse (1995) observes a phenomenon of interculturalism in which individuals themselves have multiple ethnic identities which may be more or less salient in different settings. Scholte states: ‘A hybrid identity draws from several different strands in substantial measure, so that no single marker holds clear and consistent primary over others. For example, a person might hold several nationalities, or might be of mixed race . . .’ (Scholte, 2000: p.180). According to Bhabha (1994), the phenomenon of hybridization produces inconsistent, ambiguous or conflicting meanings that create opportunities for culturally oppressed groups to resist the dominant culture. National borders are important sites for hybridization because, in those areas, ethnic cultures are most likely to become detached from national territories and to be influenced by their counterparts in other countries. Building on this notion of the special significance of borders in global culture, García Canclini (2001: pp. 507–508) suggests that ‘today all cultures are border cultures’because they have lost their exclusive relationship with a specific territory. Contemporary popular music provides an interesting example of hybridization (Regev, 2003). Regev argues that: ‘World or global culture is apparently developing through diversity within sameness’ (Regev, 2003: p. 223). In other words, in the case of popular music, new forms of musical diversity are emerging based on globally dispersed and shared practices and technologies associated with the aesthetic of rock music which has become the dominant aesthetic in popular music world-wide. On the basis of these shared practices and technologies, unique

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national and local styles and genres have been and are being developed. The widespread dissemination of the rock aesthetic has been facilitated by its connotations of rebellion, subversiveness and the empowerment of youth. Instead of being perceived as another example of cultural imperialism, rock music has been accepted as a means for making music that expresses rebellion against traditional cultures and authoritarian regimes while at the same time conveying ‘local cultural uniqueness’ (Regev, 2003: p. 226). Styles of music worldwide that incorporate elements of the rock aesthetic are not necessarily identified as rock music by their creators or their publics. Often they combine the rock aesthetic with indigenous styles and idioms that provide enormous possibilities for cultural diversity (see, for example, Mendonça, 2002).

Transnational communities, network structures and cultural flows What types of social structures are associated with different types of relationships among those who are creating, producing, or consuming cultural flows? One type of structure, the transnational community, refers to a group of people whose members have many different types of relationships with one another. Alternatively, the term, ‘network’, generally refers to groups whose members have one principal type of relationship with one another. Our knowledge of these structures on the international level is limited because they are very difficult to study.

i. Transnational communities Migrants and refugees who remain in contact with their relatives, friends, and associates in their ‘home’ countries are described as belonging to transnational communities. Excluded or alienated from the dominant culture in the countries to which they have migrated, they maintain linkages based on communication, cooperation and financial transfers across geographical locations (Al-Ali and Koser, 2002). These types of relationships have been facilitated by the

availability of inexpensive transportation and electronic communications. Members of these transnational communities have dual allegiances in that they do not entirely identify with a particular geographical location but are affected in crucial ways by social and legal policies enacted towards them in both their adopted countries and their countries of origin (Wong, 2002).

ii. Global communities Epistemic communities of scientists have produced a ‘rationalistic and scientized culture’ that provides the basis for a global legal world, whose principles and institutions shape the actions of states, firms and individuals. For example, an epistemic community concerned with environmental issues has influenced perceptions of environmental problems in many countries and led to an enormous growth in international environmental associations, environmental treaties, environmental intergovernmental organizations and national environmental ministries that share ‘a worldwide scientific culture’ (Meyer et al., 1997b: p. 625).

iii. Interpersonal networks Several types of interpersonal global networks have been identified, such as knowledge networks (Stone, 2002), corporate culture networks (Carroll and Carson, 2003) and migrant entrepreneurial networks (Ong, 2003). Knowledge networks formed by scientists and scholars disseminate ideas. Corporate culture networks are concerned with the development and dissemination of technology. Networks of migrants are formed by migration of highly educated technical personnel who typically maintain business contacts in their countries of origin. Coe and Bunnell (2003) have attempted to identify the social organization of international or transnational networks of innovators in the corporate sector. Transnational networks are shaped by and reshape corporate structures in different countries and are not confined to a single home-host country. Specific regions as sites for innovation need to be seen not as discrete islands of activity, but

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as sites where knowledge circulates as a result of intra-local, extra-local and transnational connections. While the term ‘global network’ is very frequently used, a study of networks among think-tanks (a form of knowledge network) found that two-thirds had a distinctly regional focus. (Struyk, 2002: p. 88)

iv. Inter-organizational networks This is the largest and probably the most important category. It includes cities, corporations, social movements, and nongovernmental organizations. Global cities provide the nodes for major inter-organizational networks in the global media. Tracing the connections between 33 global media firms (including the largest media firms in the world in terms of sales and numbers of employees) with media production firms in 39 global media cities (Krätke, 2003) revealed that specific firms have contacts with media production firms in numerous global cities that in turn have contacts with one another. Krätke states: ‘Information and communication flows enable special regional or local impulses and customer requirements to be picked up and processed in a flexible manner world-wide’ (Krätke, 2003: p. 616). Companies located in cities in Europe and North America perform the most important roles in this network. Companies located in a few cities on other continents are included but are less integrated in the global network. Global cities are highly interconnected in other ways. Defining global cities on the basis of the presence of multinational business services firms (such as finance, insurance and public relations), Anheier and Katz (2003: p. 243) measured the links between them using data on branches of these firms in different cities. Ten cities, primarily in Europe but also located in the USA, Asia and Australia, were highly interconnected. Anheier and Katz argue that these ten interconnected cities are ‘part of an emerging system that transcends the boundaries of the nation-state’ (Anheier and Katz, 2003: p. 243). None of these cities was located in Latin America, Africa or the Middle East, an indication of the limitations of global flows and the extent to which high

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levels of globalization are developing in some regions but not in others. Advocacy networks, consisting of nonprofit or non-governmental organizations and usually identified by their issue orientation, such as gender, the environment or natural resources, disseminate ideas about social policy (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Advocacy networks amplify the impact of ideas, reaching many more people than most unconnected individuals could contact and influencing the implementation of various types of policies (Stone, 2002). Transnational advocacy networks devoted to women’s issues are based on highly decentralized forms of global networking (Sreberny, 1998) in which small groups at the local and regional level develop links with similar groups in many other countries. These ‘networks of networks’ are able to mobilize widespread support for their political initiatives. According to Sreberny (1998: pp. 218–219), the global women’s movement ‘is built upon grassroots organizations, which combine into networks, build networks of networks, and then utilize communications technologies to exchange information as quickly and cheaply as possible and in ways that facilitate greatest access and therefore mass participation’. Sassen (2002) provides a detailed description of similar types of global networks devoted to ‘transboundary’ issues such as social justice, migrants and anti-trafficking. Global cities constitute sites for new types of cross-border politics ‘centred on places understood as locations on global networks’ (Sassen, 2002: p. 219). These political activities, which are carried out by citizens rather than by professional politicians, tend to begin on the local level, focused on very specific issues, but develop into global networks of actors engaged with similar issues in other countries and continents.

Assessment The network concept is a powerful tool for the study of non-economic forms of globalization. It provides a means of conceptualizing

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and studying the amorphous phenomenon of flows between nation states in which knowledge and culture are disseminated to fellow members and for providing empirical bases for the relatively vague concept of community. In some cases, these networks are producing ‘deterritorialized’ forms of culture that are potentially accessible on a wide scale. However, the idea of networks as being inherently open and democratic has been challenged by several authors. Some types of global networks are elitist. By analysing interlocking directorates among the world’s largest companies, Carroll and Carson (2003) have shown that the global network of corporations is dominated by a few dozen men, primarily in Europe and North America. They argue that ‘a well-integrated global corporate elite has formed’ (Carroll and Carson, 2003: p. 53), aided by the activities of global policy groups. Appadurai (1990) identified ethnicities as a major type of global flow but recent studies document the existence of a ‘gated’globe that prevents certain types of migrants from entering specific geographical locations (Cunningham, 2004). Stone concludes: ‘ “Global knowledge networks” are mechanisms with which to broadcast and advocate one form of knowledge, research or norms in preference to other perspectives’ (Stone, 2002: p. 9).

GLOBALIZATION AND THE CONDITIONS FOR GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AND GOVERNMENT The third orientation towards globalization is concerned with political cultures and international organizations that are or could provide the basis for a stable global society. Some observers characterize the present world order as a form of structural anarchy in which there are few indications of a global civil society. There is a great deal of controversy over the possibilities for a global civil society and for global democracy (see, for example, Baker and Chandler, 2005, and Holden, 2000a).

Global civil society A global civil society is considered a prerequisite for a global democratic system, which in turn would provide the means for counteracting the negative features of neoliberal economic globalization. Baker and Chandler (2005) conclude, on the basis of a review of the literature on the subject, that scholars generally define it as ‘an extension of the rule of law and political community . . . beyond national boundaries’ (Baker and Chandler, 2005: p. 2). As such, it has the potential to transform the international realm from a space dominated by national elites and neoliberal economic policies (globalization from above) to one controlled from the ‘bottom up’ in which new forms of moral and political community oriented towards human rights and transnational values will flourish, in other words, ‘a global rule of law, global justice, and global empowerment’ (Kaldor, 2003; cited in Colás, 2005: p. 20). Colás criticizes this view of global civil society as being highly idealized. The existence and influence of civil society can only be shown indirectly on the basis of an increase in the numbers and activities of INGOs (international nongovernmental organizations) and the emergence of social movements and global advocacy networks in relation to specific issue areas, such as the environment, human rights and women’s rights (Falk, 2005). The role of global cultural exchanges is important in these developments. Falk (2005) traces a series of events that gradually increased the breadth and importance of global civil society leading to a set of organizations linked by networks that were capable of exerting an influence on governments and international organizations, such as the World Bank, that were identified with neoliberal capitalism. According to Falk, the idea of a global civil society began to develop in the 1960s with the growth of ‘new social movements’ and global advocacy networks. A turning point occurred in 1972 with the Stockholm UN Conference on the Environment, where representatives of governments were challenged by civil

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society activists associated with INGOs. This led to the first global environmental social movement. Falk (2005) says: It became apparent that a serious tension existed between governmental immobilism based on the inhibiting influence of industrial capitalism, and civil society expectations of far-reaching adjustments that seemed to correspond with empirical necessity and evolving and widely endorsed world order values. (Falk, 2005: p. 71)

At first, global civil society advocates limited their activities to pressuring governments to take more steps to solve problems such as environmental protection, human rights and peace. In the latter stages of the Cold War, global civil society activists in Europe and Asia began to move towards greater challenges towards state control by oppressive governments. Following the end of the Cold War, the major actors in global civil society were an anti-globalization movement and a global justice movement. Increasing concern among global civil society activists about the extent of power over the global economy being exercised by multinational corporations and international banks coalesced during the meetings of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 and produced a new level of militancy that was exhibited at later intergovernmental meetings devoted to world economic policy. Global civil society activists had become an important political force on the global stage. Activists established global social forums that increased the visibility of their agendas. The fall of the Berlin Wall coincided with increasing receptivity to claims by groups whose members had been abused or killed by governments, such as Holocaust survivors and ‘comfort women’ in Japan during World War II. As a result, a global justice agenda acquired increasing support on the grounds that vulnerable populations needed legal protection by the world community. The idea of humanitarian intervention to protect such populations from catastrophe became part of this movement, beginning with the intervention by NATO in Kosovo. Another theme was the idea of holding politicians

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accountable for crimes against humanity during their regimes. A coalition of civil society actors and sympathetic governments led to the establishment of the International Criminal Court in mid-2002. The aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the American intervention in Iraq revealed both the strengths and weaknesses of global civil society. Activists all over the world mobilized extensive protests against the war but were unable to prevent it.

‘Mapping’ global civil society It is exceedingly difficult to measure the impact of organizations and movements promoting civil society goals. The antiglobalization movement, which constitutes one of the most visible segments of civil society organizations, includes thousands of groups, such as grass-roots movements, community groups, labour, social movements and INGOs. Their effectiveness is limited by their diversity, lack of consensus concerning goals and lack of agreement about the means for attaining their goals (Fotopoulos, 2001). Because these groups lack a coherent ideological position and long-term or shortterm strategies for changing the current system, they have not been able to mount a mass political movement that could compete with groups and institutions that support the neoliberal economic order. However, recent successes in Latin America suggest that the movement may be beginning to overcome some of its organizational problems (Said and Desai, 2003). One of the components of the antiglobalization movement is the transnational social movement. Olesen defines social movements as ‘organized attempts to obtain social and political change with the use of non-institutional repertoires, such as public protests, information distribution, and lobbying’(Olesen, 2005: p. 109). Social movements include organizations but transcend organizations. Eschle and Stammers define them as ‘a network of informal interactions that ties together informal groups and individuals, and sometimes formal organizations, in

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struggles for social change on the basis of shared identity’ (Eschle and Stammers, 2004: p. 353). These networks, which must include grassroots activists at the national level, can be transnational. Formal organizations (transnational movement organizations or TSMOs) that associate themselves with social movements may include NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) and INGOs.8 Smith (1998) argues that global civil society is emerging as a result of the activities of these transnational social movements that create ties in which information is exchanged between citizens at the national level and organizations at the international level. Most INGOs are relatively weak and under-financed in comparison with IGOs (intergovernmental organizations, such as the World Bank, IMF and the UN) and national governments whose activities they attempt to influence. Coalitions among INGOs are a means of increasing their capacity to influence policy outcomes by creating a communication network which enhances the visibility of campaigns against corporate and government policies. In comparison with networks, coalitions are alliances that are focused around specific issues but the level of inter-organizational interaction among members is less dense and less oriented toward conflict than in social movements (Diani and Bison, 2004). The amount of transnational activism is steadily increasing (Bandy and Smith, 2005; Tarrow, 2005). Yanacopulos (2005) illustrates this phenomenon using the case of coalitions among INGOs dealing with problems of developing countries. For example, Oxfam International, a coalition of 12 national Oxfams, was created to increase these organizations’ capacities to engage in national and international advocacy through lobbying and other activities. Following Held et al.’s criteria (1999: pp. 17–27) for global networks, Anheier and Katz (2003: p. 247) measured the extensity (prevalence) and intensity (density) of the global civil society infrastructure. Their map of the organizational infrastructure of global civil society reveals that Europe has the highest concentration of INGOs, followed by the East Coast of North America from Montreal

to Washington. In other parts of the world, higher prevalence and density of INGOs was found around major cities, such as Mexico City, Buenos Aires, New Delhi, Singapore, Osaka-Tokyo and Sydney-Canberra. Their map also reveals extensive regions with low INGO prevalence and density, such as Central Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Countries with high INGO densities were characterized by high levels of outbound foreign investment (an indicator of economic globalization), high levels of income, education and life expectancy, high levels of political activity and participation, high levels of cosmopolitan values, such as tolerance and respect for others, high communication density (phone lines), and low extent of human rights violations. Their data suggest that low prevalence and density of INGOs in some regions is correlated with low levels of domestic civil society. Overall, global civil society, as indicated by growth in the number of INGOs, has expanded significantly since the 1970s.

Value systems of international organizations and social movements Two very different value systems are in conflict with one another in the international sphere: the values of neoliberal economics and the values of civil society. Theoretically, international organizations are ‘the keepers of a moral conscience that applies across borders’ and that is concerned with human rights, environment and democracy (Chandhoke, 2002: p. 41). Commitment to the values of civil society is lowest in transnational corporations. TNCs are largely identified with neoliberal economic values, including free trade and open markets. They dominate global space as a result of their huge resources and their geographically far-flung activities. Under pressure from INGOs, some TNCs have become more socially responsible in the last two decades (Oliveiro and Simmons, 2002). International organizations that might be assumed to be bastions of civil society have a mixed record in this respect. Certain IGOs, such as the World Bank and the World

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Trade Organization, are closely identified with the pursuit of neoliberal economic policies. However, INGOs have had some influence on the World Bank’s policies for economic development, leading the Bank to revise its policies in some areas. Other IGOs, such as UNESCO, are more likely to express support for civil society values in their publications and reports. Partly as a means of obtaining donations and other forms of financial support, many INGOs cooperate closely with corporations, both national and transnational, and are likely to share the outlook of business organizations. INGOs that are devoted to community building or to monitoring and challenging global power-holders are more likely to support civil society values. Social movement organizations are almost always committed to civil society values. The relationship between ‘the global and the local’, which as we have seen is frequently discussed in relation to globalization, can be reassessed by examining transformations in the cultures of local social movements as they are transmitted from regional to national, transnational and global levels. A study of a social movement among indigenous peoples in remote regions of Bolivia showed how the movement was able to change the national government’s perceptions of indigenous peoples while, at the same time, the policy frameworks of transnational organizations reshaped their perceptions of their local ethnic identities (Andolina et al., 2005). The local indigenous group sought recognition from the national government for its local cultural practices and social organization. In doing so, they cooperated with IGOs and INGOs whose members were anxious to implement ‘social neoliberal’ development policy. Promoters of this type of policy attempt to show that ‘gender equality, cultural difference, environmental protection, and fair resource access can be compatible with the market’ (Andolina et al., 2005: p. 682). However, the result of this transnational networking differed from the ‘glocalization’ model in that these frameworks were not revised to fit local cultural specifications that favoured non-capitalist modes

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of production. Instead local cultural identities were adapted to these frameworks. Andolina et al. state: ‘While most indigenous organizations expected “glocalization” to generate culturally appropriate government and development, the result has resembled governmentally and developmentally appropriate culture’ (Andolina et al., 2005: p. 682).

Global democracy and the world polity thesis Like civil society, global democracy (also called ‘cosmopolitan democracy’, ‘transnational democracy’ and ‘supranational democracy’) is a controversial concept (Holden, 2000b: p. 1). A simple definition is ‘that of democracy at a level above or beyond the nation state’ (Holden, 2000b: p. 2). Supranational democracy could take a number of different forms, including the crossborder referendum and the deliberative forum (Holden, 2000b: p. 5). Falk (2005) views the US government and most other governments as being opposed to participation, accountability and equity in the formation and implementation of global policy (i.e. global democratization) and suggests that there is likely to be increasing conflict between nation states and global civil society regarding the world order. The richest, most visible and most powerful international organizations, IGOs, are unlikely to be valuable allies in this conflict. Koremenos et al. (2001) argue that states use intergovernmental organizations ‘to further their own goals, and they design institutions accordingly’ (Koremenos et al., 2001: p. 762). For Falk, at present, global democracy is ‘beyond the horizon’in the sense that there does not seem to be any plausible trajectory that is likely to lead from the present situation to global democracy. Exactly how a global democracy might come into existence is seldom discussed in this literature. In this respect, the world polity model is useful and interesting. Given that the number of international nongovernmental organizations has increased dramatically in the past century, Boli and Thomas (1997; see also Meyer et al., 1997a) argue that rules and

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standards developed by these organizations are beginning to provide the basis for global society. INGOs are enactors and carriers of world culture based on the norms of civil society. In many areas of social life, the impetus for regulation comes from INGOs; states respond by founding agencies and creating policies. INGOs lobby, criticize and convince states to act on their principles. World polity constitutes a form of global culture that can be identified by studying the structures, purposes and operations of INGOs. At the moment, these organizations function like a world proto-state that lacks political authority. States monopolize the use of violence and keep their sovereignty. If a legalrational world state emerges, INGO personnel would be co-opted to staff and advise its bureaucracy. Held (1997) argues that, eventually, increasing global interconnectedness in economic affairs, politics, technology, communication and law, along with the growing permeability of national borders, will lead to the decreasing power of states to deal with economic, legal and social problems. This in turn will lead to increasing cooperation with other states in the form of regional agreements, such as the European Union, and the continued expansion of international agencies and institutions, culminating in the emergence of a democratic system of global governance. Other scholars have proposed that global democracy need not necessarily be composed only of nation states but might include other forms of governance. Galtung (2000) suggests that various other types of ‘world citizens’, such as transnational corporations, civil society and its components, and towns and cities, should participate in global democracy, which he sees as being ‘interconnected democracy, at the world level’ rather than just a world state organization, along the lines of the United Nations. Held (2000) suggests that global democracy could create a world in which citizens would enjoy multiple citizenships ‘of their own communities, of the wider regions in which they live, and of a cosmopolitan, transnational community’ (Held, 2000: p. 30).9

However, given the enormous economic, social and cultural differences between the economically advanced and the less advanced countries, the emergence of a meaningful global democracy would presumably require that many more states have reached a higher minimum level of development, a goal that remains relatively distant. Many nation states are not yet democratic and others have only the rudiments of civil societies. While the number of countries that have adopted democratic systems of government has greatly increased in the past 20 years, these systems are often only nominally democratic (Crane, 2005). They often fit the definition of ‘low intensity democracy’ (Gills et al., quoted in Evans, 2001: p. 630) that emphasizes democratic elections and other democratic institutions but is less committed to civil and political rights and social reform.

Assessment Chandhoke (2002: pp. 46–48) is not optimistic about the future of global democracy centred on INGOs. She argues that INGOs do not necessarily represent the inhabitants of the regions in which they operate. She suggests that ordinary individuals may be disempowered rather than empowered by the activities of INGOs, staffed by bureaucrats from Western countries. Chandhoke, says: Global NGOs come in from the outside armed very often with their own ideas of what is wrong and what should be done to remedy the situation. At precisely this point the issue of representativeness arises to bedevil thinking on civil society. (Chandhoke, 2002: p. 46)

In short, Chandhoke is concerned about the accountability of INGOs, whose leadership is often ‘self-appointed and non-accountable to their members’ (Chandhoke, 2002: p. 46). She points out that most INGOs do not publish financial or activity reports. Furthermore, she questions whether these organizations offer a genuine alternative to global capitalism and the global order, dominated by Western nation-states.

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Anderson and Rieff (2004) share Chandhoke’s concerns. They argue that not only are INGOs undemocratic, they are incapable of becoming democratic because their concerns are primarily issues of human rights rather than democracy. Rather than constituting a global civil society, these organizations are ‘merely a collection of advocacy NGOs and social movements with visions and axes to grind on any number of particular topics’ (Anderson and Rieff, 2004: p. 29). Sassen (2004) is more optimistic about the accomplishments of INGOs. She stresses the importance of cooperation among INGOs and NGOs (their counterparts on the national level). Relatively small national organizations that represent the weak and unempowered have more influence than in the past because they can draw upon the resources of INGOs and certain IGOs. For example, a study of attempts to resolve the problem of killings of Brazilian street children (Serra, 2000) revealed a process in which NGOs in Brazil attracted the attention of INGOs, IGOs and the international press. National authorities took action only when international organizations and the international press became concerned with the problem.

PROSPECTS FOR CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION THEORY: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF GRAND THEORIES Globalization has produced its own versions of ‘grand’ theory and, like most grand theories, there is a disjunction between this type of theory and empirical research. Grand theories tend to concentrate on the dominant themes in the globalization literature but pay little attention to the implications of recent empirical research for understanding these issues. Two major candidates for grand theories of globalization are Castells’s ‘network society’ theory (1996) and Urry’s theory of global complexity (2003). Both theories emphasize the roles of networks and other types of global connections and downplay the importance of nation states and

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of transnational, multinational and intergovernmental organizations. As we have seen, Castells (1996) argues that information/communication technologies have brought about a new, networked form of business organization which transcends specific locations and creates a ‘space of flows’ that diminishes the power of ‘spaces of places’ at the national level. He claims that this nonhierarchical, open network mode of organization is more efficient and productive than centralized, hierarchical bureaucratic structures.10 Urry’s goal is to show how theories of complexity, originating in the physical sciences, can be used to explain the phenomenon of globalization.11 He interprets global phenomena using the concepts of regions, networks and fluids. Regions have clear and distinct boundaries that correspond to societies or nation states. Networks are channels for flows of cultural, economic and material goods that are not confined to regions. Fluids have no boundaries and no stable characteristics. Urry says that fluids flow ‘in and out of different regions, across different borders using diverse networks’ (Urry, 2003: p. 41). A fluid can be analysed in terms of ‘its rate of flow, its viscosity, its depth, its consistency, and its degree of confinement within certain channels’ (Urry, 2003: p. 42). He sees nation states or ‘societies’ (his quotation marks) as having been transformed through their involvement in systems of global complexity. They engage in ‘global’ branding, based on a kind of banal nationalism (flag-waving, national sports heroes, etc.). Mega-events occurring in a particular nation are circulated through global information channels. Nation states are increasingly required to act as ‘legal, economic and social regulators’ of practices and activities generated by external activities. However, nation states are just one type among many types of ‘islands of order’, that include ‘supranational states, global religions or civilizations, international organizations, NGOs and cross-border regions’ (Urry, 2003: p. 108). Urry does not perceive cultural hegemony as an important issue. Instead, he claims that

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all societies are becoming more like empires with ‘icons of power, such as buildings, landscapes and brands’ (Urry, 2003: p. 129), combined with ‘imperial’economic and social inequalities. The USA is the most powerful and dominant of such societal empires. Like Castells, Urry emphasizes the importance of networks in creating the effects that we associate with globalization. He attributes the power of global networks to their size, which greatly amplifies the benefits of a network for its members. Their power stems only partly from humans. He stresses that ‘humans are intricately networked with machines, texts, objects and other technologies’ (Urry, 2003: p. 56). Urry distinguishes between two modes of networked relationships, globally integrated networks (GINs) and global fluids (GFs). GINs refer to the activities of transnational corporations and INGOs such as Greenpeace. These organizations are ‘deterritorialized’ networks of ‘technologies, skills, texts and brands (global hybrids) that ensure that the “service” or “product” is delivered in much the same way across the entire network’(Urry, 2003: p. 57). Such networks have relatively instantaneous and simultaneous communication. He claims that transnational corporations, organized as GINs, ‘constitute one of the most powerful sets of “particles” comprising the new world order’ (Urry, 2003: p. 58). A second mode of networked relationships, the global fluid (GF), is even more powerful than the GIN. Global fluids consist of networks of machines, technologies, organizations, texts and actors that contribute to global flows which move across huge regions of the world in the form of unpredictable and unplanned waves of people, information, objects, money and images. These fluid systems are self-organizing and uncontrollable. Some examples of global fluids include: (1) the massive migrations of ‘traveling peoples’ that are occurring everywhere today; (2) the Internet, which he describes as consisting of vast flows along decentralized and uncontrollable communication networks;12 (3) information, which has become thousands of times more accessible than in the past; (4) world money being traded 24 hours per

day all over the world; (5) global brands or logos that create the economic value of many manufactured products; and (6) social movements which Urry sees as ‘exceptional and unexpected upsurges of protest’ that seem to have ‘no beginning or end point’ (Urry, 2003: p. 71). In Urry’s opinion, there is no global society or single centre of global power and no clearcut global region. He mentions the importance of transnational corporations and particularly their global brand names, referring to some of them as empires (such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Disney) that are more powerful than societies. Other components of the ‘global level’ (Urry, 2003: p. 45) include regional blocs (NAFTA, EU), globally organized religions (Islam, the Catholic Church), IGOs, INGOs and international treaties, such as Kyoto. He also alludes to the emergence of various forms of resistance to globalization at the national and global levels. Urry discusses the lack of global order and the ever-present tendencies towards disequilibrium at the global level and suggests that cosmopolitanism (‘the capacity to live in both the global and the local, in the distance and the proximate, in the universal and the particular’, Urry, 2003: p. 137) is a global fluid that will transform civil societies. Cosmopolitanism will provide the basis for a new type of global order that will alter the conditions under which ‘societies’ operate today. However, he does not connect this emerging cosmopolitanism with the activities and impact of international organizations that have been discussed in this chapter. On the whole, he develops a complex set of abstract and very general concepts but fails to show how this theoretical apparatus provides new insights into global phenomena. Because the same concepts apply to so many different types of phenomena, he does not succeed in making meaningful connections between his concepts and his empirical examples. Since he states that it is not useful to examine the phenomenon of globalization in terms of variables and cause and effect, it is not clear how globalization could be studied. In fact, his hyperbole in discussions of many of his examples tends to discourage detailed

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empirical documentation of these events and effects. Nevertheless, both Castells and Urry, by attempting to visualize the entire system of globalization, provide insights and hypotheses that could be used to develop specific theories for understanding these phenomena, which might eventually provide the basis for general theories in the future.

CONCLUSION: GLOBALIZATION, CULTURAL FLOWS AND THE WORLD ORDER The present overview of approaches to cultural globalization reveals enormous diversity in the characteristics and effects of globally transmitted culture. Each set of approaches presents a different assessment of the effects of and prospects for cultural globalization and relies on different concepts to interpret what is taking place. In nation state approaches, the major interpretive concepts are centre-periphery and hegemony vs. glocalization. The concept of centre-periphery describes relationships between nation states in terms of a hierarchy in which certain states occupy more favourable positions and have more influence than others. The concept of hegemony describes the effects of cultures disseminated by dominant powers that shape the attitudes and values of recipients in less dominant states. The concept of glocalization contests the idea of hegemony by suggesting that consumers of culture, regardless of where they are located, are able to contest hegemonic messages and reshape them according to their own needs. While there has been a great deal of discussion of the demise of the nation state as a consequence of globalization, there is considerable evidence that the nation state remains an important actor on the global stage. Shared cultures and cultural exchanges also develop on regional bases, such as television broadcasting and technology transfers. Global cities, which are often influenced by globalization independently of nation states and regions, have become major sites for the production of economic and cultural goods.

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In contrast to nation state approaches, network approaches suggest that consensus, social integration and hybridization are important outcomes of cultural globalization. Presumably because social networks form in social groups or groupings whose members share specialized information, knowledge and values, the activities of corporate culture networks, knowledge networks, advocacy networks and migrant networks tend to contribute to increasing integration between disparate and distant populations and cultures. Amajor aspect of networks is their capacity for multidirectional transmission of social phenomena. Instead of a centre and a periphery, in which some types of flows have priority over others, network models evoke hybridization as the outcome of flows from different networks, along with multiculturalism and interculturalism. The network concept is important for the study of globalization but there is a tendency to exaggerate the importance of flows and networks, which are often insufficiently documented and poorly understood. Empirical studies suggest that flows and networks are not as deterritorialized as the globalization literature often seems to suggest but are frequently anchored in certain global cities and in certain regions. The third set of approaches, which envisages the existence or emergence of a global system of governance or global society, focuses attention upon transnational and international organizations that have developed in the past century. In this category, the major concept refers to a form of globalization that represents an international civil society based on human rights, equality and democracy, among states that would have overcome the enormous disparities in levels of income and development that currently exist. IGOs and INGOs are not equally committed to this goal. Transnational social movements and INGOs that form part of the anti-globalization movement are attempting to overcome the influence of the neoliberal policies and practices of the most powerful actors in the global system, transnational and multinational corporations. IGOs and INGOs offer the possibility of providing the infrastructure for

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some type of global democratic order, a world polity, in the future. Much more research is needed to provide empirically grounded theories of globalization but such theories are likely to incorporate the types of approaches discussed in this chapter. The task of conducting such research is complicated by the fact, which Urry (2003: p. 96) emphasizes, that globalization is not a single, clear, unambiguous causal entity. It results from many different processes rather than being a distinct causal process in its own right. What has been presented in this chapter is a multidimensional and interdisciplinary approach to cultural globalization, based on the idea that globalization permeates many levels of social and cultural organization from the micro to the macro and needs to be studied using conceptual tools and theories from several social science disciplines. A general theory of cultural globalization would specify the conditions that lead to transnational and global transmission and dissemination of culture, as well as the different types of consequences that result from these flows. How is globalization changing the conditions under which national cultures or elements of national cultures interact with one another and the types of consequences that ensue? Under what conditions does the global transmission of culture lead to various forms of global integration, hybridization, hegemony or conflict? How do cultural and economic globalization reinforce one another or, alternatively, limit or constrain each other’s expansion?

NOTES 1 Although historically, aspects of globalization can be identified in economic and cultural relations between countries and regions for over 2000 years, widespread use of the word in nonacademic circles began around 1960. The noun ‘globalization’ first appeared in a dictionary (of American English) in 1961 (Scholte, 2000: p. 43). Scholte states: ‘With isolated exceptions, words such as “global”, “globality”, ”globalization” and “globalism” are absent from academic titles published before 1975’. The term has become increasingly popular in the social sciences since the 1980s (Robertson, 2001: p. 458;

Waters, 2001). Waters attributes the popularity of the term in the social sciences to the influence of publications by Robertson, who was probably the first sociologist to use the word in the title of a sociological article in 1985. Globalization is a multidimensional phenomenon that is difficult to define because it occurs at many different levels of social organization, from the national to the transnational to the multinational or global. The majority of the academic literature on globalization analyses economic issues that are generally seen as the major factors driving globalization, although often scholars do not bother to qualify their use of the term to specify which aspect of globalization they are discussing. 2 The word ‘transnational’ is sometimes used interchangeably with the word ‘global’. It is preferable to restrict the usage of this word to connections between two or more specific nation states, rather than to all types of supranational connections. Examples would be transnational corporations which originate in a specific state and conduct business in another state and the transnational ties of immigrants who maintain extensive personal and other types of contacts in their countries of origin. 3 This broad interpretation of cultural globalization can be contrasted with a narrow definition which would restrict the topic to ‘branches (and products) of social activity that are determined by creative work and the production and communication of symbolic meanings and images’, such as the arts and most branches of the modern media industry (Krätke, 2003: p. 606). Relevant literature on the subject is being produced by several social science disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, geography, international relations, political science and sociology. 4 Critics have argued that the term ‘imperialism’ implies a degree of control by powerful countries that no longer exists (Tomlinson, 1991: p. 175). 5 Statistics on imports of feature films by country (UNESCO, 2000, Table 4) demonstrate clearly the overwhelming dominance of American film. In 86 per cent of the 73 countries for which data is available, the U.S. was the major country of origin for imported films in 1994–1998. In 68 of these countries, the average percentage of imported films (out of the total number of films distributed in 1994–1998) was 86 per cent. 6 See UNESCO (2005) for a detailed statistical analysis of international trade in cultural goods. 7 Nederveen Pieterse (2004: 53) states: “Hybridization goes under various aliases such as syncretism, creolization, métissage, crossover.” 8 Eschle and Stammers (2004: 341) state that a relatively small number of INGOs are associated with transnational social movements. 9 For a discussion of the concepts of global identity and global citizenship, see Boli and Thomas (1997), Jamieson (2002), Lizardo (2005), and Spillman (2006). 10 Urry (2003: p. 11) criticizes Castells’s approach on the grounds that Castells does not differentiate sufficiently between different types of networked

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phenomena at the global level and that ‘Castells’s notion of “network society” does not capture the dynamic properties of global processes’ (p. 15). 11 The theory of complexity proposes that there are ‘diverse networked time-space paths … often massive disproportionalities between causes and effects, and that unpredictable and yet irreversible patterns seem to characterize all social and physical systems … Complexity investigates emergent properties, certain regularities of behavior that somehow transcend the ingredients that make them up’ (Urry, 2003: pp. 7–8, 13). 12 His view of the Internet is very different from the picture that emerges from recent studies, such as Kogut (2003).

REFERENCES Al-Ali, N. and Koser, K. (2002) ‘Transnationalism, international migration and home’, in N. Al-Ali and K. Koser (eds), New Approaches to Migration? London: Routledge, pp. 1–14. Anderson, K. and Rieff, D. (2004) ‘“Global civil society”: a sceptical view’, in H. Anheier, M. Glasius and M. Kaldor (eds.), Global Civil Society, 2004/2005. London: Sage, pp. 26–39. Andolina, R., Radcliffe, S. and Laurie, N. (2005) ‘Development and culture: transnational identity making in Bolivia’, Political Geography, 24: 678–702. Anheier, H. and Katz, H. (2003) ‘Mapping global civil society’, in M. Kaldor, H. Anheier and M. Glasius (eds), Global Civil Society. Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press, pp. 241–258. Appadurai, A. (1990) ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy’, Public Culture, 2: 1–24. Baker, G. and Chandler, D. (2005) ‘Introduction: global civil society and the future of world politics’, in G. Baker and D. Chandler (eds), Global Civil Society: Contested Futures. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–14. Bandy, J. and Smith, J. (eds.) (2005) Coalitions across Borders: Transnational Protest and Neoliberal Order. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Barber, B. (1995) Jihad vs. McWorld. New York: Times Books. Beck, U. (1999) What is Globalization? Tr. P. Camiller. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Beck, U. (2003) ‘Rooted cosmopolitanism: emerging from a rivalry of distinctions’, in U. Beck, N. Sznaider, and R. Winter (eds), Global America? The Cultural Consequences of Globalization. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 15–29. Bhabha, H.K. (1994) The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.

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Boli, J. and Thomas, G. (1997) ‘World culture in the world polity: a century of international non-governmental organization’, American Sociological Review, 62: 171–190. Boyd-Barrett, O. (2000) ‘Constructing the global, constructing the local: news agencies re-present the world’, in A. Malek and A. P. Kavoori (eds), The Global Dynamics of News: Studies in International News Coverage and News Agendas. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Company. Breward, C. and Gilbert, D. (2006) Fashion’s World Cities. Oxford: Berg. Carroll, W.K. and Carson, C. (2003) ‘The network of global corporations and elite policy groups: a structure for transnational capitalist class formation’, Global Networks, 3: 29–57. Castells, M. (1996) The Information Age. i. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Chandhoke, N. (2002) ‘The limits of global civil society’, in M. Glasius, M. Kaldor and H. Anheier (eds), Global Civil Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 35–54. Coe, N.M. and Bunnell, T.G. (2003) ‘“Spatializing” knowledge communities: towards a conceptualization of transnational innovation networks’, Global Networks, 3: 437–456. Colás, A. (2005) ‘Global civil society: analytical category or normative concept?’, in G. Baker and D. Chandler (eds), Global Civil Society: Contested Futures. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 17–33. Crane, D. (2002) ‘Culture and globalization: theoretical models and emerging trends’, in D. Crane, N. Kawashima and K. Kawasaki (eds), Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–25. Crane, D. (2005) ‘Democracy and culture in the global economy’, in M. Jacobs and N. Hanrahan (eds), Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 412–427. Cunningham, H. (2004) ‘Nations rebound? Crossing borders in a gated globe’, Identities, 11: 329–350. Curran, J. and Park, M.-J. (2000) ‘Beyond globalization theory’, in J. Curran and M.-J. Park (eds), De-westernizing Media Studies. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 3–18. Delanty, G. (2003) ‘Consumption, modernity, and Japanese cultural identity: the limits of Americanization?’ in U. Beck, N. Sznaider and R. Winter (eds), Global America? The Cultural Consequences of Globalization. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 114–133. Derné, S. (2005) ‘The (limited) effect of cultural globalization in India: implications for culture theory’, Poetics, 33: 33–48.

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Diani, M. and Bison, I. (2004) Organizations, coalitions, and movements. Theory, Culture and Society, 33: 281–309. Eschle, C. and Stammers, N. (2004) ‘Taking part: social movements, INGOs, and global change’, Alternatives, 29: 333–372. Evans, T. (2001) ‘If democracy, then human rights?’, Third World Quarterly, 22: 623–642. Falk, R. (1999) Predatory Globalisation: A Critique. Malden, MA: Polity. Falk, R. (2005) ‘The changing role of global civil society’, in G. Baker and D. Chandler (eds), Global Civil Society: Contested Futures. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 69–84. Fotopoulos, T. (2001) ‘Globalisation, the reformist Left and the anti-globalisation “movement” ’, Democracy and Nature, 7: 233–280. Galtung, J. (2000) ‘Alternative models for global democracy’, in B. Holden (ed.), Global Democracy: Key Debates. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 143–161. García Canclini, N. (2001) ‘Hybrid cultures, oblique powers’, in M. G. Durham and D. M. Kellner (eds), Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 488–510. Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Guibernau, M. (2001) ‘Globalization, cosmopolitanism, and democracy: an interview with David Held’, Constellations, 8, 4: 427–441. Hamelink, C.J. (2002) ‘The civil society challenge to global media policy’, in M. Raboy (ed.), Global Media Policy in the New Millennium. Luton, UK: Luton University Press, pp. 251–260. Hampton, K.N. (2002) ‘The not-so-global village of Netville’, in B. Wellman and C. Haythornwaite (eds), The Internet in Everyday Life. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 345–371. Held, D. (1997) ‘Democracy and globalization’, Global Governance, 3: 251–267. Held, D. (2000) ‘The changing contours of political community’, in B. Holden (ed.), Global Democracy: Key Debates. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 17–31. Held, D., McGrew, A. and Goldblatt, D. et al. (1999) Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hirst, P. and Thompson, G. (1999) Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Polity Press. Holden, B. (ed.) (2000a) Global Democracy: Key Debates. London and New York: Routledge.

Holden, B. (2000b) ‘Introduction’, in B. Holden (ed.), Global Democracy: Key Debates. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–13. Huntington, S.P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Iwabuchi, K. (2002) ‘From Western gaze to global gaze: Japanese cultural presence in Asia’, in D. Crane, N. Kawashima and K. Kawasaki (eds), Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization. New York: Routledge, pp. 256–273. Jamieson, L. (2002) ‘Theorising identity, nationality, and citizenship: implications for European citizenship identity’. Sociologica, 34: 507–532. Kaldor, M. (2003) Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. Cambridge: Polity Press. Keck, M.E. and Sikkink, K. (1998) Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kellner, D. (1999) ‘New technologies, the welfare state, and the prospects for democratization’, in A. Calabrese and J.-C. Burgelman (eds), Communication, Citizenship, and Social Policy: Rethinking the Limits of the Welfare State. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 239–256. Kogut, B. (ed.) (2003) The Global Internet Economy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Koremenos, B., Lipson, C. and Snidal, D. (2001) ‘The rational design of international institutions’, International Organization, 55: 761–799. Krätke, S. (2003) ‘Global media studies in a worldwide urban network’, European Planning Studies, 11: 605–628. Kuisel, R. (2003) ‘Debating Americanization: the case of France’, in U. Beck, N. Sznaider and R. Winter (eds), Global America? The Cultural Consequences of Globalization. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 95–113. Lizardo, O. (2005) ‘Can cultural capital theory be reconsidered in the light of world polity institutionalism? Evidence from Spain’, Poetics, 33: 81–110. McChesney, R. (1999) Rich Media, Poor Democracy. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Meyer, J.W., Boli, J., Thomas, G.M. and Ramirez, F.O. (1997a) ‘World society and the nation-state’, American Journal of Sociology, 103: 144–181. Meyer, J.W., Boli, J., Thomas, G.M. and Ramirez, F.O. (1997b) ‘The structuring of a world environmental regime, 1870–1990’, International Organization, 51: 623–651. Medonça, L.F.M. (2002) ‘The local and the global in popular music: the Brazilian music industry, local culture, and public policies’, in D. Crane,

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N. Kawashima, and K. Kawasaki (eds), Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization. New York: Routledge, pp. 105–117. Nederveen Pieterse, J. (1995) ‘Globalization as hybridization’, in M. Featherstone et al. (eds), Global Modernities. London: Sage, pp. 45–68. Norris, P. and Inglehart, R. (2002) ‘Islamic culture and democracy: testing the clash of civilizations thesis’, Comparative Sociology, 1: 235–263. Olesen, T. (2005) ‘World politics and social movements: the Janus face of the global democratic structure’, Global Society, 19: 109–129. Oliveiro, M.B. and Simmons, A. (2002) ‘Who’s minding the store? Global civil society and corporate responsibility’, in M. Glasius, M. Kaldor and H. Anheier (eds) Global Civil Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 77–107. Ong, A. (2003) ‘Techno-migrants in the network economy’, in U. Beck, N. Sznaider and R. Winter (eds), Global America? The Cultural Consequences of Globalization. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 153–173. Quemin, A. (2006) ‘Globalization and mixing in the visual arts: an empirical survey of ‘high culture’ and ‘globalization’, International Sociology, 21: 522–550. Regev, M. (2003) ‘”Rockization”: diversity within similarity in world popular music’, in U. Beck, N. Sznaider and R. Winter (eds), Global America? The Cultural Consequences of Globalization. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 222–234. Ritzer, G. (1998) The McDonaldization Thesis: Explorations and Extensions. London: Sage. Robertson, R. (2001) ‘Globalization theory 2000+: major problematics’, in G. Ritzer and B. Smart (eds), Handbook of Social Theory. London: Sage, pp. 458–471. Robertson, R. and Khondker, H.H. (1998) ‘Discourses of globalization: preliminary considerations’, International Sociology, 13 (1998): 25–40. Said, Y. and Desai, M. (2003) ‘Trade and global civil society: the anti-capitalist movement revisited’, in M. Kaldor, H. Anheier and M. Glasius (eds), Global Civil Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 59–84. Salwen, M.B. (1991) ‘Cultural imperialism: a media effects approach’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8: 29–38. Sassen, S. (1991) The Global City : New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (2002) ‘Global cities and diasporic networks: microsites in global civil society’, in M. Glasius, M. Kaldor and H. Anheier (eds), Global Civil Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 217–238. Sassen, S. (2004) ‘Local actors in global politics’, Current Sociology, 52: 649–670. Scholte, J.A. (2000) Globalization: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

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Scott, A.J. (2001) Global City-Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Serra, S. (2000) ‘The killing of Brazilian street children and the rise of the international public sphere’, in J. Curran (ed.), Media Organisations in Society. London: Arnold, pp. 151–172. Sinclair, J., Jacka, E. and Cunningham, S. (1996) New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral Vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, J. (1998) ‘Global civil society? Transnational social movement organizations and social capital’, American Behavioral Scientist, 42: 93–107. Spillman, L. (2006) ‘Global transaction, global representations, and global orientations’, Paper presented at the conference of the ESA Research Network on the Sociology of Culture and the Cultural Policy Research Centre, Ghent, Belgium, November 15. Sreberny, A. (1998) ‘Feminist internationalism: imagining and building global civil society’, in D.K. Thussu (ed.), Electronic Empires: Global Media and Local Resistance. London: Arnold, pp. 208–222. Stone, D. (2002) ‘Introduction: global knowledge and advocacy networks’, Global Networks, 2: 1–12. Struyk, R.J. (2002) ‘Transnational think-tank networks: purpose, membership and cohesion’, Global Networks, 2: 83–90. Tarrow, S. (2005) The New Transnational Activism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tomlinson, J. (1991) Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Tomlinson, J. (2003) ‘Culture, modernity and immediacy’, in U. Beck, N. Sznaider and R. Winter (eds), Global America? The Cultural Consequences of Globalization. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 49–64. UNESCO (2000) World Culture Report, 2000. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2005) International Flows of Selected Cultural Goods and Services, 1994–2003: Defining and Capturing the Flows of Global Cultural Trade. Montreal: Institute for Statistics. Urry, J. (2003) Global Complexity. Cambridge: Polity. Wallerstein, I. (1974) The Modern World System. New York: Academic Press. Waters, M. (2001) Globalization. 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Wong, L.L. (2002) ‘Home away from home? Transnationalism and the Canadian citizenship regime’, in P. Kennedy and V. Roudometof (eds), Communities across Borders: New Immigrants and Transnational Cultures. London: Routledge, pp. 169–181. Yanacopulos, H. (2005) ‘Patterns of governance: the rise of transnational coalitions of NGOs’, Global Society, 19: 247–266.

18 Colonialism and Culture Christopher Pinney

It is . . . too simple and reductive to argue that everything in European or American culture therefore prepares for or consolidates the grand idea of empire. It is also, however, historically inaccurate to ignore those tendencies – whether in narrative, political theory, or pictorial technique – that enabled, encouraged, and otherwise assured the West’s readiness to assume and enjoy the experience of empire. (Said, 1994: pp. 95–96)

As colonialism has come to be seen as something other than just a question of economics and politics, its ‘cultural’ dimensions have come to the fore. These include not only the obvious and central issue of the cultural dimensions of colonialism as a practice, but the fact that different colonialisms have had their own cultures, the manner in which colonialism has come to inform the metropolitan cultures of Europe, and the ways in which the colonial experience has itself helped constitute the very notion of culture. Colonialism’s variables are complex. We might consider the differences between trade, conquest and settlement. The list of European aspirants to empire is long: Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy – even Sweden and Denmark.1 Some succeeded and others desired, but failed,

to control large parts of the world. These different projects were driven at different times by radically different motives: the Lockean natural law justification for the British expropriation of American land, the ‘civilizing mission’, and ‘whites bring death from afar’.2 These are some of the modalities, some of the European progenitors, some of the ideologies that are so deceptively concealed by the word ‘colonialism’. And to this we must add the stages on which all this complex drama was played out: the Americas, Asia, Australasia,Africa. To add further complexity, colonialism refuses historiographic compartmentalization: it rapidly unfolds into the history of the modern world: modernity and globalization are intimately entangled with colonialism. Beyond this we can consider, as a coda, non-European empires. It is perhaps one of the ironies of colonialism’s tenacity that Euro-American scholars are reluctant to concede visibility to the colonies created by non-Europeans. In a moment, then, culture. But first, blood and destruction. Any consideration of the cultural technologies of colonial rule needs first to inscribe the more brutal technologies on which certain colonial projects were built.

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Sven Lindqvist provides an unforgettably powerful meditation on the technologies of extermination perfected in colonial Africa, prior to their use in twentieth-century Europe.3 He recalls reading Conrad in the 1940s, the ‘black shadows of disease and starvation’ appearing as prophecy of twentiethcentury death camps, and a refutation of the claim for the ‘phenomenological uniqueness’ of the Holocaust. His point resonates with the passionate declaration by the poet of Négritude Aimé Césaire: What the very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against humanity, not the humiliation of humanity itself, but the crime against the white man . . .; it is the crime of having applied to Europe the colonialist actions as were borne till now by the Arabs, the coolies of India, and the negroes of Africa. (cited by Ferro, 1997: p. x)

Adam Hochschild asks how it is that the museums of Nazi Germany have been destroyed, Moscow’s Museum of the Revolution been utterly transformed and yet the Royal Museum of Africa at Tervuren in Belgium remains packed with colonial forgetting and lies. The museum celebrates campaigns against ‘Arab’ slavers, shows black and white films of Pende masked dances, preserves spears and fish traps in glass cases. But in this whole museum, swarming with numerous visitors, there is not the ‘slightest hint that millions of Congolese met unnatural deaths’ (Hochschild, 1999: p. 293). When Leopold II was forced to officially cede his private killing fields in the Congo basin – the Congo Free State – to Belgium in 1908, the furnaces burnt for eight days incinerating the records of his holocaust. Leopold, through his private army in the Congo, the Force Publique, was responsible for the death of, at a conservative estimate, ten million Congolese. The new historiography of colonialism has rightly reacted against what is sometimes referred to as the ‘fatal impact’ thesis (the reference here is to Moorhead’s popular 1966 book of the same name), and has sought to stress the ambivalence and incompleteness of colonial projects, and the resilience of those who were colonized.4 However, it

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is important not to repeat the forgetting which has characterized Leopold’s legacy, when we consider the cultural dimensions of colonialism: Lindqvist and Hochschild’s accounts must remain as moral spectres over the rest of this discussion The new prominence given in various accounts to colonialism’s cultural dimensions has also been attendant on the formal decay of colonialism as a world historical force: the more distant it has become the more ‘cultural’ it is seen to have been. Colonialism conceived of as brute economic and political oppression has ceded much ground to a vision of colonialism as a concatenation of ideas, categories, texts, images and exhibitions: instead of colonialism as the epiphenomenon of greed and the desire for conquest, different colonizing projects are increasingly approached through their complex cultural entanglements. The plausibility of a singular Colonialism is now a thing of mere shreds and tatters, although its afterlife in notions of ‘colonial worldview’, and ‘colonial discourse’ displays a huge tenacity. Perhaps this should not surprise us for, as Nicholas Thomas observes, we need to theorize colonialism ‘but discussion may be obstructed if we assume that the word relates to any meaningful category or totality’ (Thomas, 1994: p. ix). The binary of Master and Slave has been displaced by the complexities of the different European cultural matrices that informed national empires and a growing awareness of the manner in which the transactions and ‘translations’in the encounters between colonizers and colonized can hardly be reduced to a pure domain of power or economics. Although this enormous empirical diversity makes it difficult to generalize about colonialism itself, it remains possible to sketch certain trajectories of thinking about colonialism. In the next section I will consider different approaches to the cultural technologies associated with colonialism which vary in the degree of efficacy that they grant to cultural practices in creating and sustaining asymmetrical relations in colonial situations. Following this, the rest of this chapter will

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focus on vision, incarnated in a Foucauldian fusion of visibility and power. This will be explored as a theme in academic analysis, and then in the concluding part of the chapter as an ongoing concern in visual arts practices predominantly by ‘fourth world’ artists.

CULTURAL TECHNOLOGIES OF COLONIALISM We might start by considering what we might think of as ‘strong’ theories of the cultural technologies of colonial rule (Dirks, 1996: p. ix). These are predicated on the efficacy of colonial ideology and practice.5 Initially articulated as an alternative to ‘punishment’ paradigms of colonialism, which stressed military and economic dimensions, some of these ‘disciplinary’6 approaches have paradoxically come to mirror an earlier Imperial History in the power they grant to the colonizer. The Nietzschean power/knowledge formulation quickly passed via Foucault into the ‘cultural’ study of colonialism. The Saidean variant of this (that is, following the insights of Edward W. Said) is undoubtedly the most celebrated and derided, but other important versions of this paradigm have also had a great impact. Many years before Said published Orientalism, the anthropologistturned-historian of India Bernard Cohn was producing powerfully detailed studies of the cultural technologies of rule in South Asia. His remarkable studies on the impact of the Census on Indian social organization, the hierarchical modalities of imperial assemblages (darbars), the role that indigenous texts played in colonial understandings of Indian society and the socio-linguistic aspects of ‘command’ would effectively inaugurate a ‘Cohnian’ school.7 Among his former students are Ronald Inden, Nicholas Dirks and Arjun Appadurai, who have all elaborated and extended Cohn’s interest in the cultural dimensions of colonial relations.8 Cohn had suggested that the Census, with its hierarchized and objectified categorizations, formalized identity in new ways, and

‘became an object to be used in the political, cultural and religious battles at the heart of [Indian] politics’ (Cohn, 1990: p. 250). Most importantly, Cohn demonstrated the precise mechanics through which objectifications passed from ‘hand to hand’ and transformed worldviews. Hierarchy also appeared in the British appropriation of the ritual idioms of darbars, which they turned into spectacles of submission and obedience. Following the Government of India Act of 1858 (which ‘de-sacralized’ the Mughal Empire), British rule faced the problem of ‘internalizing’ itself within the Indian polity. Seeking to anchor their authority in the security of the past, Mughal court rituals of display and incorporation became the model for a British neo-traditional idiom of power. Complex and contradictory though this neo-feudal idiom was, it established a trope, to be affirmed or negated in the future: early Indian National Congress meetings replicated its basic form; Gandhi’s later political semiology directly repudiated it. Cohn’s concerns with the impact of British ‘systematizations’ of Indian cultural practice is taken up by Dirks, in his detailed ethnohistory of a small south Indian polity and his subsequent study of colonial understandings of caste. Cohn, and subsequently Inden (1990) and Bandyopadhyay (1990), had shown the Orientalizing effect of British valorizations of caste as ‘religious’ rather than aspects of a political and economic aspiration. Dirks consolidates this, exploring in detail how the ‘spectre’ of caste emerged out of a colonial modernity, how the manner in which ‘caste has been constituted as the principal modality of Indian society draws as much from the role of British Orientalists, administrators and missionaries as it does from Indian reformers, social thinkers and political actors’ (Dirks, 2001: p. 8). Similar arguments are advanced by Fox (1985) in his study of British conceptions of ‘martial races’ on Punjabi Sikhs, and Mahmood Mamdani’s (1996, 2001) study of the legacy in Africa of colonial constructions of political identity. Here we see colonizers’ categories partially constituting the social formations they purported to describe.

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The strong account of colonialism’s cultural technologies that Said mapped in Orientalism (1978) was considerably complexified in his later work Culture and Imperialism (1993). The earlier work had an impact which is hard to overestimate, and famously established what has almost become an academic sub-discipline – the study of colonially generated cultural knowledge and its relation to power. In Orientalism’s original formulation this centred on the inscription of two phantasmatic identities – Occident and Orient generated and sustained by an ‘enormously systematic’ European knowledge practice. Although Said gestures to the complex desires that underlay this practice (‘a battery of desires, repressions, investments and projections’ [Said, 1985: p. 8]) the bulk of his analysis advances a confident systematicity – a world of ‘racial, ideological and imperialist stereotypes’ (Said, 1985: p. 328) – apparently devoid of selfdoubt and contradiction. Culture and Imperialism shares Orientalism’s curious mixture of declamation and qualification and ultimate ontological indeterminacy. EuroAmerican cultural production is charged with a blanket assumption that ‘outlying regions of the world have no life, history of culture to speak of, no independence or integrity worth representing without the West’(Said, 1994: p. xxi) and some of the most reductive formulations of the relationship between literature and ideology are praised. In one see-saw movement we are offered a vulgar reprimand. But the see-saw swings back when Said wisely observes that ‘A novel is neither a frigate nor a bank draft. A novel exists first as a novelist’s effort and second as object read by an audience’ (Said, 1994: p. 87). Just as in Orientalism the Orient’s ontological status is never really made clear (‘almost a European invention’, it was ‘manage[d] – and even produce[d]’), so in Culture and Imperialism the reader is offered a menu of incompatible options strangely juxtaposed like rocks on a scree bed. Said has acquired a deserved iconicity, in part because of his political courage and an attractively archaic humanism. However, the

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term ‘Saidean’, so often invoked, sketches a volatile position in a broader debate where other analysts have brought more penetration, subtlety and consistency. More negatively, some scholars, deterred from investigating the intellectual life of ‘outlying regions of the world’because of eagerness to avoid repeating Orientalism’s tenacious ideology, conjure a mirror-image phantom of the discourse they wish to attack. Anxious about the possibility of ever engaging a world that has not already been ‘Orientalized’ they perversely echo Imperial History’s own delusions of grandeur. Said, it is true, did state in Culture and Imperialism, that ‘No vision . . . has total hegemony over its domain’ (Said, 1994: p. 225) but Saidean analyses rarely stress an incomplete hegemony.9 More recent work on empire and literature has many more points of contact with Said’s much more nuanced assessment of Raymond Schwab’s encyclopaedic Oriental Renaissance, a work first published in 1950 and which provides a sympathetic portrait of European literary tropes of alterity. For Schwab, the East was Europe’s ‘invisible interlocutor’, providing a ‘disruptive invigoration’ (before succumbing to ‘condescending veneration’) and the complex, fluid, cultural alignments and realignments he presents force the conclusion (which Said here affirms) that ‘the library, the museum and the laboratory underwent internal modifications of paramount importance’ (Said, 1984: p. xvii). This is a position very different from the suggestion in Orientalism that from Homer to Cromer10 European paradigms changed very little. Ros Ballaster, in her recent discussion of the role of fictions and fables of the East from the late seventeenth to eighteenth century, affirms the Saidean supposition that ‘these tales are part of a wider cultural project which creates the object it feigns identifying’ (Ballaster, 2005: p. 2), but rejects the idea that they are in any sense ‘cultural technologies of rule’. Fables of the East are more than simple ideological reflections of colonial interests: they are, Ballaster argues, ‘a form of subaltern discourse, a means of seizing verbal authority’

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(Ballaster, 2005: p. 4). Works such as Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1687–1694)11 are forms of what Ballaster terms ‘reverse ethnography’ in which an ‘oriental voice is deployed to provide an enlightened rationalist critique of European political and social mores’ (Ballaster, 2005: p. 10). This reverse ethnography conjures a complex space of shifting identities and locales. Certainly they remain European fictions, impersonations of an imagined subaltern who provides an alibi for the ‘subversive intent’ of other Europeans (Ballaster, 2005: p. 5) but there is no denying their complexly alienated relationship to emergent imperial formations. These fables of the East and other later ‘reverse ethnographies’ such as Diderot’s Supplement to the Voyage of M. Bougainville have been discussed by Sankar Muthu as instances of Enlightenment Against Empire (2003). This is a radically post-Foucauldian vision of Enlightenment (in part because it is read ‘globally’rather than ‘domestically’) and foregrounds a sense of ‘shared history, and sameness of self and culture’ (Ballaster, 2005: p. 4), a moment of radicality greatly different from nineteenth-century consolidations of difference through race.12 Two important points arise from this. The first concerns the intra-European nature of many discourses around empire. Just as Stephen Greenblatt (1991),13 Anthony Grafton (1992) and many other scholars have argued that early European depictions of New Spain (the Spanish Empire in the Americas) reflect internecine European sectarian struggles (Protestantism versus Catholicism), so Ballaster draws attention to the centrality of debates around absolutism and democracy in these early fables. The ‘Black Legend’14 is really a critique of Spanish Catholicism by European non-Catholics, and the critique of the Ottomans becomes a proxy critique of an incipient European absolutism. Ballaster agrees with Said that ‘Orientalism has more to do with the Occident than with the Orient’ (Ballaster, 2005: p. 2), but the argument then implicitly diverges from Said’s inasmuch as the fables (and the ‘Black Legend’) are shown not to be concerned

with power over a phantasmatic Orient, but are almost exclusively debates internal to Europe which happen to take the ‘Orient’ as their ‘alibi’. In this respect there is a certain resonance with John MacKenzie’s ongoing critique of Said on the grounds that Orientalism is expressive of desires that predate and exceed the instrumental knowledge/power dynamic on which Said focuses.15 The second point concerns the inadequacy of any analysis which differentiates simply between different forms or national practices of colonialism and ignores the complex historicity and variability of those individual lineaments. This is to take the process of analytical fragmentation much further than simply Spanish versus British and British versus French. It insists that we attend to the radical historical transformations and understand that colonial projects were not the epiphenomenal reflection of unchanging European national interests, but highly conflicted and contested endeavours that incarnated themselves in radically different ways often within the space of one or two decades. These cautions may appear the perfect justification for the abandonment of any attempt to theorize continuities and resonances in colonial practices. The retreat to empirical particularism can be very comforting. However, it is possible to respect the singularity of colonialism’s multiple and diverse iterations, and at the same time draw out certain themes and idioms which appear as recurrent leitmotifs cutting across this bewildering terrain. One such motif concerns the relationship between visibility, knowledge and power.

COLONIALISM AND VISIBILITIES In both Cohn’s and Said’s work there is a key visual trope: the certainty of knowledge is predicated on visibility. Cohn writes of an imperial gaze (‘The British appear . . . to have felt most comfortable surveying India from above and at a distance’ [Cohn, 1996: p. 10]), while Said repeatedly presents the colonial

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archive as a material and visual structure (‘there emerged a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration . . . in theses about mankind and the universe’ ([Said, 1985: p. 7]). Tony Bennett’s (1995) theorization of a metropolitan ‘exhibitionary complex’ as a mode of moral education and control was exported to Indian contexts by Gyan Prakash (1999), discussed in the broader context of the British Empire as a whole by Peter Hoffenberg (2001) and has been reformulated as a ‘colonial exhibitionary complex’ by Daniel Rycroft (2006). Colonial content was central to many of the exhibitions and museums that Bennett describes: Rycroft describes how new illustrated popular journals such as the Illustrated London News extended the exhibitionary complex through an infinite prosthesis. Through the wood engravings that made possible new forms of illustrated history, an endless stream of images of the British Empire became available in ways that they had previously not. In Timothy Mitchell’s (1988) justly influential Colonizing Egypt the ‘world as exhibition’ is fused with a Heideggerean sense of the world as picture. The general disposition that has been termed ‘Cartesian perspectivalism’ (Jay, 1988) is given an especially intense colonial incarnation: ‘the age of the exhibition was necessarily the colonial age’ remarks Mitchell in one of his most Heideggerean moments. The exploitative framing of the world (which movements such as Arne Naess’s ‘deep ecology’ attempt to undo16 ) achieves its fullest and most destructive form in colonialism – a structured regime of spectatorial distantiation. Indeed one could almost substitute the word ‘technology’ with ‘colonialism’ in Heidegger’s writing and produce a text very close to Mitchell’s. Echoing Cohn’s (1996: p. 10) comments about the fear of Britons in India of ‘the narrow confines of a city street’ (as opposed to the certainty of distance and elevation), Mitchell cites Gustave Flaubert’s 1850 letter from Cairo. ‘As yet I am scarcely over the initial bedazzlement . . . each detail reaches out to

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grip you; it pinches you; and the more you concentrate on it the less you grasp the whole. Then gradually all this becomes harmonious and the pieces fall into place of themselves, in accordance with the laws of perspective’ (cited by Mitchell, 1988: p. 21). Colonial perspectivalism becomes the quest for a privileged ‘point of view’, abstracted from the dangers of nearness and physical contact, and seeking surety in distance and framing. As with the panopticon it was ‘a position from which . . . one could see and not be seen. The photographer, invisible beneath his black cloak as he eyed the world through his camera’s gaze, in this respect typified the kind of presence desired by the European in the Middle East’ (Mitchell, 1988: p. 24; see also Alloula [1986] and Pratt on the ‘seeing man’ [Pratt, 1992: p. 7]). And yet Europeans also sought immersion within the object-world of the colony, a contradiction resolved for some writers such as Edward Lane and Richard Burton through the use of disguise. These are positions very different from earlier ‘dialogical’ impersonations of the sort addressed by Ballaster in the literary field and popularized among a wide public by William Dalrymple.17 Monitorial schooling, urban planning and new modes of writing and communication were all aspects of a strategy, Mitchell argues, of making Egypt colonizable through visibility: ‘the colonial process would try and re-order Egypt to appear as a world enframed. Egypt was to be ordered up as something object-like . . . it was to be made picture-like and legible, rendered available to political and economic calculation’ (Mitchell, 1988: p. 33). Mitchell’s work exemplifies an approach – derived from Heidegger and Foucault – in which a colonizing modernity is incarnated through the disembodied modality of vision. This was a theme theorized with remarkable explicitness by Léopold Senghor in his essay De La Négritude (1962), which opposes a European deathly objectification with a desirable African immersion in the materiality of thought. Whereas ‘the European’ ‘freezes’ an object ‘out of time . . . fixes it, kills it’ and ‘makes a means of it’, ‘the African turns it

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over and over in his supple hands, he fingers it, he feels it’ (Senghor, 1965: pp. 29–30). Mitchell’s approach has been subject to measured and useful critique by Charles Hirschkind. He has suggested that Mitchell entangles two quite different modalities of power – what Foucault would term ‘microphysical techniques’ and those that depend on what Hirschkind terms a ‘theological effect’. This criss-crossing between quite different forms has the consequence that ‘power seems to reside outside of the realm of material forces, and hence to lay claim to a certain suprahuman authority’ (Hirschkind, 1991: p. 284). This critique alerts us to an aporia at the heart of many assertions about culture and colonialism: the difficulty of demonstrating the mechanisms of consumption and iteration that link ideological artefacts to the material arenas of colonial policy. Arguments, such as that advanced by Linda Nochlin (1983), who reads Orientalist paintings much in the same way that Said reads texts, frequently depend on a generalized colonial zeitgeist in order to convince us of an epistemic colonialism which produces colonially inclined artists who produce images which appear selfevidently to propagate the same colonial episteme. MacKenzie draws attention to the volatile identifications of signs which Said and Nochlin gloss negatively: images of boys studying in Koranic schools, which for Saideans may signify languor, can also be read as ‘showing respect for learning and literacy’, craft production may signify ‘backwardness’ but might also be understood as positive valorizations of pre-industrial production by artists who were in some cases closely allied with William Morris’s arts and crafts movement. ‘The east’, MacKenzie argues, ‘offered inspiration for a radical movement to refresh itself anew at the deep wells of colour and light, pattern and design’ (Mackenzie, 1995: p. 67). Subsequent work by Roger Benjamin (1997, 2003) nuanced this considerably, allowing us to understand the changing historical moments in which particular configurations of artists, images, exhibitions and ideological iteration occurred.

The desire to use the visual as an emblem of other historical forces always encounters the wider issue which Carlo Ginzburg, following E.H. Gombrich, termed the ‘physiognomic problem’. Here the issue is whether images or texts (or other aspect of cultural production) genuinely inform analyses as originary evidence, or whether they must always be relegated to the role of illustration of a thesis which has already been determined. Ginzburg put it this way: The mishaps that can result from such a ‘physiognomic’ reading of artistic documents are clear enough. The historian reads into them what he has already learned by other means, or what he believes he knows, and wants to ‘demonstrate’. (Ginzburg, 1989: pp. 34–35)

Ginzburg is concerned with this as a fundamental methodological issue for all visual-historical enquiry. However, much of the debate around ‘Orientalism’ has engaged the image in such a cavalier fashion that this has become a peculiarly acute issue.

DIVERGENCES AND CONVERGENCES It is a curious, and generally overlooked, fact that scholars who dwell on the polarization of their viewpoints increasingly agree on the fundamental modalities of colonialism. Superficially one could easily present an account of the historiography of colonialism that pitted ‘postcolonial’ scholars against those who exhibit a tolerance of, and nostalgia for, empire. So the work of Edward W. Said is in certain obvious respects wholly opposed to the widely disseminated ‘notorious’ (Porter, 2006: p. xvii) views of Niall Fergusson. For Said, a Christian Palestinian product of the nakba, (British) colonialism ‘required an abiding . . . subordination of the native and colony to the English, individually and collectively’ (Said, 2003: p. 5). For Fergusson – Oxford historian turned Bushregime confidant – British colonialism was rendered as a beneficent and foresighted ‘Anglobalization’. Underlying this apparent incommensurability are a shared set of

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assumptions that colonialism was something far more subtle, complex and tenacious than gunboats and the Maxim gun. Beneath differences in political evaluations of colonialism’s legacy – frequently expressed with an extreme combativeness – there is a growing agreement about the cultural dimensions of its modality. To illustrate this, consider Homi Bhabha’s exemplary reading of the material dimensions of colonialism as translational slippage in his essay ‘Signs taken for wonders’, C.A. Bayly’s Empire and Information, and David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism. Whereas Bhabha is frequently cited as an empathetic critic of Said the latter two authors are commonly taken to exemplify (respectively) the dying embers of the ‘Cambridge School’ of South Asian historiography, and of ‘High Toryism’. Said has described Bayly’s work (here filtered via Dirk’s characterizations) as ‘assigning a good deal of blame to Indian “agents and accomplices” ’ and Cannadine’s approach as turning ‘the whole business into a peripheral episode in the history of the eccentricities of the British upper classes’ (Said, 2003: p. 3). What alignments and resonances can we detect beneath this surface animosity? Where Said conjures a world of binaries, the one holding sway over the other, Bhabha imagines an asymmetric world characterized by ambivalence, anxiety and dialogue. ‘There is always, in Said, the suggestion that colonial power is possessed entirely by the colonizer, which is a historical and theoretical simplification’ (Bhabha cited in Young, 1990: p. 142). In ‘Signs taken for wonders’, Bhabha scrutinizes a colonial logic as the ‘partialization’ of the ‘English book’. Diagnosing colonial power’s own claims as rhetorical anxiety, Bhabha focuses, almost ‘ethnographically’, on a precise moment of encounter, transaction and translation.18 Colonial power may appear incarnated in its own terms at the beginning of this account but is quickly revealed in its fragility once it becomes subject to negotiation in a particular location at a particular time. It is here that Bhabha’s subtitle – Questions of ambivalence and authority under a tree outside Delhi,

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May 1817 – assumes such importance, for he intends us to understand that all relations are subject to empirical articulation.19 It is in the enunciation of power – its iteration – that we see slippage as the condition of manifestation: ‘the presence of the book’ triggers a ‘process of displacement’in which it is ‘repeated, translated, misread . . .’ (Bhabha, 1994: p. 102). Bhabha’s text describes the perplexity of a native catechist who had encountered a small crowd of Indians under the eponymous tree. The catechist is initially delighted by what appears to be a group of bible-clutching Christians, Indians who have assimilated themselves in a utopian conversion to ‘the religion of the European sahibs’. But all is not as it seems. The Indians’ books cannot be the same as the Europeans’because Europeans eat flesh, and besides the Indians were given it directly by God. Here ‘through an act of repetition . . . the colonial text emerges uncertainly’ (Bhabha, 1994: p. 107). The catechist attempts to merge this ‘re-iterated’ book in the possession of the group of Indians with the ur-text of the bible as the codification of the ‘religion of the European sahibs’ but fails. This incident exemplifies a more general proposition for Bhabha, that ‘colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference’ (Bhabha, 1994: p. 107). It also conjures a tangible and material space of transaction, encounter and iteration.20 It is material both in terms of its specificity and in the appearance of the ‘English book’ not as a disembodied text or ideology, but as incarnations that have complex histories, surfaces and appearances: ‘it is its appearance that regulates the ambivalence between origin and displacement, discipline and desire, mimesis and repetition’ (Bhabha, 1994: p. 110). A close reading of Bhabha’s ‘case studies’ helps dispel the oft-cited claim that he is only interested in a placeless, de-historicized and de-materialized phantasmatic ‘colonial discourse’. From the placedness of the shade of a tree outside Delhi, we find Bhabha inhabiting a space which is epistemologically

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(if not politically) curiously resonant with the spaces conjured by Bayly and Cannadine. When Cannadine repeatedly asks what colonialism ‘really looked like’ (Cannadine, 2002: p. xvii), he is – unexpectedly – engaging the same issue as Bhabha in his preoccupation with ‘surfaces’ and ‘appearances’. Similarly, Bayly’s project – to explore the ways in which colonial knowledge depended on ‘native’ mediation of that knowledge – produces a space very similar to that described by Bhabha’s catechist. In a parallel manner in his remarkable book Empire and Information, Bayly is keen to document the emergence of what he terms ‘an Indian ecumene’ – a terrain of shared knowledge negotiated between Indians and colonizing Britons – which is also characterized by contestation and failure. In Bayly’s account, the power/knowledge relationship, which for Foucauldians such as Cohn and Said entails intimacy and potency, has a Bhabha-esque anxiety and ambivalence. In the first place it is not colonial sui generis; rather it is the co-option by colonizers of ‘sophisticated systems of internal espionage and political reporting which had long been deployed by the kingdoms of the Indian sub-continent’ (Bayly, 1999: p. 365). In the second place, we should not understand this to have been a ruthlessly efficient system for it ‘rested on shaky foundations’ (Bayly, 1999: p. 365). Colonial knowledge was ‘never absolute’ and was the result of a ‘dialogic process’ in the manner that Irschick uses this Bakhtinian idiom (Bayly, 1999: p. 370).21 If one wishes one can roll up these ‘anxious’ characterizations as part of a paradigm which desires to portray ‘colonizer[s] as victim[s]’ (as Said claims Linda Colley – wife of Cannadine – does in her book Captives [2002]). Alternatively, and I think more productively, one can search beneath the superficial political oppositions (whose reality I do not deny) and explore resonances between very different approaches which attempt to apprehend different forms of colonialism in their complexity. So as a further example, David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism exemplifies a High Toryism

which, by the device of never bothering to read the works of those authors to whom they imagine themselves to be opposed, ends up unwittingly mirroring certain elements of them. It is striking that the central point made by many of his critics is that what he says is not ‘new’: postcolonial historiography of the kind he professes to disparage has been exploring these issues for several decades. Thus do phantoms battle phantoms. Another idiom through which we can trace a curious symmetry between ‘postcolonial’ and High Tory approaches can be found in the area of biographical reflexivity. What Said (1985: p. 25) described as the necessity of a Gramscian ‘inventory’ has become de rigeur for historians of different hues: Bayly (1998: pp. 307–322), Hall (2002 passim), Cannadine (2002: pp. 181–199) and Porter (2006: pp. x–xi) have all recently offered their own reflexive inventories. Different approaches have also reflected different audiences. A postcolonial scholarship, engaged with the tenacity of colonial ideologies, has consolidated a position within the academy through its recondite professionalized language. A contrasting populism – largely based in the academy but looking to broader publics – has advanced politically conservative positions in an everyday language. Part of a wider public desire for the return to neo-Macauly-an history as narrative, works by authors such as Colley, Cannadine, Fergusson and Dalrymple (some tied also to a television series) have fed into a public desire for absolution from the burdens of the postcolonial.

PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE I have suggested that the starkness of Said’s vision has been fruitfully complicated by Homi Bhabha’s suggestion that ‘Orientalism’ was never as straightforwardly successful as Said imagined it to be for it was itself internally flawed – ‘forked’ or ‘split’ – by the entanglement of horror and desire that constituted it. Bhabha’s re-elaboration of the complex urges driving colonialism has also

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illuminated the ways in which those who had been ‘orientalized’ might work within the contradictions of ‘orientalism’ as a practice to partially overthrow it. Whereas Said’s model is suggestive of a mimesis in which colonialism is granted the power of the master copy, Bhabha’s is more suggestive of Pandora’s Box – the act of colonial enunciation immediately sets free a surplus of possible enactments ensuring unpredictable outcomes. The potential of Bhabha’s insight is demonstrated by Stephen Eisenman’s study of the painter Paul Gauguin’s residence in Tahiti. Previous approaches to Gauguin had stressed his complicity in various systems of domination: he was variously condemned for ‘colonial racism and misogyny’ (Eisenman, 2000: p. 120). In a world of colonial binaries he seemed to be unequivocally placed on the side of the French colonizers. Eisenman, however, presupposes a world of more fluid identities and hypothesizes a congruence between Gauguin’s bohemian refusal of European sexual dimorphism and Tahitian categorizations of the Tata-vahine, or Mahu – terms that are sometimes translated as the ‘third-sex’. Remaining alert to Gauguin’s colonial investments and the complexity of his position, Eisenman nevertheless opens up the possibility of seeing how Gauguin’s liminality permitted him an almost ethnographic intimacy with Tahitians, and provided the base for aesthetic projects which cannot be reduced to a ‘colonial gaze’. This privileged liminality is compressed in his illuminating title: Gauguin’s Skirt. Echoing Bhabha, Eisenman concludes that ‘Rather than buttressing repressive regimes, colonial arts and literatures may actually undermine their ideological legitimacy, or at least offer potential paths for future cultural and political resistance’ (Eisenman, 2000: p. 19). Gauguin’s Tahitian and Marquesan experiences fed back into metropolitan European art, just as Picasso’s ‘epiphany’ in the Trocadero opened European Modernism to African and Oceanic aesthetics. ‘Europe was made by its imperial projects, as much as colonial encounters were shaped by conflicts within Europe itself’ as Cooper and Stoler note

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(1997: p. 1) This is a trajectory that could be given a vast temporal dimension. Wolfgang Schivelbusch has argued – in a wonderful provocation – that early modern Europe’s class system emerged through the control of spices, prestige substances from the east that brought with them the ‘taste of paradise’. Spices were ‘emissaries from a fabled world’ (Schivelbusch, 1992: p. 6) and would give an undifferentiated European palate its first ‘decisive refinement’. Schivelbusch draws a parallel between today’s Age of Oil and an earlier Age of Spices in which the Occident borrowed its vestments from the east: ‘More and more people desired sumptuous, exotic clothes and sharply seasoned dishes, and this change in taste signalled the end of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the modern age’ (Schivelbusch, 1992: p. 10). Sidney W. Mintz (1985) makes a parallel argument about the manner in which the European love of sugar (initially an elite sumptuary classed as a ‘spice’) was transformed through the economics of slave labour into a massproduced source of calories that reduced the cost of reproducing an industrial workforce. From spice to sweetener, sugar became a necessity demanded by the masses. Bernard Porter asks ‘in what ways [was Britain] an imperial society, as well as an imperial nation?’ (2006: p. vii). His answer is that most of the time it wasn’t, at least in any obvious self-conscious way. Attempting to systematically survey British cultural life for colonial/imperial ‘content’ (as opposed to opportunistically ‘pok[ing] about for the occasional imperial shard’ [2006: p. 224]) he finds surprisingly little. Surveying public statutary erected in London he finds that a mere five out of eighty erected before 1880 (and still standing) were of ‘imperialists’. Glasgow’s statuary, however, betrays a far greater material residue of empire (Porter, 2006: p. 147). Porter concludes that empire played a small role in the constitution of domestic British society, at least until the late nineteenth century, when there were more concerted attempts to generate imperial patriotism and affect. Their lack of success explains, he suggests, the lack of popular

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political angst in Britain during the disintegration of empire. Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects (2002) argued that empire had fundamentally constituted a Britain which had been able to imagine itself civilized through continual counterpoint with colonized others. Focusing in the latter part of her study on mid-Victorian Birmingham she traces the slippage from paternalistic Abolitionist discourse into a harsher vocabulary increasingly configured by notions of race as biological difference.22 Porter in response complains that in support of a Birmingham structured by empire she ‘can come up with nothing apart from Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and a popular entertainment about Australia. The former does not count as ‘imperial’ in Porter’s scheme and the latter ‘should probably not count as serious theatre’. ‘The silence’, Porter concludes ‘is deafening’ (Porter, 2006: p. 140). In his staging of doughty panoramic historical empiricism against a flighty and unreliable postcolonial scholarship,23 Porter privileges only the visible and the countable as evidence. The subliminal, the repressed, the allusive (and even the sweet) have no place in his enumeration. The Saidean conclusion – on a reading of Mansfield Park and Great Expectations – that English literature demonstrates the ‘hegemony of . . . imperial ideology’ is, Porter argues, possible only if one is prepared to ‘put more weight on very incidental aspects of their plots than they can bear’ (Porter, 2006: p. 141). Here we encounter an impasse between different methodologies: Porter’s vulgar enumeration (illuminating in many ways) finds itself passing a sophisticated ‘new imperial history’ (proposing that British history simply cannot be understood without an understanding of empire) which looks to a radically different order of signs as evidence. We can think about different kinds of signs in a different idiom. Stephen Eisenman’s argument, briefly touched on above, proceeds from a material moment, rather like Bhabha’s scene under a tree, outside Delhi: the moment when a long-haired Gauguin alights at Papete in 1891. This concern with an

embodied world is also taken up by Cannadine and E.M. Collingham. Cannadine’s Ornamentalism was essentially concerned to inscribe imperialism as a question of class, of rank and status, rather than race, an echo of Joseph Schumpeter’s argument. In exploring the question of ‘imperialism as ornamentalism’ (Cannadine, 2002: p. 122), Cannadine dwelt on a material dimension of colonialism – which he summarized inter alia as ‘processions and ceremony, plumed hats and ermine robes’ (Cannadine, 2002: p. 126). This was part, he argues of imperialism’s anti-capitalist nostalgia for an idealized hierarchy evident in ‘Gothic cathedrals in the Dominions; ruling princes and IndoSaracenic architecture in South Asia; native chiefs and traditional tribes in Africa and the Middle east; imperial chivalry, royal images and icons. . .’ (Cannadine, 2002: p. 128). Imperialism permitted a magnification of a fantasy no longer plausible within Britain: ‘blooming with brighter colours, greater radiance and stronger perfume’(Cannadine, 2002: p. 128).24 Collingham examines the body as a locus for the construction and contestation of authority in colonial India. The manner in which Gandhi would use his body as a somatic signifier, a visible sign of bio-moral substance, has been extensively analysed (Alter, 2000; Bean, 1989). Collingham focuses on colonial somatics, showing how dialogical ‘nabobism’ is displaced by an anxious ‘sahibism’. Transformations in British power were complexly mirrored and prefigured in transformations in bodily norms. Collingham’s book cloaks a celebratory account of the British in India in a thin carapace of Foucault and Elias; however, she draws our attention to the need to study the material articulations of colonizers’ cultural practice.25

SOMATICIZING EMPIRE The corporeal anxiety that Collingham describes and Gandhi’s ‘implosion’ of colonially constituted somatics alert us to the volatility of difference in colonial contexts. Cooper and Stoler note that ‘the otherness

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of colonized persons was neither inherent nor stable’ (Cooper and Stoler, 1997: p. 7). In India, the Dutch East Indies, French Indo-China and diverse parts of Africa, colonizers invested much energy in managing race as a crucial idiom of colonial logic. The colonial ‘construction’ of caste has already been alluded to in the discussion of Cohn and Dirks, but we might note here that the dominant colonial anthropological theorization of caste at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century constituted it as ‘race’ on the basis of the ‘nasal index’ (Risley, 1891: p. xxxiv). Associated with Herbert Hope Risley, Census Commissioner in 1901 and President of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1911 (see Pinney, 1990, 1992), this conceptualization of caste as race was very explicitly mobilized as part of a divide-and-rule anti-nationalist ideology. Since caste ‘perpetuate[s] such differences between classes of men as we readily recognize between different breeds of horses or cattle’ (Anderson, 1913: p. 5), Indian nationalism could never succeed, it was claimed. Risley characterized European nations as built on ‘national types’ made possible by genetic interchange. In India by contrast ‘the process of fusion was long ago arrested . . . There is consequently no national type, and no nation in the ordinary sense of the word’ (Risley, 1909: p. 288). Gyanendra Pandey (1990) has traced a parallel process in the sphere of ‘communalized’ constructions of Hindu and Muslim identities in colonial northern India. But race was more commonly configured as the difference between colonizer and colonized. The differential role it played in diverse colonialisms with diverse histories makes it impossible to produce a generalized history of its trajectory. Eighteenth-century Mexican casta paintings were profoundly typologizing minute fractions of mestizo difference (see Katzew, 2004) at the very moment that in some parts of Europe Enlightenment anti-imperialism was rejecting naturalized difference in favour of a quasirelativistic form of ‘culture’ (Muthu, 2003: p. 184), albeit one which was heavily

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influenced by ‘climatalogical’factors. Herder, for instance, is interested in ‘nation’ as ‘a state of mind or a sense of distinctiveness’ (Muthu, 2003: p. 246)26 : race has almost no role to play in this. From the midnineteenth century onwards, partly under the weight of misreadings of Darwin, and in the face of increasing anti-colonial resistance, a biologistic race assumed a new tenacity in many official colonial projects and in the popular European imagination (Rich, 1986). Here, as Stoler (1995; see also Young, 1995) has argued, a ‘racially erotic counterpoint’ of black and white bodies was a key vector through which colony and metropole interacted. The strength of these identifications was most powerfully expressed in the anxiety that surrounded métissage, which Stoler reads as a ‘metonym for the biopolitics of empire at large’ (Stoler, 1997: p. 199) I will shortly turn to the ways in which contemporary visual artists have explored what Sarat Maharaj terms a ‘xeno-epistemology’, which may help us understand some of the questions which have so far, in this essay, only been addressed through the idiom of academic dispute. Prior to that we must consider two central conceptual paradigms – negritude and neo-Gandhism – which have articulated influential paradigms of post-coloniality. Négritude can be seen (like Ubuntu, and Mbeki Thabo’s ‘African Renaissance’) as a tactical inversion of ideologies implicated in colonialism. Originating in 1930s Paris under the influence of the Harlem Renaissance (a further exemplification of what Paul Gilroy terms the Black Atlantic), figures such as Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire invoked a striking set of essentializations about Black Africa. Senghor’s 1962 text De La Négritude starts with a starkly drawn characterization of a colonial ‘Cartesian Perspectivalism’ which kills its object in order better to understand it. Black Africans, by contrast, are presented as immersed affectively in a world from which they are not yet divorced. Senghor’s disparagement of colonial objectification finds echoes in an Indian tradition of anti-colonial opposition. Rabindranath Tagore – a major influence on Ashis Nandy

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and Partha Chatterjee (India’s two leading public intellectuals) – produced powerful poetic descriptions of what Partha Chatterjee has termed the ‘prisonhouse of colonial reason’ (Chatterjee, 1995: p. 55). In 1893 in a letter written at Shelidah, Tagore wrote that ‘Curiously enough, my greatest fear is that I should be reborn in Europe! For there one cannot recline like this with one’s whole being laid open to the infinite above . . . . Like the roads there, one’s mind has to be stonemetalled for heavy traffic – geometrically laid out, and kept clear and regulated’ (Tagore, 1921: p. 106). A year later he would write of his repugnance with Calcutta, which ‘is as ponderously proper as a Government Office. Each of its days comes forth like a coin from a mint, clear cut and glittering, Ah! Those dreary, deadly days, so preciously equal in weight’ (Tagore, 1921: p. 121). Ashis Nandy draws on Tagore and Mohandas K. Gandhi as resources for recovering possibilities generated by Indian epistemologies which have survived colonialism, albeit in fragmentary forms. His early work The Intimate Enemy (1983), informed by Fanon and Césaire, engaged the deep insertion of colonial alienation in the Indian psyche (‘that is why the cry of the victims of colonization was ultimately the cry to be heard in another language . . .’[Nandy, 1983: p. 73]). Later work has looked to Tagore for insights on alternative modalities for national selfimagination, and popular commercial film as a bearer of ‘vestigial elements in a dialect which everyone had half-forgotten’ (Nandy, 1995: p. 21). In a memorable account of a series of 1980s hijackings of Air India aircraft by Sikh extremists he records the emergence of a repressed sense of community – triggered in extremis – and articulated by a common language of the songs and sentiments of Hindi film. Nandy writes of the ‘deep but increasingly cornered elements of Indian culture’ – by which he means non-modern and pre-colonial which still find a place in mass-cultural forms such as Hindi film. Ably championed by Lal (2000) and subsequently Young (2001), Nandy’s position has been subject to searching attack for what might

be seen as its own essentialization of the ‘non-modern’ and pre-colonial. In all these textual arguments, the material and visual have figured prominently. The appearance and non-appearance of imperial themes in public statuary, imperial plumes, styles of architecture and complexly somaticized bodies have all served as currency within linguistic discourses. Working within the humanities and social sciences it is difficult to escape a self-reflexive language as the primary mode of investigative analysis. However, the experience of colonialism has also preoccupied numerous visual artists, and the concluding sections consider the nature of the particular insights they offer.

ART-ETHICAL PROCESSING AND THE LEGACY OF COLONIALISM The legacy of the colonial within the postcolonial has been of central concern to a number of important visual artists and critical commentators on visual cultural production. Okwui Enwezor, perhaps the most consistently exciting international curator, made this a central issue in the conceptualization of Documenta 11 in 2002, noting that today’s avant-garde is ‘so thoroughly disciplined and domesticated within the scheme of Empire that a whole different set of regulatory and resistance models has to be found to counterbalance Empire’s attempt at totalization’ (Enwezor, 2002: p. 45). Sarat Maharaj (2002) wrote very thoughtfully at the time of that show about ‘xeno-epistemics’ and the potential of visual art for knowledge production that might provide such a counterbalance. Noting the different modalities of the visual arts and ‘high-speed’knowledge systems such as science and social theory, Maharaj conceptualized art as ‘ “xeno-equipment” rigged out for attracting, conducting, taking on difference . . .’and harbouring the possibility of ‘artethical processing plants churning out options and potentials . . . for action and involvement in the world’ (Maharaj, 2002: p. 72). Art’s potential to theorize options and potentials has a long history. A new history

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of art as xeno-epistemology would have to include such substantial and extraordinary bodies of work as Mexican subversions of colonial codices commissioned in the wake of the Spanish conquest of 1519 (Gruzinski, 1992) and the extensive commentary and critique of the colonial settlement of Australia provided by nineteenth-century Aboriginal artists such as Tommy McRae and Mickey of Ulladulla (Sayers, 1997). There are ample and sufficient survivor’s of non-Western visualizations of the history of colonial trade and conquest on which to construct indigenous visual histories of colonialism.

FOURTH-WORLD XENO-EPISTEMICS Among key contemporary contributors to a project of ‘xeno-epistemology’ we might include Jimmy Durham, an artist of Cherokee descent. His earliest works were a series of Indian ‘artefacts from the future’. One of them, Bedia’s Muffler (1985), is a car exhaust decorated with cowries and shamanic designs and suspended from a leather strap. This postindustrial artefact simultaneously mocked the expectations of an ‘authentic’ timeless Native American art and conjured a future in which a skilled relationship to the land again becomes necessary for survival (illustrated in Durham, n.d.: p. 18). Pocahantas’ Underwear (1985), a pair of red feathered knickers in which frayed elastic coexists with archaic pendula of beads, conjures a similar collapse of Empires. But Durham’s works constitute a more ambitious and conceptually complex critique of what we have previously considered under the rubric of ‘colonial/Cartesian perspectivalism’. In a superb reading of Durham’s 1994 ICA (London) show Original Re-Runs, Laura Mulvey situates Durham’s concerns within the literary theorist and historian Tzvetan Todorov’s conjoining of the introduction of linear perspective and the discovery and conquest of America (Mulvey, n.d.: p. 45). This technology of representation serves not simply as metaphor, but rather (as we have seen in Timothy Mitchell’s

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argument about the colonization of Egypt) a specific tool in the picturing and control of territories and peoples. Mulvey has suggested that Durham’s ICA show might be understood as a prolonged destabilization of such a visual/political regime founded on a process of binary confrontation between a valued self and disavowed other. If a system of perspective provides the stable point from which one’s own culture can (following Said) oppositionally view nature, civilization view savagery, and so on, Durham tried to corrupt the alignments that make such identifications possible. Ropes hung from the ceiling bisected the space of the gallery and set up a rival spatial regime that conflicted with a series of opposed signifiers (presented in the style of road signs) that invoke colonial binaries. The critique of colonialism as – literally and figuratively – a way of seeing forms a central part of the Brisbane-based Aboriginal artist Gordon Bennett’s work. Bennett, more than any other living practitioner, has taken as his object of analysis the visual regimes that made colonialism possible and subjected these to complex transformations and reordering. ‘By recontextualizing images subtracted from this grid of Euro-Australian “self” representation [he attempts] to show the constructed nature of history and of identification as arbitrary’ (cited in Bennett, 2000: p. 16). Bennett’s Aboriginal mother was raised on a reserve and prohibited knowledge of her own people’s belief and customs. Bennett’s own upbringing, which he has written about with searing insight and poignancy, involved a complete invisibility of his Aboriginality. Bennett’s triptych of 1989, Requiem, Of Grandeur, Empire, demonstrates his concern with cultural technologies of rule and colonial technologies of representation. Aboriginal figures (based on early photographic images by Charles Woolley and J.W. Lindt from the 1860s and 1870s) are positioned at the vanishing point of perspectively depicted cubes. Labelled A, B and C, these conflate colonial literacy and the abbreviated racist calumnies (which Bennett references explicitly in many other works) as dual technologies of domination. Linear perspective and European

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technologies of writing, together with civilizational rhetorics (two of the triptychs reference European classical archways), are diagnosed as central devices in the construction of Aboriginal identities by a colonial ‘world picture’. But, as Bennett himself has said, his is not a nihilistic investigation, despite the enormity of the genocidal history he of necessity engages with. Rather, he is interested in the arbitrary nature of identifications and the ways in which technologies which claim a natural status might be overturned by radically different world views. Empire endows Emperor Augustus at the summit of the archway with an Aboriginal ‘halo’ referenced through the ‘dot’ style which became such a characteristic feature of Western Desert acrylic paintings from the 1970s onwards. Empires disrupt Empires. The manner in which representational technologies ‘made’ a colonial history is more explicitly developed in a series of paintings in which Bennett reworks familiar images of Captain Cook. Possession Island, for instance, reconstructs an eighteenthcentury history painting, overlayering and interweaving both Aboriginal dot style with a Jackson Pollock-style dribble that references his Blue Poles, famously purchased by the Whitlam Government in 1972 for a then record sum and which for many symbolized the Australian state’s desire to find an authenticating history and narrative outside itself. Abstract Expressionism as cultural imperialism is a connection made explicitly by Bennett: ‘The overpainted Modernist trace of a Pollock skein [is] a metaphor for the scar as trace and memory of the colonial lash’ (cited by Smith, 2000: p. 16). Bennett’s concern with the ways in which ‘style’ embodies culture and history resonates with Yinka Shonibare’s deployment of kitenge printed cotton as a trace of history and identity. For Shonibare, a London-born artist of Yoruba heritage, these trans-national textiles (originating in a Dutch East Indies batiks factory, printed in Manchester for the colonial African market) articulate the contingent, but enormously powerful, conditioning of style and permit

the re-cloaking of the everyday with a provocative postcolonial surface that makes history ‘strange’ (Kasfir, 1999: pp. 211–212). Bennett’s exceptional work might be seen as an actualization of Homi Bhabha’s demand that in the reading of colonial discourse ‘the point of intervention should shift from the identification of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through [. . .] sterotypic discourse’ (Bhabha, 1994: p. x). Bennett’s diagnosis of the intimate efficacy of this discourse provides us not simply with a moral/political position but an enormously sophisticated and precise analysis of its mechanics, demonstrated especially well in his 1988 series titled Notes on Perception (Bennett, 1999). His wider oeuvre constitutes a penetrating intellectual disquisition on the ways in which we perceive other histories through the experience of colonization and the grain of visualization. Bennett’s work is also powerfully concerned with the relationship between centre and periphery, and their mutual dependency and fictionality. Ian McLean has observed ‘Perspective does not expel the periphery to the ends of the world, as it might seem, but brings these ends into the centre of both the picture’s space and the subjectivity of the viewer’ (McLean, 1998: p. 138). Through this manoeuvre, Bennett (like Durham) sought to place under erasure the relationship between centre and periphery, and subject and object, which discourses like that of linear perspective propose. But there is a broader concern here with cartography – the making of maps, territories and borders which Paul Carter (1987) has diagnosed as ‘spatial history’. The illegitimacy of colonially imposed borders has also been the object of a direct, explicit and literal attack in the Namibian artist John Ndevasia Muafangejo’s linocuts. In Angola and South West Africa (1976), for instance, he traces the legacy of King Mandume (a figure of great political resonance for Kwanyama people) and the artist’s own experience of trans-national migration. The pictorial space occupied by Angola and (apartheid South African-occupied) South West Africa,

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or Namibia, is bisected by a line marked ‘artificial boundary’ (Timm, 1998).

CONTESTING THE COLONIAL WORLD PICTURE The work of all these artists suggests what has already been hinted at: that beneath all its infinite variety, what we understand as colonialism is the climax of a man-besotted view of reality, the fruition of a way of regarding the world as expendable, as something simply there for human exploitation. European world conquest was precipitated by the desire to extract resources (spices, gold, slaves . . .) and colonialism and imperialism emerged as technologies of control and quantification. In the terms delineated by Heidegger, the world became increasingly viewed as a ‘picture’ – as something set apart from man, rather than that thing that encloses and moulds man (Heidegger, 1977). The modern concept of man indeed emerges as a product of the ability to set oneself apart from the world. Many colonial projects intensified this concern with the world as a field of mathematically quantifiable, spatial and temporal, certainty, drawing out the differences between European subjects and non-European objects. Colonial pseudo-sciences and representational practices can be interpreted in this light as anxious attempts to guard against the collapse of this separation. The world as something set apart, and as something ripe for colonization, constitutes one of the central concerns of Leah King-Smith’s elegiac Patterns of Connection series. These photo-compositions emerged from King-Smith’s work in the archives of the State Library of Victoria (Australia) in 1989 and 1990. The works overprint archival images of Aboriginal people with King-Smith’s original fish-eye landscapes in large Cibachrome prints. The smallness and disposability of the original archival prints has been banished by these imposing prints, whose glossy surface confronts the viewer with their own mirrored presence. If the archive prints were one sign of the ‘world as

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picture’ – of a realm over which ‘man’ had power (structured through alien taxonomies and endlessly substitutable), perhaps KingSmith’s photocompositions should be seen as a reassertion of the power of that world over a colonizing eye. The power relations are reversed: it is no longer the viewer who structures the world in his/her own image, but the world which ‘impresses’ the viewer (Williamson, 1996: p. 46; King-Smith, 1992). Michel Foucault once characterized an emergent form of European knowledge as ‘the absolute eye that cadaverizes’ (Foucault, 1976: p. 166). He was concerned here with the paradoxical manner in which certain forms of encompassing knowledge demand the death of their subject in a way that Senghor had prefigured. The black British photographer Dave Lewis has confronted this continuing cadaverization in a series of works which introduced fluid, live bodies into the regimented and ordered spaces of nineteenth-century anthropological archives (Charity et al., 1995). The desire to analyse the ‘absolute eye’ and its tendency to ‘cadaverize’ has also been a central concern in work by the white South African artist Penny Siopsis. In a powerful series of photographs she engaged with the legacy of Sartje Bartmann, the socalled Hottentot Venus, who was exported to Europe as an object of curiosity in the early nineteenth century. South Africa has also been the setting for a significant recent debate about the rights to use certain images. Okwui Enwezor, director of the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, launched a fierce critique of white South African artists’s use of ‘black bodies’ in their attempts to negotiate the new ‘rainbow nation’. He focused particularly on Candice Breitz’s Rainbow Series, which morphed pornographic and National Geographic images of white and black bodies in a manner that referenced Dada and Surrealist notions of the ‘exquisite corpse’. Practitioners such as Breitz, Enwezor implied, appeal to a universal space of Modernist creativity and right to speak: they fail to recognize the ways in which political histories in which they are complexly

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implicated have deprived them of that right to speak (Enwezor, 1997). Enwezor’s intervention problematically entangles itself with essentializations of (in Foucault’s term) enunciative modality, which has been wittily critiqued by Rasheed Araeen under the rubric of ‘Our Bauhaus, others’ mudhouse’ (Araeen, 1989). Araeen, the Pakistani-born London-based editor of Third Text, has recounted how after his arrival in London as a sculptor working in a postCaro tradition, he came increasingly ‘to feel that the context or history of Modernism was not available to me’ (Araeen, 1987: p. 10). Instead, he was continually reminded of the relationship of his work to that of ‘his own Islamic tradition’(Araeen, 1987: p. 10). While Araeen dreamt of a universal ‘Bauhaus’, he was offered only a ‘mudhouse’. Araeen sees this artworld vision of the modernity of the self and the archaicism of the other as part of a structural dependency, for one cannot have the modern without its obverse, the archaic. Araeen’s diagnosis of the artworld’s Orientalism provides a useful frame through which to view the important recent work of the Russian artist Haralampi G. Oraschakoff. Like Bennett, Oraschakoff attempts to implode the basis of centre/periphery distinctions, proposing instead something rather like the Möbius loop in which the inside and outside transmute. His exhibition on the theme of Itinerants and Orientalists – which juxtaposed his own images of cartographic marginalization with painted ‘copies’ of canonical Orientalist works by artists such as Delacroix and Gerome – explores the mutability of different positions, noting that ‘For the British artists, Russia represented eastern exoticism, but the Russians identified themselves as Europeans, condemning Ivan the Terrible’s bloody excesses . . .’ (Borovsky, 1999: p. 14). Echoing Dipesh Chakrabarty, Oroschakoff takes as his central problem the belief that ‘time on the boundaries flows differently’ (Borovsky, 1999: p. 14). This struggle between centres and peripheries, metropoles and interstices, gives rise to one of the major framing tropes of

postcolonial art practice: the margin as centre. This involves a repudiation of a temporalized cartography which positions much of the world in a relationship of ‘belated-ness’ to colonial centres. Recall Said’s argument (much elaborated by Inden [1990], and independently theorized by Fabian [1983: p. 25ff.]) that a key Orientalizing strategy involved (in Fabian’s term) the denial of ‘co-evality’ (the denial of a singular temporality uniting both centre and periphery: the Occident had History and Agency; the Orient did not). As Dipesh Chakrabarty has discussed, it became the fate of the belated zones to replicate a history that had already happened elsewhere: Europe and America had histories of art (see Nelson, 1997), the belated zones had traditional art practices which might one day cease to be traditional, but never with the possibility of becoming ‘original’. Nineteenth-century evolutionist propositions which posited colonial metropoles in historical advance of their peripheries are easy to dismiss now, but they have a tenacious shadow in the assumption that aesthetic history is made in New York or Paris by practitioners who, like Nietzsche’s madman in the market proclaiming that ‘God is Dead’, discover that they have arrived ‘too soon’ and that the ignorant public are not ready for them. If Nietzsche’s madman’s burden was to arrive ‘too soon’, the belated-zones’s burden was to arrive too late. Dipesh Chakrabarty – who has perhaps theorized this question more perceptively than anyone – observed with regard to the writing and thinking of history that ‘ “Europe” remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call “Indian”, “Chinese”, “Kenyan” and so on . . .’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: p. 27) The same could be said – perhaps with even more justification – about much art history, which so fully presumes the ‘sovereignty’ of the primary European model that all other contending histories are merely footnoted, or even deleted. Some commentators would claim that a similar ‘denial of co-evality’ lay at the heart of two exhibitions in the 1980s which generated a huge critical industry.

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The Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern exhibition was a milestone in the creation of a new consciousness of the politics of representation and exclusion. Committed to exploring the ‘affinity of the tribal and the modern’, the ostensible aim of the show was to demonstrate the influence of ‘Primitive’ non-Western art (primarily African and Oceanic) upon European ‘Primitivists’. Building upon earlier studies (von Sydow, 1921; Goldwater, 1938), William Rubin, the curator of the MOMA exhibition, was honestly explicit about his interest in the ‘modern’ half of the equation, being concerned to ‘understand the Primitive sculptures in terms of the Western context in which modern artists “discovered” them’ (Rubin, 1984; p. 1). It was this privileging of EuroAmerican artists’ actions and the almost complete silencing of the voices of the creators of the ‘Primitive’ objects which caused such outrage among a plethora of critics who ranged against what came to be seen as Rubin’s ‘colonial’ strategy. The dominant narrative in the exhibition sustained a beneficent and self-possessed EuroAmerican modernism granting African and Oceanic art mere walk-on parts as proofs of its generosity and open-ness to diverse influences. This entailed an inventory of (in the sense that Homi Bhabha characterizes it) cultural ‘diversity’, as opposed to a confrontation with cultural ‘difference’ as a conflictual and historically constituted struggle (Bhabha, 1994: p. 34). Thomas McEvilley turned up the heat further in a denunciatory exchange in Artforum. For McEvilley, the MOMA show strove for a ‘Western-imposed “commonality”’, but for all its pretensions had only served to further inscribe the ‘Hegel-based conviction that one’s own culture is riding the crucial timeline of history’s self-realization’ McEvilley, 1984). Ultimately the Primitivism exhibition’s desire to believe in the ‘wholeness, integrity and independence’ of the Western tradition reinscribed the Hegelian assumption that Western art history alone embodied the self-realization of Universal Spirit (1984).

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A similar critique was developed by Rasheed Araeen with respect to Magiciens de la Terre, which, like Primitivism, was ostensibly concerned with a universal creativity. Curated by Jean-Hubert Martin in 1989 in Paris, Magiciens deployed a ‘superempiricism’aimed at destroying the ‘false distinction between Western and other cultures’ but, for many critics, its refusal to address the institutional and cultural frameworks through which different art practices were mediated vitiated this laudable project. The exhibition mixed works produced by EuroAmerican named individual artists with those produced by ‘anonymous’ collective ‘tribal’ practitioners, reproducing for many a further neo-Hegelian sense of the West as the sole occupant of historical space (Araeen, 1989). In this sense the history of non-Western aesthetics’colonial entanglement (e.g. Mitter, 1977) is merely repeated, not superseded and resolved. Approaching colonialism’s cultural dimension through the prism of contemporary visual ‘xeno-epistemology’ presents a clear sense of a recurrent concern with colonial perspectivalism – a coercive rationalizing mode of hierarchical knowledge. However, it provides little sense of the heterogeneity of colonialisms which I was keen to stress at the beginning of this discussion. Perhaps this reflects the way in which a hypostasized colonialism is presented in the art schools in which most of the artists I have discussed have been trained. The art I have discussed demonstrates in a powerful way that, as Stoler notes, ‘“to colonize” is an evocative and active verb accounting for a range of inequalities and exclusions – that may have little to do with colonialism at all. As a morality tale of the present the metaphor of colonialism has enormous force but it can also eclipse how varied the subjects are created by different colonialisms’ (Stoler, 1995: p. 199).Arts xeno-epistemology appears exceptionally good at ‘Heideggerean’ evocation, not as successful in nuanced delineation. An analysis of subaltern visual xenoepistemology grounded in the study of Indian popular responses to colonialism (Pinney, 2004), Zairean popular ‘history painting’

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(Fabian, 1996) and other localized practices would almost certainly generate a vastly more disparate set of perspectives, positions that might be congruent with Stoler’s.

CONCLUSION: WHOSE COLONIALISM? Such an approach would also highlight the multiple non-European colonialisms which although having very low visibility in mainstream academic discourses have nevertheless structured the experience of significant numbers of people. Haralampi Oraschakoff’s work directs our attention to Russia’s incorporation of neighbouring lands into its empire, a process which has increasingly attracted the attention of scholars, as has Japan’s regional expansion, where attention has been directed to culture as a tool of imperialism, ‘a tool often so malleable, transportable, and imperceptible that it masked its own profound instrumentality’ (Weisenfeld, 2000: p. 595; see also Low, 2003). We might also note that one of the most significant, and earliest, documents of ‘visual resistance’ to European colonialism, Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno of 1615, is also marked by local struggles over empire. Guaman Poma sent his remarkable illustrated text to King Philip III of Spain as a primer in ‘good government’, a moral guide as to how the Spanish should act if they were good Catholics (see Adorno, 2000, 2001). His own position was complex for though he was matrilineally descended from Inca nobility he articulated a pro-Andean but anti-Incan stance on the basis of his paternal YarovilcaAllauca Huanco lineage. From this perspective the Incas were ‘usurpers’: thus did two empires entwine Guaman Poma. The list of empires which the discussion of colonialism generally has no space for might be extended: we could add the Ching, Mughal, Ottoman, the Sultanate of Sokoto (Ferro, 1997).27 A focus on an exclusively European presence can produce curious results: Brian Larkin notes that Northern Nigeria was colonized by the British between 1903 and 1960 and ‘a history of over a thousand

years is divided into a period pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial which centres less than 60 years of British rule at the heart of Hausa experience’ (1997: p. 408).28 The acknowledgement of non-European expansive forms would perhaps contribute a further stage in what Dipesh Chakrabarty terms the ‘provincialization’ of Europe. The move towards culturalized accounts of world history has been accompanied by an increased scepticism about the centre-periphery models which seemed to replicate colonialism’s own self-delusion. Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory has been increasingly displaced by a ‘provincializing’ trajectory. In this new historiography colonies emerge not simply as a ‘belated’ periphery but as motors of innovation. In Jorge CañizaresEsguerra’s account of Spanish histories of Mexico, it is indigenous historiography which plays a key role: early Spanish historians ‘did not hesitate to consider the historical information stored in quipus and codices as trustworthy’ (Cañizares Esguerra, 2001: p. 68). In Bernard Smith’s (1960) account of European artists in the South Pacific in the late eighteenth century it is the effect of Tahitian light on the landscape painter William Hodges which facilitates his aesthetic breakthrough 25 years before William Turner’s belated metropolitan achievements. For Susan BuckMorss (2000), Hegel’s writing on the masterslave dialectic can only be understood through the impact of the Haitian Revolution,29 and for Carlo Ginzburg, a key element in the surveillance of colonial metropolitan populations – fingerprinting – has its origins in rural colonial Bengal of the 1860s (1989). The belated acknowledgement that the ‘periphery’ was also capable of generating its own vast empires now needs to be added to the inventory of this process of ‘provincializing Europe’.

NOTES 1 At various times Sweden had a colonial presence in Delaware, Guadeloupe, parts of the Gold Coast

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and India. Denmark also had a presence in the Gold Coast, various Caribbean islands and Serampore in India. 2 These are ideological permutations described, respectively, by Anthony Pagden (1995, 1998), FisherTine and Mann (2004) and Lindqvist (1997). Locke’s sanction against American natives attempting to regain their lands (that they ‘be destroyed as a lion or tiger, one of those savage wild beasts’ [Pagden, 1995: p. 77]) was in practice similar to the modality Lindqvist describes. 3 See also Davis (2002). 4 Nicholas Thomas observes that the extent to which fatal impact theories ‘require qualification is variable’ (Thomas, 1994: p. 15). 5 ‘Colonialism was made possible, and then sustained and strengthened, as much by cultural technologies of rule as it was by the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest that first established power on foreign shores’ (Dirks, 2001: p. 9). 6 ‘Punishment’, following Foucault (1979), denoting a modality of naked power, and ‘discipline’ denoting an internalized self-policing. 7 Cohn taught for the whole of his career in the Department of Anthropology in the University of Chicago. See Guha’s foreword to Cohn (1987) and Vinay Lal’s helpful assessment at: http://www.sscnet. ucla.edu/southasia/Culture/Intellectuals/cohn.html. 8 See Inden (1990), Dirks (2001) and Appadurai (1996). 9 In this light, the repudiation of the sense in Orientalism that colonial ideologies were all-powerful, by the claim in Culture and Imperialism that ‘there was always some form of active resistance’ (Said, 1994: p. xii) appears equally absurd. One would like to think there was ‘always’ resistance, but this is surely a historical phenomenon to be documented in particular situations rather than humanistically posited as a general reflex. 10 Lord Cromer, Agent and Consul-General in Egypt, 1883–1907. 11 Almost certainly the work of the Italian writer Giovanni Paolo Marana (Ballaster, 2005: p. 207ff.). 12 ‘Common understandings of “Enlightenment universalism” fail to come to terms with the . . . manner in which Diderot, Kant and Herder interweave commitments to moral universalism and moral incommensurability, to humanity and cultural difference’ (Muthu, 2003: p. 10). 13 ‘Europeans no longer appear as representations of a a single univocal tradition, but as figures who were improvising sinuous paths through fiercely competing claims’ (Greenblatt, 1991: p. xx). 14 The portrayal of Spanish colonialism as motivated by gold and blood, and stressing greed and cruelty. 15 For instance MacKenzie suggests that Orientalist pre-occupations with the desert are expressive of industrialized nations’ citizens’ desire for cleanliness: ‘the central point about the desert was that it was

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perceived as morally and physically clean . . . the desert represented a great purifying force’ (MacKenzie, 1995: p. 59). 16 See Zimmerman (1993). Naess’s philosophy can be read as generically anti-colonial, as much as it can be read ‘ecologically’. 17 Dalrymple’s White Mughals (2003), celebrates the eighteenth-century British Resident at Hyderabad, James Kirkpatrick’s cross-cultural entanglements. 18 In this respect Thomas’s critique of Bhabha (1994) is curious inasmuch as Thomas’s earlier work (1991) could be viewed as precisely concerned with those questions of translational slippage which are so central to Bhabha himself. 19 Conversely Bhabha in other writings does invoke a disembodied ‘colonialism’ and ‘colonial’ discourse for a critique of which see Parry (2004), Perloff (n.d.) and Thomas (1994). 20 Important works which engage this problematic (though without recourse to Bhabha) include Greg Denning (1992, 1996) and Jonathan Lamb (2001). Lamb paraphrasing Pagden notes ‘the damage caused to the self by its own mobility’ (2001: p. 114) and cites John Trenchard’s 1725 warning against the ‘selfextrusion’ provoked by voyaging: ‘People are like Wire: the more they are extended, the weaker they become’ (Lamb, 2001: p. 115). 21 Irschick describes how the ‘colonial’ understanding of the vellala caste in South India was not the ‘product of the British alone but formed a project resulting from many voices, high and low, past and present’ (Irschick, 1994: p. 201). 22 See an illuminating review by Edward Said (2003). Hall’s argument could be fitted to Stepan’s suggestion that racism – almost indiscernible through the middle ages – is a product of the slave trade (Thomas, 1994: p. 78). Hall can then be seen to describe an Abolitionist modulation, after which earlier attitudes are reconsolidated. 23 Although this is a distinction he seeks to undercut in the preface to the paperback edition of 2006. 24 See Geoff Eley’s critique: ‘Ornamentalism’s approach seems bizarrely disconnected: durbars and plumed hats may have made empire into a spectacle, but its mechanisms of rule depended far more on the local contexts of legitimacy and contestation’ (2002). 25 See also Arnold (1994) and Cummings (2003). 26 For a contrary position see Young (1995: p. 40). 27 And sub-regional strategies that have sometimes been termed ‘internal colonialism’ (Hechter, 1975). Beyond this we might also consider diverse ‘counterflows’ such as non-Europeans’ travel accounts of their experiences of Europe (Mukhopadhyay, 2002; Fisher, 2004). 28 See also Cooper and Stoler (eds.): ‘We question the “colonial” as well as the “-ity”, the former because it homogenizes a power relationship whose

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limitations and contingencies need to be examined, the latter because it suggests an essential quality to the fact of having been colonized, implying that colonialism was the only thing of importance to people who live in what were once colonies’ (Cooper and Stoler, 1997: p. 33). 29 She shows in convincing detail that, contra most Hegelian scholarship, this was not the result of an internal debate within European philosophy but a reflection of Hegel’s awareness of German press coverage of Haitian slaves’ revolt against their colonial masters.

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a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–56. Cummings, W. (2003) ‘Orientalism’s corporeal dimension: tattooed bodies and eighteenthcentury oceans’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 4(2). (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v004/ 4.2cummings.html). Dalrymple, W. (2002) White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India. London: Penguin. Davis, M. (2002) Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famine and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso. Denning, G. (1992) Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Denning, G. (1996) Performances. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dirks, N.B. (1996) ‘Introduction’, in B.S. Cohn (ed.), Colonialism and Its Form of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dirks, N.B. (2001) Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Durham, J. (n.d.) Jimmie Durham. London: Phaidon. Eisenman, S. (2000) Gauguin’s Skirt. London: Thames and Hudson. Eley, G. (2002) ‘Beneath the skin or: how to forget about the Empire without really trying’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 1. (http://muse.jhu. edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_ history/v003/3.1eley.html). Enwezor, O. (1997) ‘Reframing the black subject: ideology and fantasy in contemporary South African representation‘, Third Text, 40: 21–40. Enwezor, O. (2002) ‘The Black Box’, in Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition (Catalogue). Ostfilden-Ruit: Hajte Cantz Publishers, pp. 42–55. Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fabian , J. (1996) Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ferro, M. (1997 [1994]) Colonization: A Global History. Tr. K.D. Prithipaul. London: Routledge. Fisher, M.H. (2004) Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain 1600–1857. Delhi: Permanent Black. Fisher-Tine, H. and Mann, M. (eds) (2004) Colonialism as Civilising Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India. London: Anthem Press. Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

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Fox, R. (1985) Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilroy, P. (1995 [1993]) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Ginzburg, C. (1989) ‘From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: a problem of method’, in Clues, Myths and the Historical Method. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, pp.17–59. Goldwater, R. (1938) Primitivism in Modern Art. New York. Grafton, A. (1992) New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. New York: New York Public Library; and Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Greenblatt, S. (1991) Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gruzinski, S. (1992) Painting the Conquest: The Mexican Indians and the European Renaissance. Tr. Deke Dusinberre. Paris: Unesco/Flammarion. Guha, R. (1987) ‘Introduction’, in B.S. Cohn (ed.), An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. vii–xxvi. Hall, C. (2002) Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–67. Cambridge: Polity. Harney, E. (2004) In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Hechter, M. (1975) Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development. London: Routledge. Heidegger, M. (1977) ‘The age of the world picture’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Tr. William Lovitt. New York: Harper. Hirschkind, C. (1991) ‘ “Egypt at the exhibition”: reflections on the optics of colonialism’, Critique of Anthropology, 11(3): 279–298. Hochschild, A. (1999 [1998]) King Leopold’s Ghost. New York: Mariner Books. Hoffenberg, P. (2001) An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Inden, R.B. (1986) ‘Orientalist views of India’, Modern Asian Studies, 20(3): 401–446. Inden, R.B. (1990) Imagining India. Oxford: Blackwell. Irschick, E.F. (1994) Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1975–1895. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jay, M. (1988) ‘The scopic regimes of modernity’, in H. Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality. Seattle: Bay Press, pp. 3–23.

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Kasfir, S.L. (1999) Contemporary African Art. London: Thames and Hudson. Katzew, I. (2004) Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. Yale: Yale University Press. King-Smith, L. (1992) Patterns of Connection. Sydney: Australian Centre for Photography; Daytona Beach: Southeast Museum of Photography. Lal, V. (2000) Dissenting Knowledges, Open Futures: The Multiple Selves and Strange Destinations of Ashis Nandy. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Lamb, J. (2001) Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Larkin, B. (1997) ‘Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities’, Africa 67(3): 406–440. Lindqvist, S. (1996 [1992]) ‘Exterminate All The Brutes’. Tr. Joan Tate. London: Granta. Low, M. (2003) in C. Pinney and N. Peterson (eds), Photography’s Other Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McEvilley, T. (1984) “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief: ‘primitivism’ in twentieth century art at the museum of Modern Art, Artforum, November, pp. 54–60, reprinted with replies from Rubin and Varnedoe in R. Ferguson, W. Olander, M. Tucker, and K. Fiss (eds), Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; and Cambridge MA: MIT, 1990, pp. 339–404. MacKenzie, J.M. (1995) Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McLean, I. (1998) White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maharaj, S. (2002) ‘Xeno-epistemics: makeshift kit for sounding visual art as knowledge production and the retinal regimes’, in Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition (Catalogue). Ostfilden-Ruit: Hajte Cantz Publishers, pp. 71–84. Mamdani, M. (1996) Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mamdani, M. (2001) When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mintz, S.M. (1985) Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking. Mitchell, T. (1988) Colonizing Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitter, P. (1977) Much Maligned Monsters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moorhead, A. (1966) The Fatal Impact: An Account of the Invasion of the South Pacific 1767–1840. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Mukhopadhyay, B. (2002) ‘Writing home, writing travel’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 44(2): 293–317. Mulvey, L. (n.d.) ‘Changing objects, preserving time’, in Jimmie Durham. London: Phaidon. Muthu, S. (2003) Enlightenment Against Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nandy, A. (1988[1983)] The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nandy, A. (1995) ‘The discreet charms of Indian Terrorism’, in his The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nelson, R. (1997) ‘The map of art history’, Art Bulletin, 79: 28–40. Pagden, A. (1995) Lords of All The World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c.1800. Yale: Yale University Press. Pagden, A. (1998) ‘The struggle for legitimacy and the image of Empire in the Atlantic to c. 1700’, in N. Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume 1, The Origins of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 34–54. Pandey, G. (1990) The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Parry, B. (2004) Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London: Taylor and Francis. Perloff, M. (n.d.) ‘Cultural liminality/aesthetic closure? the interstitial perspective of Homi Bhabha’, http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/bhabha. html. Pinney, C. (1990) ‘Colonial anthropology in the “laboratory of mankind”’, in C.A. Bayly (ed.), The Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947. London: National Portrait Gallery, pp. 252–263. Pinney, C. (1992) ‘Underneath the banyan tree: William Crooke and photographic depictions of caste’, E. Edwards (ed.), Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920. Yale University Press, pp. 165–173. Pinney, C. (2004) ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion. Porter, B. (2006 [2004]) The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prakash, G. (1999) Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pratt, M.L. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge Rich, P.B. (1986) Race and Empire in British Politics Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Risley, H.H. (1891) The Tribes and Castes of Bengal. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press. Rycroft, D. (2006) Representing Rebellion: Visual Aspects of Counter-Insurgency in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rubin, W. (1984) ‘Modernist primitivism: an introduction’, in William Rubin (ed.), ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Said, E.W. (1984) ‘Foreword’, in R. Schwab (ed.), The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680–1880. New York: Columbia University Press. Said, E.W. (1985 [1978]) Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Said, E.W. (1994 [1993]) Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. Said, E.W. (2003) ‘Always on top’ (review of Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects), London Review of Books, 25(6). Sayers, A. (1997) Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Schivelbusch, W. (1992) Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants. Tr. David Jacobs. New York: Vintage. Senghor, L. (1965) Prose and Poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, B. (1960) European Vision and the South Pacific 1768–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, T. (2000) ‘Australia’s anxiety’, in History and Memory in the Art of Gordon Bennett. Birmingham: Ikon Gallery/Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. Stoler, L.A. (1995) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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19 Indigenous Culture: The Politics of Vulnerability and Survival Tim Rowse

‘Indigenous’ is the problematic adjective in this chapter. The noun ‘culture’ I am not so worried about. For the sake of starting somewhere, I follow the argument by Helliwell and Hindess (1999) that ‘culture’ is a meaningful category in modern projects of government. Asking why the human sciences have been so committed to the idea that humanity can be understood as a number of different ‘societies’ (discrete, self-regulating) and ‘cultures’ (the ideational unity that makes a ‘society’ possible), they answered, in part, by pointing to the governmental ambition to make populations productive. It is the imaginary realization of this desire to harness society’s resources that presents us with the fantastic image of society itself as a discrete, self-regulating unity that incorporates civil society, culture, economic activity and morality as so many component parts of one systematic whole – and it is this sense of systemic totality that suggests radical difference between members of distinct societies. (Helliwell and Hindess, 1999: p. 14)

The notion ‘Indigenous culture’, I will argue, enables us to think about the relevance to government of a ‘radical difference between members of distinct societies’ – a difference in susceptibility to those changes that we call ‘development’. In the language of development studies, the notion ‘Indigenous culture’has been liberally and potently present through the currency of the phrase ‘Indigenous knowledge’. I will begin this chapter by reporting a recent debate about the pertinence of ‘Indigenous knowledge’ to ‘development’. Working back from the modern governmental project ‘development’, I will trace two ideas that emerged within Imperial sensibility once it began to make cultural difference a matter of ethical consequence: a concern for the ‘vulnerability’ and for the ‘immanent temporality’ of non-European peoples. By a brief examination of the work of the International Labour Office (ILO) I will argue that notions of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘immanent temporality’ have been formative

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of the late-twentieth-century recognition of the ‘Indigenous’. In the second half of this chapter, I will illustrate the richness of the idea of ‘vulnerability’ by reading some recent academic commentaries on contemporary Indigenous peoples in the Anglophone settlercolonies.

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS ‘INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE’? Michael Warren, a social scientist studying ‘development’, told readers of the Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor in 1996 how he and his colleagues had come up with the phrase ‘Indigenous knowledge’. They did not like the connotations of ‘traditional knowledge’ because ‘ “traditional” denoted the nineteenth-century attitudes of simple, savage and static. We wanted a term that represented the dynamic contributions of any community to problem solving, based on their own perceptions and conceptions, and the ways that they identified, categorized and classified phenomena important to them’ (Warren, 1996). This coinage led not only to the inception of the journal in which Warren was writing, but also to ‘25 indigenous knowledge resource centres scattered across countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, and North America’ (Agrawal, 2002: p. 288). Warren was responding to Agrawal’s objections (Agrawal, 1995) that ‘Western knowledge’ and ‘Indigenous knowledge’ are internally heterogeneous categories, and that they had been in contact and exchange (however unequal) for five centuries. Citing recent philosophy and sociology of science, Agrawal had argued that there are no substantive, methodological or epistemological criteria to distinguish knowledge that is ‘Indigenous’. Warren’s and others’ responses to Agrawal reaffirmed the category ‘Indigenous knowledge’. Some emphasized the localness of ‘Indigenous knowledge’: ‘Indigenous knowledge is the practical knowledge and experience of people who still have a direct link to

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the “soil” and their immediate environment’ (Köhler-Rollefson, 1996). Another argued that the localness of Indigenous knowledge usually meant that it was obtainable outside the market or in local markets that did not depend on currency, unlike ‘scientific knowledge’, which often had a price tag; it was associated with techniques of production that had not yet been converted to the forms of contemporary agribusiness (van ’t Hooft, 1996). ‘Local expertise’ was central to ‘Indigenous knowledge’: ‘It makes perfect sense for me as an educator to distinguish Indigenous knowledge as a category when examining educational systems as pedagogical sites of knowledge production. This category is made possible by identifying the producers of knowledge as distinct actors’ (Semali, 1996). The localness of ‘Indigenous knowledge’ obviated the perilous process of technology transfer (Hess, 1996). From the point of view of locals such as Andean peasant farmers, it was easy to distinguish ‘indigenous and scientific/Western knowledge’, wrote two US anthropologists (evidently without understanding Agrawal’s argument that no general characterization of the difference was possible) (Benfer and Furbee, 1996). Another ground for making the distinction, argued one Canadian respondent, was the motive for knowledge development. ‘The development of iatrobotanical knowledge by Canadian west coast Indigenous peoples (e.g. on Vancouver Island’s Clayoquot Sound) is clearly motivated by “immediate and concrete necessities”, while the development of certain aspects of knowledge concerned with particle physics by Canadian west coast scientists (at Vancouver’s TRIUMF facilities) is not’ (Heyd, 1996). Indigenous knowledge ‘entails the honing of sensory skills that are not exercised in the course of academic study’ (Köhler-Rollefson, 1996). Pertinence to practice was what commended ‘Indigenous knowledge’ to the Food and Agriculture Organization, one of its officers pointed out (Van Crowder, 1996). Some authors pointed to the embedded, holistic character of Indigenous knowledge. The environment of Indigenous knowledge

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production was not a specialized facility but ‘the full context of lived experience’ (Heyd, 1996). ‘The local symbolic system’ is ‘an integral part’ of Indigenous knowledge, wrote Giarelli, so Indigenous illness remedies could not be reduced to their active chemical components without extinguishing the contextual meaning that contributed to their therapeutic effect (Giarelli, 1996). Haverkort and Hiemstra have coined the term ‘cosmovision’to refer to the symbolic systems of which agricultural practices are a part, in farming communities in India, Sri Lanka, Ghana, the Netherlands, Norway, Mexico, Peru and Bolivia (Haverkort and Hiemstra, 1996). Brouwer asserted that ‘the study of Indigenous knowledge is impossible without a knowledge of Indigenous languages’ (Brouwer, 1996). Several responses to Agrawal were politically self-conscious. The unfortunate tradition of imposing technologies, in the name of ‘development’, made it desirable to uphold the local non-expert. If ‘Indigenous knowledge’ is ‘rhetoric’, then it is important rhetoric, insisted Semali ‘because it encourages a discussion that has been suppressed for many years by the dominant European-centred education systems’ (Semali, 1996). One of the originators of the term described himself and his colleagues as ‘people with a mission to convert the “heathens”, those who do not accept the value of Indigenous knowledge or its potential contribution to development. I held this view 30 years ago, and Agrawal has not persuaded me that I should change it now’ (Brokensha, 1996). In reply, Agrawal pointed to anthropological research that supported his scepticism (Ellen et al., 2000). He was still not persuaded that we can distinguish ‘Indigenous knowledge’ as a kind of knowledge – local, embedded in context, holistic, and so on. However, he wanted to recover ‘Indigenous knowledge’ in political terms. ‘The critical difference between indigenous and scientific knowledge is not at an epistemological level: rather it lies in their relationship to power . . . the criterion of power will triumph when local, traditional, or practical knowledge is

contrasted with global, modern, or theoretical knowledge’ (Agrawal, 1996).

CONSTITUTIVE AGENTS If Indigenous knowledge was defined in terms of its vulnerability to marginalization by more powerful knowledge then it could be found, or it could announce itself to be, anywhere. Thus Serrano suggested that ‘indigenous knowledge systems and practices must exist among Western cultures’, and Köhler-Rollefson asked how we would classify ‘the kitchen garden skills of German farm women’? (Serrano, 1996; Köhler-Rollefson, 1996). Much of the scholarly attention to ‘Indigenous people’ emphasizes their selfconstructive agency. Dean and Levi, theorizing indigeneity as a kind of ethnicity, write: An indigenous people become an ethnic group not simply by sharing such things as a group name (ethnonym), connection to a homeland, and beliefs in common ancestry, culture, language, or religion, but only when such traits are consciously recognized as emblems of connectivity and are mobilized at least in part to develop a sense of political solidarity. (Dean and Levi, 2003)

However, note that the crucial verbs in this passage are passive: ‘recognized’ and ‘mobilized’. Who is recognizing and mobilizing? The authors answer: ‘Typically, this occurs when such groups perceive their minority or submerged status within the polities where they reside’ (Dean and Levi, 2003: p. 5). This is not good enough: the constitution of the category ‘Indigenous’ is an effect of actions by a number of different actors. In Yudice’s account of the public performance of cultural difference in the USA, the claim to autonomy and legitimacy on the basis of a particular culture ‘is made possible by the conjuncture of a welfare state that defines clients by group, by a media and market system that targets consumers, by the juridical means available to challenge discrimination’ (Yudice, 2003: p. 56). Anna Muehlebach writes that ‘difference . . . cannot simply be unilaterally claimed. It must be

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fought for and acknowledged by the actors and parties addressed’ (Muehlebach, 2001: p. 419; emphasis added). The anthropology of Indigenous peoples, according to Kay Warren, no longer thinks of ‘cultures as bounded entities and fixed authenticities’ but focuses on ‘culture makers’ (Warren, 1998: p. 27) – a term that is open-ended. Her work on pan-Mayan activism includes discussing the class interests of a Mayan middle class that, deploying pan-Mayanism as ‘cultural capital’, parallels and competes with Guatemala’s Ladino-identified professionals (Warren, 1998: pp. 49–51, 201–202). Tania Li argues that the factors enabling the Lindu people to articulate ‘a collective position as Indigenous people’ were: competition for resources, in the context of which group boundaries were rendered explicit and cultural differences entrenched; the existence of a local political structure that included individuals (elders, leaders) and an adat council mandated to speak on behalf of the group; a capacity to present cultural identity and local knowledge in forms intelligible to outsiders – an activity undertaken in this case by a literate elite of teachers, local officials, prosperous farmers, and entrepreneurs; an interest on the part of urban activists in discovering and supporting exemplary indigenous subjects, and documenting indigenous knowledge which fit the niche preconstituted in national and international environmental debates; and, finally, heightened interest in a particular place, arising from a conflict which pit locals against the state or state-sponsored corporations. (Li, 2000: p. 169)

Although we can’t do without some ‘people’ whose claims to be Indigenous are in contention, I see no reason to grant theoretical priority to one kind of agent in the constitution of an ‘Indigenous people’. One agent that we should not overlook is the World Bank.

THE WORLD BANK AND INDIGENOUS CULTURE According to Craig Murphy, ‘development populism’ is the global hegemonic ideology. While there may be a diversity of views about ‘development’ among multilateral, nationstate and non-government agencies, there

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tends to be uniformity of understandings of ‘development’among officials ‘on the ground’ and their clients. At that level, development has come to refer to strengthening the public infrastructure of the Third World state and ‘making their citizens more dependent on the central authorities for basic social services’ (Murphy, 1994: p. 217). The post-WorldWar-II project of global ‘development’ has successfully shaped and appealed to popular material interests, incorporating ‘the Third World masses into the often disappointing political systems that they or their parents fought to create’ (Murphy, 1994: p. 217). Murphy contrasts the relative uniformity of popular experience of ‘development populism’ with the plurality of perspectives found within the loosely integrated system of institutions that has evolved since the 1940s to deliver ‘development’. The UN agencies, relatively autonomous from one another, rely on institutions of international civil society and on the ‘epistemic communities’ – technical workers such as economists, engineers, doctors, anthropologists – that are associated (as clients, critics, consultants) with them. People and agencies within this loose-knit system have room to consider the multiple ends of development and to debate the trade-offs among: economic growth, equality of distribution, environmental sustainability, bio-diversity, cultural diversity. While diverse agencies and peoples may weight these goals differently, ‘development’ is unlikely not to refer to changes in the processes of production of goods and services, including changes in the means of transport and communication. A debate about the manner and content of ‘development’ acknowledges that it is possible to be variably suited to such changes, and even to be vulnerable to them. In what ways could ‘development’ be bad for people? The World Bank’s answer to that question is implied in a 1991 ‘operational directive’ that lists the characteristics of ‘the Indigenous’. In quoting them (World Bank, 1991: n.p.), I have interpolated in italics the implied vulnerability.

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(a) a close attachment to ancestral territories and to the natural resources of these areas; with ‘development’ they might have to change their use of these resources or even to lose their occupation and use of them. (b) self-identification by others as members of a distinct cultural group; ‘development’ might compel them to transact with strangers whose ways are embarrassing, puzzling or threatening to that acknowledged distinctness. (c) an Indigenous language, often different from the national language; they might have to accommodate new terms into their language, or learn a new language, in order to transact, and they may reasonably fear for the survival of their language. (d) presence of customary social and political institutions; these institutions may be inhospitable to new transactions and relationships and thus may be abolished/reformed, may fall into disuse, or may lose their centrality to collective identity. (e) primarily subsistence-oriented production; almost certainly, production will be redirected towards exchange, and labour power will become a commodity.

In these ways, ‘development’is a process from which people might seek protection, or special consideration by ‘developing’ authority. To be deemed ‘Indigenous’ is to have one’s vulnerability to development acknowledged and to be entitled (in principle) to consideration from the World Bank or from agencies over which it has influence. The World Bank in 1991 said that in ‘any project that affects indigenous peoples and their rights to natural and economic resources’ it is essential to get ‘the informed participation of the indigenous peoples themselves . . . through direct consultation, incorporation of indigenous knowledge into project approaches, and appropriate early use of experienced specialists . . . ’(World Bank, 1991: n.p.). That the World Bank can be pressured to dishonour these standards became evident in the 1990s when the Pehuenche people were not allowed by the International Finance Corporation (the private sector arm of the World Bank Group) to see an anthropologist consultant’s report on the social impact of the Chilean government’s Pangue Dam (Johnston and Garcia-Downing,

2003). To the extent that the World Bank can be embarrassed by a national government’s bullying of Indigenous people (as it was by Chile), the Bank has an interest in monitoring domestic policies towards any peoples that claim (or that might claim) the status ‘Indigenous’; the Bank seeks ‘Bankcountry dialogue’ on such issues. The World Bank thus has the potential to be either an (embarrassed) accomplice or a critic of national governments accused of trampling upon Indigenous rights. How have such leaders of global capitalism become susceptible to the argument that ‘development’ must confer what the Bank calls ‘culturally compatible social and economic benefits’ (World Bank, 1991: n.p.; my emphasis)? How did the European colonial project come to treat cultural difference as relevant in this way?

ENLIGHTENMENT CRITICS OF EUROPEAN UNIVERSALISM In his distinctive characterization of ‘modernity’, Charles Taylor (2004) represents it as a moral order whose intellectual lineage can be traced back to the detaching of human affairs from divine authority that natural law theorists Hugo Grotius and John Locke initiated in the seventeenth century. Through numerous ‘redactions’ since then, the idea that humanity contrives its own political and moral order for its own quotidian good has been extended in scope and intensity so that it now makes up a ‘social imaginary’ whose four ‘crucial features’ are: (1) the order of mutual benefit holds between individuals (or at least moral agents who are independent of larger hierarchical orders); (2) the benefits crucially include life and the means to life, although securing these relates to the practice of virtue; . . . (3) the order is meant to secure freedom and easily finds expression in terms of rights . . . (4) these rights, this freedom, this mutual benefit is to be secured to all participants equally. Exactly what is meant by equality will vary, but that it must be affirmed in some form follows from the rejection of hierarchical order. (Taylor, 2004: pp. 21–22)

INDIGENOUS CULTURE: THE POLITICS OF VULNERABILITY AND SURVIVAL

Sankar Muthu has recently described one ‘redaction’ of these ideas that was stimulated by two centuries’ record about the best and worst of European conduct in the New World: the critique of ‘empire’ offered by Kant, Diderot and Herder. Muthu sees three important ideas in the Enlightenment critique of European colonization. One was that as humans, the colonized were entitled to respect. Second, and more innovatively, the critique conceived humans as ‘fundamentally cultural beings or cultural agents . . . as artful, reasoned, and free individuals who are partly shaped by their social and cultural contexts, yet who also through their actions and through changing perceptions alter such contexts themselves’ (Muthu, 2003: p. 274). The third step is what makes anti-imperial Enlightenment thought such a singular episode in European history. In Herder’s words ‘the culture of man is not the culture of the European; it manifests itself according to place and time in every people’ (quoted in Muthu, 2003: p. 276). Muthu sadly notes, however, that ‘Enlightenment-era anti-imperialist thought failed to generate a legacy that would be nurtured by prominent nineteenth-century thinkers’ (Muthu, 2003: p. 278). A famous critique of imperialism published at the end of the nineteenth century, J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study (1902) pleads not for the cessation of imperialism but for European colonists to set higher standards for colonial conduct. Governments could combine forces to protect the natives from colonial adventurers and from the more predatory nations. ‘[F]or the real good of the subject race’ (Hobson, 1938: p. 235), Hobson proposed that development not be imposed but solicited; it must be immanent of place and of people: ‘to step in and utilize natural resources which are left undeveloped is one thing, to compel the inhabitants to develop them is another’ (Hobson, 1938: p. 28). He decried policies that ‘induce or compel natives to substitute wage labour . . . for the ancient tribal life upon the land’ (Hobson, 1938: p. 259). ‘If under the gradual teaching of industrial arts and the general

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educational influences of a white protectorate many of the old political, social and religious institutions decay, that decay will be a natural wholesome process, and will be attended by the growth of new forms, not forced upon them, but growing out of the old forms and conforming to laws of natural growth in order to adapt native life to a changed environment’ (Hobson, 1938: p. 280). In the words ‘natural’ and ‘tropical’ Hobson evoked the immanence of the development to which colonized peoples were entitled: ‘Natural growth in self-government and industry along tropical lines would be the end to which the enlightened policy of civilized assistance would address itself’ (Hobson, 1938: p. 243). Imperialists in the nineteenth century had not been able to ignore the practical demands of the fact that humans are fundamentally, and in different ways, cultural beings or cultural agents, and that each society carried in its own fashion the burden of a past. Evangelical Christianity, undoubtedly a form of imperial power, included the belief that the barbarians would be more disposed to receive divine grace if they found God’s word in their own language. This was a Christian application of a broader humanism nurtured by studies of the languages of the New World. From the late eighteenth century English Protestant missionaries undertook an immense project of Bible translation. In one theory of Christian mission, the word ‘Indigenous’ came to signify, honourably, the different ways that non-Europeans were embracing Christianity. Thus Henry Venn (1796–1883), Honorary Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, envisaged the ‘euthanasia’ of the European clergy in Africa, India and even in parts of the Antipodes, to make way for an ‘Indigenous’ Christian church. The native clergy would not have to master Latin, Greek and sophisticated theology; ‘simple vernacular training, preserving native dress and life style’ would free the Gospel from its metropolitan encumbrance (Williams, 1990: pp. 19–20). ‘Native Bishops’ would embody an ecclesiastical authority attuned to local traditions. ‘Association’ between metropolitan and native churches, not ‘superintendence’

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or ‘dependency’, was the political ideal of these architects of mission. India was a tutor to imperial pretensions, as we can see from the work of Henry Maine, Legal Member of the Council of the Governor-General of India from 1862 to 1869. In 1857, British authority in India had been shocked by the Indian Mutiny into making a more critical appraisal of the nature and limits of colonial authority. Drawing on his experience of governing post-Mutiny India, Maine became an influential interpreter of Indian society. In a chapter that he published in 1887, Maine argued that the biggest challenge in governing India was to reconcile two temporalities. A minority of Indians was committed to one temporality: these people were seized with the urgency of progressing India towards modern ways. The majority of Indians, however, was still entangled in what Maine called ‘a dense and dark vegetation of primitive opinion, stubbornly rooted in the debris of the past’ (Johnson, 2004: p. 73). Those governing India had the difficult task of respecting both the forward-looking minority and the immobile majority. ‘If they are too slow, there will be no improvement; if they are too fast, there will be no security’, wrote Maine (quoted by Johnson, 2004: p. 73). This ‘too slow’/‘too fast’ dilemma is one of the defining issues of the enlightened approach to colonial trusteeship that flourished in the twentieth century.

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS Hobson’s ideas contributed to a movement among British intellectuals in World War I to remove ‘natives’ from the responsibility of nation-states and to entrust them to an international body. The League of Nations, founded by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, fell short of their schemes (Porter, 1990: pp. 178–179), but the League’s 1920 Covenant was nonetheless the first formal recognition by the world’s governments that there was a category of ‘Indigenous people’ entitled to special treatment because of their vulnerability. When the Covenant referred to

‘Indigenous people’, it was not all the ‘native peoples’ whose well-being Hobson had considered, but only those whose ‘vulnerability’ took a form that weighed heavily on the European statesman’s mind at that time: they were ‘deprived’, by the war, of a colonial master. That is, although liberal Imperialists such as Hobson would have liked all colonies to be internationally mandated, the League mandated colonial authority only over those native peoples that had been under Ottoman and German authority.As ‘peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world’ (Article 22), certain aggregations of humans could make a claim on the world’s conscience, as the Covenant formulated it: ‘The well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization’ and ‘the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations’ (Article 22). Some peoples would require more careful supervision than others, according to ‘the stage of the development of the people’. Article 22 mentioned the ‘communities’ formerly governed by the Turkish Empire as among the more sophisticated. As well – and here we find the word ‘Indigenous’ – there were the inhabitants of the ‘territories’ in South West Africa and the South Pacific Islands. Under a ‘C’ class mandate, the League entrusted South West Africans to South Africa, the people of the Marianas, Caroline and Marshall Islands to Japan, the peoples of New Guinea (northeastern part), New Ireland, New Britain and the Solomon Islands to Australia, the people of Nauru to the British Empire (to Australia, in effect) and the people of Western Samoa to New Zealand. Peoples rendered vulnerable, not only by ‘backwardness’ but also by the loss of their colonial overlord, were the first to be labelled by a multilateral agreement as ‘Indigenous’. However, the League did not see these ‘Indigenous’ peoples as the only peoples who were owed a more considered tutelage. When the International Labour Organization wrote Conventions to govern the well-being of the labourers of the world, it used the

INDIGENOUS CULTURE: THE POLITICS OF VULNERABILITY AND SURVIVAL

word ‘Indigenous’ to refer to a greater number of peoples than those who lived in the former German colonies of Africa and the Pacific. In three conventions that it published in the 1930s – the Recruiting of Indigenous Workers Convention (1936), the Contracts of Employment (Indigenous Workers) Convention (1939) and the Penal Sanctions (Indigenous Workers) Convention (1939) – the term ‘Indigenous’ included not only ‘workers belonging to or assimilated to the Indigenous populations of the dependent territories of Members of the Organization’ but also ‘workers belonging to or assimilated to the dependent indigenous populations of the home territories of Members of the Organization’ (Article 2b of each of the above three conventions, emphasis added). This broadened ‘Indigenous’ from those African and Pacific peoples who had lost their colonial overlord (Germany) as the result of the war to something closer to its current meanings. What was ‘Indigenous’ labour, in this broader sense, understood to be? Here the important word seems to be ‘native’. A guide to the ILO’s work written for young people stated in 1937 how natives were understood by the authors of ILO Conventions: ‘Whereas they were formerly regarded as lazy members of the human race, who were better for enforced regular employment, it is now realized that what seemed like laziness was sometimes the fact that they were fully occupied with their own economic affairs, sometimes malnutrition, and sometimes fundamental unsuitability for industrial work. Furthermore, the real potentialities of these people now begin to have some consideration. Their simple economy is beginning to be protected, their craftsmanship encouraged, and their codes of living given respect’ (Gibberd, 1937: p. 83; emphasis added). It was assumed that to administer ‘native labour’ required a particular expertise that could see such labour in its social setting. ‘Native labour’ was intelligible only in the context ‘of tribal life, of health conditions, standards of living and habits of these workers, including in many cases those relating to marriage and tribal life’ (ILO, 1931: p. 222).

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Experts in native labour faced a riddle that is characteristic – as we now know – of modern human rights discourse: how to respect custom while ‘developing’. The problem, as conceived by the ILO, was to time modernity’s challenges (and here is the echo of Maine’s ‘too slow’/‘too fast’ dilemma): Legislation based on native custom may artificially cause to survive primitive forms of relations between employers and employed, while more advanced laws may bring the native, as yet unprepared for such changes, face to face with modern conceptions of the relationship between capital and labour from which he would be unable to profit. (ILO, 1931: p. 222)

Thus, a case could be made both against and for the ILO’s submission of ‘custom’ to regulation. We can see in the wording of some Conventions in the 1930s the ILO considering carefully its approach to labour that was subject to customary obligation. In the Convention on Forced Labour (1930), Article 19 was about the possibility that ‘compulsory cultivation’ could be justified ‘as a method of precaution against famine or a deficiency of food supplies’ as long as the resulting food was shared among the cultivators. The Article also allowed to persist ‘the obligation on members of a community, where production is organized on a communal basis by virtue of law or custom and where the produce or any profit accruing from the sale thereof remain the property of the community, to perform the work demanded by the community by virtue of law or custom’. Nine years later, the ILO seems to have edged closer to regulating ‘custom’. The Penal Sanctions (Indigenous Workers) Convention (1939) sought to abolish penal sanctions on breaches of contract by employees. It applied to contracted (not customary) service (see Article 1(1)), but it explicitly included ‘Indigenous’ employers, whether they were paid in cash or ‘in any other form whatsoever’. Whether this applied ILO standards of employment to all ‘customary’ labour, that had so recently been exempt from such standards in the Convention on Forced Labour, may have depended on what counted as a ‘contract’.

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After World War II, the ILO became the main UN agency to speak authoritatively on the managed transformation of ‘indigenous and other tribal and semi-tribal populations which are not yet integrated into the national community and whose social, economic or cultural situation hinders them from benefiting fully from the rights and advantages enjoyed by other elements of the population’ (Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention, 1957; emphasis added). The theme of this Convention (no. 107) was the supervision of uncoerced progress of certain vulnerable peoples towards the conditions of life common to the nation in which they found themselves. For example, Article 23 wanted government provision ‘for a progressive transition from the mother tongue or the vernacular language to the national language or to one of the official languages of the country’ while, at the same time ‘appropriate measures shall, as far as possible, be taken to preserve the mother tongue or the vernacular language’. Integration was good, but ‘artificial assimilation’ was proscribed (Article 2). Special measures of protection were good, as long as they did not last forever and did not create or prolong ‘a state of segregation’ (Article 3). A document of such ethical trade-offs, gesturing towards a timetable of change that could be neither doubted nor defined, left room for judgement about any nation-state’s conduct towards ‘Indigenous and tribal populations’. The revised ILO Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (1989, in force from September, 1991) enjoins that governments will not make such judgements unilaterally; they must discuss them, in good faith, with the Indigenous and tribal peoples who are assumed to be not a passing but a permanent feature of the nation-state and to be capable, in their maintained or revived institutions, of such a dialogue. Indigenous organizations since 1975 have been elaborating, in international forums, the implications for nationstates of the arrival of ‘the Indigenous voice in world politics’ as encoded in ILO 169 and in similar declarations (Wilmer, 1993; Niezen, 2003).

Thus the adjective ‘Indigenous’ – applied to nouns such as ‘culture’, ‘society’ and ‘knowledge’ – has become a ‘keyword’ in a way of imagining non-European history as a sympathetically managed transformation. Notwithstanding that the ideas of protection and preservation have gained force, and that Indigenous actors have registered irrevocably that they will speak and act in their own interests, the assumed underlying reality remains ‘transformation’. David Maybury-Lewis, one of the best-known advocates of respect for Indigenous peoples to have emerged during the 32 years that separate the two ILO Conventions, made this clear when he explained the name of the advocacy body that he helped to found, Cultural Survival. Cultural survival does not mean stasis, but ‘cultural control and continuity. Such cultures can be said to survive (and are thought to do so by the people that live in them) to the extent that their members control their own affairs and maintain a satisfactory continuity with the past. Since no society, especially in these days when globalization proceeds apace, has complete control over its own affairs (and Indigenous societies, by definition, do not), cultural survival is always a relative matter’ (Maybury-Lewis, 2003: p. 326). In late-twentieth-century multilateral respect for the Indigenous, the old issue of enlightened colonial authority – what weight should be assigned to the customs of the colonized? – is handed to a new (or newly recognized) post-colonial subject. Increasingly, ‘the people that live in them’ are invited to judge whether the customs of their societies matter, and in what way they matter, to deliberated projects of social and cultural reproduction and transformation, that is, to government. The modern discourse of human rights and self-determination propagated since World War I by the wealthiest nations on earth has evolved a language for bestowing legitimacy on the demand that, in the name of their difference, Indigenous people should manage how (or whether) their labour and their land become commodities in a global system of exchange. ‘Indigenous people’ is the key phrase for global organizations

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that have written standards for the exchange of labour power (the ILO) and for the flow of capital for ‘development’ (the World Bank). As a multilateral keyword, ‘Indigenous’ is as difficult to define as it is politically attractive to use (Beteille, 1998; Bowen, 2000; Colchester, 2002; Dean and Levi, 2003: pp. 4–9; Kenrick and Lewis, 2004; Kingsbury, 1998; Kuper, 2003; McIntosh, 2002). When the Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP) first convened at the UN in 1982, there were 30 Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants; by 1999 the WGIP meeting was attended by ‘46 South and Central American indigenous groups, 40 Asian indigenous organizations, 31 US and Canadian indigenous organizations, 23 African indigenous organizations, nine Australian Aboriginal organizations, six Russian and Siberian indigenous organizations, five indigenous Pacific organizations, four Inuit indigenous groups, two Saami organizations, and about six explicitly international indigenous organizations’ (Muehlebach, 2001: p. 420). Ian McIntosh, former editor of Cultural Survival Quarterly, has reminded us that the potency of ‘Indigenous’ could dissipate from over-use (McIntosh, 2002: pp. 23–24).

IF ‘INDIGENOUS’ IS THE ADJECTIVE, ‘SURVIVE’ IS THE VERB In the phrase ‘cultural survival’ is the word ‘cultural’ redundant, or are there forms of Indigenous survival that are not ‘cultural’? If we try to think of Indigenous being/ survival in a non-cultural, purely physical register, we will be tempted immediately to go to the terrible facts of historical demography. The European invasion of the Americas brought catastrophe. For example, in what we now know as Peru, between 1520 and 1630, the total Indian population fell from 3.3 million to 600,000 (Saignes, 1999: p. 87). In the first century of colonial penetration of the Paraguayan region, the Guarani population fell to one tenth of its estimated pre-invasion

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level (Garavaglia, 1999: p. 25). In the middle of the eighteenth century (1730–1780), the Caribs were reduced from 120,000 to 20,000 (Whitehead, 1999: p. 399). Much of the New World mortality was due to diseases against which people had no immunity, and some of the most devastating epidemics arose when missionaries relocated peoples, the better to evangelize them (Whitehead, 1999: p. 399). What we know of New World population history puts us in mind of an irreducibly material sense of ‘survival’: millions of people did not live as long as they would have had they not been infected, shot at, persecuted or disrupted in their productive activities; some peoples were wiped out altogether, and others came close to total extinction. There is colonial testimony that in Andean regions, in the seventeenth century, women ceased to believe in the reproduction of their own kind, preferring to bear children from Spanish, Mestizo and even African men, so that their children would be spared labour service and tribute (Saignes, 1999: p. 93). Three centuries later, on a dejected Australian frontier, two anthropologists heard demographic despair among Gurindji women (Berndt and Berndt, 1987: pp. 90–91). Nonetheless, today we refer to some of the peoples of Peru, Paraguay and Australia (and many other countries) as ‘Indigenous’. We imply their ‘survival’ and their ‘recovery’, in the face of every adverse colonial circumstance. Thus Thornton dates the ‘nadir’ of the North American Indian population at ‘around the turn of the twentieth century’ (Thornton, 2002: p. 73). Any narrative of ‘survival’ and ‘recovery’ might seem to rest on facts that are simply biological, variables untroubled by culture, such as the ratio of males to females, the age structure, the average fertility and the ages of death. However, these are variable characteristics of something – a human population, or a ‘people’ – that is inescapably ‘cultural’, for a ‘people’ cannot be conceived independently of the criteria by which humans reckon themselves to be different kinds of humans – ‘peoples’. To conceive of the survival and/or recovery of an Indigenous people, we must consider the social processes

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that constitute that category. In presenting Indigenous population figures for Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela, Maybury-Lewis explains that ‘the question of who consider themselves (or are considered) to be indigenous is a highly ideological one’ (Maybury-Lewis, 1999: p. 873; and see Pool, 1985). In what counts as ‘Indigenous’, public policy and popular culture engage. According to Thornton, in the USA ‘about 25 per cent of the population “growth” of American Indians from 1960 to 1970, about 60 per cent of the “growth” from 1970 to 1980, and about 35 per cent of the “growth” from 1980 to 1990 may be accounted for by . . . changing identifications’. Like Maybury-Lewis, he speculates that the changing public value of being Indian has encouraged people to declare to the Census authorities that they are Indian (Thornton, 2002: p. 76). These acts of self-identification must be included in what Maybury-Lewis means when he refers to a people maintaining a sense of satisfactory continuity with the past. To declare oneself to be ‘Indian’ is to assert membership of a surviving people. However, in the USA and Canada, individual (or household head) self-identification is not the only way that the Indigenous ‘self’ is enacted. The history of Indigenous relationships with the state, in those two nations, has given rise to supra-individual selves – tribes or bands – that are empowered to determine who is ‘Indian’. Thornton sees a trend that is fed by the persistent tendency of some city-dwelling peoples to identify as Indians and by Indians’ high rates of marriage to non-Indians: ‘A Native American population comprising primarily “old” Native Americans strongly attached to their tribes’may change to a ‘population with a predominance of “new” Native American individuals who may or may not have tribal attachments or even tribal identities’ (Thornton, 2002: p. 80). Here is an excellent example of the difficulty of judging ‘cultural survival’. If the Native American population continues to grow, but ‘tribes’ are less salient social forms, should we speak of cultural survival? Answers to this question will vary.

Although it is tempting to conclude that ‘cultural survival’ is a project without general criteria of success, within the UN’s Human Rights Committee in the 1990s there had been some consistency to Indigenous thinking. It had conceptualized ‘culture as reproduced through and dependent on a resource base, that, if taken away, violates a group’s capacity and right to exist collectively’ (Muehlebach, 2003: p. 256). Even if political activism secures such a notion of ‘culture’ as ‘territorialized practice’, in arguments with nation states about recognizing land rights, there remain opportunities for disagreement about the strategies for reproducing that practice. The Khanty of Siberia, for example, debate whether to accept payments from energy corporations, ‘with moralists arguing that [Khanty] leaders cannot effectively fight development if they are in the pay of administrators, who are in turn too cozy with energy company officials. Others argue that precisely energy money, in negotiated fixed percentages, should go toward cultural programs and infrastructure such as school, housing and clinics’ (Balzer, 2003: p. 128). The Innu of Canada make diverse assessments of whether hunting and bush living are central to their survival. Some believe the Innu should live in the bush for extended periods of time and that this should be supported by such things as rearranging schooling and setting up alcohol treatment centres in the bush . . . . Others, however, say that, while going to the bush should be an option, the practicalities of competing needs dictate that this cannot be expected of everyone and that, therefore, it cannot be imposed. These people argue that Innu culture can also be passed on within the village setting by modifying the school curriculum and through the use of radio and other media. (Tanner, 2001: pp. 408–409)

If the demography, the social forms, and the strategies of ‘Indigenous cultural survival’ are so resistant to general definition and formulation, is the phrase empty of meaning? One cannot easily set aside the terms in which human dignity is nowadays so effectively asserted. In the rest of this chapter, I want to build up an account of ‘Indigenous cultural survival’ that would cohere around the theme

INDIGENOUS CULTURE: THE POLITICS OF VULNERABILITY AND SURVIVAL

of ‘managing exchanges’. I will review studies of three kinds of exchanges that Indigenous peoples are trying to manage: the exchange of their labour power, the exchange of certain goods as ‘art’, and the political exchanges that are intrinsic to their emergence as a global movement.

INDIGENOUS LABOUR POWER, CULTURE THROUGH SPACE AND TIME In 1971, the geographer Wilbur Zelinsky remarked that ‘The growth of human mobility has been spectacular in modernizing societies’ (Zelinsky, 1971: p. 224). The two most important mobilities in modern history have been from countryside to city and from ‘advanced’ to less advanced regions of the world. Using ‘mobility’ broadly enough to make ‘mobility’ another summary term for modernity’s dissolution of ‘tradition’, Zelinsky points to the spatial aspects of what Taylor, in his account of modernity, calls ‘disembedding’. Zelinsky refers not only to spatial mobility, but also to mobility of mind ‘. . . there remain no effective boundaries beyond which the nimbler mind cannot penetrate’ (Zelinsky, 1971: p. 225). In Zelinsky’s paper we can see an account of three processes that have given rise to contemporary Indigenous circumstances: the colonization of the lands and peoples of the New World by the peoples of Europe, the creation of national and global labour markets, and the rise of global tourism. Human geographers and demographers have recently considered Zelinsky’s relevance to Indigenous people in the settler colonial nations Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA – the Indigenous peoples that were largely responsible (with Saami and Inuit) for successfully initiating ‘the indigenous voice in world politics’ in the period 1975–1982 (Wilmer, 1993: pp. 137–138). As a condition and an effect of that voice, Indigenous leaders are now among those exemplary moderns who travel city-to-city (Oslo-Geneva-New York, for example), but I will leave until the last part of this chapter my discussion of the cultural

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consequences of that kind of Indigenous modernity. In this section I will confine myself to describing the evident ambivalence of Indigenous peoples towards labour markets in these four nations. In Australia a relatively high proportion of the Indigenous population lives outside metropolitan areas, and a relatively high proportion of Indigenous mobility is circular, within region, and comparatively frequent, sustaining social and ceremonial networks and a modified subsistence economy; in some regions, people have dispersed from small towns to live as family-based groups on their land (Taylor and Bell, 2004: pp. 15–17). This pattern of mobility is in a mutually reinforcing relationship with the high rates at which Indigenous Australians are unemployed and/or not looking for work (Taylor and Bell, 2004: p. 25). There is an apparent trend for Indigenous Australians to become increasingly urban, but this is less because people are leaving the rural and remote regions and more because it has become more common for metropolitan people of Indigenous descent to declare themselves Indigenous in the Census. Those who live some time in the metropolitan areas are comparatively likely to move between city/town and hinterland, rather than between cities, as non-Indigenous Australians do. As Taylor and Bell point out, we can describe this situation either as ‘the lack of Indigenous integration with mainstream institutions’ or (emphasizing Indigenous agency) as ‘an ongoing capacity of Indigenous people to sustain difference’ (Taylor and Bell, 2004: p. 38). Maori adapted to the British colonization of New Zealand by becoming farmers, encouraged by British policies and by their own leaders; their migrations to sell their labour were over short distances. For about a century, Maori remained very much within their regions of origin, their relative immobility securing continuity in their modes of employment (farming, forestry, fishing) and in their social life. Their population recovered to its 1840 level by 1945, and eventually the opportunities of the cities began to attract them out of their viable but relatively static

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rural enclaves, particularly under the stimulus of World War II, with its opportunities for enlistment and manufacturing employment. From 1945 to 1971, Maori massively relocated to the cities (they went from being 75 per cent rural to 75 per cent urban; Bedford and Pool, 2004: p. 61), and from rural to manufacturing occupations. Although a desire to participate in the wider economy motivated that shift, according to Barcham (2004: p. 165), urbanization did not extinguish Maoris’ sense of cultural difference, for it was from among young urban Maori that a movement of cultural revival – uniting Maori from different regions – took off in the 1970s. The 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act, establishing the Waitangi Tribunal, was one result. A new Maori intelligentsia became the interlocutor of government, as public policy devolved responsibilities for programmes to Maori organizations known as iwi. This official affirmation of Maori institutions, combined with the strong sense that Maori ways are ever at risk, has made it desirable for individual Maori to be both urban and rural, resulting in ‘Maori return-migration’. According to Barcham, while this Indigenous habitus ‘is at least partially dependent on labour market conditions’, it also depends ‘upon certain cultural factors’, notably their relationship with ‘their papa k¯ainga (traditional tribal territories)’ (Barcham, 2004: p. 173). Returnmigration contributes to ‘re-tribalization’; it enables Maori to affirm their ‘Maori side’ (Barcham, 2004: p. 177). In the USA, there are relatively high rates of population mobility among the Indigenous populations (Snipp, 2004: p. 197), but selling one’s labour is only one reason to move. Snipp comments on US Indians’ mobility from the point of view of cultural survival – or as he says, of ‘sustaining and enhancing the cultural, political and economic viability of Indigenous communities’ and of ‘finding ways to transport and reproduce Native culture through space and time’ (Snipp, 2004: p. 198). Thus, it is possible to consider Native American urbanization as a challenge to the principal institution of their society, the reserve-based tribe. Eschbach points to

an apparent tension between the goals of raising Indians’ material living standards and preserving reserve populations: ‘urbanizing out-migration as a development strategy seems to compromise the promise of tribal sovereignty’ (Eschbach, 2004: p. 86). As in New Zealand, a significant proportion of Indians have become urban only since World War II. And, as in New Zealand, returnmigration has recently become a feature of Indian mobility, or so Snipp suspects (Snipp, 2004: p. 185). Snipp evokes the problem facing Native political leaders. On the one hand, they seek to preserve the connections between the more mobile Indians and their tribe/reservation of origin; this keeps the population estimates large (for government funding purposes), it secures the political and financial support of the mobile ones, and it keeps open the possibility that one day some of the best-trained Indians will work for their tribe. On the other hand, the return (or the coming and going) of Indians who have one foot in the city can be a disturbing influence ‘even when they are long-time friends and family’ (Snipp, 2004: p. 189). Governments deal with Indians as recognized tribes on reserves; it is not in the interest of reserve-based leaders to encourage governments to recognize and support ‘urban tribes’, though Indian Centres in some cities (Los Angeles, Oakland, Tulsa, Minneapolis) are able to help reservation Indians who migrate short-term to cities. Long-term migration to cities has gained employment and a materially improved life for some Indians, while posing to reserve leaders the issue: should they continue to be counted as members of the tribe? (Snipp, 2004: p. 193). Canada’s Indigenous people have been more mobile than the Canadian average in the second half of the twentieth century (according to recent analysis of the Canadian Census) and Registered Indians have been more mobile than other categories of Aboriginal Canadian (Norris et al., 2004: p. 149). Observers expected in the 1960s that there would be net migration of Registered Indians from reserves to cities, as they searched

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for work and became more assimilated into the wider Canadian culture. The data since then contradict this scenario, with both cities and reserves gaining from Indian migration while non-reserves and smaller cities have lost Indians. Registered Indians tend to ‘churn’, that is, to move back and forth between their reserves and cities. They are pulled to cities by better opportunities for consumption and employment and by the need to widen their social and intellectual horizons; they are pulled back to the reserves by the cheaper housing, ties with family, and by services tailored to their legal and cultural status as Indians. A large part of the off-reserve (including cities) growth in Indian population has been an effect of legislative expansion of the definition of a Registered Indian. The factors promoting the increase in reserve populations include the benefits available to Registered Indians living on reserves. The 1991 Aboriginal Peoples Survey found that employment was a relatively unimportant stated motive for mobility (particularly for women) (Norris et al., 2004: pp. 152–153). Taking these findings together (and ignoring differences among reserves in their rates of out-migration and in-migration) the reserve-urban ‘churning’ mobility of Registered Indians can be interpreted as the expression of a persisting cultural difference, supported by government policies favouring Registered Indians and their adapted collective institutions, bands governing reserves. In 1985, the Grand Council of the Crees told the UN’s Working Group on Indigenous Populations that they wanted to have a ‘choice between continuing a traditional life on the land, or participation in the new wage earning economy’ (quoted in Niezen, 2000: p. 124). In the known mobility patterns of Indigenous people in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA that choice is evidently being sustained, allowing a distinct Indigenous modernity. Their mobility is not actuated so much by the prospect of selling their labour at a high price, as it is by family and community strategies of social integration. Two kinds of public

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policy support this modernity: recognizing Indigenous community structures, and conceding an Indigenous land base. However, it is possible that a third government policy – Census enumeration – may modify the effect of the first two. To the extent that settler colonial nationalism now honours ‘indigeneity’ and to the extent that Censuses count people who identify as Indigenous, whether or not they have tribal or iwi affiliation, the Indigenous population of four nations has developed a core/periphery structure. In the USA, more than one third of those who meet Census criteria of Indian (that is, declare themselves to be Indian) are not tribal ‘Indians’ (Thornton, 2002: p. 79) either because they fail to meet criteria of tribal membership or because they did not seek a tribe’s judgement on that matter. In Canada’s 1996 Census, of 1.1 million people reporting Aboriginal ancestry, 799,000 reported themselves as members of a particular Aboriginal group or as registered under the Indian Act (Norris et al., 2004: pp. 137–138). Barcham (2004: p. 178) reports that 26 per cent of all individuals who identified as of Maori descent at the 1996 Census gave no iwi affiliation. In Australia, Indigenous respondents to the 2002 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey (NATSISS) showed marked regional variations in affiliation to the more traditional formations. Fewer than half (45.7 per cent) of the Indigenous people in cities, towns, agricultural and mining regions in Australia (where three out of four Indigenous Australians live) see themselves as belonging to a clan, tribal or language group. In ‘remote’ regions, where the other 25 per cent of Indigenous Australians live, three out of four people (76 per cent) identify themselves as part of a clan, tribal or language group (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004). In these four nations there is no necessary correspondence between participation in government-recognized Indigenous political institutions and enumerated (and self-proclaimed) Indigenous identity. Whether that is a challenge or a boon to ‘Indigenous cultural survival’ is a matter for debate.

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THE RELEVANT MEANINGS OF INDIGENOUS ART Sustained by a mixture of welfare payments, hunting and gathering and artefact sales, and with secure land tenure and modern technologies of transport and communications, Aborigines of Australia’s western desert maintain an extended ‘moral community’ (Peterson, 2004: p. 234) in which there are few opportunities (and arguably little need) to sell their labour power. Since about 1971, however, there have been increasing opportunities for these people to export goods that symbolize the foundations of that ‘moral community’. The international social field in which they exchange these objects returns to the Pintupi not only money but also meaning and esteem; the sources of that money, meaning and esteem are various, and many are far (physically and culturally) from the western desert. Is this exchange securing or undermining the ‘cultural survival’ of the Pintupi? Closing his recent study of these transactions, Fred Myers remarks that ‘perhaps we understand the commodity and commoditization less well than we have presumed’ (Myers, 2002: p. 361). Myers credits the Australian government with good intentions towards the Pintupi. In the 1970s, shortly after they began to paint for sale, it became government policy to purchase Pintupi paintings through two publicly funded agencies, for Pintupi aspirations to earn cash incomes far exceeded the early demand for their art. In a region that did not attract Australian enterprises, the government sought a ‘culturally appropriate’ economic base for the Pintupi; at the same time, the government recognized their customary possession of land, and it amended social security policy to make them eligible for unemployment and other benefits. In the 1980s, the governmental hopes for a western desert economy began to be answered as Australian and global demand for western desert art soared. The relationship between two regimes of value became an explicit concern of the Aboriginal arts industry.

Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal valuations were understood to be independent but convergent: some works could be of both high ‘Aboriginal cultural value’ and high ‘Western aesthetic value’ – with ‘tourist art’ ranking ‘low’ on both scales. As city-based public collections began to acquire ‘good’ paintings, a hesitant discourse of connoisseurship arose, sensitive to the cultural gap between the producers and the new consumers. Though connoisseurs tended to value western desert art as a distinctly Australian episode in formalist modernism, rather than as referencing particular people/land relationships in a remote Australian region, the paintings’ ‘Aboriginality’ was usually celebrated. Many Australians welcomed the assurance that past colonial policies had not destroyed all of Australia’s ‘Indigenous culture’. The artistic commissions for the new Australian Parliament House (which opened in 1988) included a huge ground mosaic by Michael Nelson Tjakamarra that gestured towards Australians’ post-colonial maturity. The painters’ success provoked a discourse of Indigenous vulnerability. Some observers said that western desert peoples’ problems and interests were being forgotten as the art’s formal beauty and national significance overwhelmed public attention. Myers takes issue with commentators who fear that in attaining global artistic success the Pintupi have forfeited their ‘distinctive voice’(Myers, 2002: p. 233). The reason he can portray ‘the circulation of acrylic paintings as an extension of the agency of their makers, subject to varying responses and actions beyond their making’ (Myers, 2002: p. 353) is that he adopts a performative notion of the paintings’ meanings. To render as a system the art’s semantics is not possible, he argues: it is not so much that the paintings have meaning, it’s more that the Pintupi deploy their meanings in a number of contexts in which those meanings have relevance. He refuses to privilege – as originary or definitive – those contexts that are local to the western desert (Myers, 2002: p. 53). From this theoretical position, the arrival in New York of western desert art (and of some Pintupi artists) in 1988 can be told

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as an Indigenous challenge to metropolitan habits of mind. In presenting the ‘relevance’ (Myers, 2002: p. 237) of the ‘Dreamings’ exhibition in New York’s Asia Society Galleries to the western desert artists, Myers points out that the non-Aboriginal curators contextualized each object with ethnographic information in an effort ‘to acknowledge in the Western space of art what Aborigines assert about their objects’ (Myers, 2002: p. 250). More important to Myers’s thesis, however, is his presentation of two Pintupi artists’ sand-painting performance in the Gallery in November 1988. Myers reports the stated satisfaction of the two artists that in their performance (and with the assistance of Myers and two other anthropologists who fielded the audience’s questions) they had represented their ‘country’ (not Australia, but the western desert ‘estates’ of which the two artists are custodians). And the audience’s understandings? ‘I think no one really knows what “happened” on the stage,’ Myers admits, ‘whether spiritual energy and danger were evoked or negotiated, or whether Aboriginal relations to place were securely signified’ (Myers, 2002: p. 272). (And he later illustrates the variety of themes in critics’ appreciation of the whole exhibition.) From one point of view, this admission of uncertainty could be enough to warrant a judgement of the event’s superficiality, but Myers invites us to see the performance as an ‘occasion of culture making’ whose representational adequacy must not be gauged by reference to a concept of culture ‘as a structured given’. Myers here invokes recent studies of Indigenous expression (for examples Ginsburg, 2002; Turner, 2002) in order to assert that culture is ‘an imperfect fiction that is ambiguously mediated by multiple and shifting discursive moments’ (Myers, 2002: p. 275). We are still developing our ways to interpret such data (these elicited meanings), writes Myers, just as we are at the beginnings of developing a critical language for the appreciation of contemporary Indigenous art. He has no doubt that a political opportunity has presented itself: ‘The circulation of

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Aboriginal fine art does not erase the tensions within which whites and blacks cohabit so much as it creates a sphere or forum for discussing what Aboriginality and Aboriginal identity might be in relation to whites’(Myers, 2002: p. 317). Though he distances himself from those apprehensive of Pintupi culture’s global ‘success’, Myers also hesitates to offer criteria for judging the survival of a ‘culture’ whose ontology is so elusive that it is ‘an imperfect fiction . . . ambiguously mediated by multiple and shifting discursive moments’ (Myers, 2000: p. 275). Rather than assume marketization to be the agent of cultural doom, Myers interprets the many newsworthy scandals (about authenticity, exploitation, copyright) of the Aboriginal art world as ‘a significant moment in the conceptualization or institutionalization of cultural property’ (Myers, 2002: p. 330). Objects so hybrid are bound to cause trouble. Myers would like the painters to avoid two related threats posed by the more free-booting market success of their art: their dislocation from their country, and the severing of their accountability to their kin and to their regional communities. The continuing production, in art, of Pintupi identity must have some practical-institutional roots, and Myers thinks that how dealers behave makes a difference. Myers’ fruitful theoretical uncertainty about the effects of ‘commoditization’ thus arises not only from his refusal to delimit the pertinence of the paintings’ unfolding meanings (‘the question of what kind of objects these are has not been settled’; [Myers, 2002: p. 339]) but also from his appreciation that the institutions of the art market are now intimately part of Pintupi practices of cultural reproduction.

INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION The work of Indigenous cultural survival is not only local, but also international, and thus it requires collaboration with other Indigenous people and with the personnel of multilateral agencies. We may regard these collaborations as ‘exchanges’. On scheduled occasions, such as meetings of the Working

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Group on Indigenous Populations, people tell their stories (some horrific, some celebratory) and are rewarded with political standing; people debate the wording of important public statements and formulate consensus by exchanging phrases, sentences and paragraphs – pushing here, conceding there. Their work since 1975 (when the World Council of Indigenous Peoples formed at Port Alberni, Vancouver) has built up ‘an international community with a body of shared knowledge, rules of behaviour, and strategic goals’ (Niezen, 2003: p. 205). Because ‘Indigenous rights’ are conceived in these exchanges as an instance of ‘human rights’, this global community demands of each of its participating peoples that it account for itself in terms of human rights violated and honoured. According to Russell Barsh, in 1995 the Mikmaq people committed themselves to this way of accounting their circumstances when they formally acceded to the International Covenants of Human Rights. They thus performed a sovereign action (though under UN rules they report to treaty monitoring bodies as an NGO). As well, the Mikmaq Grand Council was addressing ‘demands by Mikmaq women for greater accountability on the part of Mikmaq officials elected under Canada’s Indian Act’, and they hoped that ‘such openness would focus greater critical attention on violations of Mikmaq rights by Canada’ (Barsh, 1995: p. 36). Three levels of political exchange were thus enacted by the Mikmaq Grand Council’s accession to the Covenants: with their own members, with the Canadian domestic political debate about Indigenous rights, and with the multilateral agencies that monitor compliance with the Covenants. The reproduction of Indigenous culture is not a straightforward matter when the instruments of multilateralism are seized as weapons for survival. Niezen spells out the terms of the exchange by which Indigenous people have gained a voice in the UN: ‘To maintain its credibility the indigenous forum will have to include within its purview not only the urgent problems of racism, loss of land, industrial degradation, and state

assaults upon identity and cultural integrity but also the human rights abuses perpetrated by indigenous peoples themselves’ (Niezen, 2003: p. 117). The application of the human rights covenants to the internal affairs of Indigenous peoples has been controversial. Some have argued that it compromises ‘selfdetermination’, or that notions such as ‘gender equality’ are ‘alien to Indigenous culture’ (as reported by Barsh, 1995: p. 36). Niezen sees Indigenous peoples as being in a ‘Weberian dilemma’. To deal effectively with modernity, Indigenous peoples must adopt modern forms of authority: ‘there is no way to defend traditional societies without in some way transforming them – without, above all, taking on some of the trappings of bureaucracy and written law’ (Niezen, 2003: p. 142). ‘Human rights universalism,’ he predicts, will ‘bring about as much, or more, cultural change as protection’ (Niezen, 2003: p. 143). Barsh believes that much of that change is already evident. As an effect of colonization (including certain forms of recognition) the traditional functions of kinship and older ideals of personal responsibility have been displaced. Indigenous societies have become ‘more like the states that oppress them’(Barsh, 1995: p. 48). Some Indigenous peoples in Canada have invoked individual rights ‘not to defend the tribal social order against interference’, but selfishly: ‘the right to private property, the right to disregard family and clan obligations, the right to accumulate personal wealth without paying taxes’ (Barsh, 1995: p. 51). For this very reason, Barsh argues, Indigenous peoples must entrench ‘rights’ as a weapon against these new concentrations of power among Indigenous peoples. ‘ “Rights” become a necessary part of the new social fabric as both a destructive and remedial argument’ (Barsh, 1995: p. 51). There is irony – perhaps Faustian tragedy – in such accounts of the modern Indigenous political trade-off. However, if we reconsider, yet again, the question of who is vulnerable, it is possible to think of these binds as opportunities. The politics of gender and age within an Indigenous society may be activated when certain standards of human rights are invoked.

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In the assessment of Bartholomew Dean, Amazonian indigenismo ‘continues to conceal the endurance of systematic social distinctions (such as gender inequality) through its appeals to a putatively universal indigenous subjectivity . . . the exclusions, restrictions, and ill treatment associated with women’s lives in Amazonia are largely ignored by the indigenous rights movement’ (Dean, 2003: pp. 234–235). If Indigenous peoples answer to human rights scrutiny of their own affairs, the idea of ‘vulnerability’ becomes pertinent to distinctions among an Indigenous people. For girls growing up now in Amazonia, the modernist challenges of ‘human rights’ politics might be just what is needed.

CONCLUSION Charles Taylor writes that modern humans have imagined themselves to be parties to a moral order in which rights, freedom and mutual benefit are ‘to be secured to all participants equally. Exactly what is meant by equality will vary, but that it must be affirmed in some form follows from the rejection of hierarchical order’ (Taylor, 2004: p. 22). Starting in the eighteenth century as the ‘imaginary’ of social elites and activist groups, this self-understanding has since spread ‘downward and outward’ (Taylor, 2004: p. 144). The rise of the notion of ‘Indigenous’ culture/people/society can be understood as one of the trajectories of ‘redaction’ by which the modern social imaginary is becoming more extensively and intensively established. We can discern two steps in the ‘Indigenous’ redaction. The first (which is not over) has been rooted in the conviction that development will give ‘individuals and societies more control over their own destiny’, as Joseph Stiglitz explained in his 1998 Raul Prebisch Lecture. Challenging ‘traditional societies’ that accept ‘the world as it is’, Stiglitz continued: Development enriches the lives of individuals by widening their horizons and reducing their sense of isolation. It reduces the afflictions brought on by disease and poverty, not only increasing lifespans,

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but improving the vitality of life. (Stiglitz, 2001: pp. 58–59)

The more liberal expression of this confident mission allows that such transformations are subject to (what I have called) the immanent temporalities of peoples; those peoples are ‘vulnerable’ to development to the extent that their immanent temporalities are ignored or overridden. One way to understand ‘indigeneity’ as an emergent political construct is to historicize the various ways that ‘vulnerability’ has been (and continues to be) imagined. I have traced some episodes – from the formulation of Article 22 of the Treaty of Versailles to the World Bank’s 1991 account of the ‘Indigenous’as a set of ‘vulnerabilities’. In the assertion of women’s rights within the political forums of colonized peoples we see not only another episode in the imagining of Indigenous vulnerability but also an example of what is possible in the second step in the redaction of the ‘Indigenous’ as an instance of the modern. This second step is very recent; it became visible only in the last quarter of the twentieth century as Indigenous entities gained political standing in world forums and in the jurisprudence and constitutional development of nation-states. This phase in the redaction of ‘Indigenous’ disperses the initiative for redaction to many local political elites who now wish to elaborate, in thought and practice, their own ways to be modern, including their own reckonings with ‘human rights’. Two features of Taylor’s argument are significant here. First, he concedes that since ‘modern social imaginaries have been differently refracted in the divergent media of the respective national histories’ we should not expect ‘a simple repetition of Western forms when these imaginaries are imposed on or adopted in other civilizations’ (Taylor, 2004: p. 154). We can expect Indigenous modernities to differ, in some respects, from those that have allowed them certain spaces in which to grow. Second, in saying so little about the place of non-human species and the earth, oceans and atmosphere in ‘modern social imaginaries’, Taylor exemplifies a flaw in the

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modern social imaginary to which Indigenous thought has been sensitive. In the 1990s, Indigenous discourse highlighted ‘nature’: the dangerous relationships between humans and other species and between humans and their resources base (Muehlebach, 2001: p. 436). Thus, Taiaiake Alfred, searching for an Indigenous ‘sovereignty’ that is not contained within the opportunity structures of liberalized colonial policy, includes ‘the sustainability of the earth’ among Indigenous objectives. He sees ecological limits to the ‘natural law’ humanism from which the modern social imaginaries grew. ‘The land was created by a power outside of human beings, and a just relationship to that power must respect the fact that human beings did not have a hand in making the earth, therefore they have no right to dispose of it as they see fit’ (Alfred, 2002: p. 470). Alfred’s reference to ‘a power outside of human beings’ need not be understood as restoring the theodicies questioned by natural law. I prefer to see it as the Indigenous invitation (cast, let us note, in the language of ‘rights’) to consider human history through Darwin’s pitiless eyes.

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Porter, B. (1990) ‘Hobson and internationalism’, in M. Freeden (ed.), Reappraising J.A. Hobson: Humanism and Welfare. London: Unwin Hyman, pp. 167–181. Saignes, T. (1999) ‘The colonial condition in the Wuechua-Aymara Heartland (1570–1780)’, in F. Salomon and S.B. Schwartz (eds), pp. 59–137. Salomon, F. and Schwartz, S. (eds) (1999) Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, Volume III, Part 1. New York: Cambridge University Press. Semali, L.D. (1996) ‘Comments on article by Arun Agrawal’, Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor, 4(1). http://www.nuffic.nl/ciran/ikdm/4–1/ articles/agrawal.html. Serrano, R.C. (1996) ‘Comments on article by Arun Agrawal’, Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor, 4(1). http://www.nuffic.nl/ciran/ikdm/4–1/ articles/agrawal.html. Snipp, C.M. (2004) ‘American Indians and geographic mobility: some parameters of public policy’, in J.Taylor and M. Bell (eds), pp. 184–200. Stiglitz, J. (2001) ‘Towards a new paradigm of development’ (1998 Raul Prebisch Lecture), in Joseph Stiglitz and the World Bank: The Rebel Within – Selected Speeches. London: Anthem Press. Tanner, A. (2001) ‘The double bind of Aboriginal self-government’, in C.H. Scott (ed.), Aboriginal Autonomy and Development in Northern Quebec and Labrador. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, pp. 396–414. Taylor, C. (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Taylor, J. and Bell, M. (2004) ‘Continuity and change in Indigenous Australian population mobility’, in J.Taylor and M. Bell (eds), Population Mobility and Indigenous Peoples in Australasia and North America. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 13–43. Thornton, R. (2002) ‘Health, disease and demography’, in P.J. Deloria and N. Salisbury (eds), A Companion

to American Indian History. Malden (MA): Blackwell Publishers, pp. 68–84. Turner, T. (2002) ‘Representation, politics, and cultural imagination in Indigenous video: general points and Kayapo examples’, in F.D. Ginsburg, L. Abu-Lughod and B. Larkin (eds), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 75–89. Van Crowder, L. (1996) ‘A sequel to the debate (3)’, Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor, 4(2). http://www.nuffic.nl/ciran/ikdm/4–1/ articles/agrawal.html. van ’t Hooft, K. (1996) ‘Comments on article by Arun Agrawal’, Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor, 4(1). http://www.nuffic.nl/ciran/ikdm/4–1/ articles/agrawal.html. Warren, D.M. (1996) ‘Comments on article by Arun Agrawal’, Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor, 4(1). http://www.nuffic.nl/ciran/ikdm/4–1/ articles/agrawal.html. Warren, K.B. (1998) Indigenous Movements and their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Whitehead, N.L. (1999) ‘Native peoples confront colonial regimes in northeastern South America’, in F. Salomon and S.B. Schwartz (eds), pp. 382–442. Williams, C.P. (1990) The Ideal of the Self-governing Church: A Study in Victorian Missionary Strategy. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Wilmer, F. (1993) The Indigenous Voice in World Politics: Since Time Immemorial. Newbury Park: Sage Publications. World Bank (1991) ‘Operational Directive: Indigenous Peoples’ (OD 4.20) September. http://wbln0018. worldbank.org/Institutional/Manuals/. Yudice, G. (2003) The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Zelinsky, W. (1971) ‘The hypothesis of the mobility transition’, Geographical Review, 61(2): 219–249.

20 Cultural Property1 John Frow

In this chapter I address some recent transformations in the constitution of property, and in particular in the evolving forms of ownership of cultural material. The context for this discussion is the evolution in recent years of quite new kinds of objects of ownership: Carol Rose gives the examples of ‘internet domain names, frozen reproductive tissue, and tradeable pollution allowances’ (Rose, 2004: p. 275), and we could think as well of such things as trademarked colour combinations, the Kraft Corporation’s exclusive rights to the use of the word ‘real’ as it relates to cheese (McLeod, 2001: p. 1), or David Bowie’s sale to investors of future revenue streams from a number of his albums (Steyn, 1997). These changes have come about on the one hand because the world is full of new things that have become subject to property rights – things such as domain names and frozen reproductive tissue and future probabilities. On the other hand, our world has witnessed an extension of the boundaries of property to include areas previously excluded from private ownership. These include very generally such ‘natural’ entities as genetically engineered animals and crop varieties, and

human DNA (some 20 per cent of the human genome is now privately owned) (Ravilious, 2005); resources such as water and the airwaves; and forms of information that would once, by definition, have belonged in the public domain: such things as traditional knowledges, the ideas contained in databases, and human personality. I begin by investigating the concept of property and the network of concepts on which it depends, then look at the ownership of cultural objects, the ownership of cultural rights, and claims by particular communities to the ownership of whole cultures. My hope is that these analyses will tell us something about the ways in which the category of property is evolving, but also something about the uses and limits of the concept of culture.

WHAT IS PROPERTY? Property (or ownership) is a more complex matter than simply possessing something, because it entails the question of my right to it. I possess an apple that I pick from a tree, but my ownership of it comes about only in so far as a social group with the

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appropriate authority recognizes – in law or by custom – that I have an established right to the fruit of that tree, either in perpetuity or for some limited time, and thus the right to exclude other people from picking my apples. A textbook definition by Hoebel gets at the importance of the social recognition that constitutes property: property, he writes, is ‘a network of social relations governing the conduct of people with respect to the use and disposition of things’ (Hoebel, 1972: p. 285). What I own is thus not, directly, a thing but rather a bundle of rights in relation to a thing (cf. Hohfeld, 1923: pp. 27–29), which in turn have effects on how people may legally act, and on how they are likely to act. Many different rights may be involved in the ownership of something, but the simplest ones are ‘the right . . . of using as one wishes, the right to exclude others, the power of alienating and an immunity from expropriation’ (Honoré, 1961: p. 113). Rights in property are usually limited: my land may have easements over it which allow walkers to cross it; my house may have a heritage overlay which restricts my freedom to alter its appearance; the term of the copyright I hold in my work is of limited duration. I am prohibited from putting my property to illegal uses, and many forms of property may under some circumstances be compulsorily expropriated by the state. Property is at once a complex and a limited relation, and it is defined within a historically specific legal system. The nucleus of any developed legal system is the relation between a subject in law (a persona) and an object in law (a res). The structure of the relation between persona and res yields a basic scheme of subject-object relations and of relations between subjects. By further describing the qualifications and the acts of subjects, we can derive from it the entailed categories of rights and obligations; of acts and intentions; and of grievances and remedies. Even those areas of law (such as constitutional, international and corporate law) which do not deal with persons or personal property nevertheless operate by analogy with the concept of person.

The surface structure of the relation between persona and res is, however, misleading. Pashukanis argues that the relation of a person to a thing has no legal significance (Pashukanis, 1978: p. 122). Its real form is that of a relation between subjects, but conceived negatively, as a relation of exclusion from the use and disposition of an object. This is the structure of the distinction between the two fundamental forms of actions in Roman law, and of rights in modern civil and common law: rights in rem and rights in personam. Rights in personam are singular, imposing an obligation against a particular person; rights in rem are general, asserting an entitlement to exclude all other persons, or a determinate set of other persons, from the use of my property. In this categorical network persona and res are not entities but relational structures. Thus a ‘person’, persona, is constituted by the possession of a bundle of rights (or, in Roman law, causes of action) and of obligations, and conversely what is owned is not a material entity but an aggregate of rights defined within a legal system. I own, not a piece of land, but a set of rights of use and exclusion over the land; and my status as a legal subject is constituted in this instance by the rights to which I am entitled and the obligations I incur. For both Roman law and for civil and common law systems it is the apparently autonomous form of the subject in law that, as Bernard Edelman puts it, ‘fixes social relations and allows the real to be put into circulation as an object-in-law’ (Edelman, 1979: p. 92). Edelman further argues that the originary mode of legal possession is self possession – that is, ‘in its very structure the subject in law is constituted on the concept of free ownership of itself’ (Edelman, 1979: p. 69). This free ownership of oneself (which contrasts with the slave’s inability to dispose of him- or herself on the market) is the foundation of the freedom of ownership in general. Pashukanis thus accords the category of the subject logical priority over that of property, because ‘property becomes the basis of the legal form only when it becomes

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something which can be freely disposed of in the market. The category of the subject serves precisely as the most general expression of this freedom’ (Pashukanis, 1983: p. 110). One of the ways in which the legal relationship actively constitutes its subjects can be seen in the lack of a simple correlation between the concepts of the human being and of the person, and between ‘natural’ and ‘legal’forms of the person. These disjunctions hinge on the differential distribution of rights (for example, citizenship rights). The core of the argument is this: A person is such, not because he is human, but because rights and duties are ascribed to him. The person is the legal subject or substance of which the rights and duties are attributes. . . . Every full citizen is a person; other human beings, namely, subjects who are not citizens, may be persons. But not every human being is necessarily a person, for a person is capable of rights and duties, and there may well be human beings having no legal rights, as was the case with slaves in English law. (Black’s Law Dictionary, 1968: entry under ‘person’)

Legal persons, conversely, may be corporations, financial vehicles, nations or even under some circumstances natural entities deemed in need of protection, such as trees: there is no necessity that they be human beings. Moreover, the distinction between ‘natural’ persons and ‘legal’ persons cannot be mapped onto a simple dichotomy of nature and culture, because the status of the ‘natural’ person is itself constituted by a juridical demarcation of the problematic boundaries of the human: boundaries between foetus and child; between the living, the comatose, the braindead, and the dead; between the bodies of Siamese twins; between the normal and the subnormal. And ‘natural’ persons are not necessarily coextensive with their bodies. They may, for example, be represented by an agent, acting as a legal extension of their status as person and able to create rights and incur duties on their behalf. The natural person has distinct conditions of constitution, and distinct forms of circulation in different juridical domains. It is a fully discursive category. The counterpart to the category of the person, that of the ‘thing’ (the res, whatever

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can be owned or give rise to a cause of action), bears a similarly problematic relationship to what we normally think of as ‘things’ – concrete material entities. The law does of course bear on such entities – on land or houses or cattle or artefacts – but only as the objects of rights and obligations; it doesn’t define what sort of entities they must be, because all that matters to it is the capacity to be owned. Like persons, things ‘consist of assemblages of social relations rather than antedating those relations’(Verdery and Humphrey, 2004: p. 8). Not only is it a relational fact, but thingness, in the eyes of the law, has nothing to do with physical existence: one may have property rights in immaterial entities, such as a song, a title, or the goodwill in a business, and Hann notes that property may include ‘such intangibles as names, reputation and knowledge, personal and collective identities, not to mention intangibles such as currency holdings and shares in joint-stock companies’ (Hann, 1998: p. 4). The ‘things’ that can be owned may (in jurisdictions that recognize slavery) be human beings; and human beings who can be owned are, by definition, not legal subjects (not fully persons). These are distinctions within the rigorous logic of the law, but the relation between persons and things is also complicated by the precarious nature of this distinction in the larger social world. Pottage (2004) cites the effects of technologies of in vitro reproduction on understandings of the human: Gene sequences are at once part of the genetic programme of the person and chemical templates from which drugs are manufactured; embryos are related to their parents by means of the commodifying forms of contract and property, and yet they are also persons; depending on the uses to which they are put, the acts of embryos produced by in vitro fertilization might be seen as having either the ‘natural’ developmental potential of the human person or the technical ‘pluripotentiality’ that makes them such a valuable resource for research into gene therapies. In each of these cases, the categorization of an entity as a person or a thing is dependent upon a contingent distinction rather than an embedded division. (Pottage, 2004: pp. 4–5)

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PROPERTY AND NON-PROPERTY If property has to do not with the intrinsic characteristics of things but rather with a framework that determines that some entity may be a person or a thing according to circumstances, and that whether or not it can be owned is a matter of social convention, can we then ask whether there are sorts of things generally that can be owned and sorts of things that cannot? The answer of course is that we can ask about the frameworks that govern these distinctions. Every society has general guidelines about what is or is not appropriately treated as property, and property is a feature of all known societies. Marcel Mauss supposes that in archaic societies persons and things were not separate kinds of entity: ‘Originally’, he speculates, ‘things had a personality and a virtue of their own. Things are not the inert objects which the laws of Justinian and ourselves imply. They are a part of the family: the Roman familia comprises the res as well as the personae’ (Mauss, 1967: p. 48). As these categories become more distinct, things can be divided between those that belong to the core of the family’s value system (land, religious objects, the things of the house) and those that are somewhat removed from it and can thus be sold or exchanged in the market: the cattle, ‘movables’, surplus foodstuffs, and artefacts without religious value. The nineteenth-century anthropologist Henry Maine speaks of this as a legal distinction between res mancipi and res nec mancipi: complex concepts which translate roughly into a distinction between inalienable and alienable possessions. The crucial point about it is that, while the former list is closed (it comprises the limited core of ‘sacred’ objects), the latter is open-ended and eventually comes to incorporate many objects that were once considered inalienable (Maine, 1906: p. 288; cf. Weiner, 1992). Every society draws a line between those things that can be privately owned and freely exchanged, and those things whose circulation is restricted. The line is drawn differently in different places, and the way it is drawn will

vary over time, but every society withdraws certain domains from market relations. The domain of religion, of personal life (including personal identity, bodily integrity, sexuality and kinship ties), the political sphere, the sphere of public services and public goods and that of art and of some kinds of writing may conform, or may be presumed to conform, to a different logic from that of strict profit maximization. Exchanges in these spheres are not governed by the market: while the things and services comprised in them may be alienable in the sense of being transferable from one person or group to another, they are nevertheless, in Margaret Radin’s useful phrase, market-inalienable (Radin, 1996). The presumption may be different from the practice: most societies have tolerated the sale of sexual services; historically, most have tolerated the sale of human identity in the form of slavery; the sale of political or administrative favours has been a feature of most societies. The point, however, is the moral and often the religious force of these understandings, and thus the way they govern ‘the conduct of people with respect to the use and disposition of things’ (Hoebel, 1972: p. 285). My interest here is in the ways in which these understandings change. Writing in 1961, the jurist A.M. Honoré notes that ‘a person is not, in most systems, regarded as owning his body, reputation, skills, honour or dignity’ (Honoré, 1961: p. 130): these are not legally ‘things’ since personal attributes belong to the class of entities that are customarily withdrawn from market transactions. Honoré then notes, however, that there are exceptions even to this quite fundamental principle, since ‘it may, indeed, be argued that contracts for the assignment of goodwill and contracts of service are examples of at least partial alienation of these interests’ (Honoré, 1961: p. 130). Even with this qualification his assumptions now look dated. In today’s world these attributes of the person are all capable of being routinely endowed with economic value: sportspeople and musicians insure their bodies, or parts of them; reputation is

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protected by the legal structures (such as right of publicity in the USA) that allow celebrities to profit from their public persona, and to protect it against appropriation by others; people working in the ‘hospitality industry’ make their living from their ability to smile and to be courteous; nurses commodify their caring qualities; and businesses count as an asset with transferable monetary value the accumulated worth of their good relations with their customers. Not only businesses but universities, sportsmen and women, even artists and writers have the status of brands. What has changed is perhaps not so much the relationship of human attributes to the market as the social acceptability of such commodification. These changes are, I argue, part of a more general transformation in which the knowledge societies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have extended property relations to cover domains that were previously exempt from them. These domains include that of ‘naturally’ occurring substances (organisms, genes, plant tissue); that of forms of knowledge (indigenous knowledges, ‘ideas’ and methods, public archives); and that of the person.2 These property rights all take the form of intellectual property, to which I now turn.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY All property is ‘cultural’ in the sense that it is a socially constructed category: a complex and variable bundle of rights and obligations which is highly sensitive to social context and social change, and which is inseparable from cultural norms to do with (for example) the protected status of the person, personal liberty and group freedoms, the public domain, and in general the relation between the market and whatever it is that a particular society holds sacred. The cultural domain, conversely – the domain of values and practices that conveys meanings about the world to a group, thereby defining and demarcating for itself and others the group’s coherence – has always been one

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of those areas of exemption from property relations. If, as Eagleton puts it, culture has to do with ‘affection, relationship, memory, kinship, place, community, emotional fulfilment, intellectual enjoyment, a sense of ultimate meaning’, and is thus ‘not only what we live by’ but ‘also, in great measure, what we live for’ (Eagleton, 2000: p. 131), then it has a universality which neither can nor should be reduced to interested market transactions. Yet the restrictive ownership of cultural materials is historically widespread. Aesthetic objects, in particular, are almost archetypal objects of ownership; the reverse evidence for this is to be found in the history of looting, where aesthetic artefacts have a privileged place because of their condensed and transportable value. Books, too, were amongst the earliest mass-produced commodities in the modern era: their serial identity, their portability, and thus their widespread dissemination made them as possessable as saucepans. The disjunction, in the case of books, between their aesthetic or spiritual value and its material embodiment in ‘copies’ has meant that the ownership of books was for the most part culturally (although not of course politically) unproblematic. Possession here does not create either scarcity or exclusivity, since – as with all information – any increase in use enhances, rather than diminishing, value. In addition to the ownership of cultural objects, cultural property may extend to certain levels of information contained in cultural texts. The concept of immaterial property rights is a familiar one both in Western intellectual property law and in the customary rights to story or song or law in traditional societies. Robert Lowie writes at length in Primitive Society of what he calls well-developed notions of ‘patents or copyrights’ in ‘the lower reaches of civilization’ (Lowie, 1961: p. 235), and gives the example of rights in incantations which are held as ‘trade secrets’ among elderly Koryak women. These rights can generate payment: ‘For chanting a formula the owner receives from her client cakes of pressed tea,

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or several packages of tobacco, or a reindeer’ (Lowie, 1961: p. 236). Amongst the Kai, a poet is the absolute owner of his composition. No one else may sing it without his consent, and usually he exacts a fee for granting it. Similarly, there is ownership of magical formulas, the instructor being entitled to compensation. Certain carvings, too, must not be copied without special leave. Even personal names are in a sense a form of patented property, so that a young man adopting a name already held presents his elder namesake with a gift by way of conciliation. (Lowie, 1961: p. 236)

Lowie’s use of terms from modern intellectual property law is of course anachronistic, but it cogently demonstrates that the existence of immaterial property rights is by no means restricted to the world of Western modernity. Brown makes the same point: There exists a rich ethnographic literature detailing the complex rules about knowledge and its uses observed in countless indigenous societies. It was not unusual for Indians of Plains tribes to buy and sell personal songs, blessings, visions, and other expressions of spiritual knowledge. Among the Oto people of Oklahoma, for example, payment in goods for spiritual knowledge was a requirement, since it was believed to effect the transfer of power from seller to buyer. The problem is not that copyright or its equivalent cannot be found among native peoples. It is that the rules controlling the flow of ideas and information are often hard to reconcile with Western practices and, perhaps more significantly, with the replicative technologies spawned by the Industrial Revolution. (Brown, 2003: p. 89)

Where property rights in traditional societies originate with the gods or the ancestors or the social group, in contemporary intellectual property law they have to do with the relation between an originating subject, the work that he or she performs to endow some material with value, and the replications of that worked material in a market where the subject’s rights over the replications prevail over other rights. I have formulated this relation in rather abstract terms, but it can be put more clearly and concretely with reference to the different domains of intellectual property, the main ones being copyright, trademark, and patent law; I shall briefly discuss copyright here, since it is the form most closely associated with the cultural domain and seamlessly ties

together aesthetic and economic categories (on the history, cf. Chartier, 1994; Rose, 1993; Woodmansee, 1984). Copyright, like all other forms of intellectual property, seeks to limit a public good, information, which is inherently not scarce and which can be reproduced endlessly without any diminution of its value. It is a drive to signature which seeks to limit repetition – that is, to limit the potentially infinite iterability of writing and of all its technological extensions. There are two overlapping modes of legally controlling the proliferation of meaning. One of them, copyright, is commercial, giving an author the right to control copying of the work for a limited period. The other, that of moral rights, is non-commercial, protecting the author’s control of the circumstances of release of her work to the public, the right to withdraw the work from circulation, the right to claim attribution (‘paternity right’), and the right to object to distortion or mutilation of the work (‘integrity right’). The doctrine of moral rights is based on ‘the idea that the work of art is an extension of the artist’s personality, an expression of his innermost being. To mistreat the work of art is to mistreat the artist, to invade his area of privacy, to impair his personality’ (Merryman and Elsen, 1987: p. 145; cited in Jaszi, 1991: p. 497).3 Both copyright and moral rights, however, protect the source of market value: the artist’s unique personality, which establishes the singularity of the work of art vis-à-vis any series it might generate. Authorship as origin is the most fundamental category of copyright law, in relation to which all other categories are secondary. It is the principle that founds both the work and the copy in their respective acts; both the idea and its expression. Yet the reality of copyright is that it is in most cases assigned to the corporations that control intellectual production, or that intellectual work is produced by corporate employees who never own the rights to their creative work in the first place. Copyright is largely separated from its creators and circulates as industrial property, forming the capital basis

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of the information and culture industries. Moreover, the successive extensions of the copyright term (from 14 years, with the option of renewal for a further 14, in both the English Statute of Anne (1709) and the US Constitution to the present life plus 70 years in most jurisdictions) make it clear that this far-from-limited monopoly has little to do with the encouragement of creative endeavour and everything to do with the creation of enduring property rights. As Lury summarizes the movement of intellectual property law: ‘It was in terms derived from the functioning of the author in aesthetic discourse that individual works and movements entered the market as “property”; in short, it was through the author-function that cultural value became a thing, a product and a possession caught in a circuit of property values’ (Lury, 1993: p. 23).

THE GLOBALIZATION OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW Intellectual property law is the major means by which property rights in cultural goods, and more generally in information, are created and maintained; and the various forms of intellectual property have become central to contemporary knowledge economies ‘in an era when controlling prototypes is at least as profitable as actually replicating them’ (Brown, 2005: pp. 43–44; cf. Rifkin, 2000). The strongly aesthetic categories that underpin copyright and to a lesser extent patent and trademark law feed into an industrialized mode of production in which the aesthetic and the scientific are fully integrated. (It is for this reason that I treat both the aesthetic and the scientific dimensions of intellectual property here under the general rubric of cultural property.) In the period since World War II, and more intensively in the last decade, a truly global intellectual property regime has been put in place to enforce what are called trade-related aspects of intellectual property, or TRIPS. This regime puts cultural property rights, in the broadest sense of the term, on a stable international footing.

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The TRIPs agreement of the Uruguay round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), concluded in 1993 and ratified in 1994, achieved an international convergence of intellectual property law: that is, it required countries with ‘weak’ protection of intellectual property to come up to US standards – and indeed even US standards tended to be strengthened wherever they happened to be relatively lower than elsewhere. The core of the agreement as far as the developing countries were concerned was the creation of new rights for foreign nationals – meaning, for the most part, non-national corporations. The rhetoric of justice in which the TRIPs case was presented – the rhetoric of defence against pirates stealing legitimately owned cultural property – disguised the fact that ‘it pulled off a huge structural shift in the world economy to move monopoly profits from the informationpoor to the information-rich’ (Drahos and Braithwaite, 2002: p. 197), institutionalizing a major disadvantage between the major net intellectual property exporters (the USA and to a lesser extent the European Community) and the rest of the world. Drahos and Braithwaite (2002: p. 11) cite an Australian study of copyright royalty flows during the 1990s which ‘showed that Australia paid out to overseas copyright owners around US$1.2 billion more than it received’. More starkly, they describe what they call the ‘staggeringly inefficient’ results of the post-TRIPs intellectual property order for Africa: if African states import generic drugs from India, ‘the global intellectual property regime punishes them through well-funded litigation by drug companies, threats from Europe and the US to withdraw foreign aid, United States Trade Representative watch-listing, and the threat of bilateral sanctions backed by World Trade Organization dispute panels’; whereas ‘the US can credibly threaten trade sanctions, foreignaid withdrawal, flight of investment and refusal to transfer technology to an African state’, an African state ‘cannot credibly threaten the US with any of these things’ (Drahos and Braithwaite, 2002: pp. 190–191). We now have several detailed histories of the process by which the TRIPs agreement

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was forced onto the world agenda and into international law (Drahos and Braithwaite, 2002; Ryan, 1998; Sell, 2003). From the beginning the process was driven by a very restricted interest group: as Drahos and Braithwaite (2002: p. 12) summarize it, ‘a small number of US companies, which were established players in the knowledge game, captured the US trade-agenda setting process and then, in partnership with European and Japanese multinationals, drafted intellectual property principles that became the blueprint for TRIPs. The resistance of developing countries was crushed through trader power’, although it was also the case that the interests of the holders of intellectual property rights were concentrated and focused, while the interests of those who are net purchasers of those rights were diffuse and differentiated. On crucial questions the underdeveloped world pulled in different directions, and governments which often had little expert advice on the technicalities of intellectual property law failed to coordinate their responses with each other or with the affected industries in their own states. The layered circles of consultation meant that many states, including the vast majority of African states, had no say in the process until draft resolutions were at an advanced stage. The sheer implausibility of the TRIPs agreement has to do not only with the fact that it seems to run counter to the interests of all states except the United States, Japan and the European Union, but also that its dramatic extension of monopoly rights in intellectual property came about in the context of a trade regime that is ostensibly committed to the reduction of cartels and monopolies and the pursuit of full and free competition. The reality of course is that it is not. The trade inducements that were held out to many countries as the quid pro quo for the TRIPs provisions have largely failed to eventuate, as the breakdown of the Cancún meeting of ministers in 1993 demonstrated. In a longer perspective, it is clear that the USA is committed to intellectual property protection only when the historical conditions are right. It has a long history of free

riding: for most of the nineteenth century it ‘provided no copyright protection for foreign authors, arguing that it needed the freedom to copy in order to educate the new nation’; indeed, the USA did not sign the Berne Convention until 1988. In the same way, ‘parts of Europe built their industrial bases by copying the inventions of others, a model which was followed after World War II by both South Korea and Taiwan’ (The Economist, 2002, cited in Stenton, 2004: p. 21; cf. Ben-Atar, 2004). Japan too has a history of using patents strategically ‘as a means of absorbing Western technology, and at the same time denying Western firms power to develop in Japan on the basis of patents obtained there through the Paris Convention’ (Kingston, 2004: p. 454). Yet despite these histories, the developing nations today are not allowed the luxury of strategically protecting their emergent industries in this way. Most areas of international trade with a basis in elaborated knowledge have been affected by the new world order initiated by the Uruguay round of GATT. They include the film and music industries, publishing, libraries and archives, the electronics industry, Internet protocols and domain names, and many others. Let me briefly summarize some of the problems that have arisen in the two key areas of the music industry and of genetic research.

The music industry The music industries of the twentieth century were built on an increasingly concentrated control of intellectual property rights carved out of a domain that ordinary understanding takes to be common and participatory. McLeod (2001: pp. 50 –54) gives the example of the song ‘Happy Birthday to You’, first published by two teachers from Kentucky as ‘Good Morning to All’ in 1893 and patented (with anonymously added lyrics) in 1935; the rights are now owned by Warner-Chappell, a subsidiary of AOL/Time-Warner, and are strictly enforced for all ‘public’performances, including parties held in restaurants, and citation in films or television programmes

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or in other musical texts (Stravinsky was forced to rewrite his 1955 Greeting Prelude to avoid infringement). Yet this ‘original’ score closely resembled a number of earlier versions: ‘Happy Greetings to All’ (1858), ‘Good Night to You All’ (1858), ‘A Happy New Year to All’ (1875), and ‘Happy Greeting to All’ (1885), to name only the ones that musicologists have noted. The song was, in other words, a folk song: drawn from the musical commons, it has been converted into a piece of private property from which rents worth about $2 million a year will be extracted until the year 2030 (the copyright – long separated from its ‘creators’ – would have expired in 1991 but was extended by the Copyright Act of 1976 to 2010 and in 1998 by a further 20 years). In this it is characteristic of the way modes of musical production based on intertextual practices of borrowing, adaptation, sampling, reworking and improvization have been constrained by a system of exclusive rights, concentrated in four massive global corporations: Vivendi Universal, Sony/BMG, AOL/Time-Warner and EMI/Virgin (cf. Towse, 2004: p. 60). The intellectual property regime around which the industry is structured addresses a basic problem: how to attach exchange value to an entity which has an almost limitless use value – that is, the problem of how to make an abundant public good scarce. The uncertainty that flows from the indeterminacy of uses (the unpredictability of the ‘take’ of any information product) entails considerable risk for capital investment. At the same time, the relatively high costs of initial production and the relatively low costs of subsequent copying of information goods make predictability imperative (Caves, 2000: pp. 2–3). The problem of the minimization of risk can be solved in part by the production of scarcity through control of the right to copy, which in turn is regulated by the legal institution of authorship. The assignment of their copyright by musicians and composers gives rise to what Frith (2004: pp. 181) describes as a ‘competitive culture of exploitation’ of those rights, in which tariffs are exacted by set quantities of notes and words without

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consideration for rights of fair use or for the effects on later productive users. Yet this control is in constant tension with the technologies of proliferation and dissemination that have so centrally marked the history of the last century: the record, audio tape, the compact disc and the whole apparatus of digital reproduction. Tape and digitalization in particular have made possible the creation of new forms of property relation: the proliferation of copies at virtually zero cost tendentially undermines the tight control of copying and the licensing strategies it makes possible. Three technologies developed in the 1990s – recordable CDs, MP3 compression algorithms, and P2P (peer to peer) filesharing protocols – exacerbated the pressure on the major corporations to defend their property rights against what they construed as ‘piracy’. They did this with a series of court cases against file-sharing companies (Napster, Grokster and others) and with the introduction of DRM (digital rights management) technologies into CDs and DVDs which restrict copying and inter-operability; which, since they are automatic, cannot distinguish between fair and unfair copying; and which are perpetual. Yet as Marshall argues, not only is this war against their customers one that the majors cannot win, it is based – like the initial adverse reaction of Hollywood to the video recorder, now its major source of revenue – on a bad business model: all the evidence is that music consumption is not a zero-sum game (cf. Lessig, 2004: p. 71); rather, unauthorized copying ‘plays a central role in the social activity of music enjoyment and thus acts as a stimulus for official sales’ (Marshall, 2004: p. 196).

Genetic research In March 2000 the US and British governments signed a joint decision not to patent the human genome, a decision precipitated by attempts by US biotechnology companies, especially Celera, to patent large tracts of the human genetic commons. There has been a continuing tension, however, between patent law in the USA and in the rest of

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the world: in the UK, for example, DNA per se is not patentable, but functional methods or products arising from it are. In the USA ‘raw’ DNA itself can be patented: ‘The US patent office routinely grants patents on genes, the only country in the world to do so. This allows the holder to charge fees if anyone uses them for a commercial purpose. It is the US law which is causing the current problems in the human genome project’ (‘Patenting the Human Genome’), and which is driving the rest of the world towards the greater protection given by the American system in order to maintain investment in their own biotechnology industries and to attract investment from US-based multinationals. By September 2000 over three million genome-related patent applications had been filed worldwide (‘Genetics and Patenting’), and more than half a million patents had been granted or were pending on genes and partial gene sequences. The European Patent Office had a backlog of some 15,000 biotechnology patent applications (‘Patent Applications: Full List’). A report in The Guardian of that year found that one firm, Genset of France, had applied for patents covering more than 36,000 human gene sequences, and that patents were pending on genes controlling processes in the human heart, teeth, tongue, colon, skin, brain, bone, ear, lung, liver, kidney, sperm, blood and immune system (Meek, 2000). Although the human genome itself was delivered to the public domain by the team that mapped it, with the sequences deposited in the publicly accessible database GenBank, the partial gene sequences coding for particular functions are not in the public domain. The granting of patent requires both identification of the function of the invention and some difference, however small, from the object in its naturally occurring state; but patent offices now routinely ignore these requirements. A grant of patent on gene sequences whose function is described only in the most general terms has the effect of blocking the more detailed research required to make this basic identification useful. The criticism is that ‘over the past quarter century . . . proprietary claims have reached further upstream from

end products to cover fundamental discoveries that provide the knowledge base for future product development’ (Rai and Eisenberg, 2003: p. 289). Corporations, universities and research laboratories have expanded the opportunities to file patent applications on the ‘fundamental research discoveries that broadly enable further scientific investigation’, including such things as ‘new DNA sequences, protein structures, and disease pathways, that are primarily valuable as inputs into further scientific research’ (Rai and Eisenberg, 2003: p. 291). The result of this rapid expansion of property rights in the area of genetic research is the creation of what Rai and Eisenberg (2003: p. 297) call ‘an anticommons, or “patent thicket” ’, which slows research down by making it at once more difficult and more expensive. More generally, the tradition of open science, built on the free flow and exchange of information, is eroded by the commercial drive to secrecy.

CULTURE AS PROPERTY The questions concerning intellectual property law that I have been discussing to this point give rise to a broader set of questions. In the first place these are questions about the cultures that enable different forms of relation and interaction between people and things. By culture I mean here the broad context of values and practices that governs social exchange, and which decides whether particular valued objects, attributes and institutions may be exchanged against others or should be withdrawn from exchange; and whether such exchange takes the form of gift transactions or of the alienation of objects in a market. In part this is a question about the kind of personal tie that exists between persons and things – and thus about how the categories of person and thing are constituted differently within different contexts. It is as well a question about the degree of abstraction that may be allowed in social transactions: that is, of the extent to which people are bound up with the things that are theirs,

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and thus to which things are extensions of persons, or whether things may be ceded in a relatively impersonal way that does not commit the receiver to ties of obligation to the one who gives or sells his things (Strathern, 1988: p. 159). These questions about culture are in turn questions about how cultures shift in response to pressures from conflicting social interests; and how they draw and redraw the definitions of what is thinkable and what is unthinkable in a given society. The enforced shift by farmers in many parts of the world from a culture of seedsaving and slow varietal breeding to the use of proprietary seed controlled by patent is one example of such a redefinition. Another is the tension between ordinary music users, who see no harm in downloading music from the web, and the music industry, which conceives this as a criminal action and is trying to bring about a general shift in moral norms to support its view. A third might be the norm of control of the development and supply of drugs by privately owned and profit-oriented pharmaceutical companies rather than by bodies with a direct and accountable commitment to public health. These are in one sense questions about the value form, and about historical changes in what is socially valued. For those of us who live in capitalist societies they have to do above all with the commodity form, and with the changes that have progressively extended it from land and moveable objects to immaterial objects, and from a relatively restricted set of goods to a much broader set, many of which would previously have been withheld from commodification. They are thus about some of the fundamental categories of our world: those of nature, the person, knowledge, and the structure of social relations. Philosophically, these historical changes are reflected in the discourse of neoliberal economics, with its vision of a universe of transactions subject to a single scale of cost/benefit analysis: a vision of extraordinary power and simplicity, which has captured the imagination of governments and of policy makers in most areas of the world.

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Intellectual property law, which governs the private ownership of immaterial products, is central to the changes that have taken place in the form of value over the last two centuries, and with particular intensity over the last 50 years, as knowledge has become a dominant component of economic value. Yet consideration of intellectual property issues raises with particular intensity the question of the balance that this body of doctrine seeks between a limited set of property rights and something that is other than property (cf. Boyle, 2003), or that is a different, communal and non-exclusive kind of property. If ‘culture’ is in one sense the overarching framework that governs distinctions between property and non-property, between the marketable and the unmarketable, it is also, under some circumstances, coming to be thought of as something that can itself be an object of possession. This turning of cultures into property is, however – and paradoxically – understood as a way of protecting them from appropriation and from commercial exploitation. The concept of cultural property was developed shortly after World War II, by analogy with the ‘biens culturels’ of the French civil law tradition (Prott and O’Keefe, 1992: p. 312), to designate items of national patrimony plundered in wartime or looted from archaeological sites. Three international treaties are of particular relevance. The first, which elaborates the concept of the ‘cultural heritage of all mankind’, was The Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, signed in The Hague in May 1954; the second, which worked with the assumption that ‘particular peoples have particular interests in particular properties, regardless of their current location and ownership’ (Coombe, 1998: p. 220), was The Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, adopted by UNESCO in November 1970. The third, which develops the argument that ‘All elements of heritage should be managed and protected as a single, interrelated and integrated whole’, is the United Nations report

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Protection of the Heritage of Indigenous People (1997). In addition, various pieces of national legislation govern the protection of the cultural heritage of indigenous peoples: these include Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Act (1984), aiming to protect ‘areas and objects in Australia’ from injury or desecration; and the US Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) which ‘provides a framework for the return of human remains, burial goods, and religious objects to tribes that can substantiate claims of descent or prior ownership’ (Brown, 2003: p. 17), and which has had important consequences for museums. In this developing legal context the concept of cultural property refers to whole cultures, or to cultural objects understood as parts of whole cultures. In much of the literature the framework of definition is national: cultural property is defined as national patrimony, and the debates have to do with the recovery of national treasures (such as the Elgin marbles, taken from the Parthenon in the nineteenth century and now claimed back by Greece), with the theft of antiquities and artworks, or with the value to the nation, over and above their commercial value, of aesthetic objects which constitute a national heritage. My focus here, however, will be on indigenous peoples and the kinds of claim to cultural property that they have been enabled to make. I am interested, first, in the notion developed as a consequence of those international treaties that such cultural manifestations as knowledges, customs, traditional designs and songs, and ceremonials should be understood and legally protected as emanations of a whole and singular culture; and second, that such protection is, perhaps necessarily, conceived and enforced within a commercial framework that in many ways goes quite counter to the cultural order it is protecting. It is important, first, to understand why such protections should be attractive to indigenous peoples. Rosemary Coombe puts the argument in a compelling form. Native Americans, she says, are still ‘a privileged form of alterity’ in North American advertising: ‘From Red Man® chewing tobacco,

Indian Spirit® air-freshener, Indian-style™ popcorn, teams of Braves® , Red Indian® jeans, Warrior boxes, and Indian heads on everything from baking soda tins and neon beer signs to children’s campgrounds, the corporeality of the “Indian” continues to mark the privileges of the incorporated in commerce’ (Coombe, 1998: p. 186). As Brown notes, more than 100 trademarks are drawn from the three tribal names Navajo, Cherokee and Sioux (Brown, 2003: p. 76). Although ‘Native Americans object to having their images and symbols treated as goods lying about in the public domain ready to the hand of any entrepreneur with something to sell’ (Newton, 1995: p. 1009), protest is made difficult because owners of trademarks and of football teams with ‘Indian’ names see their symbols as valuable assets in their own right, and any restriction on their use ‘is seen as tantamount to an expropriation without compensation’ (Coombe, 1998: p. 187). Moreover, since the American legal system is highly effective at protecting property rights and highly ineffective at protecting cultural values, ‘the most successful way for indigenous peoples to challenge these stereotypical representations of themselves may be to claim them: to claim the misrecognitions of others as their own proprietary products. To do so they must occupy the author-function and seize the commodity form against the grain . . .’ (Coombe, 1998: p. 199). What this means in practice can be seen from one case that Coombe, following Newton, describes at length. Crazy Horse Malt Liquor, a high-strength beer introduced in 1992, draws on the name of the nineteenthcentury Lakota statesman Tasunke Witko, or Crazy Horse. As a way of blocking what he and his community felt was a degrading use of Tasunke Witko’s name, his descendant Seth Big Crow developed a legal strategy that involved the descending ownership of his grandfather’s publicity rights. Although the case was brought in a Sioux tribal court in an attempt to fuse ‘elements of tribal custom and Euro-American values’ and thus to ‘give credence to present-day tribal values’ (Newton, 1995: p. 1045), the claimants

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nevertheless felt that the use of an intellectual property strategy based in ownership of the persona of Tasunke Witko ‘promised greater success than the more meaningful claim that the Sioux are spiritually injured by the use of an ancestral name to market a substance that continues to poison the lives of many Native communities’ (Coombe, 1998: pp. 199/200): claims of damage to property rights win out over claims of spiritual harm. Yet the downside of this decision is that, in order to prevent commercial exploitation of the spiritual values of the Lakota people, they were compelled to ‘characteriz[e] their own historical usage of names and symbols as exercises of commercial possession’ (Coombe, 1998: p. 204). The Lakota can only win in this exercise if they can show that they have a commercial interest in the name of their ancestor and that it is stronger than that of the company that is exploiting his name. This double bind is more generally that of any indigenous people attempting to impose its traditional cultural and legal understandings through a Western legal system that is oriented to the protection of individually or corporately owned property. Similar problems have arisen in Australian cases involving the appropriation of traditional designs by commercial operators, and where the categories of intellectual property only imperfectly fit the patterns of indigenous ownership. The model of collective ownership of traditional designs that holds in Australian Aboriginal communities gives rise to a series of tensions when it comes into conflict with Western legal systems. Howard Morphy’s analysis of the system of rights and obligations in relation to painting amongst the Yolngu of Northeast Arnhem Land, for example, stresses the complexity of the mardayin or ‘law’ that regulates overlapping clan and gender rights in territory and from which other kinds of right derive. Rights are of many kinds, ownership being only one of them; other rights include ‘the right to produce certain paintings, the right to divulge the meanings of a painting, and the right to authorize or restrict the use of a painting’ (Morphy, 1991: pp. 57–58). Such rights are more widely distributed than

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membership of an individual clan, and ‘a person may assert his right to discuss a particular painting or exercise control over its production without ever having produced the painting himself’. Further, ‘a distinction must also be made between rights in paintings and knowledge of paintings, although the two are closely connected. Rights in paintings include rights to knowledge of paintings and their meanings. Such knowledge, once gained, can be converted into rights at other levels, for example, rights to divulge the meanings of paintings to others’ (Morphy, 1991: p. 58). These rights are regulated by a series of restrictions on who can know. Women and uninitiated males in principle have no access to the sacred knowledge embedded in paintings – although in practice, Morphy argues, the question of restriction is more complex than this simple opposition would suggest and there is a considerable degree of open secrecy. Initiated boys at first produce only ‘outside’ paintings – paintings which incorporate publicly accessible knowledges. They do also serve as apprentices on sacred paintings, however, and may progress through layers of increasingly ‘inside’ knowledge as they move through the age hierarchy that governs access to secrets. Rights in a clan’s paintings pass from father to son on the basis of primogeniture and subgroup affiliation, but, in addition to this primary inheritance, children acquire a set of secondary rights in paintings of the maternal clan, and then through it in the group of associated clans; these are separate and distinct rights of use, knowledge and ownership of sacred designs. Yolngu art is at once a part of ancestral knowledge, and itself a set of representations of the events of the ancestral world.4 Its power is the same as that which emanates from the clan’s sacred objects, and paintings themselves possess – as well as representing – the power of the ancestral being. Since the Yolngu universe is divided between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ forms, Yolngu languages ‘tend to have a number of words for each object’ (Morphy, 1991: p. 78), such that things can be described either within a sacred or within a mundane lexicon. This principle applies

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equally to paintings, which may have a public and readily displayed interpretation, and an inner interpretation which has to do with the ancestral law and with the mapping of rights in sacred places within the clan’s territory. The model of collective ownership of artworks that Morphy sets up, and which of course corresponds to many other systems of indigenous legality, can only with difficulty be integrated into Western legal systems, and in many ways it goes against the grain of our expectations of what a public domain in information should be like. Writing that ‘communal design traditions are regulated by mechanisms outside the common eurocentric conceptions of individuated legal entitlements, powers and property’, McDonald (1997: p. 5) notes a series of tensions between the two systems. There is a possible conflict between the Copyright Act’s requirement of originality and the ‘derivative’ nature of many Aboriginal works of art (that is, their emphasis on the faithful reproduction of a story or a design). There is the problem of the lack of material embodiment for such things as sand- and body-painting, for ceremonies, and for indigenous knowledge, and ‘the difficulty may be particularly acute in that eurocentric discourse extends protection to particular works, whereas Indigenous law may regulate use of a resource pool of styles, methodologies, techniques and knowledge’ (McDonald, 1997: p. 41). Cultural rights in the indigenous system may not have a fixed duration, since their reach may be timeless rather than historical; and such a notion of perpetual protection belongs – from a European perspective – to ‘a mode of thinking concerning the regulation and ownership of cultural material which was firmly rejected in English legal thinking in the eighteenth century’ (McDonald, 1997: p. 41). Finally, the category of ownership works quite differently in the two systems: the indigenous stake in a story or a design involves not ‘property rights in the Western sense so much as usage or management rights, which are communal in nature’ (McDonald, 1997: p. 43), and which conflict with the exclusive rights given to individuals in copyright law. McDonald

quotes an affidavit made by one of the defendants in Milpurrurru to this effect: As an artist, while I may own the copyright in a particular artwork under Western law, under Aboriginal law I must not use an image or story in such a way as to undermine the rights of all the other Yolngu who have an interest whether direct or indirect in it. In this way I hold the image on trust for all the other Yolngu with an interest in the story. (McDonald, 1997: p. 44)

Indigenous artists are thus caught, as Pask (1994: p. 64) notes, in a peculiar tension between indigenous and Western law: the one governing the social relations within which they produce, use and disseminate their work, the other governing the legal rights that allow them to protect it. As Fred Myers puts it: One might say that these objects [Aboriginal artworks] have resisted the process of simple commodification by retaining a series of properties and values that are not reduced by the market and that recognize the interests of those beyond the owner. This, one presumes, is a limitation of any attempt to conceive of objects and relations of cultural property within the regime that has been developed for property in general. These objects typically defy the framework of ‘possessive individualism’. (Myers, 2002: p. 331)

At the same time, this clash of incompatible legal systems has forced the tentative and still contested emergence of models of collective ownership of information within Western law. It is a question here of categories of ownership which are required in order to solve the technical problems posed to Western law by Aboriginal systems of ownership. One such problem is posed in Australian law by a series of cases concerning copyright, an issue that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s with the incorporation of Aboriginal art into new contexts of use. As indigenous artworks became more saleable and in some cases more prestigious, there arose an unauthorized market, mostly in cheap clothing and souvenirs, reproducing ‘original designs’; the problem that was posed for copyright protection was that of the supposed absence of a norm of individual creativity amongst Aboriginal producers (Golvan, 1989: pp. 346–347).

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The assumption made by the courts and commentators was that Aboriginal art was not copyrightable because it is ‘folkloric’ and therefore based in ‘imitation and reproduction’ rather than in ‘originality’ (Sherman, 1994: p. 122).5 Let me briefly mention three of the bestknown cases. In Yumbulul v. Reserve Bank of Australia and Others, Terry Yumbulul brought an action against the Reserve Bank and his own agent concerning the reproduction of his work ‘Morning Star Pole’ on the Australian $10 note, claiming that he, Yumbulul, had no power to assign reproduction rights, since these were vested in the tribal owners of the rights, the elders of the Galpu clan in North East Arnhem Land. In his adjudication, Justice French said: ‘It may be that Australia’s copyright law does not provide adequate recognition of Aboriginal community claims to regulate the reproduction and use of works which are essentially communal in origin’ (cited in Golvan, 1992: p. 229). In Milpurrurru v. Indofurn Pty Ltd, three living and five dead Aboriginal artists sued over the importation of carpets woven in Vietnam and using their designs. Finding against the defendants, Justice Van Doussa awarded additional damages ‘for culturally based harm following infringement of copyright in their artworks’ (Puri, 1995: p. 302). These damages were awarded as a lump sum; and McDonald (1997: p. 29) comments that ‘it is noticeable how financial compensation was obtained by reference to the remedies available under the Copyright Act, but how these monies were then divided on a communal basis’: at once a repression and a recognition of the collective ownership of these designs. In Bulun Bulun and Milpurrurru v. R & T Textiles, it was argued that Johnny Bulun Bulun is authorized by his community to use and create certain designs (depending upon a kind of communal copyright implicit in traditional law), and that the use of his work by a Brisbane-based textile company therefore harmed not just the artist but his community. The broad question at stake here was the status of indigenous law within the hegemonic

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Australian legal system (a question that Newton explores at some length for the American system in her account of the powers of the Sioux tribal court). Justice Von Doussa ruled in this case that Milpurrurru, the clan elder associated with the case, has no equitable interest in Bulun Bulun’s work such as would be associated with joint ownership, but he does have a fiduciary interest; and he agreed therefore that the clan itself would be entitled to take action to enforce the copyright if the artist himself did not. The shift of attitude documented in these cases is indicative both of the continuing problem posed to the law by indigenous systems of cultural production, and of the move towards a greater willingness on the part of the courts to give a virtual recognition to that other, indigenous legal system which nevertheless cannot quite become visible within the system of Australian law. The shift is potentially of great significance for the evolution of legal thinking about cultural production. There are, however, a number of problems posed by the extension of intellectual property law to cover the communal ownership of collectively produced or authorized culture. The first, as I have mentioned, is its presumptive incompatibility with categories of Western intellectual property law. Tom Greaves lists three areas of difficulty: first, intellectual property law is designed for the protection of new knowledge, not already existing knowledge (which is already in the public domain); second, copyrights and patents are conferred only on individuals (including incorporated persons); third, copyrights and patents are temporary. Thus the problem is that ‘there is no identifiable inventor, all traditional culture is already in a public domain, and the monopoly benefits would, at best, be only for a finite number of years. The present purpose of patents and copyrights is to encourage change, not to maintain the traditional’(Greaves, 1994: p. 8). Second, there are a range of political problems in the adoption of Western legal categories by indigenous people. Here the strongest arguments have been made in

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relation to the protection of indigenous rights in traditional crop varieties. Stephen Brush writes that intellectual property rights are inappropriate for protecting indigenous biological resources because of ‘the monopolistic and exclusionary nature of intellectual property and the collective nature of indigenous knowledge’, and he lists five obstacles to the ‘utility’ argument for claiming intellectual property rights as a way of conserving crop genetic resources. These have to do with the introduction of a division of profits into social relations; with the difficulty of defining the group, and especially the ambiguity of the boundary between ‘indigenous’ and ‘peasant’ groups; with the potential to create new inequities reflecting the unevenness of the distribution of knowledge and biological resources between groups; with the reliance of intellectual property law upon state power, ‘a power not generally used in favour of indigenous people’ (Brush, 1994: p. 136); and with the fact that the market for biological resources is undeveloped, and that there are large stockpiles in the public domain. If we extend these arguments to the domain of culture, the central issue becomes that of what Brown (2004: p. 50) calls ‘the inexorable, commodifying logic of the culture-as-property perspective’. There are two dimensions to this. The first is that, ‘in drawing an impregnable wall around culture . . . we end up with something thoroughly property-like in its essence, exhibiting such key attributes of property as responsibility, identity, rights of control or disposition, and a “distribution of social entitlements” (Hann)’ (Brown, 2004: p. 58). The other has to do with the way such a dependence upon property rights involves a prior essentialization of complex cultural differences. Coombe notes the way such a conception of culture bears traces of the logic of copyright: ‘Each nation or group is perceived as an author who originates a culture from resources that come from within and can thus lay claim to exclusive possession of the expressive works that embody its personality’ (Coombe, 1998: pp. 224–225). Any dependence upon the reduction of cultural materials to a

supposed ‘whole culture’ defined in terms of property rights is likely to have the effect of reifying tradition in a simulacrum acceptable to Western courts and of disallowing the adaptive engagement with modernity that characterizes all living cultures. Murphy raises this question in relation to the argument that national cultures should have a property right in their heritage (Greece’s claim to the Elgin marbles, for example): ‘the problem’, he writes, ‘is what this means in an era of globalization following a long period of extensive and intensive culture contact and commercial exchange and the resulting near-impossibility of almost any culture remaining impervious to commodification’ (Murphy, 2004: p. 138). Brown’s critique of the influential Daes Report on The Protection of the Heritage of Indigenous People (1997) makes this point with great clarity in its argument against the assumption that throughout the world indigenousness is readily identifiable, both in individuals and in cultures. Members of such communities own their heritage, including its ‘works, arts, and ideas’, and they can manage it in a conscious fashion like any other resource. A people may specify precisely what their heritage consists of and what the rules for using it are to be. Other groups, including the state, must honour these definitions and rules. (Brown, 2003: pp. 211–212)

The Report, Brown says, is silent ‘about the world’s cultural and intellectual commons or whether one should even exist’: it ‘takes for granted that indigenous people are not part of any public other than their own enclosed conceptual universe and the piece of territory to which it belongs’; the report doesn’t consider how the enjoyment of absolute rights over a group’s cultural productions fits in with ‘the conduct of everyday life in pluralist societies’; and it isn’t concerned at all about the impact of new regulatory regimes on indigenous life – that is, with the bureaucratization of heritage management and the granting of power to ruling fractions over dissidents (Brown, 2003: pp. 211/212). This introduces the third problem with the notion of communal ownership of cultural property, namely that exceptionalist solutions

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in fact undermine the public domain in the form it takes in Western capitalist societies, and thus sets up a tension with values that we as intellectuals might be expected to espouse. Indigenous cultural systems are not built upon a principle of open access but are highly regulated and restricted; they are built upon secrecy as much as upon openness. For Strathern (1996: p. 22), ‘the crux is that intellectual property rights – whether recognized in patents for inventions, trade secrets, copyright, plant variety rights or trade names – cannot ordinarily be applied to general knowledge’ – that is, to knowledge which is already in the public domain – since the whole force of Western intellectual property law is to allow no more than a limited monopoly right over a part of the product, not a full monopoly. Hence the distinction between idea and expression, which expressly reserves ideas, methods and systems from private appropriation. Pask (1994: p. 73) puts the problem more directly: indigenous people’s interests in protecting cultural property may be directly in conflict with ‘universalist’ models which favour ‘either no regulation at all of intellectual objects, or regulation only in the interests of ensuring maximum availability’. On the face of it, there is a generally recognized need to broaden the public domain in order to ensure the accessibility of culturally significant symbols; but the political issues shift when the cultural heterogeneity of ‘the public’ is recognized (it includes both users and exploiters). The tension here is between a model of the public good grounded in a liberally defined public domain, and the protection of the cultures of groups which are not well served by openness to inspection and use by others. The interests of indigenous people in safeguarding a culture that defines them are different from and perhaps incommensurable with those of a social order that enforces exclusive property rights in culture.

CONCLUSION The questions that I have been exploring here are of interest not only for what they say about

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the socially conflicted consequences of claims to property rights in cultural materials, but because they require us to think hard about the work that is done in such contexts by the concept of ‘culture’ itself. In Frow (1995: p. 2) I wrote that culture is always a matter both of what binds together and of what keeps apart. At its most basic, it is a concept that refers to the means of formation and of identification of social groups. More precisely, as Fredric Jameson argues, it refers to a social group seen as other, or to my own group’s ways and customs as seen by another group; it is always ‘an idea of the Other (even when I reassume it for myself)’. (Jameson, 1993: p. 34)

The great virtue and the great defect of the concept is its ability to relativize cultures to each other. The virtues have to do with recognition and tolerance of otherness. The defects have to do with the way the concept tends to absolutize the otherness of the other, framing cultures as clearly delimited and coherent moral universes expressing the essence of a stable and rigidly bounded social group. The concept of culture tends to freeze the social life of groups, to reduce their complexity and their internal contradictions, and to exoticize cultural difference. It reifies the domain of the traditional, and it doesn’t work well with situations ‘where communal identity has been fractured through invasion, dispossession and the passage of time’ (Anderson, 2004: p. 591). It is now perhaps opportune, as DiMaggio has argued, to start working with a weaker conception that posits culture less as a totalizing paradigm than as ‘complex rulelike structures that constitute resources that can be put to strategic use’ (DiMaggio, 1997: p. 265). The uses to which culture is put are not incompatible with property: to the contrary, cultures are constituted by one or another kind of property relation. But the category of property is itself rapidly changing and extending its scope. Our understanding of the domain of the cultural is directly affected by these changes.

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NOTES 1 This chapter draws upon material from earlier articles and books which develop some of its themes, often at greater length. The relevant ones are Frow (1987), Frow (1996), Frow (1997), Frow (1998) and Frow (forthcoming). 2 I have written extensively about these transformations in ‘Gift and Commodity’, in Frow, 1997: pp. 102–217. 3 Most of my examples of copyright law are taken from US doctrine, which is the most highly developed in the world and which has set the pattern for the standardization of intellectual property law at a global level; the USA is, however, only one jurisdiction amongst many and it has its own idiosyncrasies. 4 Munn (1986: p. 5) writes of Walbiri cosmology, as it is manifested in guruwari, ancestral designs, that it ‘binds notions such as “ancestors”, “country”, and “dreams” into a unitary matrix of ideas, and it defines the relations between the present world of proximal, visible forms and the ancestral world that is distal and “out of sight”’. 5 Cf. Sherman (1994: p. 123): ‘Once the conclusion was reached that Aboriginal art was produced by anonymous artists on the basis of communal or external concerns, it was a short step to conclude that Aboriginal art was also characterized by the absence of historical change. This denial of the historical dimension played an important role in the idea that Aboriginal art did not attract copyright protection because it lacked originality’.

REFERENCES Anderson, J. (2004) ‘The politics of indigenous knowledge: Australia’s proposed communal Moral Rights Bill’, University of New South Wales Law Journal, 27(3): 585–604. Ben-Atar, D. (2004) Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power. New Haven: Yale University Press. Boyle, J. (2003) ‘Foreword: the opposite of property’, Law and Contemporary Problems, 66(1–2): special issue on The Public Domain, 1–32. Brown, M.F. (2003) Who Owns Native Culture? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brown, M.F. (2004) ‘Heritage as property’, in Verdery and Humphrey (eds), pp. 49–68. Brown, M. (2005) ‘Heritage trouble: recent work on the protection of intangible cultural property’, International Journal of Cultural Property, 12: 40–61. Brush, S.B. (1994) ‘A non-market approach to protecting biological resources’, in Greaves (ed.), pp. 138–143.

Caves, R.E. (2000) Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chartier, R. (1994) ‘Figures of the author’, in Sherman and Strowel (eds), pp. 7–22. Coombe, R. (1998) The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cornish, W.R. (1981) Intellectual Property: Patents, Copyright, Trade Marks and Allied Rights. London: Sweet and Maxwell. DiMaggio, P. (1997) ‘Culture and cognition’, Annual Review of Sociology, 23: 263–287. Drahos, P. with Braithwaite, J. (2002) Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? London: Earthscan. Eagleton, T. (2000) The Idea of Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Edelman, B. (1979) Ownership of the Image: Elements for a Marxist Theory of Law, Tr. E. Kingdom. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Frith, S. (2004) ‘Music and the media’, in Frith and Marshall (eds), pp. 171–188. Frith, S. and Marshall, L. (eds) (2004) Music and Copyright, 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Frow, J. (1987) ‘The Subject of Law’, in Wickham (ed.), pp. 68–74. Frow, J. (1995) Cultural Studies and Cultural Value. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Frow, J. (1996) ‘The signature: three arguments about the commodity form’, in Grace (ed.), pp. 151–200. Frow, J. (1997) Time and Commodity Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Frow, J. (1998) ‘Public domain and collective rights in culture’, Intellectual Property Journal, 13(1): 39–52. Frow, J. (forthcoming) ‘New world order and the public domain’, Indian Journal of Law and Technology. ‘Genetics and patenting’, Human Genome Project Information, www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/ Human_Genome/elsi/patents.shtml, last accessed 3/9/2006. Golvan, C. (1989) ‘Aboriginal art and copyright: The case for Johnny Bulun Bulun’, EIPR 11(10): 346–355. Golvan, C. (1992) ‘Aboriginal art and the Protection of Indigenous cultural rights’, EIPR 14(7): 227–232. Grace, H. (ed.) (1996) Aesthesia and the Economy of the Senses. Sydney: University of Western Sydney. Greaves, T. (1994a) ‘Introduction’, in Greaves (ed.), pp. 3–16. Greaves, T. (ed.) (1994b) Intellectual Property Rights for Indigenous Peoples: A Sourcebook. Oklahoma City: Society for Applied Anthropology.

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Hann, C.M. (1998a) ‘Introduction: the embeddedness of property’, in Hann (ed.), pp. 1–47. Hann, C.M. (ed.) (1998b) Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoebel, E.A. (1972) Anthropology: The Study of Man, 4th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill. Hohfeld, W.N. (1923) Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Legal Reasoning, and Other Legal Essays. New Haven: Yale University Press. Honoré, A.M. (1961) ‘Ownership’, in A.G. Guest (ed.), Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 107–147. Jameson, F. (1993) ‘On “Cultural Studies”’, Social Text 34: 17–52. Jaszi, P. (1991), ‘Toward a theory of copyright: the metamorphoses of “authorship”’, Duke Law Journal, 455–502. Kingston, W. (2004) ‘Why harmonisation is a Trojan Horse’, EIPR 26(10): 447–460. Lessig, L. (2004) Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin. Litman, J. (1990) ‘The public domain’, Emory Law Journal 39(4): 965–1023. Lowie, R.H. (1961 [1920]) Primitive Society. New York: Harper. Lury, C. (1993) Cultural Rights: Technology, Legality and Personality. London: Routledge. McDonald, I. (1997) Protecting Indigenous Intellectual Property: A Copyright Perspective. Redfern: Australian Copyright Council. McLeod, K. (2001) Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership, and Intellectual Property Law. NY: Peter Lang. Maine, Sir H.S. (1906 [1861]) Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relations to Modern Ideas. London: John Murray. Marshall, L. (2004) ‘Infringers’, in Frith and Marshall (eds), pp. 189–207. Mauss, M. (1967) The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, Tr. Ian Cunnison. New York: Norton. Meek, J. (2000) ‘The race to buy life’, The Guardian, Nov. 15. Merryman, I.J. and Elsen, A. (1987) Law, Ethics and the Visual Arts, 2nd edn. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Morphy, H. (1991) Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Munn, N. (1986) Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central

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Australian Society, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Murphy, T. (1994) ‘Legal fabrications and the case of “cultural property”’, in Pottage and Mundy (eds), pp. 115–141. Myers, F.R. (2002) Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Newton, N.J. (1995) ‘Memory and misrepresentation: representing Crazy Horse’, Connecticut Law Review, 27: 1003–1053. Pashukanis, E.B. (1983) Law and Marxism: A General Theory. ed. Chris Arthur, Tr. B. Einhorn (1978; rpt). London: Pluto Press. Pask, A. (1994) ‘Cultural appropriation and the law: An analysis of the legal regimes concerning culture’, Intellectual Property Journal, 8: 57–86. ‘Patent Applications: Full List’ (2000), The Guardian, November 15. ‘Patenting the Human Genome’, http://www. biotechanalytics.com/Topics/Human%20Genome% 20Patenting.htm, last accessed 10/4/05. Pottage, A. (2004) ‘Introduction: the fabrication of persons and things’, in Pottage and Mundy (eds), pp. 1–39. Pottage, A. and Mundy, M. (eds) (2004) Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Protection of the Heritage of Indigenous People (1997), no. E.97.xiv.3 (Geneva: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights). Prott, L.V. and O’Keefe, P.J. (1992) ‘ “Cultural heritage” or “Cultural property”’, International Journal of Cultural Property, 1: 307–320. Puri, K. (1995) ‘Cultural ownership and intellectual property rights post-Mabo: Putting ideas into action’, Intellectual Property Journal, 9(3): 293–347. Radin, M. (1996) Contested Commodities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rai, A.K. and Eisenberg, R.S. (2003) ‘Bayh-Dole reform and the progress of biomedicine’, Law and Contemporary Problems, 66(1–2): special issue on The Public Domain, 289–314. Ravilious, K. (2005) ‘Private companies own human gene patents’, The Guardian, October 14, at http:// www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,1591991,00. html, last accessed 4/9/2006. Rifkin, J. (2000) The Age of Access: How the Shift from Ownership to Access is Transforming Modern Life. London: Penguin. Rose, C. (2004) ‘Economic claims and the challenges of new property’, in Verdery and Humphrey (eds), pp. 275–296.

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Rose, M. (1993) Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ryan, M.P. (1998) Knowledge Diplomacy: Global Competition and the Politics of Intellectual Property. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press. Sell, S.K. (2003) Private Power, Public Law: The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sherman, B. (1994) ‘From the non-original to the Aboriginal: a history’, in Sherman and Strowel (eds), pp. 111–130. Sherman, B. and Strowel, A. (eds ) (1994) Of Authors and Origins: Essays on Copyright Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stenton, G. (2004) ‘Biopiracy within the pharmaceutical industry’, EIPR, 26(1): 17–24. Steyn, M. (1997) ‘Bowie Bonds: rock ‘n’ roll officially stops being revolutionary’, Slate, http://slate.msn. com/id/2894/?nav=navoa, posted 8th May, last accessed 4/9/2006. Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Strathern, M. (1996) ‘Potential property: intellectual rights and property in persons’, Social Anthropology, 4(1): 17–32. The Economist (2002) ‘Patently Problematic’, Sept. 14.

Towse, R. (2004) ‘Copyright and economics’, in Frith and Marshall (eds), pp. 54–69. Verdery, K. and Humphrey, C. (2004) ‘Introduction: Raising questions about property’, in Verdery and Humphrey (eds), pp. 1–25. Verdery, K. and Humphrey, C. (eds) (2004) Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy. Oxford: Berg. Weiner, A. (1992) Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wickham, G. (ed.) (1987) Social Theory and Legal Politics. Sydney: Local Consumption Publications. Woodmansee, M. (1984) ‘The genius and the copyright: economic and legal conditions of the emergence of the “author”’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 17(4): 425–448.

Legal cases and reference texts Black’s Law Dictionary (1968) 4th edn. St. Paul: West Publishing Company. Bulun Bulun and Milpurrurru v. R & T Textiles (1998) 1082 FCA. Milpurrurru v. Indofurn Pty Ltd (1995) 91–116 A.I.P.C. 39,051. Yumbulul v. Reserve Bank of Australia and Others (1991) 21 IPR 481 at 490 (Fed. Crt. Australia).

21 Culture and Economy Timothy Mitchell

To conventional ways of thinking, economy and culture stand as opposites. The economy is the sphere of material needs, it is said, shaped by a universal human requirement to interact with the environment in order to secure survival and satisfy wants. Culture, from this perspective, represents merely the local meanings people attach to this process or the particular values that shape their needs. The cultural turn in social analysis marked a shift in emphasis, drawing attention to the fact that no economic process can be understood independently of its cultural dimensions and proposing a much closer understanding of how the economic and the cultural are related. Yet the question remained one of the relationship between two different dimensions of the social world. Economy and culture continued to appear as opposites. Today, debates about economy and culture raise a more interesting problem. How is the modern sphere we call the economy brought into being? What technical and social arrangements define it, in such a way that however many cultural aspects we show the economic to have, it seems that economy and culture still refer to different spheres or dimensions? If the term culture continues to

presuppose the existence of the economic, as the non-cultural dimension in relation to which culture establishes its location, then to ask about the making of the economy is also to ask how we came to form our contemporary ideas about culture.

ECONOMY AS GOVERNMENT It is generally agreed that the economy came into being as an object of government and thinkable entity only in the modern period. Most analyses locate the emergence of the economy in the development of new forms of political power and social knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including new ways of administering land and labour and new methods of knowing about goods and their circulation (Appleby, 1978; Brown, 1996; Buck-Morss, 1995; Escobar, 2005; Hindess, 1998; Kalpagam, 2000; Meurat, 1988; Poovey, 1998; Rose, 1999; Tribe, 1978, 1988). As we will see, however, the actual birth date of the economy remains subject to debate. The appearance of the economy is often related to Foucault’s well-known analyses of discipline and biopolitics (Foucault, 1977,

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1997, 2003). If discipline refers to methods of managing human bodies through the control of movement, spatial arrangement and mechanical effort, and to the forms of knowledge that these methods generated and employed, then these new ways of governing turned the very mental and physical agency of persons into processes that could be disassembled, monitored, rearranged, intensified and recombined. Foucault emphasizes the development of these methods in the training of modern armies and in other enclosed, disciplinary institutions such as schools, prisons and asylums. But the same techniques also began to shape new worlds of supervised labour, commercial exchange and cultural consumption. The factory became a site of discipline, inspection and the decomposition and reassembly of forces, from which Marx (1992 [1867]) derived his analysis of nineteenth-century capitalist society. In commerce, the modern joint-stock corporation, especially the large colonizing corporation, which by the early nineteenth century represented its most well-organized form, developed novel powers of accounting, control and supervision (Blackburn, 1997: p. 333; Stinchcombe, 1995: pp. 57–58). Railway corporations, which provided a template in the second half of the nineteenth century for the organization of the large industrial corporations of the early twentieth century, solved problems of managing operations over long distances and disciplining widely distributed workers and customers, in part by borrowing methods from the armed forces (Chandler, 1977; Roy, 1997). In the same period, commodity markets began to rival the colonizing corporations as long-distance mechanisms for assembling, regulating and distributing goods, their producers and their consumers (Cronon, 1991). New sites of cultural consumption and training, such as museums, world exhibitions and department stores, also developed novel methods of organizing human sociality and desire (Barry, 2001; Bennett, 1988; Mitchell, 1989). Biopower, referring to parallel transformations at the level of populations rather

than individuals, involved the organization of bodies across the territory of a modern state through measures aimed at managing the health, reproduction and livelihoods of entire communities. Sovereign power, Foucault (1997) proposes, was no longer limited to the power to command death or let live, but was involved in creating, fostering and managing life. As rationalities of power, discipline and bio-power involved new ways of doing and new ways of knowing. In disciplinary institutions, one sees the emergence of techniques for observing, measuring and reforming human conduct, and the numerous modern forms of accounting (Miller, 2001; Miller and O’Leary, 1987). At the level of populations, parallel forms of counting and accounting developed, in the aggregation and organization of knowledge relating to birth, disease and mortality, the growth or decline of population, the ownership of property and the circulation of wealth. As administrative authorities harnessed and developed these new methods of accounting, political life could be increasingly organized in terms of what Desrosières calls ‘the politics of large numbers’ (Desrosières, 1998, 2003; Hacking, 1990). Both discipline and bio-power were concerned with questions of government, not in the narrow contemporary sense of public administration, but in the broader meaning of the term whose genealogy Foucault unearths. Government referred to ways of acting upon, regulating and managing the conduct of others, whether in governing personal conduct, managing the health and livelihoods of a population, or controlling the circulation of material and political resources. At the centre of the new forms of government was the field of political economy (Foucault, 2003; Miller and Rose, 1990). Before the twentieth century, the term ‘economy’ (usually with no definite article) did not have its contemporary meaning (Mitchell, 2005a). It referred to ways of acting and to the forms of knowledge required for effective action. Originally used in relation to the family household or the estate, ‘economy’ denoted

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the proper management of the circulation of goods, the husbanding of resources, the supervision of labour and the accumulation of wealth. The idea of the economy of the household or estate was extended in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to refer to proper management on a more extended scale (Poovey, 1998; Tribe, 1978). In his article on political economy for the great French Encyclopédie, Rousseau explains that the word economy had originally meant ‘the wise and legitimate government of the house for the common good of the whole family’, but had now been extended to mean ‘the government of that great family, the State’ (Rousseau, 1913 [1755]: p. 117). Political economy denoted the knowledge and practice required for governing the realm and managing its population and resources. It referred to the economy, or government, of the polity, not to the politics of an economy. Some scholars argue that while the concept of ‘the economy’ in its modern sense is not found in the work of the classical political economists, the modern idea of the economy does emerge in the nineteenth century, but outside Europe, especially in the government of the colonies (Goswami, 2004). Friedrich List’s National System of Political Economy (1856 [1841]), written by a German-American and popular in India, Japan and other parts of the non-European world, is singled out as a precocious study of the ‘national economy’ in its twentiethcentury sense. For List as for other writers, however, the term economy still denotes the methods of government rather than its object. National economy, or ‘the economy of the people’, refers to ‘the institutions, the regulations, the laws, and the circumstances which govern the economical conditions of the citizens’. He contrasts this with ‘the financial economy of the state’, which refers ‘to the collection, to the use, and the administration of the material means of a government’ (List, 1856 [1841]: p. 281). As with other writers, economy refers to the forms of administration, regulation, law and social circumstance that define the processes of government.

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Most studies of governmentality that develop Foucault’s analysis fail to notice that no nineteenth-century writer conceived of the economy as an object or sphere. Foucault himself mentions in passing that the phrase ‘the economy’ was not used in the period he discusses. He notes that ‘the very essence of government – that is the art of exercising power in the form of economy – is to have as its main object that which we are today accustomed to call “the economy” ’(Foucault, 1991; emphasis added). He still assumes, however, that the object exists, even before anyone knew its name, and fails to ask when it was first named, and what difference this made. The marginalist revolution that began in the 1870s and was consolidated by the turn of the century displaced the field of classical political economy, and at the same time facilitated the rapid professionalization of economic expertise as an academic discipline (Mirowski, 1989; Routh, 1989). The possibility of conceiving of ‘the economy’ in the twentieth-century sense of the term was pushed further back. The object of analysis was now made up of forces, conceived as individual preferences or utilities, that were assumed to tend towards a state of equilibrium. The site of this mechanical equilibrium was ‘the market’. This term no longer referred to the social marketplace of Ricardo or Marx, conceptualized in relation to the city, to agriculture and to the factory, but to a utopic space, formulated geometrically, by the axes of a chart, as the two-dimensional plane upon which numerical utilities could meet and balance one another. As a neutral, planar surface, the market had no depth, no dynamic structure, no forces of its own, and thus no ‘macro’ dimension that could be described apart from the individual preferences that moved across it. As recently as the 1920s, the second edition of Palgrave’s Dictionary of Political Economy contained no separate entry for or definition of the term economy. It used the word only to mean ‘the principle of seeking to attain, or the method of attaining, a desired end with the least possible expenditure of means’

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(Palgrave et al., 1963 [1925–1926]: p. 678). In 1932, Lionel Robbins’ classic Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science described the subject matter of economics as ‘human behaviour conceived as a relationship between ends and means’ (Robbins, 1935 [1932]: p. 21) and never employed the term economy in its novel mid-twentieth-century sense.

THE ECONOMY In the course of the twentieth century, new ways of administering the welfare of populations, developing the resources of colonies, organizing the circulation of money, compiling and using statistics, managing large businesses and workforces, branding and marketing products and desiring and purchasing commodities brought into being a world that for the first time could be measured and calculated as though it were a free-standing object, the economy. ‘Economy’ no longer referred to a way of exercising power and accumulating knowledge; it now referred to an object of power and knowledge (Mitchell, 2005a). The emergence of the economy in the middle decades of the twentieth century differs from the era of nineteenth-century governmentality in at least three important senses. First, economists, government agencies and corporate planners defined the economy in ways that enabled them to claim the power to measure it, manage it and, above all, make it grow. They defined it not in terms of human labour power, or the management of resources, or the accumulation of national wealth, but as the circulation of money. The economy was conceived as the sum of all those transactions in which money changes hands, and its size and growth were to be calculated by estimating this sum. The idea of ‘growth’ was no longer limited in reference to primarily physical and human expansion, such as the expansion of imperial territory, national population or urban fabric. With the economy one had an object that could seem to

grow almost infinitely, without changing its physical size. Second, the idea of the economy belongs to the era of nation-states, in which human sociality is understood as a series of equivalent national units (Anderson, 1998). Each of these units claims the right to its own national state, replacing the earlier system of European colonial empires, and each is thought to be composed of a series of distinct sociotechnical spaces: a society, an economy and a culture (Mitchell, 2002). Third, the emergence of the idea that state, society, economy and culture exist as separate spheres, which collectively fill the space of the nation-state, coincided with the twentiethcentury development of the social and cultural sciences as distinct professional and academic fields. Political science, sociology, economics and anthropology (and the study of national literatures and histories in the case of Western societies) each contributed to the making of its respective object, providing it with concepts, calculations, agents and methods of evaluation. Portrayed as merely an object of knowledge, the economy, along with these other spheres, was in fact enmeshed in the new forms of academic expertise and professional knowledge. These new objects of expertise and public policy were constructed in reference to one another, but did not necessarily emerge simultaneously. In the case of the concept of culture, for example, the meaning of the term changed, as with the idea of economy, from denoting a process to denoting an object, but the timing varied (Bennett, 1998; Williams, 1983). The nineteenth-century sense of culture as aesthetic and intellectual development gave way to the twentieth-century concept of culture as a specific sphere of artistic and intellectual production, but the forms of government and expertise that helped define this new object emerged mostly in the second half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the naturalness of the idea of ‘economy’, ‘society’, ‘culture’ and ‘state’ as topological terms denoting distinct spheres of human sociality was strengthened by the way they referred to and helped define one another.

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Making the economy involved a wide range of socio-technical projects that embedded people and things in new machineries of calculation, new techniques of accounting and new impulsions of discipline and desire. The development of marketing and brand identity, the management of the flow of money by corporate and national banks, New Deal programmes such as electrification and the building of large dams, colonial development schemes and the post-war projects of development agencies and the World Bank: all contributed to the organization of worlds that could now be described and measured as the economy. Economists and most other social scientists would argue that the novel use of the term ‘economy’ was simply a new way of naming an object that already existed. All societies make things and market them, buy goods and sell them. In the twentieth century, economists, business managers, bankers and government officials merely coined a new term to represent the material practices they had always been concerned with. It is important, they would say, to distinguish representations from reality, the realm of meaning from the object world to which it refers – or culture from economy. Yet in practice they did no such thing. The representations that economists produced participated in making the economy. Their contribution was to help devise the forms of calculation in terms of which new kinds of socio-technical practice were organized, to monitor these forms of practice as though they formed a self-regulating system, and to put forward rival accounts of how the system worked. In material ways economic theory helped to format and regulate the processes to which it referred. The concepts, calculations and statistical data involved in this work were all forms of representation. But the representations were part of the object, not something outside it. In devising concepts and calculations that made it possible to imagine, manage and modify an object called the economy, economics was not simply describing what always existed. It was participating in its formation.

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EMBEDDEDNESS Those who locate the birth of the economy in practices of government of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries share a common assumption with those who locate its emergence in the transformations of the midtwentieth century: that the economy does not preexist the forms of accounting, circulation, representation and regulation that bring it into view. One can contrast this approach with an earlier understanding of the modern emergence of the economy, that of Karl Polanyi (1944). Polanyi’s argument in The Great Transformation shaped a generation of research among anthropologists on the relationship between economy and culture. Thanks to the work of Granovetter (1985), it has influenced a more recent generation of scholarship in economic sociology. It continues to be the most widely discussed account of the emergence of the modern economy (Block, 2003; Block and Somers, 2005; Burawoy, 2003; Carrier and Miller, 1998; Escobar, 2005; Krippner, 2001). Polanyi shares with more recent studies the view that the modern era is characterized by the emergence of economic relations as a distinct object of government and knowledge. But he has a different understanding of how this occurred, what the economy is, and how it relates to modern economic knowledge. Understanding these differences is complicated by the fact that Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation in 1941–1943 (it was first published in 1944), during the years when the twentieth-century concept of the economy was being formulated. Although the book is said to describe the birth of the economy in the nineteenth century, it does not express the transformation in quite these terms, leading Block (2003), for example, to puzzle over Polanyi’s inability to find adequate words for the change he is describing. Polanyi describes what happens as the separation of ‘market relations’ or ‘market economy’ (with no definite article) from the non-market relations in which they were embedded. As Hart (2004) points out, The Great Transformation portrays this change as

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the birth not of the economy but of ‘society’. Society emerges in a counter-movement to the freeing of market relations, in the form of the collective protections and regulations required to limit the damage done by those relations. In later essays, published in the 1950s and 1960s, Polanyi recasts his argument as an account of the modern disembedding of ‘the economy’. By this point, the idea of the economy as a self-contained social sphere had become self-evident. In retrospect, however, we can see The Great Transformation as part of a mid-twentieth century discourse that helped identify and define this new object. In his later essays, Polanyi shifts his focus from describing the great transformation of the modern era to understanding what the term ‘the economy’ might refer to in pre-modern societies. The difficulties he encounters in trying to identify the economy in societies that did not themselves construct representations of an economy are instructive. Polanyi argues that what emerges in the nineteenth century is the economy of formal economic theory. In earlier periods, ‘the facts of the economy’ were ‘embedded in situations that were not in themselves of an economic nature’ (Polanyi et al., 1957; ‘The Place of Economies …’, p. 242). In premodern societies, however, ‘only the concept of the economy, not the economy itself, is in abeyance’ (Polanyi, 1968: p. 86). The premodern, embedded economy, which he terms the empirical or substantive economy, in contrast to the formal economy of theory, is ‘an instituted process of interaction between man and his environment, which results in a continuous supply of want satisfying material means’ (Polanyi, 1957; ‘Economy as instituted process’, p. 248). Thus for Polanyi the economy is a reality that always exists; the task is to locate and map its position in relation to a larger real object, society. It may be visible as something separate from society, or it may be ‘embedded’ within it, disguised in other forms. The idea of embeddedness turns out to be a difficult concept. Polanyi himself stumbles on the difficulty. The components of the embedded economy may be ecological, technical or

societal, he explains, depending on whether they belong primarily to ‘the natural environment, the mechanical equipment, or the human setting’ (Polanyi, 1957: p. 249). But how does one identify which aspects of nature, the human and the mechanical constitute this human/nonhuman, natural/mechanical apparatus? The bare process of satisfying wants, he acknowledges, could not be identified as an economy, even an embedded one, because it would possess ‘no all-round reality’. It would be just an uncoordinated sequence of movements and actions, involving the interplay of the human and nonhuman. ‘What occurs on the process level between man and soil in hoeing a plot or what [sic] on the conveyor belt in the constructing of an automobile is, prime facie, a mere jigsawing of human and nonhuman movements’ (Polanyi, 1957: p. 249). There has to be some interdependence among the parts and some pattern of recurrence, otherwise ‘the interacting elements of nature and humanity would form no coherent unit’(Polanyi, 1957: p. 249). The jig-sawing of the human and the nonhuman appears to be the key to the economy. The economy is a process or mechanism that connects the human and the nonhuman, the cultural and the material. Polanyi’s co-author Hopkins offers the example of a shoemaker, a craftsman whose liminal status makes him a curiously recurrent figure in Western political thought (Rancière, 2004). To make shoes, the shoemaker must have leather. His ‘having’ the leather depends on a series of noneconomic processes, such as the maturation of the calf and the action of acid on the hide. These natural processes are said to be external to the social system. Hopkins suggests that the economy can be thought of as a ‘reduction gear’ operating in ‘the “boundary sphere” between the “purely” natural and the “purely” social’. The economy is a boundary mechanism that maintains the line separating the social and the natural, the human and the nonhuman (Hopkins, 1957: pp. 296–297). Only recently, with the intervention of science and technology studies, has this question of boundary mechanisms been opened up to new kinds of analysis.

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For Polanyi, the mere jigsawing of the human and nonhuman can be identified as an economy because these processes are ‘instituted’; that is, they are organized into repetitive and recognizable patterns. Being instituted turns a human/nonhuman process into ‘a mere referent of terms like labour and capital, craft and union, slacking and speeding, the spreading of risks and other semantic units of the social context’ (Polanyi, 1957: p. 249). Human/nonhuman interaction becomes an economy – something real, possessed of an all-round reality – by becoming the referent of a discourse, a set of institutional terms and categories such as risk, capital and labour. To be real means to be the object of a discourse. The instituting of the economic enables the process to ‘have a function in society’ and to ‘possess a history’ (Polanyi, 1957: p. 249). These qualities ‘cause everyday thought as well as scholarship to turn towards matters of human livelihood as a field of eminent practical interest as well as theoretical and moral dignity’(Polanyi, 1957: p. 249). The contradiction here is instructive. On the one hand, Polanyi argues, before its disembedding in the nineteenth century the economy was not an object of which people were conscious. On the other hand, economic facts can still be found, embedded in other processes and functioning as an economy. Yet the jigsawing of the human and the nonhuman that constitutes interaction with the environment, along with the equipment used in this jigsawing, can take on an allround reality and function as an (embedded) economy only when it becomes the object of a discourse – when both scholarship and everyday thought treat it as a distinct entity. In the end Polanyi found no way to identify an economy independent of the forms of knowledge that might be involved in its constitution.

NETWORKS Despite the problems encountered by the idea of embeddedness, in recent decades the concept has enjoyed a revival. While

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British social theory was turning to Foucault and the study of governmentality, American theorists rediscovered Polanyi. In perhaps the most frequently cited sociology article of the recent past, Mark Granovetter (1985) argues that Polanyi was partly right and that all economies, not just premodern ones, should be understood in terms of the networks that embed them in wider social and cultural ties. American sociology was responding to developments in neoclassical economics, which had acquired a renewed interest in the study of non-market economic organizations such as the firm. In market societies, the role of large firms and other institutions represented a challenge to neoclassical accounts of the economy as the outcome of individual, utility-maximizing calculation. Economists associated with the neoliberal movement (a transatlantic political and intellectual network established in the early 1950s and enjoying a dominant position within economics in the USA since the 1970s), concerned to defend the prerogatives of corporations against government regulation, devised ways to describe firms as the result of efficient and therefore rational responses to the costs and weaknesses of market transactions and to the technological demands of production (North, 1981; Williamson, 1975). The new institutional economics, as this approach was known, was able to describe any nonmarket arrangement found in a market society, including its distinctive cultural forms, as the product of self-interested calculation. The sociologists disagreed with the new institutional economics. Granovetter showed that the economic organization of a given industry was not necessarily the most economically rational or technologically efficient, and that even the question of which activities were organized as a single industry or economic sector was in part the outcome of sociological factors. To account for developments that did not fit the logics of market rationality, he modified Polanyi’s thesis to argue that even modern economies remain partially embedded in social and cultural networks. His study of the development of the electric utility industry, for example, concluded that

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the shape of the industry arose not from an optimizing rationality but from ‘longstanding friendships, similar experiences, common dependencies, corporate interlocks, and active creation of new social relations’ (Granovetter and McGuire, 1998). Granovetter’s work gave rise to a generation of scholarship on ‘market networks’, tracing the social and cultural ties in which economies were embedded. Although it offered a more persuasive account of the institutional forms of market societies than did the work of institutional economics, the sociology of economic networks had two notable weaknesses. First, as Zelizer (1988), Krippner (2001) and others point out, it continued to accept the economists’ assumption that the economy should be understood as the sphere of self-interested individual rationality. The freeing or disembedding of this self-interested calculation from earlier cultural constraints is said to define the arrival of modernity. Even as attention shifted to the networks of social and cultural ties from which it is unable to fully disentangle itself, this calculating rationality itself was not open to investigation. Pure economic calculation is understood as the faculty of an individual agent, achievable to the extent that the agent can free itself from the constraints of society and culture. This weakness is connected to a second one. Since the economy is assumed to exist as a space of individual calculation, the networks in which the economy is embedded are conceived only as connections among persons. Networks are formed out of friendships, professional associations, shared experiences, business connections and the interlocking ownership of corporations. The term embeddedness refers only to the way the economy is contained within the ties of human culture and sociality. It does not refer to ties between persons and things, or to the complex but very common arrangements that connect together human agency, equipment or hardware of various kinds, and the codes or intellectual devices that enable networks and agencies of different sorts to operate. This limited conception of networks is curious. Granovetter’s research exploring how the

economy is embedded in networks is based on a study of the formation of a complex technical network, the electrical power industry. The sociology of economic networks is said to be an approach particularly suited to studying other kinds of socio-technical network, such as telecommunications, transportation, entertainment and finance (Granovetter and McGuire, 1998: p. 167). Such networks are built out of much more than just personal connections. Yet because economic sociology shares with economics the assumption that an economy is a space of self-interested personal calculation, to re-embed this economy in culture and society requires only the demonstration of personal ties.

SOCIO-TECHNICAL ARRANGEMENTS Another way to understand the making of the economy has been to take seriously its socio-technical qualities. This offers an alternative to approaching it as the sphere of simple human rationality, whether a rationality disembedded at a certain historical moment by the weakening of wider social constraints, or a rationality still limited by the personal networks and cultural entanglements from which it is unable to fully extricate itself. It also differs from the Foucauldian emphasis on the economy as a form of governmentality, to be read as the expression of a particular rationality of power. The alternative draws upon research in science and technology studies (STS) and is associated particularly with the work of Michel Callon (1998) and the Paris school of STS led by Callon and Bruno Latour. Like much of the governmentality scholarship considered earlier, Callon and Latour do not approach the world as something composed of large structures such as economies, societies, cultures, states or classes, terms denoting containers that envelop the individual or in relation to which the individual is positioned. From an STS perspective, these terms refer merely to projects that rival forces attempt to define, appeal to, act on behalf of, or make natural (Latour, 2005). At the

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same time, they do not take the world to consist only of atomized human agents. In fact the capacity for meaningful action does not belong primarily to individual persons, Callon argues, but is typically distributed among various combinations of human beings and technical devices. Drawing on a notion of ‘distributed action and cognition’ (Hutchins, 1995), he refers to these heterogeneous combinations as ‘actor-networks’ (Callon, 1987). This term is very different from the concept of networks in American sociology, which retains an individualist conception of agency and sees networks only as the relatively stable connections between agents. More recently, Callon has preferred the term ‘agencement sociotechnique’ to denote the combinations of human and technical capacities that populate the world (Callon, 2004). The phrase is usually translated as ‘sociotechnical arrangement’, but the word agencement connotes agency as well as arrangement – or what might be called an ‘arrangency’. Like Foucault’s concept of dispositif, and Bourdieu’s (1977) habitus, it is a term that moves beyond the distinction between agency and structure. It carries more sense of collective agency than Foucault’s term, however, and directs more attention to the technical and material than Bourdieu’s. The use of the phrase agencement sociotechnique indicates that it is impossible to separate in advance the human and the technological, and that the particular mixes in which human and technical, cultural and material, animate and inanimate, are combined is a question to be answered by investigation rather than assumed from the start. With his essays in The Laws of the Markets (1998), Callon brought the methods of STS to the study of economists and the economic. Echoing the way in which Foucault proposed that disciplinary methods of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries be studied as a set of technologies, modes of calculation and forms of knowledge that spread across a range of sites, Callon argues that markets be examined as diverse calculative devices that have proliferated in the contemporary period. They are collective socio-technical

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arrangements that a wide range of actors attempt to shape – not just the producers and consumers of conventional economic analysis, or the firms and other agents of economic sociology, but also lawyers, bureaucrats, market analysts, accountants and economists themselves (Callon, 2005; Callon and Muniesa, 2005). One can study concrete markets to see how these diverse forces frame and define markets. Given the role of economists and the theoretical tools they bring, economics is not just a science for describing the economy; it is, Callon suggests, performative. Its performative aspect is especially clear if one employs an expanded definition of economics to include the great variety of technical expertise that competes or collaborates in the forming of the economy, such as accounting, management, finance, statistics and planning. From a performative perspective, the narrowly conceived homo economicus of classical and neoclassical economics is not to be dismissed as a fiction that should be replaced by more complete accounts of human sociality. Rather, the goal is to study how economists are actively engaged in the coconstruction of socio-technical worlds that enable this narrow, calculating rationality to thrive. Several studies have deployed the methods of STS to examine the economic. Leyshon and Thrift (1997) study the dynamic international actor-networks transforming the production and distribution of money. Holm (2001, 2007) demonstrates the socio-technical work required to transform fish in the oceans into quotas that can be owned and traded. Caliskan (2007) examines the calculative technologies deployed in the construction of the global cotton market. MacKenzie (2006) explores the creation of a market for financial derivatives in which the latest economic theory is built into the market’s structure. Other recent studies of finance and financial markets that draw to differing degrees on the methods of STS include Beunza and Stark (2004), Knorr Cetina and Bruegger (2002), Lépinay (2003), Muniesa (2003), Riles (2004) and Zaloom (2006). In each

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case, rather than examining the gap between economic representations and the reality of economic practice, the authors show the constitutive role of economics in performing the economy. Knorr Cetina and Preda (2005) and MacKenzie et al. (2007) bring together many of these studies in edited collections, while Barry and Slater (2004) explore some of the political implications of STS for the study of the contemporary economy. The strength of these kinds of studies is in their detailed analysis of particular market arrangements, deployments of knowledge and practices of calculation. Rather than asking about the relations between economy and culture, or between market rationality and social ties, they examine the socio-technical work that makes calculation possible and that frames certain agents, objects and computations as markets. However, this focus on the technologies of the market means that such work does not, on the whole, address the larger question of the economy as a space of calculation and political project. Can the methods of STS be used to think not just about markets, but about the economy? What would this entail, and how would it enable us to think about the co-constitution of the economy and culture as objects of government and knowledge?

THE ECONOMY AS SOCIO-TECHNICAL PROJECT An approach to the question of the economy is suggested by an earlier work in science studies, the superb account by Thomas Hughes (1983) of the making of the modern electricity industry in the USA and Europe. This is arguably the best study available of the socio-technical work of making the industrialized economic world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The formation of this technical world predates the emergence of the economy as a political project in the mid-twentieth century. But in the building of large-scale socio-technical schemes of this sort one can trace the creation of the kinds of arrangements and agencies that

could be subsequently grasped and measured as an economy. Hughes’s work can be used to outline an analysis that does not take for granted the concept of the economy, embedded or otherwise, and thus brings into view the work involved in making the world calculable in new ways. At the same time, since Hughes’s study examines the design and construction of networks – for the generation and distribution of electricity – it enables us both to enrich and to see the limits of the concept of a network employed by economic sociology. The first thing to consider is the nature of the new socio-technical networks of the twentieth century. Electrical networks differ from, say, the networks of colonial trading corporations that spanned the globe a century before Thomas Edison created the Edison Electric Light Company, or the computer networks developed a century later. But in each case a network is something much more than the array of personal ties described by economic sociology, or by similar work in economic anthropology. It is a technical arrangement as much as a social one. The technical dimension and its place in hybrid forms of agency and agencement is what is most lacking in more conventional cultural or sociological understandings of the emergence of the economy. To build the new electrical networks, Edison had to establish not only ties among investors, politicians and technicians, but also circuits for the transmission of capital into his enterprises, generating stations to transform coal into electric power, carbon filaments whose resistance was calibrated to the currentcarrying capacity of copper cables and to the cost of the copper, a system of patents and the means to enforce them, and cable networks to carry direct or alternating current from place to place (Hughes, 1983). These other elements would traditionally be described as purely physical, technological or financial, in contrast to the social and cultural ties among agents that economic sociology describes. But the development of domestic electric lighting did not respect such categories. It depended upon building networks that tied together

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humans and electrons, the flow of electric current and the flow of capital, the calculation of the cost of copper wiring and of its conductivity. Hughes describes some of the heterogeneous connections involved (Hughes, 1983: pp. 39–41). The Edison Electric Light Company, set up in 1878, did not sell lighting. It held patents on the devices Edison’s team invented – light bulbs, generators, distribution systems – and licensed or sold the patents around the world to raise income and attract investment to finance Edison’s workshops, experiments and demonstration projects. It organized capital flows through networks of lawyers, legislation, patent enforcement and publicity. Edison’s first central generating station began commercial operation in 1882 in New York City at 257 Pearl Street, close to Wall Street. The location was chosen to attract the attention of financiers, and because the half-mile radius its distribution network could reach included many shops and restaurants, which would draw customers and publicize the system. This was not just a human network, connecting Edison to friends and financiers. It was a hybrid network, connecting engineers, generators, filaments, buildings, consumer desire and capital investment. Such hybrid networks began to put in place the interconnected spaces and flows that could subsequently be identified as the economy. The economy was not a mechanism for managing ‘the “boundary sphere” between the “purely” natural and the “purely” social’, as Polanyi’s followers suggested. The natural and the social are not separate territories that meet along a frontier, as the placing of the term ‘purely’ inside quotation marks already tacitly acknowledges. Any collective project draws upon multiple animate and inanimate elements, mixing them in new combinations. Rather than operating as a boundary mechanism between spheres that are already separate, the economy offered a way of resolving these hybrid forms into what could begin to appear as a world simplified into separate realms. By transforming their nonhuman elements into mere objects

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of human calculation, large-scale sociotechnical projects could manufacture worlds that appeared divided into nature on the one hand, and human calculation on the other (Mitchell, 2002: pp. 31–38). This work of simplification never quite succeeds. As Callon (1987) points out in a study of rival projects to manufacture an electric vehicle, the relations among the heterogeneous elements of socio-technical networks do not form a fixed topology that might be precisely mapped and made predictable. Agents try to recruit new elements, and the relationships among them are open to constant manipulation and reconfiguration. Hughes relates how a battle broke out between Edison’s direct current system and the alternating current system of the Westinghouse Electric Company. Alternating current could be carried at much higher voltages, allowing the transmission of electric power over greater distances. To alter the calculations about the cost-effectiveness of the rival system, Edison tried to associate the higher voltage of alternating current with the danger it posed to humans who accidentally connected themselves to the network. He joined forces with those advocating the use of electrocution as a humane method of putting people to death and helped persuade the New York State Legislature to replace hanging with death by electrocution, using a Westinghouse AC generator installed in Auburn State Prison (Hughes, 1983: p. 108). The electrocution of William Kemmler on August 6, 1890, marked the beginning of the twentieth-century recruitment of the shock power of electricity for a variety of political purposes (Ronell, 1989: pp. 375–376) As this example suggests, the building of socio-technical networks offers a different way to think about the question of economic rationality or calculation. If economic sociology tries to preserve a distinction, inherited from Weber and from Polanyi, between the ‘purely economic’ and the broader social relations in which the economic is shown to be (partially) embedded, Hughes’s study of the electricity industry provides the basis for a different understanding of how the

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economy as a realm of calculation comes into being. A study by Latour (1996) of a project to build another socio-technical network, a driverless railway system in Paris, shows how the economy was not an external ‘reality principle’ against which the design of a new project would be tested. Similarly, Edison’s project did not involve designing a technology in the workshop that would then be taken outside the workshop and introduced into ‘the economy’. His team had to create an economic calculus inside the workshop, as an integral part of the design of the network. They acquired arc-light generators, the older lighting technology they hoped to replace, and measured the cost of their operation. They collected information on the cost of copper wiring of different gauges, and visited plants using arc-light dynamos to take notes on transmission losses and the cost of fuel. They purchased back volumes of gas journals and the proceedings of gas engineering societies, to calculate the rival costs of gas lighting and the candle power it achieved (Hughes, 1983: pp. 28–29). As Hughes explains, however, information about comparative costs could be made useful only by integrating it with technical calculations about the properties of materials and electrical circuits, and social calculations about the density of housing and population. Edison’s team realized that Joule’s and Ohm’s laws could be used as tools to relate the costs and material properties of the components. They wanted to lower the current in the system, to reduce expensive transmission losses and the cost of copper cable. Learning how to use Joule’s law, they realized that a proportionate increase in the voltage would enable them to reduce the current without any loss in the level of energy. To increase the voltage in proportion to the current, Ohm’s law provided the method: raise the resistance, by designing an incandescent bulb with a high-resistance filament, and at a constant current the voltage would increase (Hughes, 1983: p. 36). These calculations were related in turn to the number of households and businesses in certain cities

located within the radius that could be reached by a network of a given energy and gauge of distribution wiring. The economic calculus was not an economy of rational agents outside the system. It was an apparatus of calculation that brought elements from other projects – generator costs, transmission losses, data on gas lighting, population densities – into Edison’s workshops at Menlo Park, New Jersey, where they could be combined with other instruments of measurement and calculation in the construction of an electrical system. These calculations, built into the design of the new electrical equipment, would then be carried back, depending on the success of Edison’s project and the rivalry of alternative calculations built into the designs of his competitors, and installed in shops, factories and homes. Successful calculation would help bring into being a chain of sites increasingly ordered in ways that reinforced those calculations. The power of calculation was never simply a faculty possessed by individual agents. It was a property of particular sociotechnical arrangements. In a similar way, Callon’s (1987) study of electrical vehicle projects shows how the engineers involved could be considered ‘engineer-sociologists’, as each project presupposed not just a rival technical design but a rival social world in which their calculations and designs would make sense. Since such calculations were helping to bring into being the world they calculated, success did not necessarily depend on having the most accurate figures. What mattered more was whether the calculations enabled the network to be conceived and built. As one can see from the studies by Guala (2001) and Mirowski and Nik-Khah (2007) of the creation of another network, cellular telephones, successful calculative devices are not necessarily those that are the most statistically complete or mathematically rigorous. They are those that make it possible to conceive of a network, or market, or national economy, or whatever is being designed, and assist in the practical work of bringing it into being.

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Economics is not a calculus that exists in advance, which then determines the success or failure of different technologies. The economy is not a pre-existing sphere, into which technological innovation introduces changes. Rather, there are different attempts to introduce calculations and persuade others that they are superior to rival models and calculations. The economy is a twentiethcentury invention that was built out of such rival projects. An important feature of this world of calculation is that there is no simple divide between an experimental or simulated world of the industrial workshop or business planning and a real world outside it. Every situation offers a certain arrangement of the simulated and that to which it refers. Edison’s team built models to test the relationships among costs, material properties and electrical flows using batteries, fine wires and ‘Kirchhoff’s laws of conductor networks’ (Hughes, 1983: p. 23). Although just a model, it was a real circuit carrying live electricity. Next they built a full-scale demonstration project, providing lighting for the Menlo Park offices and workshops, which was used to impress investors and tie them into the project. Even their first commercial network, the Pearl Street power station, as we saw, was designed as a demonstration project. Every instance of building networks was simultaneously a demonstration and the thing being demonstrated. As the network was built, there were many other socio-technical problems to be solved: basic issues of the subdivision of light (the existing arc light technology produced too intense a light for small spaces), so that large numbers of small consumers could be connected to a single distribution system (Hughes, 1983: p. 31); conventions of address and other ‘knowledges of position’ (Thrift, 2004), so that consumers could be identified, metered, and made to show up reliably in accounts and billing procedures; and statistical methods for anticipating trends and cycles of demand, matched with electromechanical devices for balancing load and supply. Solving such problems generated new kinds of information and calculation.

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These issues were typical of the technical problems addressed by a series of large-scale projects of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including such areas as the oil industry and its long-distance pumping, shipping and retailing networks; the building of large dams and associated irrigation and hydro-electric systems; the manufacture and marketing of consumer goods with brand identities that could circulate and be protected on a national and international scale; and the development of mechanized global warfare that required an unprecedented coordination of manufacturing, energy supply and civilian manpower. The forms of technical calculation, of distribution and the control of flows, of addressing, accounting and billing, of public demonstration and marketing, and many other widely replicated procedures and techniques, helped to constitute the world that would later take shape and be identified as ‘the economy’. The fact that this discussion has addressed these issues in terms of the question of networks does not mean that all forms of econotechnical practice should be understood according to the model of a network. The question of networks is of interest because examining a project organized as a network, such as an electrical system, brings into view the limited nature of the sociological concept of networks – the way it ignores the technical properties of the very networks studied. But not everything is built as a network. Even things organized predominantly as networks also try to create isolations and disconnections. Some projects involve very little networking. Miller (2002) proposes the looser idea of entangling, following the work of Thomas (1991) that rethinks the anthropology of exchange, while Callon (2005) describes a double movement of entangling and disentangling. But the same issues arise of calculative devices, the organization of alliances, and of connections and disconnections. The same points apply about not starting with economy, society, culture and state, as objects, and asking how they relate, but tracing instead the socio-technical projects and rivalries that

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helped bring these contested objects into being.

VIRTUALISM The projects of regulation, planning, measurement and metrology in which the economy emerged belong to a particular era. The economy was first formatted and measured in the interwar decades of the twentieth century, drawing upon new ways of organizing consumption, defining the qualities of goods, producing consumers, managing large-scale technical projects and generating statistical knowledge. The wartime development of industrial planning and statistical research, the collective regulation of wages and prices, and the government mobilization of economic expertise accelerated the reorganizations of socio-technical life that produced the economy as a distinct object of measurement and political management. In the postwar decades, among the advanced industrialized countries in particular, the economy was established as the central object of national politics. The main responsibility of government was to manage what could now be called growth: the rate and direction in which this newly identified object was expanding and the adjustments and balances required to maintain its momentum. Economists devised the tools of calculation on which this politics depended, helping to determine what social costs could be counted and what could not, and to distinguish those political claims that could be calculated and compared from those that were incommensurate. The economy was both a way of calculating and representing social and material worlds, and a set of projects for producing worlds that are calculable and representable. In the final quarter of the twentieth century, these calculative projects were exposed to new kinds of criticism and doubt. The environmental movement emerged as one source of criticism (Henderson, 1978; Meadows et al., 1972; Schumacher, 1973), arguing that the economy was defined in a way that excluded many of the real costs of

social actions, such as ecological damage and the exhaustion of nonrenewable resources. Feminist and other progressive movements drew attention to the way household labour and other unpaid or unmonetarized activity escaped economic representation. Even orthodox academic economists began to question the possibility of adequately measuring and representing the economy (Eisner, 1989; Griliches, 1994). They attributed the difficulty to the growth of service industries such as finance, information, tourism and culture and entertainment, where it was difficult to define the product or measure its turnover, and to the increasing rate of innovation and specification of consumer goods, which made it difficult to compare the value of different products. Accounts of the ‘postmodern condition’ (Harvey, 1990; Lyotard, 1984) related this expansion of service industries and cultural consumption to a transformation in the nature of knowledge itself. Digitized as ‘information’, knowledge was becoming the most important commodity of a postindustrial age. In Lyotard’s view, knowledge should be considered ‘a major – perhaps the major – stake in the worldwide competition for power’ (Lyotard, 1984: p. 5). If postindustrial economies are formed increasingly of commodified representations, what consequences follow for the projects of economic measurement, calculation and representation that helped organize the economy as an object? How do economic representations represent a material world that is composed more and more of representations? One line of thinking addresses this as the problem of ‘virtualism’. Carrier (in Carrier and Miller, 1998) suggests that the change from material consumption to the consumption of increasingly abstract commodities marks the latest stage in a process of abstraction that has defined the history of modernity. The reference is once again to Polanyi. If the modern world disembeds the practical activities of production and circulation from ‘social and other non-economic contexts’ (Carrier and Miller, 1998: p. 3), then the contemporary commodification of culture can be understood as the latest stage in this history of abstraction.

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Economic representations, according to this argument, perform an increasingly powerful role in the history of abstraction. The process of ‘practical abstraction’ of economic activity is accompanied by a movement of ‘theoretical abstraction’. In both academic and everyday contexts, people try to understand economic situations by relying on increasingly abstract models. The theoretical abstractions of economics have become so pervasive as cultural forms that people are now fooled into mistaking these abstractions for the world they represent. They take the virtual world of economic representations as something real. The final step into this condition of virtualism is marked by the increasing ability of economists and others to empower economic abstractions, by making the world itself conform more closely to the patterns of their economic models (Carrier and Miller, 1998: p. 2). The leading contemporary example of the politics of virtualism, Carrier and Miller suggest, is the political project known as neoliberalism. Miller argues that the neoliberal effort to reorganize social worlds according to the rules of neoclassical economic theory has led to the ‘dominance of economic theory over actually existing capitalism’. He relates this change to the spread of forms of simulation, self-monitoring, auditing and accounting characteristic of contemporary social life, all of which try to replace ‘the reality of economic practice’ with more simple representations. Economic theory is one of several such simplifications. These representations can become so powerful that they attempt to replace ‘actual economic practices’ with the simplified models (Miller, 1998: p. 198). Several questions can be raised about this way of understanding the contemporary relation between economic representations and the reality they invoke. First, it is certainly the case that the neoliberal movement has turned the deployment of economic experiments into a widely used political technology, a technology whose distinctive rationality of government has been the subject of a number of discussions (Barry et al., 1996; Brown, 2003; Lemke, 2001). However, there is

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nothing new in the use of economic arguments as tools to reorganize social practice. Social science has always been involved in social experiments – in attempts to reorganize patterns of urban life, for example, or methods of controlling deviance, or systems of trade, according to scientific principles. Political economy emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a new knowledge and practice of government in conjunction with the political projects it helped to reorganize, such as the trading and governing activities of the East India Company or the British colonization of Ireland and North America. Second, as Maurer (2005) argues in his study of two modes of alternative economic activity, local currency initiatives and the practice of Islamic banking, economic agents themselves are often involved in a complex deployment of the real and the virtual, simultaneously escaping dominant representations and reenacting them. What is genuine and what is counterfeit, he argues, is not a question to be resolved simply by more accurate sociological description. More generally, the virtual is not a screen or display that disconnects us from the real. Rather, the modern experience of the real has always involved the production of what claims to be a realm of mere models or simulations (Mitchell, 1991, 2000). We secure our sense of the objectivity of the world as a reality prior to and independent of its representations by staging what appears as the separation of the virtual from the real. Producing the existence of the economy as a world that seems to stand apart from the economic representations that describe it is perhaps the most commonplace twentiethcentury form of this technology of the real. Finally, studies of the actual deployment of neoliberal models reveal a political process in which success depends less on forms of abstraction than on the political alliances and powers of discipline that a project gathers together (Elyachar, 2005; Mitchell, 2005b). The way in which economic models were used in the USA to design the market for cellular telephone licences illustrates this well (Guala, 2001; Mirowski and Nik-Khah, 2007). To create a national cell

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phone industry, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided that the right to use new frequencies of the wireless spectrum should be auctioned to the highest bidder, rather than simply given free to those who applied for it as with earlier uses of the spectrum. They invited economists with rival models of how markets work to propose designs for the auction process. The economists encountered unexpected difficulties in this creation of a new market: the rivalries among game theorists recruited by different corporations, shortcomings in theoretical models that forced the game theorists into an unusual collaboration with experimental economists, and tiny errors in the design of the auction procedure that triggered much larger failures. Mirowski and Nik-Khah argue that in the end the outcome was determined by the power of large corporations. The socio-technical problem of designing the market was ‘yet another instance of bigger forces determining the economic outcomes while masking their activities with a fog of learned disputation and superfluous mathematics’ (Mirowski and Nik-Khah, 2007: p. 34). This confirms their view that ‘more durable structures like the nation-state, the corporation, and the military’ shape economic practice – and the practice of economics (Mirowski and Nik-Khah, 2007: p. 42). They return, in other words, to a capitalo-centric argument, to use GibsonGraham’s (1996, 2006) term, in which the political and military-industrial institutions of large-scale capitalism constitute a determining structure, a frame inside which particular activities, such as the emergence of a new industry or the design of a market, take place. Yet this is not what their study and other accounts of the FCC case suggest (Guala, 2001; Murray, 2001). While some ‘bigger forces’ came out of the FCC auction as winners, not all of them did, and in some cases smaller actors were transformed into bigger forces in part by their deployment of economic calculation. To describe the outcome of an uncertain situation of technopolitical contestation as the unambiguous and predetermined result of larger economic

forces is to surrender the political field to agents that have neither the coherence nor the power attributed to them, but that benefit from every declaration that they represent a structure and logic that cannot be overcome. The objection is not to the argument that corporations or government agencies may be powerful and often seem to get their way. It is about methods of thinking about how and why this happens. The problem lies in the often implicit assumption that such things form a ‘structure’, understood as those ‘bigger forces’ whose power needs no explaining because it assumes the form of a permanent frame or constraint that envelops the particularities of modes of calculation or mechanisms of interaction; or that they constitute ‘the economy’ (another kind of structure) or ‘the state’ (yet another) (Mitchell, 1999). As soon as we populate our analysis with these monstrous objects, the work of understanding the constitution of the economic is closed off.

CONCLUSION The problem of economic representations and the virtual character of contemporary economic life brings us back to the general question of economy and culture. If the economy comes into being as a political project and knowable object only in the twentieth century, it stands in a special relationship to the emergence of culture as a parallel field of governmental practice and specialist knowledge. Thanks to the influence of the work of Polanyi, the idea that the economy appears as a distinct object only in the modern era has been widely accepted. Yet from the reading and misreading of Polanyi’s work two unhelpful tendencies emerged in thinking about economy and culture. The first was the tendency to assume that the twentiethcentury concept of the economy was simply an elaboration of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century ideas about self-regulating patterns of exchange. The problem with this assumption is not just that the use of the

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term ‘economy’ in its contemporary sense emerges more than a century after the work of the classical political economists. It is that tracing its emergence back into the past diverts attention from the twentieth-century innovations in techniques of business, patterns of empire, technologies of distribution, uses of money, control of energy, management of consumption, production of desire, styles of knowing and forms of expertise that made possible the making of the economy. The second unhelpful consequence was a certain conception of the relationship between economy and culture. The term culture was used to denote the larger ground in which premodern economies were embedded. In more recent formulations, it denotes the meanings people attach to economic processes, the ways in which different communities represent the economic, or the shared values and attachments with which the force of economic calculation is attenuated. In each of these ways of approaching culture and economy, the two terms denote different spheres or dimensions of human sociality. As a result, the underlying question always remained the problem of how these rival spheres affect one another, or how resources from one sphere can be transformed into the other (as with discussions of turning cultural capital into economic resources). Since the cultural is understood as the local and the meaningful, a further result of these ways of thinking is that the economic by definition stands for what is universal. The economic is taken to express principles of necessity or rationality that transcend the particular cultural sites and meanings in which it may be found. The alternative approach to the making of the economy that has emerged in the last few years involves a different understanding of its relationship to the question of culture. Approaching the economy not as a feature of all societies, more or less visible or embedded, but as a set of metrological projects that came to dominate the politics of the middle and later decades of the twentieth century, makes it possible to trace the way those projects were often intertwined with the reformulation of culture as an array of collective resources to

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be managed and a new set of fields for the government of conduct. The transformation of culture into an object of government was not necessarily simultaneous with the making of the economy, for these projects had differing and overlapping temporalities. But they were linked by common technologies of representation and by the tendency of one transformation to refer to and reinforce the other. The more work that was done to make the economy appear as a distinct object to be measured and managed, the more readily culture could appear as its own realm of government and expertise.

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22 Culture, Class and Classification Mike Savage

Understanding the intersection between culture and class has preoccupied generations of political activists, social scientists and administrators over the past century and more. Bitter political conflicts, abstract theoretical debates and complex bureaucratic classifications have all been conducted in the name of class. Class identities of one kind or another have been important in giving large numbers of people, in many different parts of the globe, collective and individual attachments which matter to them. And, even though it was fashionable to argue in the 1980s and 1990s that the significance of class was fading, in a globalizing world where multiple social inequalities proliferate, such claims now appear dated. If leading academics think that the cultural importance of class is declining, this can better be read as a telling commentary on the nature of the contemporary academic career rather than as a perceptive means of addressing the contemporary situation. This chapter argues that it is precisely because ‘class’ spans so many different worlds – academic, political, social, cultural – that it is both so pervasive and powerful, and

yet also so difficult to pin down in order to provide a coherent and consistent account. It is necessary to render the relationship between class and culture historically. However, rather than seeing such changes in terms of the ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ of class, or the ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’ of social classes, I will argue that we can better see this as a process whereby class is subject to increasingly reflexive and referential treatment. This process has the dual effect of both distancing us from class, seen as a set of fixed categories, and yet also re-embedding it in complex yet pervasive ways. But I am already leaping ahead. I elaborate this argument in four sections. First, I consider why the encounter between culture and class has been so important over such a long-term period. Here, my point is that apparent continuities should not mask a significant re-working of the stakes involved in debates on class in recent decades. Although we can trace a decline of class in overt political discourse, in large part due to the collapse of viable socialist politics, class continues to form an important cultural repertoire. Although individuals tend not to

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emphasize their collective class identities, preferring to define themselves as individuals, pursuing their own projects and concerns, this still involves placing themselves in class terms so that they can demonstrate their own mobility between different locations. I trace the important role of academic disciplines, especially those in the social sciences, in encouraging this proliferation of reflexive class identities. There has been a distinctive process over recent years where social sciences and humanities disciples have staked their expertise around, and have helped construct class as a socially significant process implicated in multiple forms of visible social classification. The second part of the chapter turns explicitly to consider these academic debates on class. I lay out the difference between ‘depth’ models and ‘surface’ models. In the former, the emphasis lay on relating class cultures to class position, most famously in Marx’s ‘base and superstructure’ approach. This perspective was strongly wedded to concerns about understanding working-class politics and culture and was reproduced in different formats until the 1960s. Since that time it has been subject to powerful and generally convincing critiques. The third part of the chapter explores the more recent – and still hesitant – emergence of an alternative ‘surface’ model. Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of fields is the most celebrated example of this (though I also show that Bourdieu’s approach also has elements of the older depth models). This approach emphasizes the fluidity of class forms, and emphasizes how processes of classification are themselves integral to the making of class relations. I point to the advantages of this way of understanding the relationship between class and culture over traditional ‘depth’ models. In the final part of this chapter, I use recent empirical research, to draw out how my arguments lead us to understand the re-embedding of class as a contemporary cultural form. I bring out how we can register both the obstinacy yet also the fluidity of class by recasting the debate in more historical and reflexive forms. Class figures

not simply as inhering in the social world, but as something which is central to the identities and stakes of academic disciplines themselves. This last part of my chapter relies on the findings from a number of recent research projects, many of which have been concerned to re-work the concept of class as a means of understanding cultural change in Britain over recent decades. Some of these projects have involved conducting fresh research on class identities in contemporary Britain (e.g. Savage, 2000; Savage et al., 1992, 2001, 2005). In reflecting on how previous generations of social scientists wrote about and researched class, I have returned to their original field notes and interview transcripts to elaborate how they have been implicated in the transformation and reproduction of class identities over recent decades.

WHY THE DEBATE ABOUT CULTURE AND CLASS? Interests in class derive from three rather different, though intersecting, concerns, each of which has a distinctive history and geography. The oldest of these is liberal classifications. These involve evoking social categorizations, of rank, status, hierarchy and class in processes of classification, governance and regulation. Pre-capitalist societies drew explicitly on such categorizations in assessing the legal rights and obligations of different social groups. Recent research emphasizes how such classificatory processes proliferated with the onset of capitalist social relations, even though capitalism purported to rely on ‘free’ labour without visible social markers. Especially in those European nations with a strong legacy of feudal social relations, the project of classifying moral populations became a central feature of nineteenth-century liberal regimes in an increasingly urbanized and industrialized context. In Germany, terms such as Burgertum (bourgeoisie), mittelstand (small employers), Angestellte (white collar employees), liberale Berufe (professionals), Beamte (civil servants) and Facharbeiter (qualified workers)

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differentiated groups according to their honour (Siegrist, 2002). Social classifications became embedded strongly in citizenship rights, for instance in limiting the franchise to propertied groups, or in targeting initiatives in public health, education, pensions and other welfare to specific groups of workers. Central to this process was distinguishing those deemed ‘deserving’from those ‘undeserving’, with the result that notions of respectability came to have enormous social, cultural and political significance. This concern was implicated in the social and cultural mapping of populations, as a means of assessing moral dangers and hazards. Post-colonial historians have also demonstrated the way that social categorizations of indigenous populations were underscored as a key aspect of colonial governance (for instance Dirks, 2003, on the use of caste in India). Liberal classifications therefore involved the elicitation of social distinction as a means of governance, a process which defined the different, bounded population groups when they went to make up the ‘social body’. It is, however, important to note that liberal classifications did not exclusively use the language of class. Gender, ethnicity and race were central to these discourses (e.g. McKlintock, 1999; Skeggs, 1997), and class was by no means the most important way of differentiating occupational or income groups. The term class was explicitly used in England, but in other nations, such as France, it was much less popular (Charle, 2002). It is for these reasons that the second concern, political agency, played a central role in giving priority to class itself. Social historians, notably Edward Thompson (1963), have claimed that from the early nineteenth century, class became a defining identity for popular political mobilization in England. This view has been much contested by more recent historians who have emphasized the power of populist, rather than class, identities, even down to the early twentieth century (Charle, 2002; Joyce, 1990). These recent contributions have highlighted the role of the state, and associated political parties and movements for constructing popular identities

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and yoking them to issues of class. The same revisionist literature has also emphasized the concern to define a ‘middle class’, as a bulwark who could be relied upon to preserve the status quo. One can detect, in the period of the French revolution, and also in the extension of democratic rights in Britain, concerns to construct a democratic ‘middle class’ (Wahrman, 1994). Such a concern later motivated the German sociologist Max Weber, with his insistence on the role of administrative cadres as vital supports for liberal democracies. From the later nineteenth century, political mobilization became more centrally linked to issues of class, through the rise of socialist movements, especially those influenced by Marxism. Such movements were strong on continental Europe, especially in Germany, Russia, Austria, Scandinavia and to a lesser extent France. These socialist movements internationalized the language of class by defining the working class as a core constituency for the bringing about of progressive political and social change. The major issue confronting Marx, and generations of socialist politicians influenced by him, was how to bring about radical social transformation of the kind that could seriously challenge the dominance of the capitalist economic and social order. Marx and Engels signalled the role of class in the Communist Manifesto: Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses . . . this distinct feature; it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society is splitting up more and more into two great hostile groups: Bourgoisie and proletariat. . . . But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians. (Marx and Engels, 1969: pp. 49, 55)

Such was the power of capitalism, Marx argued, that it was hopeless to expect that its own agents or institutions could be harnessed to bring about meaningful change. In which case, how was change to come about? Possibly change could be seen as an evolutionary necessity, and some versions of Marxism indeed emphasized the way that the development of productive forces would itself

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pave the way for communist transformation (Cohen, 1982). Yet the problem here was that such an evolutionary view gave no scope for political intervention: why not just sit back and wait for the good times to roll? In order to justify political intervention, Marx and Engels identified the working class as the central agents of social revolution. This was a class of people, forming a large proportion of the population, who, since they were exploited, had no interests within the system. The working class were hence allotted a huge symbolic and political significance as harbingers of change. Classes mattered because they could be identified as political agents. The issue of class hence emerged as a means of articulating political strategy within socialist politics, and pioneer Marxists such as Lenin, Trotsky and Lukács were centrally concerned to identify the way that the working class could best be mobilized to bring about revolutionary change. The socialist tradition proved vitally important, however, for two reasons. First, as an explicitly international political movement, the language of class was itself internationalized, becoming a familiar term across the metropolitan capitalist world. Second, since the working class was seen to usher in progressive political change, the ‘problematic of the proletariat’ (Lockwood, 1995) became the focus. Attention centred on understanding the conditions under which the working class would be prepared to take on its historic role, and much sociological reflection, especially in the tradition influenced by Weber, was centrally concerned to explore such issues. From the early twentieth century this interest in working-class agency began to take on an increasingly ‘cultural’ inflection for two reasons. First, the working class seemed reluctant to take on the role of political agent in the manner which Marxist theory had allocated it. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, writing between the two world wars, inaugurated an interest in the cultural processes which might explain how the working class might be culturally dominated by established elites, through his

concept of ‘hegemony’. The Frankfurt School Marxism of Adorno and Horkheimer insisted on the power of the new cultural industries associated with modern capitalism to generate new forms of mass culture which subordinated the working class. In this respect, they took up the argument, latent in Marx, and overt in the work of Lenin, Trotsky and Lukács, that left to their own devices the working class would never be able develop a revolutionary consciousness. Perry Anderson (1976) sees the increasing interest in ‘culture’ within Marxist debates as the century wore on as fundamentally linked to this ‘failure’ of the working class. Understanding the relationship between class and culture, and especially ‘working class culture’ thus became pivotal to socialist political analysis during the middle years of the twentieth century. This concern was amplified by the fact that whereas during the long nineteenth century, it was difficult to detect a significant improvement in the living conditions and incomes of the working and popular classes, from the early decades of the twentieth century it became clear that increasing proportions of the working class enjoyed higher incomes and significantly better conditions. Although this process was interrupted by the Great Depression which lasted from the late 1920s until World War II, by the 1950s there was clear evidence, initially in the USA, and shortly afterwards in Europe, that workers were enjoying an unprecedented rise in living standards. As Judt writes, For the overwhelming majority of the European population up to the middle of the twentieth century, ‘disposable income’ was a contradiction in terms. As recently as 1950, the average western European household spent more than half of its cash outlay on necessities . . . (but) by 1980, the average for northern and western Europe was less than one quarter. (Judt, 2005: pp. 337, 338)

This shift meant that the working class could no longer be defined as an absolutely poor or deprived class, defined by necessity and ‘hard graft’. The middle class, with relatively high incomes, could less easily be seen as ‘cultured’ by virtue of their lives not being marked by the simple need to get by. Typically, academics

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took a little time to recognize this. The last significant attempt to define class in these terms is Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1985), written on the basis of French data drawn from the 1960s. But over the past twenty years, and not withstanding the continued existence of absolute and particularly relative poverty in the affluent nations, it has become clear that the part of the socialist vision which yoked class agency to pauperism and deprivation has run its course. However, whilst this particular model of political agency has waned, a third set of concerns around class prospered in the post-war years. Class has come to play a central role in defining expertise, and especially in governing the jurisdiction of academic disciplines. Class had no place within traditional scholarly expertise, centring on the humanities and sciences, where there was no systematic interest in studying social classes until the mid twentieth century. The social sciences, however, saw an interest in social class as a means of professionalizing and legitimizing its expertise. In part this was through the role of social scientists in elaborating the liberal classifications discussed above. This current was found earliest in the USA in the early years of the twentieth century, associated with the anthropologist Lloyd Warner in his ‘Yankee Town’ studies. This was later developed by the social psychologist Richard Centers, whose book The Psychology of Social Classes (1949) was one of the first extended treatments of the way that cultural perspectives were linked to social classes. American political scientists later took up this concern, notably Martin Seymour Lipset, whose Political Man (1960) inaugurated interests in the social class foundations of political alignments. Influential American sociologists and social commentators also popularized ideas of class, including C. Wright Mills (1951) on white collar workers, and Alvin Gouldner (1979) on the new, or middle, classes. These studies testify to an enduring interest in social class in American social science which persists today, albeit as a minority concern, despite the weakness of American socialist politics, and

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the relatively muted significance of class as a device of liberal classification (linked in large part to the centrality of race and ethnicity in the American context). Similarly, in the USA as in other nations, as Marxism moved into academic circles, so issues of class were imported into academic research. Marxist sociologists and economists such as Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis and Erik Olin Wright insisted on the importance of class divisions within American society. In many parts of Europe academic Marxists, such as Ossowski (1963) in Poland, also inspired interest in class. In the UK, the Communist Party Historians Group, active in the decade after World War II, developed new research on labour history and on working-class culture. Historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Raphael Samuel and Edward Thompson sought to render Marx’s interests in class formation in a developed programme of historical analysis (see Kaye, 1995, for an overview). French historians such as Soboul explored the significance of class for the French revolution. Important though this body of work is, of greater significance was the rise of nonMarxist perspectives on social class. In the period after World War II, interest in social class became central to many parts of the social sciences. Challenging the authority of the two dominant social sciences, economics and politics, class became a central feature of the claims of anthropology and sociology, as they sought to define their intellectual ‘jurisdiction’ in competition with their more established neighbours. These disciplines intervened in the debate triggered by the failure of working-class revolutionary politics, and championed their expertise in unravelling the cultural worlds of the working classes in new and elaborated forms. In Britain this trend can be detected first in the discipline of social administration (or social policy), where T.H. Marshall (1950) developed his celebrated account of the vital connection between social class and citizenship in 1951. Distancing himself from Marxist preoccupations with the working class as revolutionary agent, but

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also from the liberal view that the expansion of citizenship was the product of social evolution, he emphasized … that the working class were agents in the achievement of social citizenship (in the form of welfare rights). We can see Marshall’s move as a concern to place the study of class on a distinctive terrain: one critical of both Marxist and liberal conceptions, and which saw class as central to social welfare projects. Over the next two decades, Marshall was followed by many others who staked out their disciplinary expertise in terms of its ability to provide a particular frame for the study of the relationship between the working class and culture. The British case is especially interesting. The relative weakness of Marxist politics in the UK and the weak position of the social sciences before 1945 allowed the potential for sociology, social history and cultural studies to launch themselves under the banner of class. All were looking for ways of muscling into a (relatively small) social-science community which political economists, economists, scholars of politics (not yet using the label of political scientists) and (to a lesser extent) anthropologists dominated. Of these disciplines anthropologists had traditionally been most interested in class (see Bott, 1957; Dennis et al., 1956), yet they lost their monopoly of expertise around these issues. Sociologists increasingly staked out their own pitch by insisting on the need to locate class cultures within the context of the division of labour and the occupational class structure. Although sharing common cause with the anthropologists in the 1950s, by the 1960s sociological approaches to class seized upon the survey method and on the increasing sophistication of their maps of the occupational class structure as a means of defining their distinctive area of expertise. In Britain, Goldthorpe et al.’s (1968/1969) study of The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure, the most influential work in British sociology, was important precisely for these reasons. In France, Pierre Bourdieu’s move from anthropology to sociology was in large part related to his growing interest in cultural capital and social inequalities

It was in this same intellectual space that Richard Hoggart (1956) and Raymond Williams (1961) launched their call for cultural studies, fusing literary studies and social analysis into a distinct research programme. It is not incidental that, especially in Hoggart’s pioneering work, the study of the workingclass culture was central. Understanding forms of working-class culture which were not obviously best unravelled through literary analysis provided a means of moving away from text-based literary criticism to a more social analysis. Their concern with the impact of American-influenced consumer culture was a further example of how workingclass affluence offered the opportunity for new kinds of disciplinary stakes. Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) marked a further move in this direction through its emphasis on the working class, an active agent, not one which was the product of ‘empty theoretical boxes’. The concern to rescue the derided and forgotten working class proved crucial to the claims of social history to have its own kind of intellectual jurisdiction, separate from more established kinds of political history, and led to a sustained interest in issues of class from within its ranks. Thompson’s work led to a sustained rise of social history, in both Marxist and liberal forms, which championed the idea that class formation was fundamental to social change. In all these cases, by criticizing the theoretical frameworks of the more established academic disciplines which emphasized social laws (of supply and demand, functional relationships and so on), emerging academic disciplines sought to define their own expertise as a means of addressing the distinctive agency of the working class as something which could not be read off, derived from the abstract workings of teleological social analysis. The distinctive methodological and theoretical skills of these new disciplines became focused around their ability to interpret and analyse working-class culture. Through this process, interests in class and culture were yoked together in enduring ways.

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I have shown, then, how interest in class and culture therefore come from three directions: from governmental concerns with liberal classification; from concerns with popular political agency, especially within socialist circles; and from the jurisdiction claims of emerging academic disciplines. We need to understand these different stakes in class to understand why an interest in the subject has proved so enduring, yet also variable, through the interplay between these interests. Thus, in the USA concerns with liberal classification were focused strongly on race (rather than class), and socialist political agency was limited, but class proliferated in the academic social sciences. In continental Europe and Asia socialist and Marxist concerns with political agency dominated. Britain was distinctive because of the strength of liberal classifications of class, and because of the marked way that class was used in the professionalization of several of its social science disciplines. It is important to recognize these three different concerns around class, because arguments that class is declining in importance have been focused very much on the second of these, and are in large part an extended footnote to the end of viable Marxist politics. Those arguing for the end of class have emphasized that classes are not the kinds of collective, radical, actors that Marx thought they were. Even if we assume that such arguments are true, this does not mean that the two other stakes around class have disappeared. Indeed it might indicate their increasing importance. I return to this possibility later in this chapter, but it is now time for me to explore in greater detail the nature of academic debates on class so we can better understand the precise stakes that different disciplines have in the name of class.

‘DEPTH’ MODELS OF CLASS AND CULTURE The ‘problematic of the proletariat’ focused on the question of how an objectively defined

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group, the working class, could develop the social and cultural cohesion so that it could bring about change. Given this question, the question of reflecting on the categories used to define classes was less important than that of understanding the conditions which might affect whether the working class could be its own agent. This involved some kind of ‘depth’ model in which agency could be attributed, in some form or another, to the ‘being’ of the working class. The most celebrated and familiar model was Marx’s ‘base and superstructure’metaphor. This is the idea that people’s beliefs, their attitudes, the way they live their daily lives, are attributed in direct or indirect ways to their class position. This base and superstructure approach generated tension from the outset between those seeking to anchor cultural forms in economic and social relations, and those insisting that this relationship was complex and mediated. Even in Marx’s own writing, it is possible to distinguish those works where he announces a deterministic handling of class and culture (such as in The Communist Manifesto) and those, such as the 18th Brumaire, which recognized that social action is more indeterminate than the base and superstructure metaphor allows. In the latter, Marx recognized that political mobilization itself could generate outcomes which could not be predetermined by structural forces. This oscillation can best be read as an intrinsic feature of the fundamental theoretical and political dilemma facing socialists: on the one hand it was necessary to show how class cultures were the result of the iniquities of the capitalist order (hence, base determined superstructure); on the other hand, to justify political action, it was necessary to identify the way that political forces could have their own importance in mobilizing support. This led Lenin and Lukács, in apparent defiance of the base and superstructure idea, to emphasize the need for revolutionary parties to ‘lead’ the working class. A similar kind of oscillation is evident within early sociological formulations, which also relied upon a depth model. Latour has

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recently excavated the tensions produced through this characteristic intellectual move ‘it is perfectly true to say that any given interaction seems to overflow with elements which are already in the situation coming from some other time, some other place, and generated by some other agency. . . . Although social scientists are proud of having added volume to flat interactions, it turns out they have gone too fast. By taking for granted this third dimension . . . they have withdrawn from inquiry the main phenomenon of social science: the very production of place, size and scale. (Latour, 2005: pp. 166, 171)

Weber’s thought, more measured than Marx’s, can still be seen to resonate with the problems inherent in the ‘depth model’. He insisted that ‘status’ was paramount for people’s values and lifestyles and was not determined by economic class position. Yet Weber’s account, like that of his sociological followers, still relied on a notion of class formation. Around a (deep) economic base, social classes might form (surface) in certain situations. The sociologist’s job was to delineate what kinds of conditions might allow class formation of this kind to occur. Thus, an extensive Weberian sociology was spawned which examined the conditions under which classes could cohere (see Giddens, 1973; Goldthorpe, 1980). Probably the single most important figure in the intellectual formation of British sociology, Lockwood (1966) criticized functionalism for its inability to link system with social integration, and sought to understand the formation of people’s norms and values through the way that their occupational and community position shaped their outlook (Lockwood, 1966). Some Marxist-influenced work, notably that of the Marxist historians, also developed this more fluid rendering of the complex links between class position and class action (Katznelson and Zolberg, 1986; Kaye, 1985). So it was that this oscillation between more and less determinist renderings of the relationship between economic position and culture persisted until the 1950s. Even in the late 1970s Stuart Hall (1977) still tried to retain features of Marxist class analysis, whilst Raymond Williams could devote a whole

chapter of Marxism and Literature (1979) to considering how a less deterministic account of base and superstructure could be generated. Erik Olin Wright’s Marxist approach to class is the last sophisticated attempt to retain a base and superstructure approach to class consciousness. Wright (1997: p. 537) argued that ‘in all three countries we studied (namely, the United States, Sweden, and Japan), capitalists and workers are ideologically polarized in their attitudes towards class issues’. He argues that people’s values are not a simple reflex of their class location: he prefers the argument that class position ‘limits’ the kind of consciousness that members of classes may evince. Wright candidly notes that whilst class location affects attitudes and class consciousness, it by no means appears to be all-determining: about 10 per cent of the variance in people’s class consciousness could be explained by class location in Sweden and USA, and only 5 per cent in Japan. Furthermore, as he admitted, the extent of difference between nations is striking: in Sweden employers and managers are pro-capitalist as he expected, but in Japan they were anti-capitalist: indeed in Japan all occupational groups were ideologically opposed to capitalism. What comes out of Wright’s study, therefore, is a recognition that the determining powers of class on consciousness are limited, and subject to the powerful mediating forces of different national cultures. Notwithstanding Wright’s important work, by the 1970s it was becoming clear that the ‘problematic of the proletariat’ was under strain. British work, much of it influenced by Weber, pointed to the difficulty of relating class identities to milieu in any kind of a clear and consistent way (Bulmer, 1975). Newby (1977) , for instance, debated whether deference was really a performance put on for special occasions (when one wanted a job, for instance) rather than a deeply held state of mind. Others, such as Richard Brown, contested the idea that pecuniary, money and power models of society could be clearly delineated anyway, noting that these were often run alongside each other. In short, there

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simply was no clear relationship between social identities and people’s values and identities (see also Mann, 1970, 1973 and Parkin, 1971, and the discussion in Devine and Savage, 2004). From the early 1970s it became increasingly clear that the ‘problematic of the proletariat’, which had energized concerns about class and culture for the previous century, was losing its relevance. Although this was linked to a recognition that the working class, at least as manual industrial workers, were declining in numerical importance, conceptual problems with the depth model itself were also evident. Edward Thompson insisted on the contested and unfinished nature of class identities and culture. His arguments about the fluidity of class identities and cultures were bolstered by the impact of Gramscian Marxism from the early 1970s, with its emphasis on hegemony and cultural conflict. This current of thought proved important in further breaking from reductive notions of culture, evident in even sophisticated renderings of the base and superstructure metaphor, and led to a series of key studies in cultural studies from the early 1970s that thought through the relationship between class and culture in provocative ways. Willis (1975) examined how the agency of young working-class lads could have the unexpected consequence of binding them to the world of everyday manual labour that would confirm their own subordination. This body of work was supported by the popularity of structuralist theory, with its insistence on ‘relative autonomy’ and ‘structural determination’. Although the Gramscian moment originated in a similar problematic to that of E.P. Thompson’s cultural history, it became clear from the mid 1970s that they were uneasy bedfellows. Thompson was keen to retain a concept of class, though increasingly the Gramscian current turned against class. The reasons are clear. By repudiating the base and superstructure model, and by emphasizing how meaning was produced by the articulation of elements of discourse, it became uncertain how class itself ‘registered’ within cultural struggles. Only when class itself

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could be discerned as an articulated principle within discursive struggles could it be seen as an important cultural force (see the discussion in Frow, 1995: chapter 2). Laclau’s (1977) Gramscian reworking of theories of ideology, which explicitly denied that ideologies were rooted in class groupings, was a key argument, later to lead to his influential co-authored work on Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Historians were increasingly struck by the relative inarticulacy of class within political discourse, which seemed to rely much more strongly on populist, nationalist, imperialist and racist motifs (see variously Joyce, 1990; Stedman Jones, 1983). Gramscian writers increasingly focused on the tension between popular forces and the state as the key dialectic (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Joyce, 1990), and in exploring this relationships race, nationality and gender seemed more significant. Influential accounts, such as those of Stuart Hall (1983) on the rise of Thatcherism, explored the remaking of political language through the remaking of ideas of the people, gender, nation, market and state. By rejecting the depth model, with its assumption that there were classes ‘deep down’, this thinking had no need for a theory of class at all.

CLASS AND CLASSIFICATION IN SOCIAL SPACE: BOURDIEU AND BEYOND Over the past two decades, there has been a strong reaction against the use of depth models. Identities arise out of the referential play of signifiers, not through an association with a ‘real’ object. Rather than relate identities to ‘deep’ phenomena, we need instead to examine the relationships between different discursive and ‘surface’ affairs. Latour (2005) has championed this new approach to social sciences in terms of an invocation to keep the world ‘flat’. It is common for this perspective to be seen as inimical to the idea of class. ‘There is no relevant group that can be said to make up social aggregates,

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no established component that can be used as an incontrovertible starting point’ (Latour, 2005: p. 29). Foucault’s criticisms of classbased accounts of social change, for instance in the development of modern penal regimes (Foucault, 1976), are familiar. However, we need to be careful in writing off class in these terms. The relationship between class and culture can be construed in ways which avoid this kind of depth model, through focusing on processes of classification. Rather than a depth model, a spatial model allows more fluidity and in particular takes our attention away from class as an object, towards the importance of processes of classification, operating in fields of power, as a fundamental feature of cultures of class. Such an argument would be consistent with numerous currents of contemporary thinking, from Foucault to Latour, but it is Bourdieu’s work which offers the most elaborated account of how it might be used to formulate a different kind of class analysis – although as we will see his legacy is complex and parts of his argument continue to rely on older conceptions of the ‘depth model’. In understanding the distinctive features of Bourdieu’s thinking, we need to see him as working within a French republican tradition, championing an ideal of national social inclusion. In contrast to the situation in Britain, liberal classifications and political mobilization in France have both historically been weakly framed by ideas of class (Charle, 2002), and the appeal of class analysis mainly limited to Marxist circles. Bourdieu’s thinking, whilst influenced by Marx, does not explicitly derive from socialist political debates. His focus is on exposing those (often opaque) features of social life which prevent some people from full participation. His approach did not require a theory of the class structure, seen as a clustering of occupations, so much as an awareness of the processes which systematically marginalize, oppress and disorganize. The Weight of the World, his co-authored study which reports in depth interviews with 410 French people, groups them into ‘social categories’(Bourdieu et al., 1999b: p. 3), and presents their stories

of suffering and stress in populist – not classconscious – terms. Although on occasion Bourdieu does pull out the significance of his thinking for the idea of social class (most famously, Bourdieu, 1987), this is a relatively minor part of his work. Similarly Bourdieu’s interests in culture are diverse. Most obviously, Bourdieu was interested in what might be seen as avowedly cultural institutions and practices, ranging from photography through art galleries and museums, literature, eating and other aesthetic tastes and practices. However, Bourdieu was not enamoured of the cultural turn within the social sciences and the humanities, and insisted on the need for a scientific and sociological framework for the analysis of these phenomena. His three substantial contributions to the debates are: first the idea that cultural processes, rather than being the epiphenomena of the class structure, themselves constitute processes of exclusion and marginalization; second the use of a ‘field’ model of social analysis, rather than a ‘depth’ model (as in the base and superstructure approach); and third an account of symbolic violence which recognizes how inequalities are naturalized and internalized in social practices. I will discuss and evaluate each of these three points in turn. First, Bourdieu is probably best known for developing the concept of cultural capital, as a counterpart of economic and social capital (see for instance Bennett and Savage, 2005). In this move, he refuses the conventional perspective from within depth models of seeing culture as somehow derived from a class which exists outside it. Instead, he juxtaposes different forms of capital – economic, cultural and social – and draws attention to the way that they involve minute forms of classification. Much of Bourdieu’s interest is in the power of cultural capital, which he sees as playing a major part in the reproduction of power in modern societies. Privileges are not only passed on through direct property inheritance, but are transmitted through the educational system: cultured parents pass on their skills and aptitudes

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to their children, who hence acquire the dispositions to perform well in the educational system. Rather than class producing culture, cultural capital helps to produce class relations as one of its effects. The concept of cultural capital has been intensely debated within the sociology of stratification and education since Bourdieu’s pioneering work in the 1970s, and there seems no sign that this interest is waning. This interest has a strongly international flavour, with inquiries in many nations exploring the possible significance of cultural capital (on Australia, see Bennett et al., 1999; on the USA, variously Halle, 1990; Lamont, 1992; Peterson and Kern, 1996; on Norway, Rosenlund, 2000; on Germany, Vester, 2004). I do not have scope to do justice to this now extensive literature but draw a few provisional conclusions. With respect to education, there seems clear evidence that Bourdieu is right that education now acts as the main filtering mechanism whereby the children of the educated middle classes are able to inherit their parents’ privileges (see e.g. Marshall et al., 1997). There are fewer possibilities for middle-class children to be advantaged in other ways, through direct inheritance of the family business or the use of personal connections, but there is increasing evidence that the acquisition of educational qualifications is the central determinant of life chances. However, numerous writers have also noted that not only middle-class children do well in the education system, and that educational attainment is a device which allows significant upward mobility from the working classes (see e.g. Goldthorpe, 2000; Devine, 2004a). Either working-class families have access to cultural capital, or cultural capital is not as important as Bourdieu suggests in affecting educational attainment. This explains why there is a growing interest in assessing whether cultural capital can be identified by direct reference to people’s cultural tastes, knowledge and participation, rather than inferred from educational outcomes. There is now widespread agreement that it is difficult to define a clearly demarcated ‘snob’ taste. It is hard to distinguish a culturally bounded,

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exclusive, cultured middle class. But, rather than this indicating the declining salience of class, cultural boundaries need to be drawn differently. The educated middle classes are able to range across cultural genres, embracing aspects of high and popular culture. This kind of cultural ‘grazing’, advocated by those claiming a shift to post-modern cultural forms, means that a central boundary is between those who have the capacities to appreciate numerous kinds of cultural artefact, and those who feel excluded, and lie outside the cultural field altogether (see Bryson, 1996; Peterson and Kern, 1996; Warde et al., 2007). Bernard Lahire (1997) emphasizes how people’s tastes are ‘dissonant’, and inconsistent, and a similar idea has been raised by American sociologists who have argued for the rise of cultural omnivorousness. Here the argument is that people increasingly range across cultural genres, and ‘mix and match’ their tastes in both legitimate and less legitimate forms of culture (see variously Bryson, 1996; Devine, 2004a; Devine et al., 2004; Halle, 1990; Lamont, 1992; Petersen and Kern, 1996).We are hence alerted to a new kind of cultural boundary, not focused on the precise cultural objects consumed (opera versus football, for instance), but residing in the embodied dispositions by which some people are reflexively able to appreciate different forms, whilst others do not. In this framing, reflexivity is itself a central resource permitting the formation of cultural hierarchies. Second, there is a tension in Bourdieu’s thinking between his arguments about habitus and fields. His concept of habitus retains a certain social determinism in embedding people’s attitudes, tastes and practices in their bodily dispositions, through processes of socialization. It thus continues to retain certain aspects of the problematic ‘depth model’. By defining working-class taste in terms of the ‘taste for the necessary’, as opposed to the elaborated cultural tastes of various middle-class fractions, he harks back to Victorian notions of class, and implies a fixity in the relationship between social position and culture that other parts of his

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work disavow. Here, we might argue that Bourdieu’s more important contribution lies less in his particular concept of cultural capital, or in that of habitus, and more in his ‘field’ model of analysis (see generally Martin, 2003). To some extent the concept of field has similarities to that of structure: ‘Fields present themselves synchronically as structured spaces of positions (or posts) whose properties depend on their position within these spaces and which can be analysed independently of the characteristics of their occupants’ (Bourdieu, 1993: p. 72). However, its distinctive feature is to render structure as ‘flat’, by defining it in terms of a game metaphor where individuals and groups contest stakes specific to that field. The participants become drawn into the resulting game, played out on a field, become vested in learning the skills and tactics necessary to do well within it, and hence internalize the values of the field itself. This model therefore points to a rather different understanding of the relationship between values, identities and attitudes and social location than in the depth model. Cultural processes, including their performative and discursive elements, are necessary components of the field, and in this respect are an intrinsic feature, rather than an epiphenomenon of it. However, this cultural dimension of the games which make up fields is latent, opaque, often unacknowledged by relevant actors, and not necessarily strategic or instrumental. ‘I want to emphasize that the principle of philosophical (or literary) strategies is not cynical calculation, the conscious pursuit of maximum specific profit, but an unconscious relationship between a habitus and a field’(Bourdieu, 1993: p. 76). The result is that the principles of classification are themselves an aspect of the organization of fields, and that a central aspect of the contests within the field are about classification (see Weininger, 2005). This relates to the third point regarding the relevance of Bourdieu’s work, the power of symbolic violence. Many of those who have used Bourdieu to explore contemporary class consciousness make much of people’s

dis-identification from class (Charlesworth, 2000; see the debate in Devine et al., 2004; Lawler, 2000; Savage et al., 2001; Skeggs, 1997). Skeggs’s account of young workingclass women’s identities reports: ‘Class was central to the young women’s subjectivities. It was not spoken of in the traditional sense of recognition – I am working class – but rather, was displayed in their multitudinous efforts not to be recognized as working class’ (1997: p. 74). The power of class lies precisely in the difficulty of articulating it clearly. What Bourdieu then brings to bear is the argument that such implicit and inarticulate renderings of identity exist in tension with the perspective from the scholastic reason of academics and related professions. Bourdieu in Pascalian Meditations (1999a) sees intellectuals playing within their own fields, with the result that we should see their own interests as moves within their own games: ‘Entry into a scholastic universe presupposes a suspension of the presuppositions of common sense and a para-doxal commitment to a more or less radically new set of presuppositions, linked to the discovery of stakes and demands neither known nor understood by ordinary experience’ (Bourdieu, 1999a: p. 11). The scholastic point of view ultimately rests on a kind of leisure which sets intellectuals apart from the world of necessity, the daily grind, which characterizes most of the population. Seen from within this approach, we can therefore return to the debates on class and culture with a somewhat different, more productive, perspective. Rather than seeking to define, objectively, the very being of class (in terms of its preexisting structural location), and then the conditions under which classes form, we are directed towards thinking about the way that categorizations of class themselves become a stake in certain kinds of fields, and how struggles over such classifications are themselves a central feature of social and cultural life. John Frow (1995) renders this point in arguing that academics and intellectuals more generally have no power to define other, objectively located groups, but need to place themselves, with

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their own distinctive values, approaches and dispositions, within the social and cultural field. This will have the effect of preventing them from attributing their own values to others, for instance under the mantle of popular culture. Frow’s (1995) insistence on recognizing the social situatedness of intellectuals draws our attention to the need to take seriously the concerns of academics, as well as of other ‘intellectuals’, and their role in adjudicating between numerous classifications. Intellectual work inherently entails classifying: between good and bad quality (whether the work of their students or peers), between branches of disciplinary expertise, and so on. Abbott (1988) accordingly formulates the fundamental nature of professional expertise as resting on claims to diagnose and treat classes of problems. We have also seen that class is implicated in the academic field itself as one of the means by which some disciplines define their own expertise, and ideas of class also circulate in the political field and social field. We are thus able to recognize how the term circulates in different domains, but not in entirely sealed ways. The intersections between these fields allow the term to migrate in powerful ways. It is by exploring further this politics of classification that we can gain fuller insights into the nature of contemporary relations between class and culture, as I now show.

REFLEXIVITY AND CLASS In this chapter I have emphasized how we cannot helpfully see the concept of class being operationalized as some kind of neutral descriptor. Rather, we have seen how class is used, defined and challenged in various classification processes, and, in particular, as a term which defines certain kinds of knowledge and expertise. Class is a stake amongst academic elites, as well as for other lay actors, yet the concern of these academic elites to make class explicit seeks to stabilize it, whilst also transforming it. In his study of caste in India, Nicholas Dirks (2003) shows how

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caste, far from being a primordial ‘given’, an enduring feature of Indian history, was subject to increasing formalization and elaboration by colonial anthropologists, census takers and administrators. Through producing caste as their master category for interpreting Indian society, they helped usher into existence the very thing they thought they were describing. One might see this as another example of the English concern to make visible what is implicit, and thereby reproduce but also transform, in a manner discussed by Strathern (1990). Dirks’s account of the construction of caste has remarkable similarities to the discovery of class by social scientists in other European nations. Simon Szreter (1993) has explored how the preconceptions of professional civil servants influenced the formation of the Registrar General’s Class Schema, first used in the 1901 Census, which became for a century the official guide to class positions used in Britain. Just as English colonial administrators in India sought to make ‘transparent’ caste differences which they actually constructed, so social scientists helped to proliferate class discourses. This point is important because over the past fifty years, professional expertise in general, and academic expertise in particular, has expanded as never before. In the years of the mid twentieth century, there was little systematic social research in any part of the world, especially in the metropolitan colonial heartlands. (As Mitchell [2002] shows in the case of Egypt, and Prakash [1999] and Dirks [2002] in the case of India, colonies were subject to rather more systematic social research in the name of rational colonial administration.) In Britain, there was the decennial census, but the first sample surveys were not conducted until the 1930s, market research barely existed, and opinion polling was in its infancy. The situation was somewhat more developed in the USA and in certain parts of Europe, but in all these nations the extent of change over the past fifty years is dramatic. We are now subject to routine classificatory practices to an extent unimagined fifty years previously. Our addresses are sorted into social zones,

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we are grouped by the products we buy in supermarkets, and through the use of our credit cards. Our debts and our purchases are mapped onto data bases which are then used to categorize the areas we live in. This is the world of Thrift’s Knowing Capitalism (2005) which depends on sifting and sorting us into numerous, market-segmented categories. Such processes drive the production of ‘neoliberal classifications’which stake out the categories deployed by agents involved in marketing commodities, services and goods in an increasingly de-regulated environment and feed into the kinds of audit processes which are integral to contemporary capitalism. It is precisely for these reasons that class has not declined in significance, but has become a more significant and marked feature of our cultural landscape. We still, however, have only a rudimentary understanding of the scale and significance of these changes. A key element here is evidence of growing reflexivities around the issue of class. It is revealing to consider Elizabeth Bott’s (1956) study of Family and Social Network afresh, one of the first works of post-war British social science to seriously examine issues of class. This can now be read as an early departure from certain aspects of the depth model, in its insistence that her respondents’ views about class were not to be seen as derived from their occupational position but were the product of their experiences. Arriving in London in the early 1950s, having studied in Toronto and Chicago, she was struck by the unstated power of social class in British life. Reflecting on this, on the basis of intensive fieldwork with 20 London households, she came to the formulation that ‘when an individual talks about class he (sic) is trying to say something, in symbolic form, about his experiences of power and prestige in his actual membership groups and social relationships both past and present’ (Bott, 1956). This formulation allowed her to do two things: stake a claim about the expertise of anthropology and sociology to unravel the links between class and environment, and create new kinds of boundaries between the researcher and the researched in ways which

produced new reflexivities around class. By defining the expertise of the social scientist in terms of their expertise in unravelling class awareness, the researched were categorized in terms of class. This was certainly not the intention of the researchers themselves, who saw their work as seeking to establish rapport with their respondents: nonetheless a particular incident reveals the tensions well. During a late stage of her fieldwork, in 1955, Bott’s notes recall how she nervously knocked at the door of one of the young married couples, whom she had come to know well during the round of 20 intensive, probing interviews she had carried out with them. On this occasion she visited the family to discuss a paper she had written, shortly to be published in the journal Human Relations, about the way that the respondents’ attitudes to social class were related to their social networks, their friendships, their work and domestic roles. It is clear that the meeting was an uncomfortable experience for everyone. Her paper was visible at the side of the room, but was never mentioned explicitly. It became clear that the young couple felt that they had been made into research guinea pigs, rather than partners. After stilted conversation, ‘Mrs C’ finally broached the topic of the paper. She said ‘that the chief difficulty (with the paper) was that there wasn’t a single clear problem that people could grasp’. Bott sought to identify with this reaction, by insisting that the researchers themselves had often thought the same thing. She explained the context for the research by emphasizing that they were not trying to differentiate ‘problem’ from normal families, but were trying instead to understand the values and identities of normal families in their own terms. The young couple then responded Mrs C said she’d been very upset by reading about herself like that – she sounded so, so she couldn’t find the right word but settled on vindictive. . . . She realized that the upsetting thing, really, is realizing that there are things about oneself that one isn’t aware of . . . Mr C said that with respect to the point that one’s personal experience was important in forming one’s ideas about class, he could see how that worked out. He sees this in personal terms, ‘he

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said that his views on it had also been influenced by not knowing who he really was’. (Bott, 1956)

Several striking features can be drawn out of this hesitant exchange: first, Bott’s courage in deciding to talk to the respondents about her own interpretation of their attitudes and values to class. Previous researchers had not engaged reflexively with respondents in this way: it was enough for qualified professional experts to pass judgement. In this way legions of social workers, journalists and social observers had categorized the moral worth of individuals and households, even to the extent – in Booth’s or Rowntree’s (1901) case – of colouring the streets of London and York in different colours as a visible marker of the moral stature of their residents. The project of social classification which was central to liberal governance in the nineteenth century was not interested in how the classified themselves classified. Admittedly Bott’s project had been framed in this tradition, and although the project team held social-worker-style ‘case conferences’ where they would sit down and try to classify key features of the sample couples – with no opportunity for the respondents to comment on such interpretations. The distinctive feature of Bott’s work was to extend these interests precisely to see how their own respondents thought about the social world, which led the researchers to find ways of relating to their respondents in different, even more egalitarian terms. By taking the highly unusual step of showing some of her own academic work to her respondents, Bott recognized that there was value in seeing how people themselves responded to academic categorization, and themselves went about the process of classifying. Second, it is clear that articulating class as an explicit issue poses worries and anxieties for the respondents because it makes explicit that there are processes of social classification. Respondents become aware that they themselves are being ‘classified’ in the name of class, and in ways which they might not choose, and that such a judgement

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codes their ‘private’ personality as much as their socio-economic position. The moment in which academic disciplines become concerned with class is therefore also marked by a new kind of reflexivity about the powers of classification itself. By seeking greater access to the everyday lives of ‘ordinary’ people so as to better understand their class identities, social scientists helped to proliferate discourses of class which these same ‘ordinary’ people could see as being about their own categorizations. It is this proliferation which has over the past 50 years become a central feature of many people’s reflexive social identities. Let me give just one example of the scale of this shift, in the British case (and see further Savage, 2007). The part surrealist, part anthropological researchers associated with Mass Observation used a distinctive research tool, the directive, from their inception of Mass Observation in 1937. Directives in 1948 and 1990 asked for correspondents’ views on class, 42 years apart. Comparison between responses in these two dates is highly revealing. In 1948 only around a third of men, and less than a fifth of women readily identified themselves as belonging to a class. There was a deep ambivalence about the very language of class itself, not because class did not matter, but because it mattered so much, but in ways which did not lend themselves to ready narrative. Numerous observers contested the value of talking about class, though in terms which indicated that they did have a clear sense of themselves in the social hierarchy. At times, such accounts were simply an initial refusal to identify as members of a class, then followed by a willingness to place oneself when pushed I hate class distinctions and do not think any definite lines can be drawn between social classes, but if there has to be a division, I consider myself to belong to the upper middle class. (MassObservation Archive: 2–195)

This kind of account shaded into the view which in one breath denied the relevance of

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class, before in the next breath claiming a clear social identity. I would like to think of myself as not belonging to any particular social class. . . . If one recognizes the professional middle class as an entity, I was born into it. None of my forbears has had the initiative to become anything other than a soldier, doctor, lawyer or clergyman. (Mass-Observation Archive: 9–458)

This is a very revealing formulation. The hesitancy in describing class lies in the way that this respondent saw the professional middle class as above class, as a category above class distinctions. The reason for this lies in the way that the professional middle classes identified themselves as a ‘cultured’ class, with this culture being seen as elevating them above the mundane and practical business of class itself. Purely financially I come under working class, but keep company with anybody, mainly upper middle class. My mentality is (pardon me) intellectually above ‘class’. So I can’t class myself. (MassObservation Archive: 11–1814)

To openly identify yourself as a member of the professional middle class would, in a sense, be to indicate a degree of vulgarity that might in fact put a question mark around one’s membership of that class. This is, in a sense, rather similar to Bourdieu’s arguments about how class and distinction were interrelated in the French context. So it is that many of the more eloquent mass observers seem to articulate a simultaneous hesitancy about class alongside an apparently clear and unequivocal social identity: I strongly resent the emphasis that is placed on differences of class and all the snobbery and inverted snobbery that is associated with it, but however reluctantly I must admit that I do consider myself as belonging to a particular class, though I don’t stress it and certainly don’t consider my class superior to any other. . . . I have a university degree and I have certain standards of security which I think the middle class hold out as an ideal, even if they don’t attain them, standards such as owning a house, with an amount of space in it which is more than the working class would consider reasonable, such as having sufficient savings to provide for emergencies, to enable one to change jobs, to remove across the country, to educate one’s

children on a higher standard than the working class would consider necessary . . . work with the brains rather than with the hands. (Mass-Observation Archive: 13–368)

This woman, the wife of a university lecturer, at one moment resists the idea that she is better than anyone else, before going on to identify her superior standards: an interesting way in which one disavows social superiority through the same process of reaffirming it. It is also this which explains why so few of the sample saw income or occupation as being the defining feature of class: for if this were so, they would be judging themselves by crude, material or monetary criteria, rather than by the cultural standards that they held so dear. The reports from the post-war decade indicate hesitancies about talking about class which have now largely disappeared. When, along with my colleagues Gaynor Bagnall and Brian Longhurst (Savage et al., 2001), I interviewed nearly 200 people in the late 1990s about their sense of local attachments, and finished off by asking them whether they thought they were members of social classes, it was striking how many people answered this question at some length, sometimes with an extended potted life-story. And indeed, survey reports from most nations rarely produce clear evidence that people are less willing or able to talk about their class identities. Younger generations of Australians appear more able to place themselves in terms of their social class (Phillips and Western, 2004), and Americans find it easy to talk of themselves in terms of their class of origin (Devine, 2004b). We can gain some understanding of this proliferation of class by considering findings from more recent Mass Observation Directives. A directive which asked about people’s perceptions of social divisions in 1990 often produced long, drawn-out narratives, quite different in texture and feel from those acquired in 1948. To be sure, there were continuities in the way class was talked about. The same class labels of middle and working class abound. However, the way that the correspondents position themselves with respect to these identities is greatly changed. I do not have scope here to fully document this

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shift (see Savage, 2007, for more detail), but I quote one extended extract as illustration. What class do I think I belong to. It would be a hard job trying to define my position according to my family background – my relations include such different characters. The one brother, in particular, who is on several boards of directors. . . . That’s at one end of the scale – at the other, our own youngest son, unemployed and with a yen for a somewhat bohemian lifestyle. . . . All a bit of a mixture. Forget my family and judge me by my friends and associates, but it’s still confusing – several classes represented . . . what about my education? Now here is a puzzling fact – I was the only one of a family of five to receive private education. . . . In fact my brothers and sisters have without doubt made more social progress than I have. I think the definition I like best is to link my social status with the area in which I live. This is the area my husband and I have chosen and in which we feel most comfortable and secure . . . this is the level of society that suits us and I suggest that to some extent one does choose the stratum of society to which you are most suited. The one thing which annoys me is terms like ‘social class A B C1’. (Mass-Observation Archive: A2168)

In comparison to the earlier accounts, a number of striking differences are evident here. First, in 1948, answers were usually terse and to the point. There was not much to be said about class. By 1990, however, extensive narratives, such as that above, were much more common. Class proves to be a powerful hook for hanging stories on, in the way it was not in 1948. Like the example above, several Mass-Observers provided autobiographical accounts, sometimes stretching to ten pages or more. This leads on to a second difference. If the power of class for the earlier generation lies in its un-stated quality, it is now the explicit narratives and politics of class which are in evidence. Talking about class is a means of connecting personal narratives with public repertoires. In 1948 Mass-Observers rarely make reference to concepts of class, or indeed to any social scientific ideas or concerns: the only exception is the sizeable minority who make reference to Freud or, much more occasionally, Marx. By 1990 this ‘double hermeneutic’ (Giddens, 1990) is much more marked, as respondents recognize

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that social scientific ideas are part of their world. Respondents now use this kind of class talk reflexively to show their sophistication – very different to the Mass-Observers of 1948, who saw talking about class as a sign of vulgarity. The ability to engage in ‘class talk’ and to position oneself as an individual within different class locations is itself now a means of making a statement. Third, and as part of this shift, we see a reworking of the relationship between family and class. Class for the older MassObservers was primarily a product of family lineage over which they themselves had no control. For Mass-Observers in the 1990s, however, families were often constructed as comprising members from different classes. Correspondents were much more likely to trace their movement between different class fractions within the family, so that the correspondent could emphasize their ‘liminal’ or ‘ambivalent’ class positions vis-à-vis other family members. The example above is a good instance of this. This can be seen as a means of avoiding being pigeonholed or classified, an insistence on a hybrid identity, which also overlaps with an insistence that people are ordinary, not ciphers of social position. Such a concern to disavow a fixed location, but in ways which draw on class-like terminology, has also been examined in other nations. Bill Kelly (2002) for instance shows how many Japanese people have sought to emphasize their attachment to the ‘mainstream’ as a means of emphasizing their core attachments to the values of Japanese society. Many Americans identify strongly with being in the middle class because it confirms their view that they are ‘ordinary’ people with no particular privileges or disadvantages (Devine, 2004b). This relates to a fifth point: that class is now inscribed as part of an individual identity, but one which is fluid and which individuals can negotiate over. Compared to the earlier Mass-Observers, the accounts in 1990 are much fuller, more confident, and placed more in terms of the individual’s experiences – of not knowing how to use a napkin, being a housewife, rising to a

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middle-class job. Class is presented as a matter of agency, rather than as something handed down, something that anchors an individual’s biography in a larger frame. Hence, although there is considerable ambiguity about how people define themselves with respect to class, the sources of ambiguity are very different from those of 1948. In the earlier year, class is something which is un-stated, and correspondents do not like to talk about it. By 1990, they are happy to talk about it, in ways which emphasize their hybrid class identities, and which use class as a set of external benchmarks around which they can announce their own individuality. There is a final, vital, point. MassObservers are not selected randomly from the population. As a self-selecting group they are over-represented by white, older, literate, middle-class women. It would be mistaken to assume that all social groups partake in these kinds of ‘knowing’ narrative. At the end of Distinction, Bourdieu argues that the familiar divide between ‘left’ and ‘right’ politics is less important than the more fundamental cleavage between those who have the confidence to state a point of view, and those who feel they do not. In the interviews I conducted with Gaynor Bagnall and Brian Longhurst in the late 1990s we felt that the most fundamental division was not between those with middle- or working-class identities, but between those who felt confident enough to play, reflexively, with class labels (in the manner of the Mass-Observers, above), and those who did not (Savage et al., 2001). This observation bears on the arguments about the rise of cultural omnivorousness which I discussed above. Rather than being able to distinguish fixed, bounded class cultures, we may now be seeing a divide between a population with mobile identities, and one which is increasingly disengaged.

CONCLUSION This chapter has covered a wide terrain, but nonetheless there are connections between the various points I have made. First, I have

argued that those who see the debate on culture and class as being about the nature of social change, or about unravelling the class structure, as if this can be unravelled ‘objectively’, miss two points which are more fundamental. First, issues of class and culture have been tied up with the intellectual formation of particular disciplines and subdisciplines, so that we need to recognize the academic stakes involved in disputes over class. Second, for this reason, issues of class are also implicated in the processes of classification which proliferate not only in academic but increasingly in a wide array of institutional and popular forums in an era of ‘knowing capitalism’ (Thrift, 2005), where forms of knowledge are ever more embedded in routine economic, social and political life. Although I have elaborated this point using my own research on post-war British society, where class as a central axis of intellectual mobilization was particularly acute, it has general provenance. This shift is important, I have argued, in leading us away from relying on depth models in understanding class and culture. These depth metaphors proliferated in a period when class was deployed, especially but not exclusively by socialists, as an axis of political mobilization. Here the focus was on understanding the conditions and contexts in which classes were formed – or failed to be formed. The substantive focus lay predominantly on the working class, in order to understand its prospects for ‘progressive’ political action. This interest persisted into recent decades, but I have argued that it has become increasingly problematic to sustain. Talking about middle-class or working-class cultures, as if the wide array of values, social practices and actions which we detect can be domesticated so that they are seen as arising out of a distinct social location seems a fraught exercise, even though some patterns and associations can still be found. However, I have also sought to argue that those who draw the lesson that class is ‘dead’, that we live in a classless society, and so forth, fundamentally misunderstand the situation. Far from being dead, class as a form of

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reflexive social classification now proliferates in unprecedented ways, with the social sciences and academic researchers being complicit in this process. This shift involves a recognition of the power of classification and categorization, which construct not unitary, strongly bounded, social classes, but fluid and hybrid identities over different dimensions and domains. I have argued that if there is a more fundamental divide within this setting, it is between those who can reflexively recognize and mobilize these categorizations, and through this process define their individuality as one which evades fixity, and those without such resources and capacities. Such a division overlaps with that between the middle and working class, but is not reducible to it. It recognizes that cultural processes are not the product – in however sophisticated a way – of class, but are themselves central to classification itself. This explains the accumulating evidence that educational attainment is an increasingly important determinant of life chances. Bourdieu’s spatial approach offers important resources here, since he insists on the power of categorization and the implication of the cultural with the generation of social divisions. Yet I have also argued that we need to break from many of Bourdieu’s specific arguments about cultural capital, and the distinction between high and low culture, to develop our understandings of this point.

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Popitz, H., Bahrdt, H.P., Jures, E.A. and Kesting, H. (1957) Des Gesellschaftsbild des Arbeiters. Tubingen. Prakash, G. (1999) Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rowntree, B.S. (1901) Poverty: A Study of Town Life. London: Macmillan. Savage, M. (2000) Class Analysis and Social Transformation. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Savage, M. (2007) ‘Changing class identities in post war Britain: lessons from Mass-Observation’, Sociological Research Online. Savage, M., Bagnall, G. and Longhurst, B.J. (2001) ‘Ordinary, ambivalent and defensive: class identification in the north west of England’, Sociology, 35(4): 875–892. Savage, M., Bagnall, G. and Longhurst, B.J. (2005) Globalisation and Belonging. London: Sage. Savage, M., Barlow, J., Dickens, P. and Fielding, A.J. (1992) Property, Bureaucracy and Culture: Middle Class Formation in Contemporary Britain. London: Routledge. Siegrist, H. (2002) ‘From divergence to convergence: the divided German middle class, 1945 to 2000’, in O. Zunz, L. Schoppa and N. Hiwatari (eds), Social Contracts Under Stress: the Middle Classes of America, Europe and Japan at the Turn of the Century. New York: Russell Sage, pp. 21–46. Skeggs, B. (1997) Formations of Class and Gender. London: Sage. Stedman, J.G. (1983) Languages of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Strathern, M. (1990) After Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szreter, S. (1993) Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, E.P. (1963) The Making of the English Working Class. London: Gollancz. Thrift, N. (2005) Knowing Capitalism. London: Sage. Vester, M. (2004) ‘Class and culture in Germany’, in F. Devine, M. Savage, J. Scott and R. Crompton (eds), Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities and Lifestyle. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 69–94. Wagner, P. (2001) A History and Theory of the Social Sciences. London: Sage. Wahrman, D. (1994) Imagining the Middle Class: Language and the Politics of Representation in Britain, 1780–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warde, A., Wright, D. and Gayo-Cal, M. (2007) ’Understanding cultural omnivorousness: or, the myth of the cultural omnivore’, Cultural Sociology, 1(2): 143–164. Weininger, (2005) ‘Bourdieu’s class analysis’, in E.O. Wright (ed.), Debates in Class Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, R. (1961) The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth; Penguin. Williams, R. (1979) Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willis, P. (1975) Learning to Labour. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wright, E.O. (1997) Class Counts. London: Verso. Young, M. and Willmott, P. (1956) Family and Kinship in East London. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

23 Analysing Multiculturalism Today Ghassan Hage

INTRODUCTION As all social and cultural analysts agree, multiculturalism today is becoming an exceptionally ubiquitous passe-partout concept. Beside it offering different kinds of conceptualization of, and government policy towards, cultural diversity in different national, supra-national or sub-national contexts, Barnor Hesse also notes that multiculturalism ‘no longer simply signifies the celebration or problem of cultural diversity; or the limited constitutional recognition of cultural difference; it can also refer to antagonisms between the sacred and the secular, educational pluralism and the distribution of democratic rights in relation to “race”, class, gender and sexuality. It has become a floating signifier that not only blurs the distinction between different social sites of enunciation but between different western national enunciations’ (Hesse, 1997: pp. 376–377). This is true not only of ‘Western’ sites of enunciations. Since becoming a fashionable term associated with a liberal version of ‘civilization’ in the way

‘having gay bars’ or ‘fusion national cuisine’ is, countries such as Lebanon, Malaysia or Senegal which have always been culturally diverse are being re-baptized by their liberal intellectuals as ‘multicultural’ without there being any particular changes in the way the politics of cultural diversity is conceived or lived within them. Somehow, it is implied that multicultural sounds better than ‘culturally diverse’ or ‘culturally plural’ without it meaning anything different. The global proliferation of the concept has led to many calls urging the need to recognize the specificities of each multiculturalism and to locate this specificity within various socioeconomic and geographical contexts. This is what Sneja Gunew, borrowing from Donna Harraway, has called a ‘situated’ analysis (Gunew, 2004). Some, like van Brakel (2003), see this plurality of multicultural discourses as a kind of multiculturalism of multiculturalisms, and argue normatively that there is no need for a strict a priori definition or a ‘shared language’ that limits multicultural discourse. For others, regardless

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of whether it is desirable, the plurality of multiculturalisms makes a shared language impossible. Thus, for Joppke and Lukes ‘there is no multiculturalism tout court; there are only specific, context-dependent multicultural problematiques’. Consequently, ‘the search for a universal formula, and final judgment, is misguided from the start’ (Joppke and Lukes, 1999: p. 16). While not aiming to discover a ‘universal formula’, and being in total agreement with the need to contextualize the phenomenon, I think it remains important to emphasize some key issues which give all multiculturalisms a collective specificity. This can be done in the very process of recognizing their diversity, not in opposition to it. Social analysts can, of course, limit their activity to simply noting whoever wishes to use the term multiculturalism ‘fashionably’ and to uncritically observing them doing so, but in the process they would have to give up on the category having any analytical or even empirical validity. I don’t think this ought to be the case. If nothing else, and while we certainly must situate all multiculturalisms, we still need a sense of why whatever it is that we are actually contextualizing and situating can be referred to as multiculturalism and not something else. It is worth remembering, at this point, that multicultural realities are not only plural, they are also contested realities. Thus, Heller has been critical of multicultural debates not only because they are ‘frequently transcontextually conducted’but because they are also ‘frequently overpoliticized’ (Heller, 1996: p. 26). It is hard to see how one can avoid this overpoliticization, since, even where it has become a dominant state policy, multiculturalism is always challenged, from both the right and the left. To use a Bourdieuian language we can say that even though multiculturalism has become a dominant orthodoxy within certain social formations, it has never managed to institute itself into an order of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1990). Nowhere is its existence taken for granted; nowhere has it become part of everyday life’s unquestioned and unquestionable doxa

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or common sense (Bourdieu’s definition of symbolic violence). Whether it perceives itself as an oppositional heterodoxy such as in France, or whether it perceives itself as an orthodoxy, something that has been integrated in the structures of the state in a relatively enduring manner such as in Canada and Australia, multiculturalism still faces considerable opposition, and its proponents have to continuously engage in practical and ideological work to justify its existence. This necessarily leads to the politicization referred to by Heller. This also has analytical ramifications. By acknowledging that multicultural realities are not only highly diverse but also contested and debated, we are acknowledging that they are always realities in the making. They cannot be analysed in abstraction from the politico-intellectual arguments for and against them, which is the very process of making and/or unmaking them as such. That is, such arguments are, with varying degrees, part of what constitutes multiculturalism as an everyday life reality, they are not some isolated ‘mental’ exercises happening ‘in the academy’, at a distance from them. This is important because, particularly since the turn of the new century, and at the same time as it was becoming ‘overused’ and popularized in the way described above, multiculturalism was also paradoxically becoming an increasingly besieged reality. This has been so even where it is an integral part of the state apparatus. As the voices of the ‘White Right’ are increasingly finding legitimacy within the media’s ‘opinion spaces’, any event hinting at intercultural friction is quickly used to demonstrate that multiculturalism is at the root of all evil: from a cultural relativism that valourizes ‘valueless’ if not outright ‘evil’ and destructive cultural traditions such as female circumcision, to ghettoization and social fragmentation via the promotion of anti-democratic and intolerant customs and practices. The exploitation by anti-multiculturalists of the ‘home-grown’ identity of the Muslim suicide bombers who were behind the London terrorist bombing is but one example of this.

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One can easily rush to dismiss neoconservative theories about the destructive nature of multiculturalism as politically driven and incorrect. But the point of recognizing that multiculturalism is always in the making is to also recognize that regardless of how ‘unreal’ neo-conservative theories, or other theories, of multiculturalism are they can become less so, and indeed they have become less so. That is, the significance of multiculturalism is never a given, stable, homogeneous reality: it is an arena of struggle and it is particularly so in today’s climate of ‘culture wars’. Those who are winning the struggle have considerable leeway to make multiculturalism whatever they want it to be: a disastrous policy that brought ghettoization and allowed terrorism to flourish, or an ideal of a society that maintains itself together despite the many cultures that constitute it. Because of its close relation to the dominant governmental forces in the West, the right has become particularly good at this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. When the idea of a clash of civilizations was proposed, many rightly thought it far-fetched. Today the way the American-British military occupation of Iraq has been conducted has made it less so. In much the same way, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had nothing to do with the Islamic fundamentalism of Al Qaeda before the American and British forces invaded the country, but the neo-conservatives confidently theorized Iraq as a flashpoint against Islamic ‘terror’, and once again they have transformed their theory into reality. When power is on your side your theory does not have to fit reality, it becomes reality. In such conditions, the boundary between the analytical and the normative cannot be clearly demarcated. This is why critical research cannot simply ‘note’ the various ways in which multiculturalism is interpreted. It is implicated in this interpretative plurality. This reinforces the need to establish a general definition of what constitutes multiculturalism into a ‘unity-in-diversity’. But, paradoxically, it also invites us to note that any definition of multiculturalism will necessarily oscillate between being a description of what multiculturalism ‘usually’ is and a prescription of

what it ought to be. Perhaps it is this oscillation which has allowed multiculturalism to bring together with various degrees of friction and/or complementarity, the traditions of the social sciences, interested in ‘what is’, those of political philosophy, interested in ‘what ought to be’, and the cultural studies tradition which is often in between.1 In fact, one does not have to look hard to establish the existence of social elements that, at least, hint to a certain common-ness among all forms of multiculturalism. First, from a macro-historical perspective, it is noteworthy that all multiculturalisms have emerged at roughly a similar period in the history of the Western nation-state to deal with broadly similar developments. Second, from a more synchronic perspective, it is significant that all forms of multiculturalism, wherever they are and despite their plurality, consistently exhibit similar tendencies and tensions in the face of global events. In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, for example, all multiculturalisms saw an emphasis on the need to stress ‘common values’ within the nation. In much the same way today, whether in New Zealand, Canada, Australia, England or the USA, all multiculturalisms are exhibiting similar tendencies and fostering similar debates and disagreements in the face of what we might call the Islamic question and the related issue of the war on terror. To be sure, they do exhibit crucial differences too. But this should not disallow us from trying to have a better grasp of the similarities that these generalized points of tensions give us access to. It is on these similarities that this chapter concentrates. It begins with an examination of the historical rise of multiculturalism as a global phenomenon concentrating on the growth of certain dispositions and sensibilities among large sections of the Western nation-states’ populations which facilitated the production and circulation of multicultural ideologies and practices. It then moves to look at the general ideologies and practices that mark multicultural realities and the tensions that are inherent to them. Finally, it concludes with an analysis of the current crisis of multiculturalism generated by the Islamic question and the war on terror.

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ON THE CONDITIONS OF EMERGENCE OF MULTICULTURALISM (1): THE RISE OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY In the second half of the twentieth century many Western developed nation-states with a European or European-derived dominant culture saw an increase in the visibility and impact of the cultures of people originating in less-developed parts of the world.2 This was particularly so in large urban centres. The presence of such people in the Western world was not a new phenomenon. However, until the 1950s, their cultural impact was reasonably minimal. There were no public signs of a collective desire on their part to ‘maintain their culture’. And if they did, their numbers were too small for their cultural everyday lives to have a communal visibility amidst the dominant western European culture. As such their more or less rapid ‘melting’ into, or ‘assimilation’ to, the dominant cultures of the places where they settled was either passively assumed or actively pursued. However, with the change in the nature and numerical intensity of their presence, migrants developed a more cultural/communal or ‘ethnic’ mode of inhabiting their host societies. That is, their cultures were, firstly, increasingly projected into social and physical public spaces, and secondly, these cultures were proving themselves to be intergenerational: they were inherited by younger generations, even if transformed in the process of inheritance. The above made these migrant cultures more and more visible within the host societies, and the assimilationist expectation was increasingly shown to be ineffective in both its assumptions and its goals. Multiculturalism emerged largely as an alternative mode of thinking about, relating to and managing the existence of the culture and the everyday lives of these ‘others’. Current critics of multiculturalism who argue for a ‘return’ to assimilation make it appear as if social policy is simply a matter of ‘choice’ between available policies regardless of what the actual happenings and trends developing within society are. Such a voluntarist version of social policy has been

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encouraged by multiculturalists themselves, who often try to portray the history of multiculturalism as if those responsible for introducing it did so as a moral choice: because they ‘thought’ that it was good in opposition to the policy of ‘assimilation’ now deemed racist and bad. This voluntarism makes it appear as if the whole emergence of multiculturalism is the end product of a moral and intellectual ‘debate’ about the pros and cons of each. Consequently, to start the history of multiculturalism, as we have, by pointing out that the problem of an emerging cultural diversity within the Western nation-state predated multiculturalism, is to highlight the fact that it was not just a ‘choice’. Like all other ideologies and policies, the dominance of multicultural policy involves a good degree of social compulsion. The adoption of and integration into the dominant culture by small cultural minorities in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries pre-dated the policies and arguments about the need for assimilation. It was the product of the relative power and the mode of existing of the social forces that constituted the nation-state. In much the same way, the growth in the number of ‘cultural others’ who did not see the wholesale adoption of the dominant culture as a viable possibility, and who began to reproduce elements of their home-cultures in their countries of adoption, predated multiculturalism. Multiculturalism did not create the dominance of cultural diversity. It simply sustained, reinforced and at best encouraged it. Or, to put it in a slightly more formulaic way: it was not because of multiculturalism that people strived to maintain their cultures; rather, it was because people were striving to maintain their cultures that multiculturalism was needed. This might do some violence to the dialectical relation that exists between a dominant ideology or policy and social reality, but it is preferable to the dominant alternative among both proand anti-multiculturalists today: attributing an unwarranted omnipotence to policy by seeing it as determining the everyday life of the entire population of a nation-state.

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The effect of policy on social life is, of course, important. But it is nonetheless minimal when compared to the changes caused by major social, political and economic transformations. This is very much the case when looking at the rise of cultural diversity within the Western nation-state. Its causes and roots lie not in social policy but in the changes in the global circulation of capital and labour, as well as the decline in the Western governments’ capacity to control the boundaries of their national economies and the flows that go through them; what later became seen as part of the process of globalization. In fact, the complexification and diversification of cultural life, such as the weakening of cultural norms and the rise of sub-national communal forms, are common features of the development, but also ultimately the decline, of most states, particularly those states that become part of an imperial formation. The historical analysis of the long-term shifts in global power that accompanies the rise and decline of new Empires has shown that such processes are always accompanied by a decentralization and diversification of culture (Braudel, 1984). From such a long-term historical perspective, the cultural diversification of the Western nation-states represents in a similar way the high point of the development of the European states that have their roots in the Enlightenment tradition, as well as the beginning of the decline of these states (Friedman, 2003). It should be noted that in its early history, the European nation-state was by its very nature an assimilationist machine. It did not need to ‘argue for’, or ‘have policies of’, assimilation. It simply assimilated and brought into its fold all that came within its reach. The very fact of needing an assimilation policy, an argument for assimilation, was itself an indication that this assimilationist momentum, what Friedman usefully calls ‘the capacity of the state to nationalise’ (Friedman, 2003: p. 746), was already lost. The rise of colonialism represented the highest point of this ever-widening assimilationist power. However, in the twentieth century,

particularly since the mid-1960s, we see the rebirth of cultural groups that had previously been assimilated by the state, such as the Welsh in Britain and the Breton in France. In much the same way, indigenous groups in European-based colonial settler nations have seen a reinvigoration of their claims for various forms and degrees of cultural autonomy. It is not surprising therefore to see that this decline in the capacity of the state to homogenize and nationalize culture, when coupled with the numerical rise in migration from the less developed parts of the world and the effects of what became known as time-space compression on the migrant’s capacity to remain in contact with home cultures, led to the formation of sub-national, ethnicized, diasporic cultural formations within the Western nation-states. The above makes clear what we have begun by emphasizing: that the formation of heterogeneous subcultures was what state policy had to deal with, it is not the product of such a policy. At the same time, however, it should also be stressed that the mere existence of cultural heterogeneity and diversity is not multiculturalism. This is often assumed by pro-multicultural groups who argue that multiculturalism is a fact on the ground regardless of the existence of multicultural policy. The same goes for those who re-baptize their culturally plural nations ‘multicultural’ without there being a change in the way this cultural plurality is governed. Multiculturalism is not the existence of communalized ethnic groups, nor is it cultural diversity or cultural plurality as such. Rather, it is a very specific mode of perceiving, experiencing and evaluating both the existence of communalized cultural difference and the inability of the state to nationalize this difference that we have already referred to. Therefore, multiculturalism is not just the product of the objective development of cultural diversity that we have briefly examined above, it is the product of the encounter between these objective factors and the rise of a new subjectivity, a new disposition and sensibility towards the nation and towards cultural difference among

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large sections of the Western nation-states’ population.

ON THE CONDITIONS OF EMERGENCE OF MULTICULTURALISM (2): THE RISE OF THE MULTICULTURAL DISPOSITION There are three key elements that make up this sensibility and that we need to briefly examine here: (a) the dominance in the post-WorldWar-II era of a ‘relaxed’ form of nationalism, (b) the rise of cosmopolitanism as a popular aspiration and (c) the popularization of ‘sociological’ modes of thinking. Each of these has its own historical roots.

(a) Relaxed nationalism In his famous work on the ‘mirror stage’, Jacques Lacan (1977) argues the existence of a period in life when a child begins to experience a disparity between their internal sense of themselves as fragmented and the ideal image of a cohesive non-fragmented self that is given to them from the outside (the mirror image). This initial stage sets in motion a dynamic through which the child is constantly trying to be the cohesive self it thinks it ought to be. Lacan’s work builds on various similar elements of the psychoanalytic tradition to offer a concept of the self that is constructed through the fragmented self’s constant attempt to almost literally ‘pull itself together’ to live up to the non-fragmented ideal of itself. It also invites a conception of identification which sees the formation of identity as a ‘trying to be I’ rather than as a simple process of ‘being I’. Psychoanalysts working within this tradition have taken this fragmented self for granted. What differentiates between people, they argue, is not only that some feel more fragmented than others, but also and more importantly it is the degree of anxiety that people experience as they engage in their never-ending attempt to overcome this sense of fragmentation. Some frantically and

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anxiously try to ‘pull themselves together’ dreading the experience of fragmentation. Others are more relaxed about their fragmented ‘I’, and even though they also ‘try to be I’, and try to ‘pull themselves together’, they do so in a more relaxed way. What is true about the subject’s imagination of their individual ‘I’ is also true of their imagination of their ‘we’. This is the case of the ‘we’ of national identity. Indeed it could be argued that this trying to be in the face of fragmentation is even more readily perceivable when we are dealing with the ‘we’ that is structured around the nationstate. Nationalists, even of the mildest variety, always experience their nation-state as ‘fragmented’ when compared with an ideal of total cohesion and non-fragmentation. But in much the same way as individuals differ according to the degree of anxiety they experience in their trying to be I, nationalists differ in the degree of anxiety they experience as they are ‘trying to be we’. Some suffer a great deal of anxiety in the face of national fragmentation and aim for ideological cohesion in a feverish way. Others are more relaxed in the face of a similar image of fragmentation and, though they also work towards national cohesion, they do so in a more relaxed manner. They are capable of conceiving of cohesion in a less strict fashion than do the anxious nationalists. This has led throughout history to continuing conflicts between ‘anxious’ and relaxed nationalists. The struggle between assimilationists and multiculturalists is a version of this same struggle. While there would be relaxed assimilationists and anxious multiculturalists, it would be reasonable to say that multiculturalists on the whole are more likely to be ‘relaxed’ nationalists who can live with ‘a bit of fragmentation’. Of course, ‘relaxed’ and ‘anxious’ nationalism are not simply the result of individual psychological variations. They are also social facts or trends related to social and historical variables such as level of education and economic well-being within the nation. Except perhaps in France, where nationalism evolved in the shadow of a fear of Anglo-Saxon hegemony, the post-World-War-II economic

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boom in the West was favourable to a more relaxed type of nationalism, particularly among the economically and culturally ‘comfortable’ social classes. The latter could afford to feel less threatened by a looser conception of national cohesion, a conception that is less dependent on a strict homogenization of whatever are considered national values and customs. Consequently, relaxed nationalism translated into an equally relaxed disposition towards the reality of cultural diversity, which was no longer constructed as a disintegrating force. It was ultimately this disposition that became a crucial component of multiculturalism.

(b) Cosmopolitanism But multiculturalism is not simply the fact of being ‘relaxed’ in the face of culture diversity. Another key component is the capacity to actually perceive this diversity as a positive gain. This disposition has its direct roots in the twentieth century rise of a cosmopolitan sensibility which strived on valourizing and accumulating the experiences of cultural difference (Vertovec and Cohen, 2002: pp. 12–14). As Hannerz has described it, cosmopolitanism is: ‘first of all an orientation, a willingness to engage with the Other. It entails an intellectual and aesthetic openness towards divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather than uniformity. To become acquainted with more cultures is to turn into an aficionado, to view them as artworks’ (Hannerz, 1996: p. 103). Sociologically, this sensibility was also becoming widespread mainly among the well-to do classes mentioned above. The change in the nature of international tourism which made it more financially and practically accessible to a greater number of people led to the rise and popularization of the cosmopolitan orientation beyond a select group of adventurers as it was perceived in the past. This was crucial for the generalization of a more detached, transcendent and less ‘primordial’ identification with one’s own national culture, as well as a relativist anti-Eurocentric tendency that saw value

in most previously devalourized (because underdeveloped) cultures. Both of these cosmopolitan tendencies became an integral part of the multicultural disposition, even when cosmopolitanism was merely experienced as a mode of capitalist consumerism (Calhoun, 2002). The cosmopolitan disposition was the core ideological source of multiculturalism’s anti-assimilationist tendency, particularly its valourization of the maintenance and promotion of cultural otherness as something beneficial to the development of a national culture. Coupled with the relaxed forms of nationalism, it transformed the inability of the state to nationalize cultures into something positive rather than seeing it as a loss of power as it has been experienced by the assimilationists.

(c) The popularization of ‘sociological’ modes of thinking The final important socio-cultural tendency which contributed to the emergence of the multicultural disposition, as well as becoming an integral component of it, is a sociologically and communally informed sense of social justice; we can call it an inter-communal egalitarianism. This was a combination of a number of key ideas. The first was the sociological idea that individual life chances are determined by larger socio-economic conditions. They are not just a matter of individual will. The second is the idea that certain identity-based communities or groups such as ‘black Americans’, ‘Greek Australians’ or ‘women’ can share similar structural conditions despite the existence of other differences among them. Finally there is the understanding that such structural conditions shared by the group or community are the product of relations of power between groups not individuals: blacks and whites, men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, non-indigenous and indigenous, locals and migrants, etc. While a version of this sociological and communal conception of justice existed in the forms of ‘collectivist justice’ and ‘communitarian’ political philosophy taught

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in the universities, what is important to us here is that this sociological and inter-communal egalitarianism was now circulating at a wider popular level. Even though it never became a general national orthodoxy anywhere in the world, it was finding support among many politicians and media commentators and was becoming an everyday belief of important sections of the national population. The general economic well-being of the postwar era and the rise of a form of ‘social literacy’ ensured that this mode of conceiving society was propagated well beyond the tertiary educated classes where it has usually flourished. This popularization was also partly due to the impact of communal/identity politics such as class, anti-racist and feminist struggles, which invited a conception of justice and egalitarianism that emphasized reversing relations of power between groups, not just between individuals. It was also due to the propagation in schools and in the media of a basic sociologically derived causal thinking which encouraged people to see personal conditions as part of and determined by wider social realities: a kind of popularizing of Durkheim’s causal ‘social facts’. This thinking of social justice as beyond individual factors allowed for the rise of varieties of notions of ‘positive discrimination’ and ‘affirmative action’ and the acceptance that group justice should sometimes override justice towards specific individuals. It was these various conceptions of intercommunal justice that fused with the relaxed experience of national unity, the cosmopolitan detachment from one’s own culture and the valourization of cultural difference, to create the core of what became the multicultural disposition. Multiculturalism itself, then, is the cluster of ideologies, policies and practices that were born from the interaction of these dispositions with the rising realities of cultural diversity examined earlier. By the same token, multicultural social formations are not any kind of culturally diverse or culturally plural formation. They are those social formations that have seen the cultural diversity within them shaped by these ideologies, policies and practices into a particular, multicultural,

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kind of diversity. In what follows, we shall examine some of the key elements that constituted the particularity of multicultural diversity.

THE SPECIFICITY OF MULTICULTURAL DIVERSITY Perhaps a good starting point for establishing the specificity of multiculturalism as a form of cultural diversity is to establish the differences that exist between it and other forms of cultural pluralism that have emerged before it. For if the calls for a situated analysis, mentioned at the beginning of this essay, highlight the need to capture synchronically the varieties of multiculturalisms in their socio-spatial contexts, we also need to capture diachronically the specificity of multiculturalism in the long history of cultural pluralist politics and institutions. Indeed it is often forgotten that multiculturalism is located in this history of attempts by culturally diverse social formations to theorize, institutionalize or quasi-institutionalize their diversity within or through the state (Kymlicka, 1999; Samad, 1997). American pluralist theories in particular have tried to account for the co-existence of democracy and cultural diversity in a number of Western (such as Belgium and Switzerland) and non-Western (such as Malaysia and Lebanon) countries. It is not a coincidence that multiculturalism as a state ideology trying to take account of migrant and indigenous cultural diversity should become formulated most cogently in Canada, a country where the state had already tried to conceive of itself as a democratically plural society to account for its bi-cultural French and English heritage and divisions. Theories of plural society, like those of multiculturalism, are as varied as the types of pluralism they have had to deal with. These differed in the kind of communities one is plural about: confessional pluralism in Lebanon, ethno-linguistic pluralism in Belgium, or a mixture of language, kinship and religion such as the pluralism studied in the defining work of F.S. Furnival on colonial Indonesia.3

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They also differed in the kind of plural arrangement the relation between them takes: federal, confederal, consociational, etc. It is important here to note, just as we have done for multiculturalism, that the fact of cultural diversity is not the same as the fact of ‘cultural pluralism’. Cultural diversity is often a mere registering of the existence of diverse cultural groupings within the nation and the registering of the identification of certain individuals with those groupings. At best, it is a policy commitment towards the valourization, recognition and the catering for the needs of the diversity that comes to exist within a national population, whether this diversity is on the basis of ethnicity, sexuality, (dis)ability, or anything else. But to call cultural diversity ‘cultural pluralism’ is to make assumptions, not just about the existence of policy towards diversity, but also about the nature of the participation of these groupings within the political, social and cultural life of the nation-state. Perhaps even more importantly, it is to make an assumption about the type of interaction such diverse groups have with each other. That is, cultural pluralism already means that cultural diversity is problematized in terms of its democratic participation in the social formation to which it belongs. If ‘cultural diversity’ does not automatically mean ‘cultural pluralism’, ‘cultural pluralism’ does not automatically mean multiculturalism either. Indeed, the relation between cultural pluralism and multiculturalism is even more complicated than that between diversity and pluralism. Samad argues that ‘multiculturalism does not displace various forms of pluralism but encapsulates them in a hybrid amalgam’ (Samad, 1997: p. 243). This is not exactly the case. For while multiculturalism does encompass some aspects of the pluralist tradition, it is in some respects more, and in others less, ‘plural’ than the pluralism they advocated or institutionalized. Perhaps one of the most important features that multiculturalism shares with these other forms of pluralism – we can call these ‘democratic pluralism’ for their emphasis on the relation between cultural plurality and

democracy – is that both as an ideology and as a policy it is driven by the same governmental desire to maintain the cohesion of the nation-state in the face of cultural diversity. While anti-multiculturalists today like to argue that multiculturalists have wilfully encouraged the fragmentation of the nation, this is simply a historically and factually incorrect claim. Multiculturalists are just as concerned with the unity of the nation. They simply saw this unity differently because of the fact of cultural difference that they were facing. Whether it was an American-style recognition of the value of other cultures, or a more full-fledged Canadian-style multicultural policy, the aim of multiculturalism was always the same as other cultural pluralist policies before it: how best to create a cohesive nation when faced with the reality of communalized cultural diversity. This allows us to reinforce what has been argued earlier: that, except for demagogical purposes, the multicultural debate is never a debate between nationalists and anti-nationalists, but a debate between two different nationalist sensibilities. Because of this nationalist orientation, multicultural theorizing often shares with other theories and conceptions of cultural pluralism a general orientation to being a form of applied social theory. That is, it produces theories and concepts whose main aim is not simply to analyse or register the existence of a social situation, but to consider this cultural diversity as a governmental problem that needs to be managed so as to achieve or maintain a desired practical state of affairs, usually defined in terms of national social cohesion or stability. This is another reason why, as we have noted above, intellectual conceptions of multiculturalism oscillate between the analytical and the normative. There are, however, a number of important differences between multicultural and these traditional democratic plural theories that can help us highlight the specificity of multiculturalism. Perhaps the first obvious element that distinguishes multiculturalism as an ideology from the above democratic pluralism is its anti-Eurocentrism. This feature exists

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in different ways and degrees in different countries but it is nonetheless shared by all multiculturalisms. While theories of plural democracy adopt certain forms of cultural relativism, they do not have an anti-Eurocentric emphasis. This is largely because, in the countries where democratic pluralism is seen to prevail and where the pluralist theories were born such as Belgium and Malaysia, there was no encounter between European and non-European culture. It was either a pluralism of various European cultures or a pluralism of non-European cultures. This anti-Eurocentric pluralism is an important aspect of multiculturalism’s specificity. It shows the latter to be an attempt to deal with a cultural encounter structured along the colonial fault line of ‘the West and the rest’. Consequently, it has led to an incorporation of the anti-Eurocentrism that animated anticolonial struggles into the culture of the Western metropolises. This anti-Eurocentrism is often, but not always, an extension of the cosmopolitan disposition examined earlier. Paradoxically, however, the above is only true at an ideological level. For despite the ‘anti-colonial flavour’ that animates it ideologically, the multiculturalism that emerged in the colonial settler settings of Australia, the USA, New Zealand and Canada never included, at least not without serious difficulties, the cultures of the colonized native people of these nations. This is because of another aspect of multiculturalism that differentiated it from democratic pluralism. It operated much better with cultural groupings that can make claims to the state, but not cultural groupings that had political claims on the state. Democratic plural theories are concerned with the way socio-cultural groups negotiated among each other the nature of the state. They are mainly power-sharing formulas between reasonably autonomous cultural groups. They deal with what is often referred to as ‘deeply divided’ or ‘segmented’ societies. These are nation-states which, from the very moment of their emergence, are composed of spatially segregated and relatively autonomous communal groups. Sometimes these groups are

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divided by language and culture, sometimes by history and sometimes even by political orientation. They can come to share little more than being historical neighbours, or they might share a social, political or historical necessity to join forces. It might even be chance that made them become part of the same state. Their being together is not built on commonality and interaction but on proximity. It is in this sense that they are perceived as ‘deeply’divided. They exist ‘side by side’ and ‘without mingling’, as Furnival has put it (in Hefner, 2001: p. 4). They are multi-national rather than multi-cultural states. As such, this kind of pluralism works with a far more anthropological notion of ‘culture’. That is, it is all-encompassing: it includes all aspects of a group’s mode of life, from its particular sense of humour to its orientations towards global politics. Multiculturalism is very far from these pluralist notions of power-sharing. It has never been the result, as in so-called consociational democracies, for example, of a horizontally conceived negotiation between the elites of different cultural communities about how to divide up political power. Rather, it is a vertically conceived struggle by individuals to be culturally, and sometimes socio-economically, ‘recognized’ and ‘included’ by and into the nation as members of sub-national cultural groups. The state and its sovereignty are never an object of struggle that the cultural communities of multiculturalism can be ‘multi’ about. Unlike negotiations between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon, for example, Anglo and Japanese Canadians will never sit at a table to try and negotiate the foreign policy orientation of Canada as part of multiculturalism. In this regard multiculturalism’s emphasis on the recognition of minority cultures is more in the lineage of the politics of imperial formations such as the usage of Islamic Shari’a law to define the status of religious/cultural minorities in the Ottoman Empire. It is this positioning of the multicultural state ‘above the foray of cultural diversity’ that makes it less attractive or useful for an incorporation of demands for sovereignty

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or even milder forms of autonomy that are part of indigenous claims. Indeed the attempts at incorporating indigenous cultures in the multicultural framework can be an attempt at mystifying the colonial relations of power and the history of dispossession that structure the existence of indigenous people by making their culture as simply ‘yet another culture one can be multi about’. In Australia, multiculturalism is often perceived in this light by the indigenous people themselves. This is also the reason why in some nation-states where the notion of bi-culturalism encompasses such ‘powersharing’ (for example, the Maori-Pakeha treaty in New Zealand and the French-English relation in Canada), this bi-culturalism is not erased by multiculturalism but co-exists with it. Consequently, it can be said that while democratic plural theories dealt mainly with horizontal relations between groups, multiculturalism was far more concerned with vertical relations between the state and the individuals in so far as they belong to cultural groups. With the first, what is at stake is the nature of the state itself. With the second, the nature of the state is already given. With the first, the groups through their representatives are asking for each others’ recognition. With the second, it is individuals asking for the state’s recognition of their cultural group belonging. With the first, the cultural group is institutionalized through its formal representatives. With the second, the cultural group is a vague entity that can have representatives but that exists primarily through the various individuals’ claim of belonging to it. In democratic plural theory, the communal group has a will of its own that is deployed in the face of the will of the other groups with whom it is negotiating. In multiculturalism, the cultural group is not an entity endowed with a political will. Unsurprisingly, the conception of group ‘culture’ that multiculturalism works with is far ‘lighter’ and less encompassing than the one presumed in plural theories. In the case of ethnic groups, for example, the culture of the group that a state and its citizens can be multicultural about has to

be limited to whatever does not threaten the sovereignty and the rule of law of the state in which migrants have settled. Of course, what is considered as threatening can change historically. The multicultural state provides physical and symbolic spatial pockets where the other can express their culture and where their law, as the law of the other, rules. But this law rules only in so far as it is decreed by the national law, not against it. This is not only true of ethnic cultures. The debates around gay marriage, for example, are an interesting example of the tension between the capacity of the multicultural state to encompass the other as cultural lifestyle but not as law. Multiculturalism always takes the form of an explicit or implicit contractual relation between the state and its culturally diverse population not as groups but as individuals belonging to groups. There is a big difference between the two, for this means that the multicultural contract is first of all a contract between individuals and the state. The group, in so far as it is an ethnically marked group, and its representatives are always in the background, but are not the main parties to the contract. Through this contract, the state says to its citizens, I am happy to recognize your cultural identity, I am happy to recognize that you have both a sub-national and a supra-national identity, i.e. if you are Pakistani in Britain or Irish in Australia, I am happy to recognize that you are part of a sub-national British Pakistani or Irish Australian community, if you see yourself as belonging to such a community. Also, I am happy to recognize that you are part of a Pakistani or Irish supra-national diaspora spread around the world, if you see yourself as belonging to such a community; likewise if you are Vietnamese, Indian, Greek or Chinese. I am happy to recognize your right to have supra- and sub-national attachments; however, you have to give me (the host nationstate) your commitment and attachment in return. This is then the nature of the contract: the state recognizes the individual and their sub-national cultural identity, and it asks them to commit themselves and become attached to their multicultural nation. All forms of

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multiculturalism insist on this reciprocal attachment by the individual even when they are not fully formulated into a state policy. In democratic plural conceptions of society the individual takes second place to the community, whose laws are integrated into the laws of the state, not simply contained by them. But if multiculturalism does not give primacy to groups in a substantialist sense, i.e. as real entities, it nevertheless does give considerable importance to group relations. This is the product of the disposition towards an inter-communal sense of justice we have examined above. Unlike with democratic pluralism, there is an acceptance of the idea that cultural minority status is often linked to social and economic marginalization. In turn, this marginalization is perceived as the product of relations of power between various groupings. This is particularly so in the case of ethnic groupings. The state (or a specific institution when multiculturalism is not an overall state policy) commits itself not just to cultural recognition but to having culturally specific programmes that aim to help people move away from states of socio-economic and political, not just cultural, marginalization. As we have seen above in analysing the multicultural disposition, it is a fusion of a social, economic and cultural categorization of the other which has the cultural as a metonymic signifier of the fused whole. The state – or an institution, such as the university system in the USA – commits itself to be both culturally accessible and socio-economically interventionist in the pursuit of equality. This is the basis of all forms of affirmative action. The opposition between the quest for cultural recognition and the struggle for economic justice might be conceptually true (see Nancy Fraser, 1997) but in practice multiculturalism is more likely than not to fuse both. This capacity to see cultural difference as part of a landscape of power relations makes multiculturalism far more subtle to questions of inequality than other forms of pluralism, even though this subtlety is more often than not restricted to instances where inequality coincides with ethnicity.

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Democratic pluralism is reasonably blind to the underlying colonial or class power relations within and between the various segments that make up its theorized ‘plural society’. Thus, for the theoreticians of consociationalism, the Catholics and the Protestants of the Netherlands and the blacks and whites of apartheid South Africa are all candidates to engage in consociational democracy. Thus for Lijphart, the creator of consociationalism, the whites and the blacks of South Africa were basically two groups living in the same neighbourhood (Lijphart, 1985). What makes the Dutch consociational and the South Africans not was neither colonialism nor expropriation and exploitation, but simply the willingness of the ‘elite’ to become realistic and sit at the table of negotiations to make the neighbourhood work. And Lijphart often liked to remind us: ‘good fences make good neighbours’. One would imagine that in that spirit Lijphart would have felt that the so-called security fence that Israel is erecting in the West Bank is a good step on the way towards a consociational democracy. What is missing is the willingness of the elite to negotiate. Multiculturalists, then, are generally at least a little bit more sensitive to the causal force of existing relations of power and domination, which are more often than not colonial in their origins. It is important to note here that this desire by the multicultural state to provide an ‘economically egalitarian cultural recognition’ also obeys the same contractual logic between state and individual we have began examining above. The multicultural state sees its fused socio-economic and cultural intervention as an offering and demands something in return: this something is social, cultural and political participation in the life of the nation-state.

MULTICULTURALISM, GLOBALIZATION AND EUROPEAN SELF-REAFFIRMATION In the above, I have tried to take a slightly different approach to introducing the nature

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of multiculturalism and multicultural social formations by highlighting their subjective and objective conditions of emergence, their national and their implicit contractual nature. Some of these elements often remain unexplored or buried under rather mystifying forms of theorization that emphasize ‘recognition’ and ‘difference’ as if all of society is engaged in academic debates. Some elements are inescapably, as I argued in the introduction, more about what multiculturalism wants to be rather than what it actually is. Nevertheless, I think that one can safely argue that, despite all differences, multiculturalism is primarily a mode of integrating third-world-origin citizens into the Western nation-state at a time when existing social and economic tendencies favour the reproduction of their original group belonging and identification. It does so by trying to establish a contractual relation between the individuals belonging to these groups and the state. There is a commitment to provide spaces of cultural self-expression and realization for these individuals. But this has been so only in so far as the laws operating within those spaces do not come in conflict with the all-encompassing national laws. There is also a commitment to combine this politics of cultural self-expression with an egalitarian politics aimed at maximizing the participation of these cultural others into the life of the nation. For all practical purposes, multiculturalism has worked well in attempting to achieve these goals throughout the 1970s and the 1980s. Even if, obviously, these goals were never fully reached, one can say that there was considerable progress and a sense of increased integration of minority groups into the Western nation-state was definitely achieved. However, from the 1990s onward, multiculturalism has become an increasingly besieged and crisis-ridden reality. New social and economic developments have introduced new cultural realities that multiculturalism finds hard to encompass within its existing framework. These new conditions have also exacerbated certain contradictory elements that are inherent to multiculturalism itself. In the remaining part of this chapter, I want to

examine the nature of these contradictions and the new elements they have had to face. The first of these elements is a rising insecurity among white Europeans, which has shrunk the spaces where ‘relaxed nationalism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ were flourishing and has created an increasing need for a mono-cultural affirmation of identity. It is often argued that globalization has gone hand in hand with the decline of the very idea of a national economy. More than anything else, globalization has meant the rise of a borderless transnational economic domain constituted by global corporations that have no allegiance to any specific nationstate, and the rapid global circulation of capital and communication that make light of national borders. It is not often commented, however, that this decline in the national nature of the economy has meant that the economy is no longer as it used to be the important ground on which national belonging can be fostered. This has had immense implications for multiculturalism. If multiculturalism and assimilation policy before it were designed to foster national belonging and national cohesion, they nevertheless were never conceived as the most important grounds on which national belonging was to be shaped. Their historical evolutions and the social and economic forces that brought them into being have always operated as a whole to a certain extent like a big domesticating and nationalizing assemblage. People do not get integrated into them on the basis of a policy aimed at facilitating integration alone. Nor was the domain of ideology and identity the sole national domain which had an integrative power. Indeed, the idea of a dysfunctional nation-state which has to ‘argue’the case of its existence as a nation-state with a heavy dose of ideological pushing and policing has always been associated with those colonially and artificially produced third-world nation-states where the integrative role of state ideology is both so artificial and yet so crucial that it is a crime to ‘speak’ against the nation-state. In the West, it had always been the case that the whole national reality – with its economic,

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political, judicial, cultural and every other domain – worked in such a way that those inserted within the nation had centripetal ‘integrative forces’ operating on them from all sides. The economy was perhaps one of the most crucial integrative domains of all. People used to become part of the nation by getting jobs in a ‘national’ economy and, sometimes, by joining national unions. That is, holding a job in the nation was itself the source of an integrative force liable to increase the sense of national belonging of the workers. Perhaps one of the most crucial changes brought about by the rise of the globalized economy is that this national-integrative function of the economy has largely disappeared. Far too many workers within the nation hold jobs in workplaces that are only very tenuously part of a ‘national’ economic network. Belonging to the ‘economy’no longer secretes national belonging. Interestingly, this is making the Western nation-state move towards a ‘third-world model’ of national integration where the ‘ideological’ is becoming central in conserving and reproducing the unity and cohesion of the nation-state. Consequently, what we have witnessed in the 1990s and since the turn of the new century is an era in which the unity of the nation is increasingly perceived to be predicated on the domain of culture and the politics of culture. This is even more so when this de-nationalization of the economic domain is coupled with the decline of the welfare state, which had equally important national incorporating capacities (Hage, 2003). It is in this sense that multiculturalism is now required to do more work than it was originally doing. As we have argued, in the 1970s and early 1980s multiculturalism worked towards integrating migrant workers into the nation-state. But, at the same time, the mere fact of being workers in a national economy was equally working towards integrating those migrants. Now, with the disappearance of the ‘national economy’, multiculturalism had to do more, if not all, of the integrative work as the cultural domain starts acquiring a national importance it did not have before. But this was not

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so much the main problem as the fact that the migrant worker was no longer the only worker who had lost the benefit of an integrating national economy. The local-born and largely white European background workers have lost their ‘national’ (and nationalizing) economy too. And if, in such conditions, multiculturalism was still capable of helping ideologically to secure the integration of migrant workers, it had not evolved in a way that made it suitable to help the integration of white European-background workers. As a policy of integration, and despite some marginal sloganeering which claimed that it was ‘for everyone’, multiculturalism worked under the assumption that the integration of white European-background workers into their nation went without saying. But the globalized economy has made this integration a national governmental problem, and now white European and European-background people also needed a stronger form of cultural affirmation to secure their national belonging, to secure their integration and to offset the weakening of the integrative power of the economy. Multiculturalism offered such people the possibility of being ‘one culture among many’ within a multicultural nation but such an offer is only attractive to people who feel relaxed about their national belonging. In the face of the insecurity of belonging, most people were opting for a revalourization of their own culture as the national cultural. The era of mono-cultural national self-affirmation was reborn and a large section of the governmental elite in the West increasingly saw this reaffirmation of European whiteness as the road towards both securing the cohesion of the nation and of securing votes in competitive party politics (Hewitt, 2005). It is in this sense that the national political interest not only in national culture but in culture as such became central. Indeed culture is now the scene of what has become known as culture wars. In the 1960s and 1970s, when the cultural domain was not perceived to be so crucial, there was a certain implicit division of labour between conservative political and economic forces, and critical intellectuals.

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The conservatives controlled the economic and political domain. Critical intellectuals controlled the cultural domain (from theatre, to movies, to educational institutions, to opinion pages of the newspapers). It was from within these locations that they launched their attacks on the political and economic elites. The latter, however, seemed reasonably happy to let the critical intellectuals dwell in, and sometimes almost monopolize, this cultural domain. Suddenly, however, and as the cultural domain began to grow in importance as a source of national cohesion, the conservative interest in occupying this domain has grown. Leftist intellectuals who were used to indulging in all kinds of cultural critiques within this domain, relatively unchallenged, are suddenly finding themselves harassed by rightist intellectuals asking them to account for their own beliefs and statements in a way they have not been accustomed to before. The teaching of history, national culture as presented in museums, the relativization of white European culture, the history and the practice of racism, truth, have all become the objects of an assault by conservative nationalist forces determined to reclaim the cultural domain from the ‘multicultural left’. What is being reclaimed is the space that is increasingly perceived as the domain on which national unity can be built and that is no longer the secondary domain it used to be. Consequently, from being initially located in a domain considered secondary for the forging of national culture, multiculturalism found itself located at the core of the battleground of how to define the nation and maintain national cohesion in the face of global centrifugal forces. Furthermore, while the ‘multiculturally inclined’ intellectuals were part of the social constituency of the ‘relaxed’ cosmopolitan nationalists, the conservatives have keyed into the rising tide of white European insecurity produced by the very globalizing forces that have undermined the national basis of economic life. Successfully, the conservatives are forcefully claiming to be the true voice of the people, precisely

by representing a majority white European constituency that increasingly feels besieged, and whose nationalism is increasingly of the ‘anxious’ sort we have examined earlier. Advocating white European cultural affirmation in the face of multiculturalism, the conservatives have increasingly portrayed white European culture as maligned, relativized and de-valued in the face of third-world cultures that were very ‘obviously’ inferior. To summarize, then, we can say that at the roots of the increasingly potent attacks on multiculturalism that we are witnessing today is a shrinking of the social space of the comfortable, relaxed, cosmopolitan class and the rise to dominance of a culturally anxious and insecure social class reflecting the anxiety and insecurity generated by the mode of their insertion within the global economy. That is, what we are witnessing is the decline, among the white European population, of the conditions of emergence of those sets of dispositions that were so crucial for the historical emergence of multiculturalism. However, it should be noted that this process of decline is not without its contradictions, for while the Western state seems to benefit from the reaffirmation of white European culture in the face of cultural relativism, its dependence on the cosmopolitan side of multiculturalism to woo skilled foreign workers and investments is increasing. Multiculturalism has always had a ‘trendy’ cosmo-multicultural side (Hage, 1997) that made it part of the ‘logic of Multinational capitalism’ (Zizek, 1997). But it would be a very partial analysis to see the crisis of multiculturalism simply in terms of the rejection of cultural relativism by a large number of white Europeans. There is also a sense in which the original constituency of multiculturalism, working class migrants from a third-world background, is itself disappearing, first, because of the increase in middle-class migration we have noted above, second, because of the effect of generational change within the migrant communities (those born and/or raised in the host country are becoming demographically more important than those born outside) and finally because of the rise of the Islamic other as a kind of

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global other articulated not only to migration but also to the war on terror.

MULTICULTURALISM, RACISM AND GENERATIONAL CHANGE Some of the comments that circulated most following the London terrorist bombing had to do with the fact that the London bombers were ‘second-generation’immigrants: ‘homegrown’, as everyone was claiming in disbelief. This was taken to demonstrate how ‘unassimilated’ London’s South Asians are given that ‘not even’ the second generation is assimilated. What the relationship is between not being assimilated and hatred is not very clear. Lack of assimilation produces lack of interest and lack of emotions towards the culture one has not assimilated to. To express such strong and destructive feelings towards a place comes from intense and even intimate interaction with it. That is, hatred does not come from lack of assimilation. If anything it comes from a frustrated and unrecognized sense of over-assimilation. This is not to say that there is a necessary link between terrorism and second generation. It is to say that if one has to pick between a first generation and a second generation a candidate for being a terrorist full of hatred towards the host country, it is far more likely that the person will be a second generation. This is because, as many works with immigrants have shown (see Phoenix, 2005), the second generation are likely to experience not only a different but also a more intense sense of injury from racism than the first generation. It is here that lies one of the problems with multiculturalism as an anti-racist ideology limited to a form of ideological antiEurocentrism. As I have argued in detail in White Nation (Hage, 2000) multiculturalism is generally very limited as an anti-racist policy. It never stops reproducing the centrality of white Europeans’ entitlement to the nation. Nevertheless, multicultural recognition as a form of anti-Eurocentrism and valourization of the other’s culture can be seen as a form

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of anti-racism. The issue I want to deal with here is that this form of anti-racism is far more geared to dealing with migrants who are relatively new to their host country. The pain of ‘not being recognized’or ‘being recognized negatively’is a predominantly first-generation experience. Furthermore, there is a sense in which the first generation ‘expect’ the racism directed towards them. Indeed, in my own fieldwork, I often hear migrants engaging in discourses aiming to even legitimate the racism towards them. They say things like: ‘I would have done the same, if they had come to my country’ and ‘well, it is their country … you know, we have to accept that’. The second generation, on the other hand, become if anything, oversensitive to any kind of exclusionary behaviour directed towards them. Because they always get a whiff of the racism experienced by their parents before them, but more importantly, because, unlike their parents, they experience racism from an early age, and because this racism is directed at them with a language and culture that is their own, they develop an excessive and even a reactive idealized sense of entitlement to non-discriminatory treatment. This is what I meant above by overassimilated: they develop an idealized sense of non-discriminatory belonging that even nonracialized citizens have no access to. Through a long history of being on the receiving end of everyday modes of being demeaned, ostracized and excluded, they develop a kind of habitus, a well-attuned capacity to recognize or to sniff all those small insignificant modes of mostly petty, subtle and unsubtle, direct and indirect, implicit and explicit, voluntary and involuntary, exclusionary behaviour that become part of their everyday life. It is this everyday petty racism coupled with the exaggerated sense of entitlement that can swell up into a sometimes formidable state of resentment that is very different in intensity from the sentiment felt by first-generation immigrants when faced with racism. A slightly transformed notion of ideological interpellation that Althusser (1971) developed long ago is good to help us theorize and get a better analytical grasp of the difference

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between the two experiences. It can be said that the first generation experiences a racism that takes either the form of non-interpellation or the form of a negative interpellation. To be nationally non-interpellated is to find no space for yourself in the ideological plane which constitutes people as subjects of a particular nation. This is the drama of non-recognition: you do not feel you are being hailed from anywhere. Non-recognition produces invisibility and a yearning to be noticed and acknowledged. Negative interpellation does not lead to invisibility. Rather it is the visibility produced by classical modes of racist inferiorization. This is where migrants say of their racist experience ‘I was treated like an animal’, meaning a form of recognition, but a recognition of someone as less than human. While the second generation can experience the above forms of racism, its primary experience is one of mis-interpellation. To be mis-interpellated is far more dramatic and emotionally complex than being negatively interpellated. For here, the person recognizes themselves as being interpellated only to find out that they are not. When the nation hails you ‘hey you citizen’ everything in you leads you to recognize that it is you that is being hailed, but when you do say ‘yes it is me’ you experience the shock of the rejection where the very ideological grid that is inviting you in expels you through the petty and not so petty acts of exclusion that racists engage in in their everyday life. You say ‘it is me’ and the ideological structure of society replies ‘No. Piss off. It is not you I am calling’. Multiculturalism has always been geared to deal with the forms of exclusion and lack of recognition that emanate from noninterpellation. It has not been up to handling the drama of mis-interpellation. As such it often leaves the second generation outside its operative sphere, as it were. This has worked to considerably weaken its legitimacy among the young. This sometimes overlaps, but is conceptually quite distinct from what is by far today the most publicized and the most important element of the crisis of multiculturalism: its relation to the Muslim question. When

looking at the problems Muslims are facing in the West, some community workers and well-meaning politicians, under the banner of non-alarmism, have tried to banalize the alterity of the Islamic question. They argue that Muslims in the West are facing what many other newly arrived groups, from the Irish to the Italians to the Chinese, have faced before them. Below, I want to argue that this is not the case; that the increasingly dominant religious mode of being a Muslim in the West produces a form of alterity that cannot be easily incorporated within existing forms of multiculturalism. This has less to do with the conservative claims of a clash between Muslim and Christian values and more to do with the transnational and existential mode of Islamic being in the diaspora today.

MULTICULTURALISM AND THE MUSLIM OTHER For many the issue of the relation between the West and Muslim migrants is a question concerning the capacity of the West to move beyond its secularism. Sometimes it is argued that the very notion of secularism is itself ethnocentric and thus the issue is to simply deepen the West’s shedding of its ethnocentrism that multiculturalism has already inaugurated. Another variant on this argument is to see the issue in terms of the capacity of the Western Enlightenment to encompass the very pre-Enlightenment culture it historically negated. Tariq Modood puts this most eloquently. ‘Is the Enlightenment big enough to tolerate the existence of pre-Enlightenment religious enthusiasm, or can it only exist by suffocating all who fail to be overawed by its intellectual brilliance and vision of Man?’ he asks (Modood, 2005: p. 112). There is a definite element of truth in this opposition between differential degrees of ‘religious enthusiasm’. The religious can be the site of social emotions and ‘enthusiasm’ in a way no other cultural mode of identification is. But this mode of formulating the problem, by continuing to see it in terms of ‘what the West can or cannot tolerate’, fails to capture

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how the move from questions of cultural difference to questions of religious difference renders this problem more complex. To begin with, it is useful to highlight the undoubted fact that part of what makes Muslims different today is that such a high proportion of them take their religion seriously. In this regard, the issues raised by the presence of Muslims in the West are issues raised by the presence of all those who take their religion seriously regardless of what religion they belong to. At the same time, not all religions at all times generate the same conception of ‘religious seriousness’. Anthropological work on religion, and specifically on Islam, has long ago strongly warned against this essentialization of what an ahistorical, asocial, purely textual ‘Islam’ entails (Asad, 1973). Consequently, it is important to recognize the specificity of the dominant mode of taking one’s religion seriously among Muslim immigrants and their offspring in the West today. Among the latter, to take your religion seriously does not simply mean exhibiting a different degree of enthusiasm to it, in the manner one takes one’s football or one’s nation seriously. To take your religion seriously also means above all to consider your everyday life as ruled by the laws of your God (Brague, 2005). It is as if, not finding a socio-political space free from colonial domination where they can be subjected to a law they can call their own, Muslim immigrants have found such a space transcendentally, in a parallel space ruled by divine law and that is constantly intertwined with and yet separate from the spaces of everyday life ruled by national law. It is here that the real problem for Western multiculturalism is located, for the laws of God are not equivalent to minor laws such as the rules of an ethnic-specific cuisine or even the ethno-specific laws of kinship. Multiculturalism has always had the capacity to find a space for such minor laws of the other within an all-encompassing national law. This is indeed part of what defines it. However, for most Muslim immigrants who take their religion seriously, this situation is reversed. It is the laws of God that are

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the all-encompassing ones and the national laws of the host nation that are the minor ones. Indeed, how can it be otherwise since the laws of nation merely regulate the order of things within the nation while the laws of God regulate the order of things tout court. Consequently, for a seriously religious Muslim migrant to integrate – and needless to say, not all Muslim migrants are seriously religious – it becomes a matter of finding a space for these national laws within the allencompassing laws of God. We see then how the very relation encompassing-encompassed cultures on which multiculturalism is based is here inverted. To claim your primary belonging to this overarching order of things is to subvert the very idea of a minority culture central to the multicultural order of things: a culture surrounded as it were by the dominant national culture and trying to find a little space within it where it is tolerated to express itself. Because of its overarching ‘existential’ nature, this mode of Muslim belonging to the order of things is necessarily also experienced as transnational by both the religious Muslim and the other members of the host society. The whole Muslim diaspora becomes perceived as embodying and obeying a transnational will that is other to the national will of the specific countries that have come to host them. Here Muslim modes of being come in direct conflict with multiculturalism’s dependence on a ‘light’ conception of cultural community that does not include a politicized sovereign communal will. Indeed, one can write a whole history of the rise of the Islamic other as a rise of this transnational communal will that forces the West to deal with it on terms it has not been used to dealing with before. The Iranian revolution instituted for the first time a rule of law that openly portrays itself as a kind of transcendent Muslim political will. Subsequently, this political will is perceived for the first time to exercise itself transnationally with the Salman Rushdie affair: here we have a situation where we witness a reversal of a long colonial history of colonizers imposing their own laws on the colonies and sometimes decreeing the assassination of persons deemed

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threatening. As if suddenly, we have the reverse situation before our very eyes: the government of a previously colonized people openly ‘sentence’ a person living in and subject to the protection of the law of a Western nation-state. Even more threatening to the Western national will, numerous Muslims who were supposed to be the subjects of this national will show themselves to be the agents of the transnational Muslim will by calling for the carrying out, or even volunteering to carry out the sentence themselves. Old colonialists must have looked at this with some envy. In the history of colonialism, there are many instances where Western nations were able to convince or coerce some people to carry out their orders within the space of the colony. But not often did they have people so enthusiastically willing to carry out such orders in their name. Certainly not in the way some Muslims living in the West were enthusiastically marching in the streets calling for the application of another law (which is also the law of the other) within Western space. Since that time, there have been many occasions where some Muslims were portrayed or have shown themselves to be the subjects of such an Islamic transnational will. It is this more than anything else that has put them outside the realm of what multicultural politics can deal with. What is more, spectacles such as the Salman Rushdie affair uncovered to many white Europeans the limits of their own power over spaces they considered as their own (Hage, 2000). This could only trigger, in a kind of backlash, an intense desire for self-affirmation and worked towards reinforcing the need for white European cultural reaffirmation that emerged in reaction to globalization. But there is more. Muslims, regardless of where they settle, experience themselves as part of a global conflict. This is partly because the conflicts they articulate their emotions to, such as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Iraqi invasions, are by their nature global conflicts. In Australia, for instance, it was common to tell migrants in the 1960s and 1970s, as part of multiculturalism, to leave

their conflicts at home. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Iraq invasion cannot be left at home. Muslim migrants often measure local politics according to the position of local politicians vis-à-vis those global conflicts. This also means a migrant interest in the foreign policy of the nation they have settled in. Again this transnational mode of belonging is difficult to contain within multiculturalism. There is a final aspect of the Islamic presence in the West that also makes it a political threat in a way that the West cannot be multicultural about. Even before it has become a migrant issue, the Islamic faith has shown itself to have a specific resonance with the oppressed and the downtrodden. In the early history of Islam this is embodied in the tale of Bilal, the black slave who was among the first to follow Muhammad and adopt the Islamic faith. This ‘Bilalism’ has manifested itself since on a number of historical occasions. Its most important manifestation in the twentieth century has been the adoption of Islam as an oppositional religion by African-Americans. Today, even in Australia, there have been a number of news reports on conversions to Islam among the indigenous population. Multiculturalism has never been conceived to pluralize such a class-politicized mode of experiencing ethnoreligious culture.

THE TROUBLES OF ASSIMILATIONISM The crisis of multiculturalism as analysed above is then the product of both a rising of white insecurity and a ‘defensive’ inability to open up to cultural otherness, and the coming into being of an ethno-religious transnational formation whose cultural difference cannot be easily encompassed within the traditional parameters of the multicultural conception of cultural recognition. In the face of this multicultural crisis, it is not surprising that alternatives are being thought and canvassed at both an intellectual and a political level. In particular, and in combination with the rise of white insecurity, there is a revival of various forms

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of assimilationism, whether in the form of a ‘going back’ to pre-multicultural assimilation (i.e. asserting the need for Muslim immigrants to adopt the culture of the host country), or in the new milder form of asserting the need for immigrants (meaning primarily Muslims) to adopt the ‘core values’ of particular nations under the slogan of citizenship and integration. This new assimilationist tendency carries with it the same problems of premulticultural assimilations as well as some new problems. Assimilation as an ideology, despite its Eurocentrism, is not necessarily always objectionable: it asserts the capacity of people to change and it often expresses the desire that people take on what is perceived as best about a local culture. In practice, however, assimilation has many contradictory features which it is important to address in this concluding section. First, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, the proclamation of the need to assimilate is in a certain way an admission that the nation-state’s power to assimilate has been weakened. Second, there is a rather naïve psychology underlying the call for assimilation: a belief that haranguing people into adopting values or cultural practices that are not their own will get them to do so. There is no historical evidence that the assimilation of migrants into the dominant cultures of the West in the first half of the twentieth century has been the product of coercion. Throughout the history of migration people have often assimilated. They have internalized values and cultural habits other than their own. But they have done so either passively because of longtime exposure or actively, when they have found it useful or even joyful to do so. On the other hand, there is more evidence that it is precisely when faced with authoritarian forms of requirements to assimilate that people create protected spaces where they can express and live their cultures outside the authoritarian gaze demanding conformity. That is, paradoxically, assimilation is more likely to create the very ghettoes it is supposedly wanting to eradicate.

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In much the same way, it has long been known in research on migration, particularly since the pioneering work of the Chicago school, that giving migrants a communal space of their own gives them the sense of security needed to move away from their home cultures and interact with the dominant cultures. When this space is under attack people are likely to withdraw into their subcultural formations and reinforce it as a closed-in spatial enclosure rather than simply abandon it. However, it is historically the case that assimilationists have cared very little about the fact that all research shows that assimilation as a policy does not work. This points to what is perhaps the most important contradiction of assimilationist discourses (as an ensemble of ideologies and practices): there are very few assimilationists who actually believe that by harassing people into assimilating they will do so. The assimilation of the other abolishes the need for assimilationists and leads to their symbolic death. What assimilationists enjoy is the very moment of harassment (i.e. of harassing people to assimilate). This, in their minds, divides the nation between themselves and their like, who are always already and unquestionably assimilated, and the others who are always lacking what is needed for them to be ‘truly’ assimilated. The assimilationists aim to perpetuate this situation for as long as it is possible. Thus, the migrant others are perceived to never assimilate enough in their eyes, and those migrants who engage in the game of trying to assimilate find themselves in a never-ending position of lacking what it takes to assimilate. There is ample ethnographic evidence of the fact that many Western-born Muslim youths started out by embracing the Western national cultural forms around them and only later turned to Islam as reaction to being constantly positioned in the role of the ‘forever-tryingto-assimilate’. Here the turn to Islam can be seen as a kind of assimilation fatigue by the youths concerned. Multiculturalism might well be ridden with internal contradiction in the face of

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the Muslim other and in the shadow of globalization and the war on terror, but what is certain is that it still offers far more potentialities of change in the face of what is an increasingly culturally diverse world than the historical dead-end that assimilation has always constituted.

NOTES 1 About conceiving the relation between anthropology and political philosophy, see Cowan, 2006. 2 There were substantial migrations from other parts of the world, of course. Nevertheless, multiculturalism was essentially the working out of a post-colonial encounter. 3 See Kuper and Smith (1969) for an interesting classification of forms of pluralism (structural, social and cultural) established during the era of the rise of cultural pluralist theory in the USA.

REFERENCES Althusser, L. (1971) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: New Left Books. Asad, T. (1973) Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. New York: Ithaca/Humanities Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Oxford: Polity Press. Brague, R. (2005) La loi de Dieu: Histoire philosophique d’une alliance. Paris: Gallimard. Braudel, F. (1984) The Perspective of the World, Part III of Civilization and Capitalism. New York: Harper and Row. Calhoun, C. (2002) ‘The class consciousness of frequent travellers: towards a critique of actually existing cosmopolitanism’, in S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cowan, J. (2006) ‘Culture and rights after culture and rights’, American Anthropologist, 108(1): 9–24. Fraser, N. (1997) Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition. New York: Routledge. Friedman, J. (2003) ‘Globalizing languages: ideologies and realities of the contemporary global system’, American Anthropologist, 105(4): 744–752. Gunew, S. (2004) Haunted Nations. The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms. London and New York: Routledge. Hage, G. (1997) ‘At home in the entrails of the west: multiculturalism, ethnic food and migrant homebuilding’, in H. Grace et al. (eds), Home/World: Space,

Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West. Sydney: Pluto Press, pp. 99–153. Hage, G. (2000) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. New York: Routledge. Hage, G. (2003) Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Sydney: Pluto Press; and London: Merlin Press. Hannerz, U. (1996) Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London and New York: Routledge. Hefner, R.W. (ed.) (2001) The Politics of Multiculturalism: Pluralism and Citizenship in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Heller, A. (1996) ‘The many faces of multiculturalism’, in R. Baubock, A. Heller and A. Zolberg (eds), The Challenge of Diversity. Integration and Pluralism in Societies of Immigration. Aldershot, Brookfield: Avebury, pp. 25–42. Hesse, B. (1997) ‘It’s your world: discrepant M/Multiculturalisms’, Social Identities, 3(3): 375–394. Hewitt, R. (2005) White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Joppke, C. and Lukes, S. (1999) Multicultural Questions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kuper, L. and Smith, M.G. (eds) (1969) Pluralism in Africa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kymlicka, W. (1999) ‘Comments on Shachar and Spinner-Halev: an update from the multicultural wars’, in J. Christian and S. Lukes (eds), Multicultural Questions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lacan, J. (1977) Ecrits: a Selection. Tr. A. Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications. Lijphart, A. (1985) Power-sharing in South Africa. Berkley: Institute of International Studies. Modood, T. (2005) Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain. Bodmin: Edinburgh University Press. Phoenix, A. (2005) ‘Remembered racialisation: young people and positioning in differential understandings’, in K. Murji and J. Solomos (eds), Racialisation: Studies in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Samad, Y. (1997) ‘The plural guises of multiculturalism: conceptualising a fragmented paradigm’, in T. Modood and P. Werbner (eds), The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe. London, New York: Zed Books. van Brakel, J. (2003) ‘Varieties of multiculturalism: no need for a shared language’, in B. Saunders and D. Haljan (eds), Whither Multiculturalism?

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A Politics of Dissensus. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 145–163. Vertovec, S. and Cohen, R. (2002) ‘Introduction: conceiving cosmopolitanism’, in S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory,

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Context, and Practice. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Zizek, S. (1997) ‘Multiculturalism, or, the cultural logic of multinational capitalism’, New Left Review, 223: 28–51.

24 Culture and Identity Simon Clarke

INTRODUCTION Cultural identities are marked by a number of factors – ‘race’, ethnicity, gender and class to name but a few; the very real locus of these factors, however, is the notion of difference. The question of difference is emotive; we start to hear ideas about ‘us’ and ‘them’, friend and foe, belonging and not belonging, in-groups and out-groups, which define ‘us’ in relation to others, or the Other. From this we get ideas about communities, even imagined communities (Anderson, 1983) and ethno-national boundaries. A central question in this debate, however, is: who ascribes a cultural identity, to whom and for what reason? Do we choose our identity, or is it beyond our control? To further complicate this matter we could also ask whether identity is a social construction or part of a psychodynamic process. Or indeed, as I would argue, whether it is a complex amalgam of both of these. These are the questions that will be addressed in this chapter. I start by examining the social construction of the self as a dramatic or performative role and in particular the way in which we

construct the self and convince other people that we are who we ‘appear’ to be. Goffman’s work in Stigma (1968) starts to give us a sense of how identity is constructed by others and the pathologization of certain identities by society. In examining how deviance from a societal ‘norm’ can lead to a certain stigmatized identity, Goffman’s work can be seen as a forerunner to the writings of Michel Foucault (1977, 1984, 1995) on the normalizing techniques of modern society. Foucault’s (1995) work on madness puts a unique spin on the creation of rational man and the modern self. In Discipline and Punish (1977) Foucault starts to analyse the intersections between power and knowledge that are constituted by the role played by particular forms of expertise in discourses that exert their own form of identity normalization on all of us. As we move on to the social construction of sexuality once again there is a strong argument that cultural identity is linked to dominant discourses and power. Although both Goffman and Foucault’s work provides a very clear history and analysis of the social construction of the self and identity, I argue that what is missing from

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both their accounts is any sense of emotion, passion or motivation in the construction of self. In looking at the work of the Frankfurt School, Franz Fanon (1986) and Slavoj Zizek (1993) we get to what I argue is at the crux of a cultural identity: that is, the notion of identity as shaped not just in relation to some other, but to the Other, to another culture. The notion of cultural identity becomes much stronger and firmer when we define our ‘selves’ in relation to a cultural Other. We start then to see ideas around ‘ways of life’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, and this is at the heart of racism, hatred and exclusion. In Fanon’s writing we see the construction of colonial black identity and the powerful affectual dynamics of power and oppression. In Zizek we see the effect that the collapse of the nation-state has had on ethnic and cultural identities. In both cases we see how cultural identities are not only socially constructed, but psychologically constructed. I conclude this chapter by looking at the work of Zygmunt Bauman (1990, 1991) on strangers. The idea of the stranger, I argue, is an important conceptual tool if we are to understand the ambiguous nature of identity construction in contemporary culture. Finally, I argue that we have to take very seriously the constructions and perceptions of the human imagination and emotion – the way in which people imagine the world to be and imagine the ways that others exist in the world is central to the construction of identity. It does not matter that such beliefs may be based more on fiction than on fact, because the human imagination is central to identity construction; it is therefore concrete and has very real consequences for the world we live in.

WHO AM ‘I’? The dramatic self For Goffman identity is a dramatic effect: the self is an effect of a performance, the way in which we present our selves in everyday life. So, if we turn to Goffman’s (1969) classic

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text The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, we have what has become known as the dramaturgical model. For Goffman life becomes a performance: When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the tasks that he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be. (Goffman, 1969: p. 28)

Identity is therefore projected at the target audience in a theatrical performance that conveys self to others. On the one hand, the performer can be completely immersed in his own act and sincerely believe that the version of reality he is projecting is actually correct. On the other hand, the performer may be cynical, not quite taken in by his own performance, indeed in some cases fully aware that the impression being fostered is but a mere act. It is not always the case, Goffman argues, that this is done out of selfinterest, but rather in the belief that it is for the audience’s own good. Politicians do this all the time, while educators often project a cynical sense of self to get over a point, and we often talk about putting on a brave face in spite of adversity. These, for Goffman, are the two poles of performativity that are little more than a simple continuum: Each provides the individual with a position which has its own particular securities and defences, so there will be a tendency for those who have travelled close to one of these poles to complete the voyage. (Goffman, 1969: p. 30)

So we have the idea of the presentation of self and identity as a performance. This, as Manning (1992) notes, is just but one of the six dramaturgical principles that Goffman outlines. Manning argues that we are provided with a bewildering array of definitions and classifications as the social world is reordered according to this theatrical perspective (Manning, 1992: p. 40). Goffman’s basic argument therefore contains six principles: performance, the team, the region, discrepant roles, communication out

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of character, and impression management. Each of these principles has subsections of devices that we use to portray our selves. So, for example, if we take the principle of performance, then we may use stage props – desks, academic attire, white coats for doctors – in order to manage a ‘front’. To convince people we really are who we are, we use certain mannerisms and project certain characteristics within a given setting that will convince people that we really are a doctor, dentist or teacher. A front, for Goffman, helps to induce or add ‘dramatic realization’ to a performance. There is, however, a paradox for Goffman, or at least a dilemma between expression and action. The dramatization of a part may well stand in the way of the action associated with that part. Goffman quotes Sartre’s example of the schoolboy who is so keen to seem attentive in the eyes of his teacher – ears and eyes wide open – that he exhausts himself playing the role and is no longer able to listen. This is why organizations often delegate the task of dramatizing the meaning of action to someone who does not perform it. So, for example, a sales representative may dramatize the role of the quality of workmanship in a particular firm promoting a product just as the marketing department may sell a degree course to a potential student rather than the worker or teacher performing these roles. Thus, for Goffman, performances are not only realized but idealized, shown in the best possible light to conform to cultural and societal norms. Where this is so, cultural identities are often idealizations that are set in opposition to stigmatized identities. As Manning notes: The picture that emerges is this: performances are both realized and idealized as our all-tohuman selves are transformed into socialized beings capable of expressive control. (Manning, 1992: p. 41)

In a performance certain things are played down while others are accentuated depending on the social context of the encounter. The performer will also often keep a distance from the audience to appear more interesting or

mysterious and, as Goffman notes, ‘the real secret behind the mystery is that there really is no mystery; the real problem is to prevent the audience learning this too’ (Goffman, 1969: p. 76). For Goffman the real sites of successful performances are to be found not in individuals but in teams who perform in ‘front’ regions: for example, teams of doctors in hospitals may work together in the front region of ward and then retire to ‘back’ regions to review and revise their performance, or rehearse it for the next time. The back region is an essential area where the audience are not allowed which enables the performer to practise the techniques of impression management: ‘since the vital secrets of the show are visible backstage and since performers behave out of character while there, it is natural to expect that the passage from the front region to the back region will be kept closed . . .’ (Goffman, 1969: p. 116). Thus, doctors keep up the mystique of the medical profession by keeping their secrets in the back region. The fear of disclosing any disreputable information encourages performers to practise the art of impression management. In Stigma, Goffman describes three types of identity – social identity, personal identity and ego identity. For Goffman society characterizes people and produces attributes that are normal in any given categorization. Social identity is about the category and attributes that a person is deemed to possess in relation to others. Often, when we meet a stranger, we make assumptions about the nature of this stranger and attribute to her or him what Goffman calls a virtual social identity. Stigma is based on a discrepancy between actual and virtual social identity, an attribute that we perceive as a shortcoming – ‘in the extreme, a person who is quite thoroughly bad, or dangerous or weak’ (Goffman, 1968: p. 12) leads us to discredit and stigmatize an individual. Goffman delineates three broad areas of stigma: physical deformities and disabilities; blemishes of the character that often arise from a person’s history of alcoholism or drug abuse, or from attributes associated with their sexuality, employment status or

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political behaviour; and stigma that arises from notions of race, nation and religion. This final area is tied in with the notion of cultural identities that I’ll explore in greater detail in the next section. So far as the concept of social identity is concerned, however, we see a form of identity that is ascribed by, and based in our relationship to, other people and to that which is considered normal and tied in with social categories such as age, gender and class. Personal identity for Goffman is about a person’s biography. It is about something that is unique to a person and makes that person an individual within the social. What Goffman is arguing is that we present certain signs that identify us as an individual in the past and the present, and that will continue to do so in the future. In other words, the signs that set us apart from others are our personal identity. This could be our biography, accumulated information about us, and even our fingerprints. It is important to note, though, that Goffman is not talking about our own sense of being, but about marks and signs that distinguish us from others and continue to do so: By personal identity, I have in mind . . . positive marks or identity pegs, and the unique combination of life history items that comes to be attached to the individual with the help of these pegs for his identity. (Goffman, 1968: p. 74)

So, this is not about our inner essence, about how we feel we are and exist in the world. Rather, it’s about a complex and continuous profiling of who we are in relation to society that marks us as an individual. It’s about our data trail, how society keeps tabs on us and ascribes or imputes a personal or individual identity to us. Goffman identifies a third form of identity – ego identity – but, as Tom Burns (1992) notes, he only mentions it to make it clear he is not dealing with ‘ego’ per se, but is more interested in socially constructed interactional identity. Ego identity is about our subjective sense of who we are and how we exist in the world, in other words how we feel about our self. Indeed, if we return to the notion of stigmatization, then Goffman clearly

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differentiates between these three types of identity: The concept of social identity allowed us to consider stigmatization. The concept of personal identity allowed us to consider the role of information control in stigma management. The idea of ego identity allows us to consider what the individual may feel about stigma. (Goffman, 1968: p. 130)

In the relations between these three senses of identity, then, we have quite a strong constructionist view of how the self and identity are both constructed by and maintained in parallel with societal norms (see also: Berger and Luckmann, 1971; Burr, 2003; Garfinkel, 1967; Gergen, 2000). The first thing we could ask of this account is: where does the role of emotion reside in Goffman’s model of self and identity? The emphasis placed on social and personal identity draws away from the feeling self and in some sense negates identity as a felt state of being. In largely affirming Margaret Mead’s (1934) work, the idea of a sense of cultural identity from the position of the subject is rather overwhelmed by the normalization of self by society. If we look at the dramaturgical model then, as Manning (1992) notes, life is reduced to a set of performances. There is very little analysis of intention or motivation, or even of how the self is created. Identity becomes so performative we lose all sense of subjectivity and reflexivity. Indeed, for Manning (1992), ‘Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective over-extends the notion of acting or performing’ with the result ‘that it offers an inadequate account of the intentions of actors and that it imposes its solution onto the phenomena it purports to explain’ (Manning, 1992: p. 54). Anthony Elliott (2001) also highlights the lack of psychic dispositions in the acting self, maintaining that an undue concern with impression management might actually be symptomatic of deeper concerns surrounding the self. Nor do questions of desire enter into Goffman’s framework and, at the same time, argues Elliott, the notion of the self as performer throws doubt on any notion of a ‘true’ self that ‘modern culture valourizes, and which is evident

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in many forms of social thought’ (Elliott, 2001: p. 36). Indeed, for Elliott, Goffman’s idea of the performative self might actually be a precursor to post-modern ideas of the self. Despite these criticisms, however, Goffman’s model offers us some positive insights into identity formation and notions of the self. Although we cannot realistically see the whole of social life through the metaphoric lens of the theatre we also quite plainly do play roles, put on fronts and perform in different ways in different social contexts. Goffman’s ideas around organization and normalization bear an uncanny resemblance to Foucault’s later work on this subject, and indeed Tom Burns (1992) argues that it is almost as if Foucault had adopted Goffman’s ideas and interpretations and expanded them into a much wider thesis on power and social control. It is then, to Foucault that I want to turn to next.

The ship of fools – self and other As we have already seen, social and cultural identities are founded on difference and, as Goffman has showed us, they are shaped in relation to societal norms. In Foucault’s exploration of the mad, the criminally insane, the history of the deviant and of sexualities we see how the self is created in relation to expert discourses that define normal and pathological as well as trying to drive us back towards a norm; to make our sense of self align with a rational model in a process of normalization. In Madness and Civilization (1995) Foucault takes us on a critical voyage from the ‘ship of fools’, a strange ‘drunken’ boat that glides along the calm waters of the Rhineland and Flemish canals, a time when madmen had a loosely regulated, wandering existence, to a very different existence in the context of the disciplinary society (Foucault, 1995: p. 7). In doing so, Foucault questions the very notion of what it means to be mad, to be a delinquent and, in his later work, probes the ways in which expert systems have tried to construct sexuality and identity. Foucault explores the processes and historical circumstances that

give rise to the modern person, to the creation of ‘rational man’ and the objectification of the Other. Much has been written about Foucault’s work on madness, deviancy and sexuality (see Clarke, 2005), but we can draw some strong themes from Madness and Civilization which give us a clearer picture of one of many forms of identity construction. The main themes of the book revolve around notions of unreason and reason, integration and exclusion, power and knowledge and the creation of Cartesian rational man. This is underpinned, Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982) note, by Foucault’s tracing the growth of ‘scientific positivism as an overlay for the real explanation of the power to cure that lay behind objectivity’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982: p. 11). Scientific knowledge for Foucault, far from being objective, is a discourse from which the powerful dominate. Foucault is effectively showing us in Madness and Civilization that there is a discourse on madness in Western civilization that has four distinct stages. In the medieval period the madman was considered almost holy, whereas in the Renaissance the madman was in part venerated as the bearer of a higher form of reason. At the end of the seventeenth century madness started to become more clearly delineated from sanity and we saw the start of the confinement of the mad in hospitals. Yet still the mad were not so much excluded from society as confined. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the asylum was developed together with psychiatric discourse which further separated reason from unreason, leading to a more complete sequestration of the mad. Finally, argues Foucault, all nineteenth-century psychiatry converges on Freud, on psychoanalysis (Foucault, 1995: p. 277). For Foucault, in the classical age rational man was created by locking away all the people who did not fit the picture of rationality and morality of the time. In the eighteenth century houses of confinement began to become the focus of concern and social anxiety. Unreason started to be associated with contagion and disease. This created a

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fear, what Foucault describes as the Great Fear. People were forever aware of their own potential madness, and consequently of the risk that they too might become confined. This resulted in a double fear in the sense that, on the one hand, people were horrified by the disease and perversity seeping out of the asylum while, on the other, they were concerned that their own minds harboured thoughts and feelings that didn’t quite align with the popular moral image of rationality. The actual walls of houses of confinement, of the madhouse and the asylum, created walls inside people as they feared the gap between the norms of rationality and their own potential madness. The discourse of psychiatry was a response to the fear of madness as a disease that might spread from the houses of confinement unless the doctors entered to control it. At the end of the eighteenth century, consequently, we saw the separation of the mad from criminals and the poor with the birth of the asylum. In the asylum, the subject is objectified. The objectified subject would be described in greater detail later by Foucault (1977) in Discipline and Punish, but the principle remains the same. The subject is constantly observed and made aware of the error of his or her ways. The mad are made to see their transgressions and brought back to the rational norms of society by the restraint, retraining and disciplining of the body and mind (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982: p. 9). It is perhaps the most significant development for Foucault that, when the doctor enters the asylum, we have the birth of the doctorpatient relationship and the expert discourses of psychiatry. Foucault shows us how expert discourses develop systems of knowledge that sustain power relations and domination in society. It is through the person of the doctor that madness becomes insanity, and thus an objectification for investigation in medical discourse. If Madness and Civilization gives us a clue as to the construction of the modern self and identity in relation to the Other, then Discipline and Punish describes in detail the processes through which this transformation is attained.

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The gaze and I In Discipline and Punish Foucault charts the history that leads from the exercise of sovereign power in the form of public spectacle to the exercise of disciplinary power in the prison or penitentiary – a transformation in the ends of punishment from the public mutilation of the offender to his private transformation.Again we see the development of an expert discourse of criminology that on the one hand identifies those who are deviant and on the other pulls us back to the norms of society. Prison becomes a transforming apparatus whose rules and processes Foucault argues also apply to most institutions and organizations. Schools, colleges, hospitals, factories all follow the principles of panopticism – of omnipresent surveillance – and the training of bodies that mark disciplinary society. Foucault begins his analysis of panopticism by describing the measures taken when the plague appeared in a town. He does this to demonstrate some of the very basic principles of panopticism – the spatial partitioning of the town; the confinement of residents to houses; ceaseless inspections; observation posts and sentinels; and every day everyone is counted. This surveillance is based on a system of permanent registrations – the plague is met by order. We then move on to the prison – Bentham’s Panopticon. For Foucault, the panoptic effect reverses the principle of the dungeon, it disposes of the deprivation of light, and the idea that you hide the prisoner, retaining only the function of incarceration. Visibility becomes a trap. Each inmate is confined to a cell, only the supervisor or inspector can see him, he cannot communicate with fellow inmates – ‘he is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication’ (Foucault, 1977: p. 200). For Foucault, this highly visible invisibility ensures there is no communication with fellow inmates and therefore no likelihood of further criminal dealing, or mass escape. If the inmate is a patient there is no possibility of contagion, if they are madmen, then no risk of violence,

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if they are schoolchildren, then there is no hope of copying. Order is maintained through the gaze, and the elimination of noise, chatter and time-wasting, in the office, the workshop and the factory just as much as in the prison. Crucially, for Foucault the major effect of the Panopticon is to: ‘Induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’ (Foucault, 1977: p. 201). This is achieved by making the prisoner think and feel that he is the object of constant surveillance, constantly under the eye of power. The Panopticon, as Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982) note, brings together power, knowledge, control (of the body, and of space, and time) in an integrated technology of discipline.Although the Panopticon was never actually built, the idea and ideas that surround it make up disciplinarity, and the techniques permeate the whole of disciplinary society, from the speed camera to the arrangement of timetables, rooms, examinations, students’ records in the university, in the temporal, spatial and observational organization of our lives. For Foucault, panopticism is the general principle of a new political anatomy whose object is not sovereignty, but relations of discipline. Think of the gathering of official statistics, the monitoring of populations: these are all part of disciplinary society. The objectification of people led to the notion of a population. Government is impossible without a statistical population which can be quantified, categorized, normalized and therefore governed – this is the essence of what Foucault refers to as governmentality. We have a huge gathering of knowledge through political economy and discourses of psychiatry, welfare and criminal justice in a society where power and knowledge are inextricably linked (see also: Barry et al. 1996; Burchell, 1991). This is also the essence of Goffman’s conception of social and personal identities where we are pulled back to the norm, and our personal identity is very much about information about us rather than how we feel. Famously we have Foucault’s conception of ‘the gaze’, stressing the role of observation, judgement, normalization and

examination in the ordering of social life. This involved a shift from the memorable man to the calculable man, from individuality to normalization.

The social construction of sexual identity The History of Sexuality (three volumes: The Will to Knowledge [1976], The Use of Pleasure [1984], The Care of the Self [1984]) contains at its heart three main themes: a rejection of the ‘repressive hypothesis’, the idea of the ‘confession’, and the notion of ‘bio-power’. While not the first to do so, Foucault was among the earliest theorists to draw attention to the social construction of sexuality. Rather than taking it as a natural given Foucault sees sexuality as being constructed through discourse. He starts his examination of sexuality by questioning the role of repression, and particularly the extraordinary power that was attributed to it during the Victorian era. His purpose is not to call into question the historical existence of repression; rather it is to question the explanatory power that is accorded the repressive hypothesis when examining the relationship between power and sex. This has to be seen in the light of the emergence of perversion, homosexuality and other forms of sexual deviance as new categories that simply did not exist before they were organized into being by new discourses. Indeed, Foucault saw a ‘discursive explosion’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around what constituted a legitimate alliance between people that were paralleled by the discursive construction of new forms of perversion and peripheral sexualities. The nineteenthcentury homosexual first became a figure of discourse at this time (Foucault, 1976: p. 43). The psychological and psychiatric/medical category of homosexual was constituted from the moment it was characterized (in 1870) not as a type of sexual relation but as a certain quality of sexual sensibility. We therefore start to see a veritable explosion of discourses around sexuality which were increasingly articulated in scientific

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terms: scientia sexualis, procedures that, in seeking to tell the truth about sex, are geared to a form of knowledge-power (Foucault, 1976: p. 58). The central concept in the scientific study and increasing administration of sexuality was the confession. Although originating in the Christian confessional, confessional techniques were subsequently generalized to become one of the West’s foremost ways of producing truth. For Foucault, the confession now plays a part in all our everyday lives – we have become a confessing society. We confess to our teachers, our friends, our doctor, in public, in private, we even pay to confess. Although the form of confession may have changed over the years, it is, for Foucault, still the general standard by which a true discourse on sex is produced. The confession has lost many of its ritualistic elements, and is no longer located only within the church or the torturers’ dungeon. It has spread to wider society and exists in the relationship between doctors and patients, parents and children, delinquents and experts, and of course, for Foucault, in the very practice of psychoanalysis. Through technologies of the self there is the idea that with the help of experts we can know the truth about our sense of being, of self and identity. It was in this way that the scientific discourse on sexuality developed within the framework of the confessional in which the subject was transformed into an object of study – a case history. Just as disciplinary technologies exercised their power over the unruly working classes, bio-power and technologies of the self were applied to the bourgeoisie. Bio-power, the exercise of power of life and bodies, constituted a specific modality of power. Foucault identifies four specific power-knowledge mechanisms centring on sex that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: first, the hysterization of women’s bodies whereby the feminine was analysed, quantified and qualified. Second, a pedagogization of children’s sex in which there is an assertion that all children indulge in sexual activity, but at the same time this is condemned as unnatural, immoral and dangerous. Doctors, parents and psychiatrists

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would have to take care of this dangerous potential. Third, we have the socialization of procreative behaviour. The couple became the locus of sensibility, just as responsibility for reproducing the social body was laid at the door of the family. Finally there has been a psychiatrization of perverse pleasure. A clinical assessment is made of all anomalies, and individuals are either normalized or pathologized with respect to all aspects of their behaviour, and appropriate corrective technologies are sought for and applied to those who err. Foucault asks us what this is all about. Is it a struggle against sexuality? An effort to gain control over sexuality? An effort to regulate sexuality? No, says Foucault, it is the very production of sexuality itself. No longer taken as a natural given but as a social construction produced through discourse (see Seidman, 2003; Wilton, 2004), sexuality operated as a tool for the infusion of bio-power into the social body. ‘Through the deployment of sexuality’, Dreyfus and Rabinow thus argue, ‘bio power spread its net down to the smallest twitches of the body and the most minute stirrings of the soul . . . the body, knowledge, discourse and power – were brought into a common localization’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982: p. 169). As Barry Smart (2002) has noted, Foucault’s work addresses the ways in which the application of power and objectification made human beings into subjects (see also Weeks, 1996). Thus we have a strong argument that cultural identity is linked to dominant discourses and power. Judith Butler (1990, 1993) builds on this perspective in her notion of performativity, where a discursive practice enacts and therefore produces what it names. Performance, gender identity and sexual power are inextricably linked. Thus, the social construction of identity is tied in with notions of rationality, discourse and power. With the help of experts we can work on our self, change our identity or even discover who we actually are. Now we have looked in some detail at who we are, we can pose the question: who are they? In other words, the analysis thus far

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has been strongly centred on the construction of identity within a given culture and lacks any referent to passion or emotion. But we must also ask: how are identities constructed in relation to other cultures? This really is the crux of the notion of a cultural identity; the notion of the construction of identity in relation to some other becomes stronger when we start to define our ‘selves’ in relation to a cultural Other and is at the heart of racism(s), hatred and social exclusion.

WHO ARE ‘THEY’? In this second section of this chapter I want to introduce a psycho-social element to the analysis of the self in relation to the Other. My starting point is a discussion of ‘race’ and ethnicity and what has been termed the ‘new racism’, where emphasis is no longer placed on ideas of inferiority and biological difference but on cultural difference. There is the idea that cultural identity is so strong that it is impossible for two cultures to co-exist. In this analysis we start to see the development of a politics of fear which uses emotional and affective processes to pathologize others in a language of cultural difference. I then go on to look at a Freudian model of difference using the work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1994) which is based in the notion of projection. This serves as an introduction to a post-Freudian reading of the construction of colonial identity with particular reference to the work of Franz Fanon. In the psychodynamic process of projective identification Fanon finds himself ‘battered down by tom-toms, slave ships. . .’. I conclude this section by examining the implication for the construction of a cultural identity when a nation state collapses, as with the former Yugoslavia. Using the work of Zizek I look at the eruptive and often visceral nature of ethnic hatred and at the ways in which people come to hate each other as particular notions of self and identity are re-written in relation to Others and often imagined communities.

Cultural identity: From biologism to the new racism The notion of ‘race’ was for many years a marker of both difference and identity. The word ‘race’ has been associated with ideas of inferiority and superiority, hierarchy and persecution. As Robert Miles (1993) argues, whatever the manner in which the term is used it implies: ‘. . . an acceptance of the existence of biological differences between human beings, differences which express the existence of distinct, self reproducing groups’ (Miles, 1993: p. 2). More than any other term race is associated with a dangerous assumption that the world is split into distinct dichotomies, that there is more than one human race, thus ignoring the wealth of cultural and ethnic diversity and, as Miles (1993) suggests, flying in the face of recent scientific knowledge which shows that the ‘world’s population could not be legitimately categorized in this way’ (Miles, 1993: p. 3). We are heirs to a history in which scientific enquiry has developed the notion of ‘race’ or ‘races’ based, as Fryer (1984) suggests, on a form of enlightenment dualism of superstition and ignorance in which biological endowment and physical features were thought to have a causal relationship with cultural superiority. Banton (1970) locates the genesis of racism in Knox’s The Races of Men (1850), Gobineau’s Essai (1853) and Nott and Gliddon’s Types of Mankind (1854), arguing that with the demise of slavery ‘some people sought new justifications for maintaining the subordination of those who had earlier been exploited by being counted as property’ (Banton, 1970: p. 19). Biological racism was espoused through social Darwinism and other pseudo-scientific theories of race. Darwin’s theory of evolution was applied to human society by Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase the ‘survival of the fittest’. The white Anglo-Saxon represented the culmination of the evolutionary process. Scientific racism has two key characteristics: the first, a biologizing of race in terms of ‘colour’ and ‘stock’; the second, a ranking

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of people in hierarchies of race implying gradations of inferior and superior beings. Mason (1995) and Fryer (1984) highlight the interaction between science and politics which led to the use of ‘race science’ as a justification for slavery. Miles (1989) also draws attention to the use of pseudo-scientific race discourse to justify both the use of Africans in slavery, and the notion that it would give ‘them’ (the ‘other’) a chance to escape from ‘savagery’. However this view was not widely legitimated. The notion of the African as being biologically suited to slavery had only a minority status. The importance lies not in the link between race and justifications for both colonization and slavery, but in the way in which representations of the ‘other’ were narrowed down and clearly defined by scientific enquiry: The sense of difference embodied in European representations of the Other became interpreted as a difference of ‘race’, that is, primarily biological and natural difference which was inherent and unalterable. Moreover, the supposed difference was presented as scientific (that is, objective) fact. (Miles, 1989: p. 31)

Clearly, what is important for Miles is not what notions of race were used to justify, but the power of scientific enquiry to define, classify, categorize and perpetuate ideas of inferiority between ‘men’ through the concept of ‘race’. ‘Race’ itself becomes a product of scientific enquiry. Mary Douglas (1966) argues in Purity and Danger that the boundaries of the body are symbolic of societal boundaries. Black or Jewish ‘otherness’ emphasizes difference to create order, and in doing so excludes Others in structures of discrimination. The Other is a crucial symbol in the definition of who ‘we’ are – our identity. If ‘race’ is about clinical definitions of difference, then the construction of the ‘Other’is about both perception and fear of difference, a specific ‘otherness’ imputed by biological-racial inferiority. Highlighting the significance of pollution in relation to the body, Douglas parallels reactions to dirt with reactions to ambiguity, in some sense representing ‘reaction to fear in another guise’ (Douglas, 1966: p. 5). Race is about

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containment of that fear. In this way, the exaggeration of difference creates a form of order, who we are, or perhaps more precisely, who we are not, by the stigmatization, marginalization and intolerance of Others. ‘Pollution powers’ are, for Douglas, an integral part of the structure of ideas. Pollution powers punish the breaking of things that should be joined and the joining of things that should be separate. Douglas is arguing that the notion of the ‘polluting Other’ defines the way in which boundaries are constructed. Pollution and dirt are associated with danger, which becomes associated with the Other. The Other then becomes dangerous. The power associated with the ‘polluting Other’ is central to the way in which the structures of society are maintained and protected. The physical crossing of a boundary has two implications: the Other is not only wrong for crossing that boundary, but she/he endangers the lives of others by subjecting them to the danger of difference. The problematic around the idea of ‘race’ has led us to think about identity in terms of ethnicity. Cashmore and Troyna (1990) describe ethnicity as a way in which we try to encapsulate the responses of various different groups. Members of ethnic groups are ‘people who are conscious of themselves as in some way united or at least related because of a common origin and a shared destiny’ (Cashmore and Troyna, 1990: p. 146). These interpretations stress the notion of common descent, as well as incorporating some notion of common culture. There has been a tendency more recently for writers to focus on common cultures and belief systems as a basis for ethnicity, and hence there is a focus on cultural difference and the ways in which ethnic boundaries are drawn or constructed (see Hall, 1990; Mason, 1995; Miles, 1993). The problem with the concept of ethnicity, however, is that it still tends to pathologize certain groups – ethnicity is ascribed to troublesome minorities, which is why Stuart Hall (1990) has argued for the notion of ‘new ethnicities’: ‘. . . a recognition that we all speak from a particular place, out of a particular history, out of a particular

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experience, a particular culture . . . We are all, in that sense, ethnically located and our identities are crucial to our subjective sense of who we are’ (Hall, 1990: p. 258). Everyone has some form of cultural identity based in the notion of ethnicity, thus we get away from the idea that ethnicity only applies to non-white people and at the same time the concept of ethnicity is disengaged from ideas of ‘race’ and nation. The idea of ethnicity itself has been contested on other grounds too. Indeed Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1992) question the relationship between culture and identity, arguing that culture is just one ingredient among many that characterize ethnic groups. Ethnicity is not just about identity, but about partaking in the social conditions of a group, for example the division of labour and gender relations. This has led people to talk about the notion of diaspora, a strong sense of belonging and identification to a particular group that transcends national and international borders (see Anthias, 1998; Bhabha, 1994; Cohen, 1999; Gilroy, 1993; and Solomos and Back, 1996). The problem, however, is that racism still exists. It is no longer possible either legally or politically to discriminate on the basis of biological difference or inferiorization, but this is not to say that people don’t do this. However, there has been a noticeable sea change where ideas about difference between cultures have come to the fore. This has been described by Martin Barker (1981) as the ‘new racism’ (see also Smith, 1992) in view of the emphasis it places on cultural identity, ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘ways of life’ and the exaggeration of difference. Barker (1981) identifies several components of the new racism. First, there is a notion that ‘our’ political and cultural systems are superior to those of others. There is an emphasis on the cultural aspects of human behaviour – language, beliefs, religions and custom – thus stressing ‘ways of life’. Second, we have a strong attachment to ‘our’ way of life which creates an emotional boundary between ‘them’ and ‘us’. There is a powerful language of cultural difference at work here, one which placing the stress on difference

rather than inferiority nonetheless identifies difference as a problem particularly when the members of more than one culture live in the same location. There follows from this a third point: other cultures are seen as pathological, in that they cause problems for the dominant culture. This gives rise to the notion of ‘genuine fears’. People feel secure with their way of life. Genuine fears are about affective attachment. People share common values, beliefs with their ‘own’, and desire to keep things that way. Fear generates strong feelings of ambivalence towards other cultures: The ‘rivers of blood’ will flow, not because the immigrants are black; not because British society is racist, but because however ‘tolerant’ the British might be, they can only digest so much ‘alienness’ (Powell quoted in Lawrence, 1982: p. 81). Powellism influenced immigration policy in Britain through the 1950s and 1960s, and similar discursive logics manifested themselves in ‘Thatcherism’ in the 1980s. Using powerful emotional hooks, racism becomes about difference, about ‘genuine fears’ about ‘us’ and ‘them’. This brings us to the final point: it is ‘common sense’ that people from different cultural backgrounds cannot live together. We have the notion that it is ‘natural’ for people to live with their ‘own kind’, this isn’t racist, it is a perfectly natural response and of course ‘foreigners’ have their natural homes too so that ‘stopping immigration is being kind to them’ (Barker, 1981: p. 21). Thus we have a very strong notion of the idea of a cultural identity and its incompatibility with other cultures. Rather than celebrate difference our cultural identity is used to pathologize other cultures whilst reinforcing who we are. This has been the case in the political realm and particularly in right-wing views on immigration policy. We also start to see an emotional side to identity construction and this is nowhere better illustrated than in the work of Franz Fanon and the colonial condition. In the next section I want to illustrate several psychosocial approaches to identity construction in which we move from simple projective models of the construction of the Other to

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more complex post-Freudian ideas around projective identification.

Psychoanalysis, identity and racism The first question to address is: why use psychoanalysis to think about cultural identity, othering and racism? We need to bear in mind that psychoanalytic interpretations of racism do not offer better explanations, but they do offer different ways of understanding. If we take socio-cultural analysis, for example, then sociologists in particular have been very good at identifying trends in practices of othering, difference and exclusion. This has particularly been the case in a structural sense through the role that sociological inquiries have played in pinpointing inequalities in housing, education, welfare, employment, etc. The problem is that since such studies don’t really bother with the affective component of racism, they don’t give us any indication of why people discriminate. They therefore offer no explanation of the ubiquity of racism, the explosive and eruptive quality of ethnic hatred. In other words the psychological structuring of discrimination is ignored. The emphasis on social structure is privileged over the psychological mechanisms that provide the impetus for people to hate each other. A psycho-social approach to identity and difference takes into account the social, cultural and psychological dynamics at work in the creation of self and others. One of the first psycho-social accounts of identity and difference is Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1994) Dialectic of Enlightenment. This is a critique of positivism, of science, of Enlightenment ideals and an exploration of the massive change in our relationship to nature. Horkheimer and Adorno interweave Freudian drive theory with Marxism and the Weberian notion of rationalization to explain the pathological nature of anti-Semitism. Endorsing Freud’s (1969) thesis on civilization, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that civilization, the modern world, has slowly and methodically prohibited instinctual behaviour. They concentrate on the instinctual mechanism of mimesis, the ways in

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which we mimic nature in order to survive – for example freezing when we sense danger – and argue that this has become perverted in modern times. Initially this came about by the organization of mimesis in the magical phase, through ceremony and rite. Religious practice outlaws the instinctual, rational practice banishes the display of emotions. People are taught behavioural norms in the school and workplace; children are no longer allowed to behave like children. Mimesis now takes a form in which society threatens nature; control equals self-preservation and dominance over nature. We no longer make our ‘self’ like nature to survive but attempt to make nature like us: Society continues threatening nature as the lasting organized compulsion which is reproduced in individuals as rational self preservation and rebounds on nature as social dominance over it. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1994: p. 181)

In other words, the instinctual mechanism of mimesis becomes sublimated in the practice of the rational control of the modern environment. Horkheimer and Adorno note that we often see signs of repressed mimesis – all religious devotion and deflection has a feel of mimicry. In the modern world mimesis has been consigned to oblivion. For Horkheimer and Adorno, those blinded by civilization experience their own repressed and tabooed mimetic characteristics in others. Gestures, nuances, touching, feeling are experienced as embarrassing remnants from our prehistory that have survived in the rationalized environment of the modern world. It is at this point that Horkheimer and Adorno draw our attention to Freud’s (1961) paper ‘The Uncanny’ (Das Unheimlich) – ‘what seems repellently alien is in fact all too familiar’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1994: p. 183). We start to see what Horkheimer and Adorno suggest when they talk about mimesis and false projection as Freud argues that the uncanny fulfils the condition of ‘touching’ the residues of our animistic mental activity and bringing them to expression.

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How do we find a discharge for these frightening thoughts, thoughts that evoke a feeling of uncanniness, uneasiness, even repellence? Freud is clear: we project them on others. Projection is a mechanism of defence in which material is projected outwards as if it is something foreign to the self. In the properly psycho-analytic sense this is an operation through which qualities, feelings, wishes or even ‘objects’ which the subject refuses to recognize or rejects in himself are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973: p. 349). Projection for Freud is symptomatic of paranoia. Distorted feelings of persecution are expelled from the internal world onto some Other. Internal perception is distorted and suppressed; in the case of persecution what should have been felt internally as love is perceived externally as hate. Paranoia is a general Freudian term that covers systematic delusions, grandeur, persecution, jealousy; it is a mechanism of defence. Projection is part of a process of recovery in which thoughts and desires that have been suppressed internally are projected outward. Thus we only see the repressed elements of our mimetic behaviour in others, but this is surely a projection of our own longing to return to a pre-social state of nature, to act and behave in accordance with our repressed impulses. Anti-Semitism is based on what Horkheimer and Adorno describe as false projection which is related to a repressed form of mimesis. In mimesis proper, we see an imitation of the natural environment – a mechanism of defence which enables camouflage and protection; we make ourselves like nature in order that we may become one with nature. False projection, conversely, tries to make the environment like us – we try to control and rationalize nature by projecting our own experiences and categories onto natural things and making that which is not natural natural, through a reification of scientific categories and constructions. Inner and outer worlds are confused and perceived as hostile. Central to this argument is projection. The product of false projection is the stereotype, the transference of socially unpalatable

thoughts from subject to object. This is also particularly alarming because Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the paranoiac cannot help or accept his or her own instincts. In doing so he or she attacks others, experiencing his or her own aggression as that of the ‘other’, a classic case of projection. The implications of this are twofold. First the Jew or ‘other’ reminds us of the peace and happiness that we cannot have. The persecuted minorities of Europe form a receptacle for those betrayed by modern society. We cannot have it so we will eliminate or destroy it in an envious attack. Second, the ‘other’ stands as a direct reminder, either real but often imaginary, of our repressed longing to return to a presocial state of nature – to return to our mimetic existence. In order to satisfy these socially banished instinctual needs we accuse outgroups of behaving like animals, because we long to behave like animals. This should not be taken too literally: what Horkheimer and Adorno mean here is that we yearn to act on impulse, on our instincts, without the constraints of rationalized modern society. It was in this way, though, they argue, that the Jew became the persecuted ‘other’. The product of false projection, the stereotype is a product of evil, a product of the ego which has sunk into its own depths lacking any form of self-reflection. It is this overriding issue of the domination of nature linked to the domination of people that leads Horkheimer and Adorno to suggest that scientific rationality is not always a good thing and that positivist methods are actually anti-Enlightenment. Rather than being free we are incarcerated within rigid frameworks of self and selfhood which are a projected image constructed through the urge to dominate and control. Fascism encapsulated this rigidity within what Horkheimer and Adorno describe as a system which promotes a rage against the non-identical. We have to be very careful indeed because, as they demonstrate in their thesis on the culture industry, this becomes transposed into our everyday life and existence and has implications for the way in which these construct our identity and that of others. It is only with a critical sociological

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awareness that we can reflect on and point to these systems of domination and control. There is no doubt that Horkheimer and Adorno’s ideas are problematic, but what they offer in terms of their explanation of antiSemitism does provide, as I have previously argued (Clarke, 2003), a theoretical basis for the explanation of racism, hatred and exclusionary practices by using a critical fusion of both structural and psychological factors. It also serves as an introduction to the application and limitations of Freudian thought in an examination of the massive substantive irrationality that has accompanied the development of modern society. By placing an emphasis on affective forces they produce a more complete picture of the ways in which psychological mechanisms support and perpetuate structural forms of racism. Martin Jay (1994) notes that Horkheimer and Adorno go beyond a purely psychoanalytic account of paranoid false projection to add an epistemological dimension. Projection per se is not problematic; we all use it in our everyday lives. A healthy projection preserves the tension between subject and object. Reflection on the dialogue between subject and object creates understanding; it is (after Kant) the key to Enlightenment. The ‘morbid’ aspect of anti-Semitism for Horkheimer and Adorno is not projection but lack of selfreflection: when the subject is no longer able to return to the object what she/he has received from it, she/he becomes poorer rather than richer. She/he loses the reflection in both directions: since she/he no longer reflects on the object, she/he ceases to reflect upon her or himself, and loses the ability to differentiate (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1994: p. 189). In the next section of this chapter I offer a post-Freudian reading of Fanon using the work of Melanie Klein (1946), which goes beyond purely projective models of identity construction and othering by using the concept of projective identification.1 Projective identification is a far more intense form of projection where feelings are forced onto an other to make them feel and behave in a certain way which can have a huge impact on identity and identity construction.

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‘I was battered down by tom-toms’: Colonialization and cultural identity In Black Skin, White Masks (1986) Fanon argues that the black person is both objectified and denigrated at a bodily level, and psychologically blinded, or alienated from his or her black consciousness and cultural identity by the effects of colonialism and racist culture. In Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (Clarke, 2003) I have argued that this is the premise of much of Fanon’s writing and argumentation. The black person becomes a phobogenic object, in other words, a stimulus that causes anxiety. In a psychoanalytic interpretation of phobias, Fanon notes that there is a secret attraction to the object that arouses dread in the individual. Hatred and racism are a means by which the individual hides from and detracts from their own sexual perversity. Drawing heavily on Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialist writings, Fanon likens this phobic response to that of anti-Semitism: the Jew is feared because of his potential for acquisitiveness. ‘They’ are everywhere. The banks, the stock exchanges, the government are infested with ‘them’. ‘They’ control everything (Fanon, 1986: p. 157). If the Jew is feared for his acquisitiveness, then, for Fanon, the black person is revered for his sexual powers. Fanon elucidates: As for the Negroes, they have tremendous sexual powers. What do you expect, with all the freedom they have in the jungles! They copulate at all times and in all places. They are really genital. They have so many children they cannot even count them. Be careful or they will flood us. (Fanon, 1986: p. 157)

Fanon argues that it matters little whether this image of the black man is real; the point is that it is cognate. In the same way that the Jew was perceived as a danger through the projection of a stereotype, the black person has suffered the same form of projection with an emphasis placed on sexual phenomena. In Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre (1976) argues that it is not the Jewish character that produces or induces anti-Semitism, it is the anti-Semite who creates this image of the Jew; indeed for Sartre, if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would have to invent him. Again, as with the

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black person, the Jew becomes a phobogenic object – a stimulus that causes anxiety. This poses the question: why invent the Jew, why choose to hate? The anti-Semite constructs this phobogenic object to project both the misfortunes of his country and himself onto some other, a ridding of unpalatable thoughts onto a bad object. For Sartre, the antiSemite is impervious to reason, to experience, and therefore to change. The anti-Semite is terrifying because his actions are based in irrational convictions, in passion; he is nothing but the ‘fear he inspires in others’. The anti-Semite is, for Sartre, a mediocre person, a ‘man’ of the crowds, lacking in any form of authenticity or individuality Fanon argues that the white person has a secret desire to return to an era of ‘unrestricted sexual licence’ and ‘orgiastic’ scenes of rape and unrepressed incest; everything he sees, creates and projects in the image of the black person. This is reminiscent of Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1994). The fascist longs to return to a presocial state of nature, seeing in the Jew what he really feels in his ‘self’. For Fanon, the white person projects desire onto the black person, the white person behaves as if the black person is the owner of these desires: ‘what appears repellently alien, is in fact, all too familiar’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1994: p. 182). The Jew is associated with wealth and power, the black person has been fixated at a bodily, biological, genital plane: Two realms: the intellectual and the sexual. An erection on Rodin’s thinker is a shocking thought. One cannot decently ’have a hard on’ everywhere. The Negro symbolises the biological danger, the Jew, the intellectual danger. (Fanon, 1986: p. 165)

The main feature of Fanon’s understanding of the psychology of oppression is that inferiority is the outcome of a double process, both socio-historic and psychological: ‘If there is an inferiority complex, it is the outcome of a double process: primarily economic; subsequently, the internalization, or better, the epidermalization of this inferiority’ (Fanon, 1986: p. 13). There is therefore a link between the sociogenesis and psychogenesis

of racism and these processes are violent and exclusionary. When Sartre talks of antiSemitism as a passion it is not the Jewish person who produces the experience; rather, it is the (projected) identification of the Jew which produces the experience. Fanon illustrates this internalization of projection: ‘My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recoloured, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The negro is an animal, the negro is bad, the negro is ugly’ (Fanon, 1986: p. 113). If we understand the reference to the breaking up of bodies, to being sprawled out and distorted, in terms of more than mere metaphor, then these processes which have consequences on the sociogenetic level are the outcome of processes of projective identification. The white person makes the black person in the image of their projections, literally forcing identity into another, as Fanon notes: . . . the white man has woven me out of a thousand details . . . I was battered down with tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave ships . . . (Fanon, 1986: p. 112)

The black person lives these projections, trapped in an imaginary that white people have constructed; trapped by both economic processes and by powerful projective mechanisms which both create and control the Other. This, of course, highlights the paradoxical nature of projective identification. White people’s fantasies about black sexuality, about bodies and biology in general, are fears that centre on otherness, but an otherness that they themselves have created and brought into being. This is what Fanon means when he says that I was ‘battered down’, ‘woven out of a thousand details’ – cultural identity is a stereotype of the black person constructed in the mind of the white person, and then forced back onto the black person as the black historical subject (see Dalal, 2002; Macey, 2000)). But this is indeed a false consciousness. Fanon, like Foucault, shows us how power is an important element in the constitution of our identities and how this is often an oppressive force. These kinds of projections can be seen in Slavoj

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Zizek’s (1993) analysis of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia and the way in which cultural identities are very much tied in with difference.

The theft of enjoyment: Cultural identity and ethnic hatred Zizek introduces us to the idea of the Theft of Enjoyment. Zizek argues that the bond which holds a given community together is a shared relationship to a Thing – ‘to our enjoyment incarnate’. The relationship we have to our Thing is structured by fantasy and is what people talk of when they refer to a threat to ‘our’ way of life. This nation Thing is not a clear set of values to which we can refer, but a set of contradictory properties that appears as ‘our’ Thing. This Thing is only accessible to us, but tirelessly sought after by the Other. Zizek argues that Others cannot grasp it, but it is constantly menaced by ‘them’. So, this Thing is present in, or is in some way to do with, what we refer to as our ‘way of life’; the way we organize our rituals, ceremonies, feasts, ‘in short, all the details by which is made visible the unique way a community organizes its enjoyment’ (Zizek, 1993: p. 201). However, Zizek cautions that this Thing is more than simply a set of features that comprise a way of life, there is something present in them, people believe in them, or more importantly ‘I believe that other members of the community believe in this Thing’. The Thing exists because people believe in it; it is an effect of belief itself: We always impute to the ‘other’ an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the ‘other’ is the peculiar way he organises his enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the ‘excess’ that pertains to this way: the smell of ‘their’ food, ‘their’ noisy songs and dances, ‘their’ strange manners, ‘their’ attitude to work. . . . (Zizek, 1993: p. 203)

Thus Zizek notes the paradoxical nature of this Thing; on the one hand the Other is a workaholic who steals our jobs and labour, on the other he or she is an idler, a lazy person

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relying on the state for benefits. Our Thing is therefore something that cannot be accessed by the Other but is constantly threatened by ‘otherness’. What Zizek’s work highlights is the role of myth and fantasy in the construction of cultural and national identity, and more importantly the way in which this identity is imagined rather than grounded in some reality. As Zizek notes, what we cover up by accusing the Other of the theft of our enjoyment is the ‘traumatic fact’ that we never possessed what we perceive has been stolen in the first place. It is a fear of the theft of enjoyment, a fear of the theft of imagination, of fantasy, of myth. Every nationality, argues Zizek, has its own mythology which describes how other nations deprive it of a part of its enjoyment, the part which allows it to live fully. Zizek likens this to an Escher drawing where in a visual illusion water pours from one basin to another until eventually you end up at the starting point. The basic premise of both Serb and Slovene nationalism, Zizek argues, is that we don’t want anything foreign and we want what rightfully belongs to us. This, as Zizek suggests, is a sure sign of racism. A clear line of demarcation is drawn, and a psychological border erected, where in reality this clarity is mere fiction. The theft of enjoyment is not about immediate social reality, it is not about different ethnic groups living together, as we know this is possible and exists all over the world. The theft of enjoyment is about inner tensions and conflicts within communities and the way these are projected out onto others in the form of hatred and loathing; this in turn is justified in terms of something stolen, and/or the community being deprived by others. In some sense, in constructing our cultural identity both socially and psychologically we tend to construct, play with and destroy the identity of others (see also: Lane, 1998; Seshadri-Crooks, 2000). What I think we can take from the work of both Fanon and Zizek is that cultural identities are not only socially constructed but psychologically constructed. They are filled with passion and emotion, and are multiple. As we construct the identity of Others, others construct our identity. Imagination and

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passion are an integral part of our perception of self and others. In the final section I want to pose the question ‘who are we?’ and to argue that cultural identities are fluid and contingent and are developed in relation to particular social, cultural and historical circumstances. I think that Foucault has developed this argument well in relation to our ideas of what constitutes rational, or irrational, mad or sane, normal or perverse. What Foucault lacks is reference to the emotional and imaginative construction of the Other.

WHO ARE ‘WE’? Strangers, ambiguity and identity In this final section I want to look at the idea of the stranger. The stranger throws identity construction into the land of ambiguity and, if we are to believe Zygmunt Bauman (1990), we now all live under the condition of universal strangerhood. The concept of the stranger has a psycho-social quality, partly fictive, partly real, partly a figment of our own imagination. Whereas identity often feels clear-cut, we know who ‘we’ are and we know who ‘they’ are, the stranger blurs these definitions and literally defies all contemporary rules that ascribe who we are. Bauman’s concept of the stranger is based on Simmel’s (1950) more positive portrayal of someone who brings something positive to a social or cultural group. Simmel’s stranger is an ambiguous person, someone we find hard to identify, having something to do with a vague spatiality, of certain measures of nearness and distance. But at the same time, the stranger presents in some sense a unity for Simmel between ‘wandering’ and ‘fixation’. The uncertainty associated with the potential for wandering leaves us in an ambiguous state of mind: is he one of us or one of them? The stranger has not belonged to the group from the start, but brings a certain something to it. The problem with this is that the qualities projected onto the group by the stranger do not stem from the group itself, which fuels the anxiety of ambiguity.

Thus for Simmel the stranger encompasses the nearness and remoteness of every human relationship: ‘distance means that he, who is close by, is far, and strangeness means that he, who is also far, is actually near’ (Simmel, 1950: p. 402). Simmel gives an example from the sphere of economics where the trader appears as stranger. If an economy is self-sufficient then there is no ‘middleman’. The trader is only required when products are imported from outside the group or economy, or, if members of a group go elsewhere to buy goods, they themselves then become the transient stranger. In economic terms then the trader is stranger, and the stranger stands out more when he settles in a particular spatial locality. The stranger may become geographically fixated for some time, but is never the owner of either the physical or symbolic space that he occupies. This gives the stranger the characteristics of mobility which embrace nearness and distance within a closed group. For Simmel a trace of strangeness exists in every human relationship, from the most intimate to the most fleeting and general encounter (see also: Camus, 1946; Schutz, 1944; Stichweh, 1997). Bauman’s stranger represents a far more complex and often sinister identity and Bauman has used it at length to describe and analyse the position of Jewish peoples in Europe. Quite simply, for Bauman, the ‘universal stranger’ is the Jew, in this post ‘race’, post Holocaust world. In Bauman’s words: ‘There are friends and enemies. And there are strangers’ (Bauman, 1991: p. 53). ‘Strangers’ are not unfamiliar people, but they cross or break the dividing line of dualism, they are neither ‘us’ nor ‘them’. There is a clear definition of the social and physical boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, both are subject to the same structures and ideas, they define good and bad, true and false, they stand in polarity creating an illusion of order and symmetry. The stranger violates this structure and order. To quote Bauman: ‘they (the stranger) bring the “outside” “inside” and poison the comfort of order with the suspicion of chaos’(Bauman, 1991: p. 56). The stranger is someone we

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know things about, who sits in ‘our’ world uninvited. The stranger has the characteristics of an enemy but, unlike the enemy, is not kept at a safe distance. Neither ‘us’ nor ‘them’, neither friend nor foe, the stranger undermines order by straddling the boundary, causing confusion and anxiety, becoming a target of hatred: By their sheer presence, which does not fit easily into any of the established categories, the strangers deny the very validity of the accepted oppositions. They belie the oppositions’ ‘natural’ character, expose their arbitrariness, lay bare their fragility. They show the divisions for what they indeed are: imaginary lines that can be crossed or redrawn. (Bauman, 1990: p. 54)

The stranger is dangerous, known but unknown. In the same way that the concept of race exaggerates difference, the concept of stranger draws attention to the perception of what might be, rather than what is known. The stranger lives inside both our community and our own psyche – the person that persecutes us is a figment of our own fantasy and our imagination. We attribute these characteristics to other groups, to real individuals and are repulsed by what we see in them, as we see our self, our own fears and chaos, and we are confronted by our fantasies – the contents of our unconscious mind. This way in which we perceive others and ultimately view others has specific implications for basic human rights of the individuals concerned. The stranger has been persecuted as Jew, as Gypsy, as Muslim, as victim and as potential victimizer, and this is even before we start to think of indigenous peoples who have had their basic rights stripped from them by colonial powers and settlers, including their right to their own land, sacred places and their own sense of history (see Clarke and Moran, 2003). More recently the notion and actuality of a fortress Europe has created a rift between the ‘West’ and the ‘rest’ and I have argued (Clarke, 2002) this is nowhere better demonstrated than by the way in which refugees have been perceived in the UK and demonized in the popular press as outsiders who have penetrated the inside.

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CONCLUSION – CULTURAL IDENTITIES If cultural identities are essentially defined by difference then the concept of stranger brings a whole new set of rules and ambiguities into the equation. We are literally no longer sure who ‘we’ are and in some sense we have to learn to live with ambiguity. In one way the analysis of cultural identity brings quite a dark cloud over the question of identity in general. This is because it quite obviously focuses on difference and the negative connotations that stem from these perceptions. After all they are the basis of hatred, racism and social and cultural exclusions. Defining your own self by another often leads to a strong sense of who we are not, or more likely who we don’t want to be. This necessarily leads to the denigration of the Other and the idealization of ‘us’. Clearly a straightforward social constructionist approach to cultural identity is helpful; it shows how a common cultural identity is constructed in relation to ‘norms’ and, in the case of Foucault’s work, to processes of normalization. It is, however, lacking in analysis of those powerful affective forces that make us feel a certain strong attachment to groups and ways of life. This is addressed in psycho-social explanations of identity and othering where I’ve argued that some psychoanalytic tools and perspectives can give us a greater purchase on the construction of colonial identity and the affective dimensions of racism. The reality may be that we have to learn to live with ambiguity. Certainly, as Hall (1990) notes, cultural identity is not just about being, but becoming (Hall, 1990: p. 223). It could be argued then that cultural identity is fluid and contingent in relation to historical and cultural circumstances. As Stuart Hall has noted: ‘We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always “in context”, positioned’ (Hall, 1990: p. 222). We may have multiple identities to choose from in a given context. So, it may be the case that our identity is chosen at a particular time for a political purpose, as in the example of the asylum-seeker debate

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where British and ‘white’ ethnicites come to the fore. There is, however, a complex psychodynamic process at work here in which emotive and affective forces play on older ideas around community, nationhood and the idea of ‘home’. These may also be mediated by class and gender differences and, as Foucault has shown us, by power, but we should acknowledge that while many people are in the privileged position of being able to choose their identity (Giddens, 1991) others are not. Finally, we have to take seriously the constructions and perceptions of the human imagination and emotion. We have to take them as concrete, even if they feel wrong. The way in which people imagine the world to be and imagine the way that others exist in the world is central to the construction of identity. It does not matter that belief may be more fiction than fact, because the human imagination is central to identity construction; it is therefore concrete and has very real consequences for the world we live in.

NOTES 1 Projection is a relatively straightforward process in which we attribute our own affective state to others; for example, we may feel depressed and view our colleagues in the workplace as being ‘miserable’, or blame others for our mistakes; whereas projective identification involves a deep split, a ridding of unpalatable parts of the self into, rather than onto, someone else. Projection per se may not be damaging as the recipient of the paranoid thoughts may be blissfully unaware as such. Projective identification, however, involves a forcing of such feelings into the recipient and is therefore interactional and communicative.

REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Anthias, F. (1998) ‘Evaluating “diaspora”: beyond ethnicity’, Sociology, 32(3): 557–580. Anthias, F. and Yuval-Davis, N. (1992) Racialized Boundaries. London: Routledge. Banton, M. (1970) ‘The concept of racism’, in S. Zubaida (ed.), Race and Racialism. London: Tavistock, pp. 17–33.

Barker, M. (1981) The New Racism. London: Junction Books. Barry, A., Osborne, T. and Rose, N. (eds) (1996) Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and the Rationalities of Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bauman, Z. (1990) Thinking Sociologically. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Bauman, Z. (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. (1971) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin. Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Burchell, G. (1991) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Burns, T. (1992) Erving Goffman. London: Routledge. Burr, V. (2003) Social Constructionism. London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ’Sex’. London: Routledge. Camus, A. (1946). L’Etranger. New York: A.A. Knopf. Cashmore Ellis, E. and Troyna, B. (1990). Introduction to Race Relations. London: Falmer Press. Clarke, S. (2002) ‘On strangers: phantasy, terror and the human imagination’, Journal of Human Rights, 1(3): 1–11. Clarke, S. (2003) Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism. London: Palgrave. Clarke, S. (2005) From Enlightenment to Risk: Social Theory and Contemporary Society. London: Palgrave. Clarke, S. and Moran, A. (2003) ‘The uncanny stranger: haunting the Australian settler imagination’, Free Associations, 10(2) 54: 165–189. Cohen, P. (1999) New Ethnicities, Old Racisms. London: Zed Books. Dalal, F. (2002) Race, Colour and the Processes of Racialization: New Perspectives from Group Analysis, Psychoanalysis and Sociology. London: BrunnerRoutledge. Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger. London: Routledge. Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P. (1982) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Elliott, A. (2001) Concepts of the Self. London: Polity Press. Fanon, F. (1986) Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press. Freud, S. (1961) ‘The uncanny’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund

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Freud vol. XVII (1917–1919). London: Hogarth Press, pp. 219–252. (1st edn. 1919.) Freud, S. (1969) Civilization and its Discontents. London: Hogarth Press. Foucault, M. (1976) The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1984) The History of Sexuality Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure. London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1985) The History of Sexuality Vol. 3: The Care of the Self. London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1995) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. London: Routledge. Fryer, P. (1984) Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press. Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. London: Prentice-Hall. Gergen, K.J. (2000) An Invitation to Social Construction. London: Sage. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. London: Polity. Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic. London: Verso. Gobineau, Arthur, comte de (1922 [1854]) Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines. Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot. Goffman, E. (1968) Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. London: Pelican. Goffman, E. (1969) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin. Gutting, G. (1994) ‘Foucault and the history of madness’, in Gutting, G (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 47–70. Hall, S. (1990) ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, in J. Rutherford, (ed.), Identity, Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 222–237. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. (1994) Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum. Jay, M. (1994) ‘The Jews and the Frankfurt School: critical theory’s analysis of anti-semitism’, in J. Bernstein (ed.), The Frankfurt School Critical Assessments. London: Routledge, pp. 235–246. Klein, M. (1946) ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 26: 99–110. Klein, M. (1997) Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963. London: Vintage.

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Lane, C. (ed.) (1998) The Psychoanalysis of Race. New York: Columbia University Press. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1973) The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press. Lawrence, E. (1982) ‘Just plain commonsense: the roots of racism’. The Empire Strikes Back. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. London: Hutchinson. Macey, D. (2000) Frantz Fanon: A Life. London: Granta Books. Manning, P. (1992) Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology. London: Polity Press. Mason, D. (1995) Race and Ethnicity in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mead, G.H. (1934) in C.W. Morris (ed.), Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miles, R. (1989) Racism. London: Routledge. Miles, R. (1993) Racism After Race Relations. London: Routledge. Nott, J.C. and Geoffrey, R.G. (1857) Types of Mankind. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott. Sartre, J.-P. (1976) Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. New York: Schocken Books. Schutz, A. (1944) ‘The stranger: an essay in social psychology’, The American Journal of Sociology, 49(6): 499–507. Seidman, S. (2003) Social Construction of Sexuality. London: Norton and Co. Seshadri-Crooks, K. (2000) Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race. London: Routledge. Simmel, G. (1950) in K. Wolff (ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Tr. K.Wolff. New York: The Free Press. Smart, B. (2002) Michel Foucault. London: Routledge. Smith, A.M. (1992) New Right Discourses on Race and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Solomos, J. and Back, L. (1996) Racism and Society. London: Macmillan. Stichweh, R. (1997) ‘The stranger – on the sociology of indifference’, Thesis Eleven, 51: 1–16. Weeks, J. (1996) Invented Moralities: Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Wilton, T. (2004) Sexual (Dis)Orientation: Gender, Sex, Desire and Self Fashioning. London: Palgrave. Zizek, S. (1993) Tarrying with the Negative. Durham: Duke University Press.

25 Culture, Sex and Sexualities Elspeth Probyn and Gilbert Caluya

‘Sex is one of the nine great mysteries of life. The other eight are unimportant’. (Henry Miller)

Is sex an art or a science or a technology? As objects of study, sex and sexuality have been distinctively theorized as a science with a systematic set of normative truths, as a technology that produces subjects, and as an ars erotica, whereby truth is derived from pleasure. In this chapter we will discuss the implications for cultural analysis of these ways of seeing sex and sexuality, as well as the antagonisms between science and the social sciences that have attended studies of sexuality. We will then use a small case study of girls talking about sex to further investigate what sex says about culture. Just thinking about the words ‘culture’, on the one hand, and ‘sexuality’, on the other, opens up a host of interesting connections. One might think of ‘cultures of sexuality’ as ‘sexual sub-cultures’ or as ‘sexualities across cultures’. You might be interested in sexuality in different cultural representations or you could think of sexuality as a cultural identity. It seems self-evident that cultures can’t survive without sexual reproduction, yet contemporary scholars seem more interested in how sexual conceptions survive through

cultural reproduction. In Western history, bourgeois culture has been accused of being sexually decadent, while state governments have pointed to liberal sexuality in the working-class as a sign of cultural degradation. Simultaneously, Western ‘civilization’ has often accused ‘other’, ‘savage’ cultures of unrestrained lasciviousness or ‘uncivilized’ relations to the ‘fairer sex’.

SEX, SEXUALITY AND GENDER But first we need to be clear about what is meant by sex and sexuality, and how they relate to gender. While we will see that there are calls to study sex and gender separately, in most academic research and in common sense, gender, sex and sexuality are hard to distinguish (this is especially evident in the deep-seated incapacity to understand sexual object choice other than in necessarily opposing terms: the mannish lesbian, the effeminate boy). Beyond these equations, sex, sexuality and gender are notoriously slippery words that equally refer to states of being, orientations or preferences, and sets of practices.

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Within feminist-inflected studies of sex, the distinction remains that sex refers to the biological basis, and gender to the sociohistorical meanings. As Barrie Thorne and Zella Luria note in their study of children’s sexuality, ‘we use “gender” to refer to cultural and social phenomena – divisions of labour, activity and identity which are associated with but not fully determined by biological sex’ (Thorne and Luria, 2004: p. 74). In this definition, sex becomes the stable ground upon which cultural meanings are inscribed. However, new scientific research in the molecular biology of sex demonstrates that this ground is more complicated than previously understood. The common thinking that the presence of XX or XY chromosomes was the marker of male and female has been thoroughly reworked and the emphasis is now on the ways in which a number of different genes interact in the process of producing female and male sex characteristics (Rosario, 2005). Although there are claims that science is on the verge of discovering a gene for gender (Cohen, 2005), other scientific research demonstrates that gender is a complex and unstable trait. Rather than a single sexdeterminant, it seems there are multiple biomolecular variables that produce a range of sexes, not easily placed into either a binary or continuum model. Such variability in the biological differentiation of sexes should lead us to question what basis there is for the common-sense bifurcation of gender. Indeed, as molecular biology reveals the complexity of sex, the social, cultural and biological basis of gender becomes ever more interesting and difficult to pinpoint. The work of the feminist philosopher Judith Butler (1999) adds another layer to gender. Her argument, which we shall elucidate later in this chapter, emphasizes the unnatural nature of gender. According to Butler, we perform gender according to social and ideological frameworks. Femininity or masculinity is a constantly changing process of ‘iteration’, of citing dominant norms, and of self-definition. In political terms Stuart Hall notes, ‘the revolution in thinking which follows in the wake of the recognition that all social

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practices and forms of domination – including the politics of the left – are always inscribed in and to some extent secured by sexual identity and positioning’ (Hall, 1996a: p. 236). For Hall, ‘The way feminism broke, and broke into, cultural studies’(Hall, 1996b: p. 270) has had far-reaching effects on both the centrality of studying sex and culture, as it also offered pathways through different types of research. ‘For cultural studies . . . the intervention of feminism was specific and decisive. It was ruptural. It reorganized the field in quite specific ways’(Hall, 1996b: p. 269). We can glean four influences from Hall’s list which usefully sums up some of the major contributions. First, feminism’s catch-cry, ‘the personal is political’ radically changed, theoretically and practically, the objects of cultural analysis. Consequently, feminists contributed a radically expansive notion of power, in particular emphasizing the centrality of gender and sexuality to political analyses. Third, they re-opened discussion around subjectivity and the subject ‘at the centre of cultural studies as a theoretical practice’. Finally, feminism’s interest in psychoanalysis reassessed the border ‘between social theory and the theory of the unconscious’ (Hall, 1996b: p. 269). Yet it remains the case that in disciplinary terms, ‘sexual’ and ‘cultural’ are promiscuous adjectives.Anthropology, feminist history and cultural history, human geography, literary studies have all turned to the study of sex. Indeed, ‘the cultural turn’ within these disciplines and others may have encouraged cross-disciplinary research into the relations between sexuality and culture. Cultural studies’ preoccupation with everyday life and with power ‘from below’ united with ‘the personal is political’ to centre on the micropolitics of sex, gender and sexuality, as they coincided with macro issues.AsAnnette Kuhn has argued, early feminism insisted on ‘the significance of cultural factors, in particular in the form of socially dominant representations of women and the ideological character of such representations both in constituting “woman” and in delimiting and defining what has been called the “sex/gender” system’ (cited in Walters, 1995: p. 23).

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LESBIAN AND GAY CULTURE Simultaneously, the American Civil Rights Movement provided the grounds for another political and intellectual project that changed Western understandings of sex and sexuality: lesbian and gay liberationism. Up to the mid-twentieth century the pathological model of homosexuality belonged to ‘medicine as both a science and an ideology, with the power to define and categorize certain key areas of human behaviour’ (Altman, 1982: p. 4). Sociologists were at the forefront of intellectual contentions with the explicitly pathological model of homosexuality in both medicine and psychology. Mary McIntosh’s article ‘The Homosexual Role’, published in 1968, drew on the social labelling perspective. The process of labelling the ‘other’ as ‘deviant’ produces the deviant, and thus helps keep the population pure. For McIntosh the ‘way in which people become labeled as homosexual can . . . be seen as an important social process connected with mechanisms of social control’ (McIntosh, 1998: p. 69). Clearly, this has similarities to Mary Douglas’s thesis in Purity and Danger (1966) published two years earlier. The concept of ‘the homosexual role’ thus challenged the psycho-biological explanation of homosexuality current at the time. McIntosh’s work paved the way for the social constructionist’s position that homosexuality was a product of social relations, framed within specific cultural contexts. Yet another important contribution came in the form of Laud Humphrey’s Tearoom Trade, originally published in 1970 and republished as an extended volume in 1975. Humphrey’s methodologically innovative work drew on anthropological methods to produce the first detailed social ethnography of men cruising in public toilets. He made the startling claim that: the tearoom participant is just another neighbor – and probably a very good one at that. He may make a little more money than the next man and work a little harder for it . . . some tearoom regulars . . . will work with Boy Scouts in the evening and spend much of his weekend at church. It may be more

surprising for the outsider to discover that most of these men are married. (Humphrey, 1975: p. 105)

We should note here that the 1948 publication of Alfred Kinsey’s The Sexual Behavior in the Human Male concluded that at least 37 per cent of the male population has had some homosexual experience and approximately 8 per cent has had a sexual experience involving animals (Kinsey et al., 1948: pp. 623, 670). Such research effectively and controversially questioned the rigid divide between homosexuality and heterosexuality, between normality and perversion, well before the introduction of ‘deconstructionism’ in feminist and queer theory. Humphrey’s work, in particular, paved the way for future sociological and ethnographic research on sexual sub-cultures (Nardi and Schneider, 1998). As Dennis Altman comments, if the homosexual subject is a product of nineteenth-century discourses, then the idea of seeing the homosexual ‘in sociological rather than psychological terms, as a member of a minority rather than as an aberrant individual is largely a product of the 1970s’ (Altman, 1982: p. 224). Such research was in part aided by the rise of Western consumer capitalism and an increase in leisure culture. With more disposable income, homosexual sub-cultures were extended by gay commercial spaces such as bathhouses, bars and clubs (D’Emilio, 1983; Wotherspoon, 1991). In short, the cultural and social contexts of sexuality took ascendancy over the scientific and medical models of innate sexuality. Historical and anthropological research on sexuality offered compelling evidence that sexual roles were not universal social structures necessarily arising from biological differences (Garton, 2004). Instead such research suggested that sexual roles and behaviours were in large part shaped by and interpreted within culture. The feminist anthropologist Margaret Mead was an important figure in this debate, whose book Growing Up in New Guinea (1942) has recently been the controversial site of postcolonial readings (Foerstel and Gilliam, 1992). While historians and anthropologists

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challenged the common-sense belief that sex roles were natural and universal, they still assumed that bodies were biologically sexed. Among historical and anthropological research on homosexuality across cultures and time, homosexuality was defined as same-sex sexual relations. Thus, even though they challenged the cultural assumptions around sex roles, they nevertheless explicitly relied on knowable, pre-cultural, sexed bodies as a given for their research. As we shall see, this notion of the knowable sexed body as something prior to culture has been widely challenged since the 1990s. Lesbian and gay studies could be seen to parallel the feminist project. As Abelove, et al. argue: ‘Lesbian and gay studies does for sex and sexuality what women’s studies does for gender’ (Abelove et al., 1993: p. xv). That is to say, lesbian and gay studies attempt to produce sex and sexuality as central categories of analysis for academic work. While important, this fails to recognize the collaboration between lesbian and gay studies and feminism that produced complex models of the interrelations between gender, sex, sexuality and culture.

POST-STRUCTURALIST SEX By the early 1990s post-structuralism profoundly changed the theoretical and methodological terms of the debates on gender, sex and sexuality. We recognize that poststructuralism is a heavily-debated concept; however, we employ it as an umbrella term for the, initially at least, North American interest and debate around a number of French theorists: Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. The debates surrounding the interpretation and reception of their work brought an increased emphasis on language and its relation to ontology and politics. Between Barthes’s thesis of ‘The death of the author’, the Derridean claim that ‘nothing is outside the text’ and Foucault’s argument that ‘nothing is outside power or discourse’, feminists focused their attention on the relation between language and

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power. For many authors gendered and sexual identities were not pre-discursive entities, but were the effects of discourse and rhetoric. One significant influence was what became known as ‘deconstruction’. The term is attributed to Derrida, but it was mainly introduced to Anglo-American circles by Christopher Norris (1982) and Jonathan Culler (1982). As a method of breaking down binaries it was quickly taken up by lesbian and gay scholars eager to question the clear-cut divisions that isolated sexual minorities. Diana Fuss’s introduction to her edited collection, Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, provides a useful example of the uses of deconstruction in lesbian and gay studies during the 1990s. The deconstruction occurs around the ‘homo/hetero binary’; that is, the assumption that heterosexuality is the opposite of homosexuality. For Fuss, heterosexuality is steeped in the ‘language and law of defense and protection’. In other words, ‘heterosexuality secures its self-identity and shores up its ontological boundaries by protecting itself from what it sees as the continual predatory encroachments of its contaminated other, homosexuality’ (Fuss, 1991: p. 2). Obviously, heterosexuality defines itself from precisely what it is not: homosexuality. Thus, the homosexual ‘stands in for, paradoxically, that which stands without’ (Fuss, 1991: p. 3). However: The binary structure of sexual orientation [the hetero/homo binary], fundamentally a structure of exclusion and exteriorization, nonetheless constructs that exclusion by prominently including the contaminated other in its oppositional logic. (Fuss, 1991: p. 3)

Heterosexuality needs homosexuality as something it continually excises from itself, in order to prove its own normalcy. Homosexuality becomes a kind of ‘interior exclusion – an outside which is inside’, which makes the heterosexual possible in the first place. In other words, the border demarcating heterosexuality from homosexuality is unstable: ‘each is haunted by the other’. It is precisely because ‘Heterosexuality can never fully ignore the close psychical proximity of its

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terrifying (homo)sexual other’ (Fuss, 1991: p. 3) that heterosexuality must constantly announce itself by vigorously, and often violently, excluding, excising, repudiating, rejecting and perhaps even destroying its supposed homosexual other. Fuss’s deconstruction of the homo/hetero binary simultaneously explains and critiques the structural homophobia that serves to regulate the boundary between the homosexual and the heterosexual.

sexes are each other’s “opposites” ’. This produces a sequence reminiscent of Russian dolls, with a series of perfect fits between:

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Sedgwick’s list continues through to how one is supposed to have sex, enjoy which acts, think of oneself as a sexualized person, and includes how one is supposed to enjoy or not enjoy power, and the community to which one should belong – all on the basis of this entrenched binary. This deeply constraining way of framing sex, gender and sexuality obscures many things, including, as Sedgwick says, the fact that women and men are more alike than not: ‘Under no matter what cultural construction, women and men are more like each other than chalk is like cheese, than ratiocination is like raisins, than up is like down, or than 1 is like 0. The biological, psychological and cognitive attributes of men overlap with those of women by vastly more than they differ’ (Sedgwick, 1993: p. 7). Sedgwick’s project is properly speaking epistemological: an investigation of the knowledges and ignorances that swirl around sexuality. Her use and evocation of queer is precisely to encourage this proliferation of energies beyond a binary model.

As we mentioned earlier, some feminist scholars have argued that the analysis of gender should be separate from that of sexuality, although the two constantly intertwine. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work has consistently tried to pry apart gender and sexuality in order to analyse their separate logics: ‘to inhabit the very farthest of the loose ends where representation, identity, gender, sexuality, and the boy can’t be made to line up neatly together’ (Sedgwick, 1993: p. 13). Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990) was ground-breaking in its thrust to complicate the common sense understandings that wed gender and sexuality, especially homosexuality. She proceeds by axioms: Axiom 2. The study of sexuality is not coextensive with the study of gender; correspondingly, antihomophobic inquiry is not coextensive with feminist inquiry. But we can’t know in advance how they will be different. (Sedgwick, 1990: p. 27)

Sedgwick’s argument against the condensing of gender and sexuality is primarily about the ways in which ‘the trope of homosexualityas-gender inversion’ (‘in which a gay man represents “a woman’s soul trapped in a man’s body” ’) has allowed for ‘the heterosexist presumption that only a self that is somehow “really a man” could be attracted to a woman, or vice versa’ (Sedgwick, 1993: p. xiii). Her project is therefore aimed at the deconstruction of the binaries that seemingly rule the organization and understanding of sexuality. As she puts it, ‘the binary calculus . . . that depends on the notion that the male and female

your biological sex, male or female; your self-perceived gender assignment, male or female (supposed to be the same as your biological sex); . . . the biological sex of your preferred partner; the gender assignment of your preferred partner (supposed to be the same as her/his biological sex); the masculinity or femininity of your preferred partner (supposed to be the opposite of your own). . . . (Sedgwick, 1993: p. 7)

Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying, troublant. The word ‘queer’ itself means across – it comes from the IndoEuropean root – twerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart. (Sedgwick, 1993: p. xii)

In her argument, the homo/heterosexual divide has been one of the major sources of energy, anxiety, silence and speech in modern European cultures. As Chris Mayo – a researcher in the philosophy of education and curriculum – puts it, ‘the closet and the open

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secret’ – knowledge in some sense known but not circulated – form the structure of a range of other binaries. For Mayo, ‘the tension between visibility and invisibility, ignorance and knowledge, and childhood and sexuality [are] central to examining the power effects attending the heterosexual/homosexual binary’ (Mayo, 1996, accessed 17 August, 2005). Arguably, Sedgwick’s entire oeuvre has been more focused on the culture-sexuality couplet than any other living scholar. What is without doubt is the intricacy of her examinations of sexuality and culture. While her work follows in the path forged by Michel Foucault, to whom we will shortly turn, as a literary scholar Sedgwick privileges what might be called high cultural texts in comparison to Foucault’s eclectic mixture of ancient Greek philosophy, medical case studies, and a constant engagement with Nietzsche. By contrast, Sedgwick works through poems (sometimes her own), fiction by modernist writers such as Henry James, Emily Dickinson and Oscar Wilde, and canonical women writers such as Jane Austen. Sedgwick has also engaged deeply with non-literary sources. Her co-edited collection (1995) of the psychologist Silvan Tomkins is an inspiring example of inter-disciplinary investigation. But her primary method remains close reading, which allows her to draw to the surface the specific cultural machinations of sexuality. This can be seen, for example, in her reading of the French encyclopaedist Denis Diderot’s novella The Nun (La Religieuse, published in 1796). The Nun revolves around the question of seduction, and the question of whether a young and pure nun knows her Mother Superior is seducing her. It and its extra-textual tale are fascinating, with a succession of editors skirting around the ‘lesbian’ scenes. In his 1875 edition of Diderot’s oeuvre, J. Assézat writes, ‘We call La Religieuse a masterpiece, and it is such a masterpiece that it cannot be touched without losing part of its value and without becoming, even, dangerous . . . To the ignorant, [Diderot] teaches nothing; to one who knows, he is very far from telling all’ (cited in Sedgwick, 1993: p. 27). Sedgwick weaves her argument

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through close consideration of the ignorant and the one who knows, constantly asking what is known when sexuality is known: Part of the interest of La Religieuse for a historical exploration of gay-related discourse is that it comes from a time before the rich and murderously contradictory modern array of ways of thinking gay identity, especially in relation to gender identity, had begun to emerge. Both because of the mideighteenth-century origin of the novel and because of its conventual venue, the question of lesbian sexual desire – is what is happening sexual desire, and will it be recognized and named as such? – looks, there, less like the question of The Lesbian than like the question of sexuality tout court. (Sedgwick, 1993: p. 28)

Reading Diderot’s description of the seduction of Suzanne Simonin by the Mother Superior it certainly sounds a lot like sex: [P]ressing here and there and she grasped as she urged me in a strange, low voice to redouble my caresses, which I did. Eventually a moment came, whether of pleasure or of pain I cannot say, when she went pale as death, closed her eyes, and her whole body tautened violently, her lips were pressed together and moistened with a sort of foam, then they parted and she seemed to expire with a deep sigh . . . I don’t know what was going on inside me, I was afraid, my heart was thumping and I breathed with difficulty, I was upset, oppressed, shocked and frightened, my strength seemed to have left me and I was about to swoon. And yet I cannot say it was pain I was feeling . . . (cited in Sedgwick, 1993: p. 37)

To our ears it’s pure sensual delight. We know that it is sex. But of course that depends on the ‘we’. Which ears are pressing against the text? Which eyes are caressing the caresses? And with what knowledge? Sedgwick’s project, across much of her work, has been to explore the tensions between ignorance and knowledge. In Epistemology of the Closet (1990) she explicitly locates the secret – the shifting knot constructed between and by relations of knowledge and ignorance – as the privileged trope of modern culture. The open secret of ‘I know you know that I know’ is at the heart of the tangled project of modern identityformation. The open secret and its disquieting effects can be heard in Diderot’s editor’s remarks when he justified Diderot’s portrayal

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of seduction and vice, or what Sedgwick calls his ‘sexual graphicness’. As Assézat puts it: How could it be wished that Diderot should halt in his path? What was it he wanted to depict? . . . And should he have left out one of the forms of hysterical illness which results from them most often, not to say always? Cruelties one may deny; they occur behind closed doors and only rarely become known . . .; but illness speaks, and always loudly, and it begs for the intervention of a man, who is no longer the priest, but the doctor. (cited in Sedgwick 1993: p. 28)

Assézat’s words capture the insistency of the secret. ‘It begs for the intervention of a man.’ And as we shall see shortly, the transition from priest to doctor effectively announces the dawn of modern sexualities, which, as Sedgwick writes, becomes the ‘issue that cuts across every locus of agency and subjectivity in the culture’ (Sedgwick, 1993: p. vii).

THE WILL TO KNOWLEDGE It is the work of Michel Foucault which has most contributed to understanding how the regulation of sexuality became intimately imbricated with modern power, scientific knowledge, regulation and cultural knowledge. For a long time the question of the history of sexuality had been a moot one. The dominant reasoning was that sexuality was itself transhistorical and natural. Therefore how could one do a history of sexuality if it was itself non- or ahistorical? As we’ve seen, historians and sociologists such as Jeffrey Weeks, Ken Plummer and Mary McIntosh had done much to further thinking about sex roles and social conditioning. Prior to their work, the Freudian-influenced historian Steven Marcus had analysed Victorian attitudes about sexuality in his The Other Victorians (1964) as evidence of repression. However, Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality broke new ground and offered a radically different set of questions around sexuality. For Foucault sexuality is a modern invention. It is the product of what Diderot’s editor called ‘the intervention’ of men. Its roots lie in the meeting and the ensuing

battles between the priest and the doctor. As he famously charted, the central mechanism in the production of sexuality was the confession, which spread from Church to surgery in a remarkably short span of time. ‘The most defenseless tenderness and the most bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal’ (Foucault, 1978: p. 59). For Foucault the story of sexuality went like this. In the Middle Ages, there was ‘a certain frankness’ about sexuality. Prior to the nineteenth century one could be punished for committing certain acts, for instance sodomy. But ‘the sodomite was not a particular category of person, with recognizable traits’. As Garton writes, ‘he could be a husband, a priest, a farmer or any other type of person, but what singled him out was the commission of an illegal act’ (Garton, 2004: p. 13). By contrast, from the late eighteenth century on sexuality becomes the object of scrutiny, which in turn produces recognizable types. Sexuality was no longer a matter of acts but the acts came to constitute the type. With the studies of Freud, Charcot and many others, what we have is the elaboration of a science of sex. This would extensively and somewhat obsessively classify and describe ‘aberrations, perversions, oddities . . . an imaginary dynasty of evils destined to be passed on for generations’ – evils that had to be named and eradicated for ‘the moral cleanliness of the social body’. Foucault distinguishes between two very different ways of knowing sex. In so-called Eastern societies, the ars erotica were the erotic arts in which the truth of sex is drawn from pleasure, pleasure in relation to pleasure itself. In Western societies, the formulation of ‘scientia sexualis’, or the procedures for telling the truth of sex were geared to a form of knowledge-power. The science of sex and classification proceeded through these main tenets (Foucault, inter alia, 1978; cf. Bové, 1995): (a) Through a clinical codification of the inducement to speak: Confession and examination revolved around compiling personal histories of patients with a

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set of signs and symptoms. In addition to this interrogation, other medical and scientific technologies were practiced as ways of extracting a truth to match the diagnosis. (b) A general and diffuse causality: Having to tell everything endowed sex with a profound causality – everything can be laid at sex’s feet. From bad habits in childhood to the degeneration of the race, everything gets blamed on sex. ‘The limitless dangers that sex carried justifies the exhaustive character of the inquisition to which it was subjected (Foucault, 1978: p. 66).’ (c) The principle that sex was obscure and needed to be revealed: It was necessary to elucidate sex in numerous and often complicated ways because sex is thought to be elusive and obscure. By the nineteenth century, confession was no longer just about what the subject wanted to hide, but what was hidden from himself. Sex was something that tried to stay hidden, and needed to be forcibly extracted. (d) Method of interpretation: One confesses to someone: this is the very principle of its power. But one also confesses to someone who is endowed with credentials to judge and interpret the confession. Sex had to be interpreted. (e) Mediatization of the effects of confession: Sex becomes the ground for adjudicating the normal and the pathological, a nosology of pathologies: ‘sex would derive its meaning and its necessity from medical interventions: it would be required by the doctor, necessary for diagnosis, and effective by nature in the cure . . . the truth healed’ (Foucault, 1978: p. 67).

These theoretical points can be illustrated by a case study Foucault published under the title of Herculine Barbin, which in translation had this explanatory subtitle: Being the recently discovered memoirs of a nineteenthcentury French hermaphrodite (1980). From his research in the archives of the French Department of Public Hygiene, Foucault found the memoirs of what turned out to be a spectacular case of hermaphrodism. The memoirs graphically told of the religious, educational and legal machinations set up to govern and protect what Foucault calls the imperative of a true sex. The memoirs are remarkable for their pathos and for the way they illuminate in

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human terms the solidification of the science of sex. Here is how Le Monde described them. With an eye for the sensual bloom of young schoolgirls, and the torrid style of the romantic novels of her day, Herculine Barbin tells the story of her life as a hermaphrodite. Herculine was designated female at birth. A pious girl in a Catholic orphanage, a bewildered adolescent enchanted by the ripening bodies of her classmates, a passionate lover of another schoolmistress, she is suddenly reclassified as a man. Alone and desolate, he commits suicide at the age of thirty in a miserable attic in Paris. (Le Monde, July 1978)

In Foucault’s description, a more salient point emerges: With a persistence that borders on stubbornness, modern Western societies have answered in the affirmative. They have obstinately brought into play this question of a ‘true sex’ in an order of things where one might have imagined that all that counted was the reality of the body and the intensity of its pleasures. (Foucault, 1980: p. vii)

Gallagher and Laqueur’s edited collection The Making of the Modern Body (1987) concurs with Foucault’s claims. The collected essays focused on the transformation of representations of the body during the late-eighteenth century and early-nineteenth century and ‘how those transformations were linked to the emergence of modern social organizations’ (Gallagher and Laqueur, 1987: p. vii). Thomas Laqueur’s own contribution focused on ‘the radical eighteenth-century reconstitution of the female, and more generally human, sexuality in relation to the equally radical Enlightenment political reconstitution of “Man” ’ (Laqueur, 1987: p. 1). He locates a shift in the late eighteenth century from the Galenic model (from Galen of Pergamum in the second century), in which women’s genitalia were considered the same as men’s, although inverted, to an ‘anatomy and physiology of incommensurability’, in which women’s genitalia were considered the opposite of men’s (Laqueur, 1987: p. 3). Through a detailed history drawing on anatomical tracts and physiological treatises as evidence, Laqueur demonstrates that the anatomical and physiological differences of sex were not heavily debated ‘until such

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differences became politically important’ in the cultural politics of women’s position within European society (Laqueur, 1987: p. 4). Schiebinger (1987) similarly points out that the first female skeleton representations only made their appearance in England, France and Germany between 1730 and 1790, within the debates about the position of women in European society. Simultaneously, such debates were entwined with ‘professional politics’ in which physicians sought to ‘free woman’s bodies from the stigma of clerical prejudice . . . and, in the process, to substitute the physician for the priest as the moral preceptor of society’ (Laqueur, 1987: p. 29). Thus, Laqueur, in Making Sex, concludes that ‘Science does not simply investigate, but itself constitutes, the [sexual] difference’, between male and female (Laqueur, 1990: p. 17). However, sexual difference is ‘explicable only within the context of battles over gender and power’ (Laqueur, 1990: p. 11). In other words, rather than being the result of scientific progress, the changes in interpreting bodies were the result of two developments. The first development was an epistemological shift in scientific discourses by the late seventeenth century. But this epistemological transformation does not produce two opposite sexes: ‘it does so only in certain political circumstances’ (Laqueur, 1990: p. 11). According to Laqueur, politics ‘as the competition for power, generates new ways of constituting the subject and the social realities within which humans dwell’ (Laqueur, 1990: p. 11). In this sense, sexual difference is the effect of power struggles within culture. ‘New claims and counter claims regarding the public and private roles of women were thus contested through questions about the nature of their bodies as distinguished from those of men’ (Laqueur, 1987: p. 35).

DISCOURSES AND/OF SEX It is well known that Foucault was not overly interested in individuals. While he treats the case of Herculine Barbin with tact, his interest

lay more in the ways in which her example illuminates the insistency of the discursive construction of sex. What is at issue is the overall ‘discursive fact’, the way in which sex is ‘put into discourse’. . . . my main concern will be to locate the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates in order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of behaviour, the paths that give it access to the rare and scarcely perceivable forms of desire, how it penetrates and controls everyday pleasure – all this entailing effects that may be those of refusal, blockage and invalidation, but also incitement and intensification: in short, the ‘polymorphous techniques of power’. (Foucault, 1978: p. 11)

For Foucault, sexuality became from the mid-eighteenth century onwards the means through which truth was constructed and policed. Truth in this sense was both the outward establishment of empirical categories through which persons were to be known, and the more insidious ways in which one’s own sense of oneself as true came to be constructed. Foucault famously argued that power operates through regimes of knowledge, which in turn are both constituted by and carried through discourse. In a strict sense, discourse designates an ensemble of statements, all of which support each other and produce what is known as the truth: A discourse is a group of statements which provide a language for talking about a particular kind of knowledge about a topic. When statements about a topic are made within a particular discourse, the discourse makes it possible to construct a topic in a certain way. It also limits the other ways in which the topic can be constructed. A discourse does not consist of one statement but of several statements working together to form a ‘discursive formation’. The statements fit together because any one statement implies a relation to all the others. (Hall, cited in Thompson, 1996: p. 40)

For Foucault, power is not seen as located in the hands of one or even several groups. Rather power is fluid. While there are instances of physical brute power, more often than not power operates through discourses to define what is right and what is true at any given time. What makes power so powerful is

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that it doesn’t just come from one source, but from many. Simply put, discourses attempt to and do define for a time the truths of our society (truth regimes). More radically, it is hard to be outside knowledge and discourse because, simply put, you do not have the words to name something outside discourse. You have to try to name what you may feel or experience within the terms and names of a discourse. It is here that confession enacts the voluntary display of one’s self; it is the way in which we happily subject ourselves to categories, which then come to rule us. Many feminists have attempted to appropriate, but also subvert, Foucault’s work around the subject, power and discourse for their own ends. Foucauldian feminism, or poststructuralist feminism, was to have a profound impact on thinking about power in cultural research (Diamond and Quinby, 1988; Fraser, 1989; Hekman, 1996; Lurie, 1997; McNay, 1992; Probyn, 1993; Ramazanoglu, 1993; Sawicki, 1991; Weedon, 1987). However, we should be careful not to think that Foucault simply re-vamped a naïve research agenda around sexuality and gender. We would do well to recall Lois McNay’s attempts to persuade feminists to take Foucault’s work seriously on the basis that: on certain points, it converges in an interesting fashion with some of the theoretical issues that are currently dominating areas of feminist debate. For example, the idea of a process of active selffashioning, which lies at the heart of Foucault’s theory of practices of the self, parallels, in certain respects, recent attempts by theorists such as Teresa de Lauretis to model the subjectivity of women in terms other than those of passive victims of patriarchy. (McNay, 1992: p. 4)

In a similar vein, Weeks commented in Against Nature that Foucault was taken up by historians and sociologists of sexuality ‘because his corpus of work seemed highly relevant to what appeared as intractable theoretical and political problems in work that was already creatively going on’ – and in Weeks’s case for 12 years (1991: p. 158). Nevertheless, from our point in history it is clear that the Foucauldian legacy heavily

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influenced contemporary cultural research on sex and sexuality, providing the key terms of the field: discourse, power, the subject and epistemic regimes. In her introduction to Gender and the Politics of History, Joan Scott (1988) notes her debt to Foucault’s reworking of power, and in particular its imbrication with knowledge. Scott argues that ‘gender is the social organization of sexual difference’ (Scott, 1988: p. 2). This is not to suggest that gender reflects natural, biological differences between women and men: rather gender is the knowledge that establishes meanings for bodily differences. These meanings vary across cultures, social groups, and time since nothing about the body, including women’s reproductive organs, determines univocally how social divisions will be shaped . . . Sexual difference is not, then, the originary cause from which social organization ultimately can be derived. It is instead a variable social organization that itself must be explained. (Scott, 1988: p. 2)

Scott rejected the use of ‘gender’as a synonym for ‘women’, while moving away from the ‘anatomy is destiny’ thesis. Her definition of gender rested on two propositions: that ‘gender is a constitutive element of social relationships’, and that ‘gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power’ (Scott, 1988: p. 42). In doing so, Scott effectively appropriated the post-structuralist critique of experience, by using it to challenge the status of gendered and sexed existence. The interpretation of experience thus became a site of political contestation. ‘Experience’, wrote Scott, ‘is at once always already an interpretation and is in need of interpretation. What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, always therefore political’ (Scott, 1992: p. 37). Since experience was already an interpretation, then how the researcher ‘reads’ the experience could itself become a site of political intervention. Such a project would entail ‘focusing on processes of identity production, insisting on the discursive nature of “experience” and on the politics of construction’ (Scott, 1992: p. 37). In other words, rather than presuming the identity of

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the subject who speaks, the cultural critic should pay attention to how language forms the subject. It is in the space opened up by this sort of Foucauldian critique that Judith Butler’s work seeks to extend through her concept of ‘performativity’. Before continuing with Butler, we note two important developments emerging from the post-structuralist debates surrounding Foucault’s work. By the mid-1990s a number of influential queer theory texts and anthologies were published, establishing it as a major field of investigation (Grosz and Probyn, 1995; Nardi and Schneider, 1998; Probyn, 1996; Seidman, 1996, 1997; Weed and Schor, 1997). His genealogical method re-invigorated research into the history of sexology and sexuality, which opened up examinations of non-normative sexualities and thus provided historical grounding for queer theory (Bland and Doan, 1998; McWhorter, 1999; Rosario, 1997; Terry and Urla, 1995). Foucault’s work has also enabled examination of how questions of race and ethnicity intersect with cultural analyses of sex and sexuality. Some students of colonialism critiqued Foucault’s explicitly Western history (Cooper and Stoler, 1997; Stoler, 1995), which led to Foucauldian genealogies utilizing a bi-optics of race and sexuality for re-reading colonial and sexological historical texts (Somerville, 2000; Weinbaum, 2004). A number of Asian-Australian and Asian-American authors have attempted to reassert the centrality of questions of race to questions of sexuality (Eng, 2001; Eng and Hom, 1998; Jackson and Sullivan, 1999; Leong, 1996). Cultural anthropologists, aware of the culturally insensitive research on sexuality in the past, have increasingly become interested in adapting queer theory to anthropological research (McLelland, 2000). More recently, an Australian research group called AsiaPacifiQueer has formed in Australia, which has been at the forefront of collaborative research on sexuality with Asian and Pacific Islander researchers.1 No doubt there is still much work to be done on intercultural, transcultural and diasporic sexualities (Patton and Sánchez-Eppler, 2000).

QUEER PERFORMANCES OF SELVES In terms of queer theory, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, originally published in 1990, has been central to critiques of the foundations of categories such as gender, sex, desire. She attempts to show that such categories are themselves the effects of specific power relations, through what she calls a genealogical critique. As she puts it: A genealogical critique refuses to search for the origins of gender, the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic sexual identity that repression has kept from view; rather, genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin. (Butler, 1999: p. xxix)

Rather than assuming that gendered or sexual identities are real, one should begin from the assumption that they are constructed through various cultural ‘institutions, practices, discourses’. This enables us to ask, for example, how such identities are culturally formed and what is at stake in their formation? ‘To what extent’, she asks, ‘do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute identity, the internal coherence of the subject, indeed, the self-identical status of the person?’ (Butler, 1999: p. 23). One important concept to arise from Butler’s work is the notion of ‘cultural intelligibility’. In the first chapter of Gender Trouble, she argues that the coherence and continuity of ‘the person’ are ‘socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility’ (Butler, 1999: p. 23). Another way of putting it is that we are ‘understandable’ and therefore ‘recognizable’ only within a cultural framework of interpretation. In our example, sexed beings such as male and female are understandable only within our cultural conceptions of sex and gender. People who don’t fall into the simplistic malefemale binary, for example intersexed people, are seen as ‘abnormal’ or ‘weird’, because they cannot be interpreted within Western conceptions of sex: that is, that we are only either male or female. From this example, it

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becomes clear how the Foucauldian notion of power as productive capacity becomes imbricated with the notion of cultural intelligibility, since who is culturally intelligible or unintelligible determines to some extent whose existence is recognized. Apart from a politics of recognition, cultural intelligibility can be used to reinforce the norms of a society. ‘ “Intelligible” genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire’ (Butler, 1999: p. 23). For Butler, cultural assumptions about gender, our everyday understandings about gender, provide the framework for reading, interpreting and understanding sexed and gendered bodies. So how does Butler conceive of ‘gender’? Unfortunately, there is no short answer for this, but we will try to give a truncated version of her argument. For Butler, gender is performative, ‘that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be’ (Butler, 1999: p. 33). She quotes Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals that ‘there is no “being” behind the doing . . . “the doer” is merely the fiction added to the deed’ (cited in Butler, 1999: p. 33). Butler draws on this Nietzschean formulation and gives it a feminist twist, ‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (Butler, 1999: p. 33). We should be careful not to read performative as performance. Butler is clear about distinguishing these notions. In her preface to Bodies that Matter, Butler (1993) attempts to distinguish between these terms by noting how ‘performance’ presupposes a wilful actor who selects their ‘gender’ as they please. Performativity, on the other hand, means that the gendered subject is always already culturally constituted: there is no actor that is prior to gender. As she remarks, ‘performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate “act”, but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ (Butler, 1993: p. 2). To say that gender is an effect is to argue that gender is ‘the repeated

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stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeals over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’(Butler, 1999: p. 44). For Butler, the ‘highly rigid regulatory frame’ is what she calls ‘institutional heterosexuality’. Compulsory heterosexuality, as Adrienne Rich calls it, is a Western cultural structure that frames the correlation between sex, gender and sexuality. For example, male bodies have a masculine identity and should be sexually attracted to the opposite sex. For Butler, as for many feminists, there is a political logic that circulates within this cultural framework to consolidate gendered binaries. ‘The institution of a compulsory and naturalized heterosexuality requires and regulates gender as a binary relation in which the masculine term is differentiated from a feminine term, and this differentiation is accomplished through the practices of heterosexual desire’ (Butler, 1999: p. 30). You can see that Butler’s suggestion that gender is culturally constructed is directed against the cultural framework of compulsory heterosexuality. By taking up Foucault’s idea that ‘the category of sex, prior to any categorization of sexual difference, is itself constructed through a historically specific mode of sexuality’ (Butler, 1999: p. 31), Butler sought to denaturalize the cultural presumptions about sex, gender and sexuality. In doing so, she opened up a space for critical reflection on how gender was culturally produced. In arguing that gender is performative, she showed that ‘what we take to be an “internal” feature of ourselves is one that we anticipate and produce through certain bodily acts, at an extreme, an hallucinatory effect of naturalized gestures’ (Butler, 1999: p. xv). The notion of cultural intelligibility has become a staple concept for cultural analyses, which often focus on how discourses and texts construct particular ways of gendered knowing. Importantly, such research not only focuses on how discourses produce gendered identities, for example, but also how certain positions are elided or erased by such structures. In her attention to the power relations

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immanent to those discourses, Butler appropriates Foucault’s methodological framework and gives it a feminist political edge. As Butler puts it in her 1999 preface to the reprint of Gender Trouble, ‘my point was not to “apply” post-structuralism to feminism, but to subject those theories to a specifically feminist reformulation’ (Butler, 1999: p. ix). Butler’s argument that gender is culturally constructed or performative has been taken up, sometimes as a given, by researchers focusing on identity formation through films or literature. Where the post-structuralist reliance on discursive or textual analyses explicitly relies on language as the privileged site of analysis, Butler’s concept of performativity also explicitly attaches gender to bodily acts as well, potentially making it useful for research in visual culture and performance studies.

BEYOND TECHNIQUES OF DOMINATION While Butler’s influence on the study of sex, gender and culture is undeniable, her reading and use of Foucault tends to (over)privilege the punitive or the disciplining aspects of his work. On the other hand, and in response to what they saw as an increasingly decontextualized, textual criticism, other theorists argued for re-asserting the centrality of ideology to cultural criticism (Morton, 1996; Walters, 1995). Such a response tends to revert to an older model of structural power in order to counter what they see as a reification of the text. We suggest that both tend to miss an important aspect of Foucault’s work that has been overlooked by some readings that have dominated the field. Sedgwick makes the point well. She argues that readings of Foucault’s first volume tend to propagate ‘the repressive hypothesis ever more broadly by means of displacement, multiplication, and hypostatisation’ (Sedgwick, 2003: p. 11). That is to say, ‘none of them can fulfil Foucault’s implicit promise: that there might be ways of stepping outside the repressive hypothesis, to forms of thought that would not be structured by the question

of prohibition in the first place’ (Sedgwick, 2003: p. 12). For Sedgwick and Frank (1995), such a reading of Foucault, with its obsessive need to ‘denaturalize’ social structures, tends to occlude other ways of theorizing human culture. In their article ‘Shame in the Cybernetic Fold’, they move away from this framing through Silvan Tomkins’s work on affect. For Sedgwick and Frank, the theoretical project today tends towards a predictable antibiological stance, which presumes biology to be essentialist and/or erasing difference. Furthermore, contemporary theory tends to presume that human language offers the best model for understanding representation, while often seeing the dismantling of binaries and teleologies as an urgent task (Sedgwick, 2003: p. 93). Consequently, they argue that the contemporary model of critique ‘reproduces and popularizes the structure, even as it may complicate an understanding of the workings’ (Sedgwick, 2003: p. 94). As an alternative path, Sedgwick has sought to grapple with the materiality and corporeality of queer desire through affect. Sedgwick and Frank’s call to look at the affective relation in sexuality echoes Foucault’s latter work on the self. While the focus on discourse, knowledge and power formed the shape and direction of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, a very different project emerged in his second and third volumes. Foucault’s plan had been to follow through with studies of particular nineteenth-century articulations and understandings about sex. There was to have been volumes on ‘the hysterization of women’s bodies’, ‘the pedagogization of children’s sex’, ‘the socialization of procreative behavior’, and ‘pyschiatrization of perverse pleasure’. However, Foucault perversely ended up in Antiquity and, when the volumes appeared some eight years after the first one, they heralded another direction. This change is heard in Foucault’s statement, courageously uttered at the height of the AIDS epidemic to which he also succumbed: ‘Sex is not a fatality; it’s a possibility for creative life’ (Foucault, 1989: p. 231).

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Foucault’s reasons for abandoning nineteenth-century sexuality are numerous. On one level, he candidly admitted: I changed my mind. A work, when it’s not at the same time an attempt to modify what one thinks and even what one is, is not much fun. I had begun to write two books in accordance with my original plan; but very quickly I got bored. It was unwise on my part and contrary to my habits. (Foucault, 1989: p. 293)

While this might sound frivolous, given Foucault’s deep commitment to the project of thinking differently, of losing oneself (‘To work is to think something other than what one has thought before’ [Foucault, 1989: p. 303]), and the respect he had for curiosity as a matter of scholarly principle, it makes sense. In terms of substantive evidence, he found in the Ancient Greeks material ripe for ‘a history of the manner in which pleasure, desires and sexual behaviours have been problematized, reflected on and thought about in relation to a certain art of living’ (Foucault, 1989: p. 294). At the heart of this project is the schism that divides our culture from the Greeks. In their practices of the care of the self (and of course it was only a small minority of men) we see a radically different idea about the place of sex. If, as Foucault argued, sex has become for us moderns a key to the inner truth of the self, in the care of the self, sexuality was only one element of the regimen, which formed citizens in their arts of existence. The regimen included what one ate, the content of dreams, sexual practices – though not the sexual choice of partner – as objects, which together were to be reflected on, or as Foucault liked to call it, ‘problematized’: The history of thought – that means not simply a history of ideas or representations, but also the attempt to respond to this question: how is it that thought, insofar as it has a relationship with the truth, can also have a history? That is the question posed. I try to respond to a specific problem: the birth of morality, of a morality that is a reflection on sexuality, desire, pleasure. (Foucault, 1989: p. 294)

Posed in these terms, we can see that inherent to his larger project is: ‘ . . . a way of reflecting on our relation to the truth. But it must not end

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there. It is a way of asking oneself: if such is the relation that we have with the truth, then how should we conduct ourselves?’(Foucault, 1989: p. 201). The Ancient Greek technologies of the self therefore figured for Foucault as the limit to what we can now think, caught as we are within the insistent message that sex is the means through which we know the self. In other words, the apparatus of discourse, with its attendant mechanisms of power such as confession, have so thoroughly imbued our culture that it is nigh on impossible to envisage the creative potential of sex as part of the care of the self. Elaborating on this project, Foucault gave several interviews where he suggested how homosexuality could be re-envisaged. With his critique of confession and the very idea that sex or anything could be deciphered as our inner truth, it is clear that Foucault did not subscribe to the idea of gay liberation. While he certainly appreciated many aspects of American gay culture, one can safely say that for Foucault the confession of one’s sexuality would only free individuals into a discursive prison of their own making. In his words: ‘Another thing to distrust is the tendency to relate the question of homosexuality to the problem of “who am I?” and “what is the secret of my desire?”’ (Foucault, 1989: p. 204). Against truth-telling, Foucault saw in homosexuality something much bigger and more exciting. ‘Better to ask oneself’, he wrote, ‘ “what relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied and modulated?” . . . The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of sex but rather to use sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships’ (Foucault, 1989: p. 205). It is indeed these multiplicities that he argues make homosexuality disturbing for mainstream society: ‘affection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie and companionship . . . things which our rather sanitized society can’t allow a place for without fearing the formation of new alliances, and the tying together of unforeseen forces’(Foucault, 1989: p. 205). To emphasize

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that he was emphatically not suggesting that homosexuality was per se better, Foucault was clear that it was ‘because the position of the homosexual [is] “off-centre”, somehow, together with the diagonal lines which the homosexual can draw through the social fabric, [that] makes it possible to bring to light these potentialities’ (cited in Halperin, 1995: p. 67). Foucault’s The Use of Pleasure takes us into the intricacies of the development of the regimen, in part so that we can ‘dwell on that quite recent and banal notion of “sexuality”: to stand detached from it, bracketing its familiarity’ (Foucault, 1986: p. 3), In his account, Foucault emphasizes that the point was not to justify interdictions but to stylize a freedom: ‘that freedom which the “free” man exercised in his activity’ (Foucault, 1986: p. 97). Here freedom should not be understood as an abstract term, but as a horizon that is produced through practices and activities: more forcefully, it is the body that eats, that fucks, that sleeps, that writes that constitutes the horizon. The regimen is therefore unconcerned with the form of the practices it brought together; no distinction was made between, for instance, ‘natural’ or ‘unseemly’ sexual practices. Rather, ‘the usefulness of a regimen lay precisely in the possibility it gave individuals to face different situations’ (Foucault, 1986: p. 105). In addition to being situational, it was also to be circumstantial: ‘Dietetics was a strategic art in the sense that it ought to permit one to respond to circumstances in a reasonable, and hence useful, manner’ (Foucault, 1986: p. 106). As opposed to a moral doxa, the point of the regimen was to allow men to place themselves in relation to themselves, and to each other in the wider world. Activities were not judged on their intrinsic merit, but rather on their manner of articulation and enactment: what followed or preceded an activity was of far greater import than the form or content of the activity. In clear contradistinction to our modern and conventional notions of morality, ‘Regimen should not be understood as a corpus of universal and uniform rules; it was more . . . a treatise for adjusting one’s

behaviour to fit the circumstances’ (Foucault, 1986: p. 106). Lest this be understood as mere relativism, central to the workings of regimen was the need to establish the right measure, restraint and precision. As Plato puts it, ‘ “even a pig would know . . . in everything connected with the body . . . what is useful is the right measure” ’ (cited in Foucault: p. 102). Thus, the injunction to find the ‘right measure’ brought together the realms of both the corporeal and the moral, the sexual and the cultural. The regimen can be seen as the principle that brought together diverse cultural practices, such as exercise, eating, sleeping, sexual activity. Through the advice of practical texts, individuals constituted themselves as healthy and moral subjects. The regimen provided guidance in terms of how to relate to particular situations and circumstances, and this both in regard to oneself and to others. It is clear that these were not abstract notions, but were indeed practices to be governed by the sense of ‘the right measure’. This entailed then an attitude ‘rooted in an ethics and not a morality, a practice rather than a vantage point, an active experience rather than a passive waiting’ (Rabinow, 1997: p. xix). The point here is not to repeat the Greek search for self-stylization, but rather to take from already existing tendencies in order to elaborate an etho-poetics, a worldly ethics of living.

SEX AND ETHICS Foucault elaborated these ideas in the early 1980s. Their full import can be clearly seen as sex and sexuality have become the central sites through which individuals attempt to fashion an everyday ethics of living. In Anthony Giddens’s terms, what marks our culture now is self-reflexivity, which as he says is most clearly seen in the ways in which sexuality is lived. Giddens’s thesis is that we are at a stage of advanced modernity marked by reflexivity. We now reflect on social structures such as the family, sexuality and intimate relationships. The old narratives about family, sex and intimacy no longer

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hold but instead of simply rejecting them we have, says Giddens, devised interesting new ways of doing them. His favoured terms include ‘pure relationships’, and ‘plastic sexuality’, by which he means that sex and relationships are transformable rather than immutable. He backs this up with examples of the changed ways people do intimacy – the experimentation that produces stay-at-home dads, or families with lesbian mothers, gay uncles and an extended support-group based in friendship rather than blood and sex (as procreation). One could say that from a sociological perspective, Giddens reframes Foucault’s own replaying of Kant’s question ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’ (What is going on here? What are we?): What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in circumstances of late modernity – and one which, on some level or another, all of us answer, either discursively or through day-to-day social behavior. (Giddens, 1991: p. 70)

These are questions which are explicitly worked out in terms of sexuality: The emergence of what I term plastic sexuality is crucial to the emancipation implicit in the pure relationship, as well as to women’s claim to sexual pleasure. Plastic sexuality is decentred sexuality, freed from the needs of reproduction. (Giddens, 1994: p. 2)

Giddens is obviously influenced by studies of gay and lesbian culture. It is a somewhat romanticizing view, but nonetheless important in realizing the cultural shifts in how sexuality is lived and how it could be a principle of ethical life: ‘the model of confluent love suggests an ethical framework for the fostering of non-destructive emotion in the conduct of individual and communal life’ (Giddens, 1994: p. 202). In Weeks’ argument, ‘the pure relationship, dependent on mutual trust between partners, is both a product of the reflexive self, and a focus for its realization. It offers a focal point for personal meaning in the contemporary world, with love and sex as the prime site for its attainment’ (Weeks, 2000: p. 214; see also Weeks et al., 2001).

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In an important contribution to the sociological understanding of gender and sexuality in late modernity, LisaAdkins (2004) provides a check to the rather celebratory turn to reflexivity. As she outlines, ‘reflexivity should not be confused with (or understood to concern) a liberal freedom to question and critically deconstruct the rules and norms which previously governed gender’ (Adkins, 2004: p. 191). Adkins weaves her argument across the influential writers on the reflexivity thesis (including Beck, Lash and Giddens), drawing out the necessity of understanding how social actors position themselves in relation to changing norms, and the theoretical exigency of not overstating the case. Usefully mining Bourdieu’s theories of social practice, she argues that practice (competencies, know-how, dispositions, perceptions) ‘operate below the level of consciousness and language through a “feel for the game” ’ (Adkins, 2004: p. 194). Sexuality can be understood as both a ‘feel for the game’ and the rules of the game. Doing sex can be well described as ‘feel for the game as a pre-reflexive, non-cognitive form of knowledge which often cannot be explicitly articulated’. At the same time, there is consciousness of the rules of the game, that sexuality is constructed as a field with implicit rules and ways of behaving, and as we’ve seen a history that underlies it. It is of course lived as habitus, ‘embodied history’, and like gender lived across several fields – ‘the economic field, the political field, the legal field and so on’. As Adkins reminds us, ‘each field has its own logic . . . [and] while the field sets certain limits on practice, nonetheless the actions of agents also shape the habitus of the field and hence the field itself’ (Adkins, 2004: pp. 193–194). This describes a less straightforward and even causal relationship that Giddens et al. assume in their reflexivity thesis: in other words, late modernity is less a time when magically individuals become free to reflect on their practices of sexuality and develop forms such as pure relationships. The situation is more realistically described as a fraught game between the embodied feel for sex

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and the field of sexuality, although actors, practices and the field are all changed through practices and transformation effected through complex interaction. The pre-cognitive and instinctual description of practice probably best captures heterosexuality, which has of course been much less pathologized and reflected upon than queer sexuality. Kath Albury notes that Giddens is influenced by queer arguments as well as by empirical research on gay and lesbian cultures. While taking from Giddens, Albury’s project is a more grounded argument about reflexive culture and its impact on sexual practices, and on the very idea of sexuality for heterosexual women. Albury’s research is ethnographic and interviewbased, and focuses mainly on the alternative uses of electronic culture. As she points out, ‘the accessibility of the Internet has made alternative heterosexualities visible’. For example: On chat lists, IRCs and websites, heterosexual men and women (singly and in groups of two or more) advertise for sexual and romantic partners, or simply perform for the camera. While pornography has traditionally been seen as a form of public or commercial sex, these websites are often produced by amateurs or hobbyists, in a kind of pornographic equivalent to the DIY ethos or reality TV stardom. (Albury, 2003a2 )

Albury uses this material both to critique the rose-coloured view of Giddens’s approach (which, as she points out, adheres to classic feminist condemnation of plastic sexuality when it is performed by heterosexuals) and more importantly to further thinking about the ethics that may flow from alternative sexual practices. Taking up the new freedoms of the electronic media, conducted within a culture dedicated to self-reflection, and enacted in the legacy of several decades of sexual experimentation by gays, lesbians and queers, Albury sees ‘these relationships as practices of self-artistry, which can re-shape heterosex in relation to queer sex and queer identities – without repudiating or othering either straightness or gayness’.

GIRL CULTURE AND SEX This attention to the lived materialities and textures of life allows us to begin to appreciate the ways in which sex and culture intermingle and change each other. It also compels more empirical studies about how people do cope and use sexuality as they try to forge a life, or even more ambitiously an art of existence. In concluding this long examination of sex, let’s turn to some current examples of individuals negotiating sex. A recently conducted three-year project on Girl Cultures provides the material. Catharine Lumby and Elspeth Probyn3 interviewed some 250 girls from schools in NSW, Australia, about what they think about how the media represent them: their bodies, tastes, and the image of girls today. In accordance with Giddens’s point about how emotion enters in and encourages self-reflexivity, one of the key points that emerged from our focus groups and interviews was how girls react to and manage emotions; their sense of self in relation to the self, and to the group. Young women feel themselves to be under constant surveillance from a variety of sources – their peer group, boys, the popular media, parents, educational authorities, and various ‘experts’. They reiterated that they felt like the Big Brother housemates, and it’s not coincidental that Big Brother was one of their favourite TV shows. Small intensive focus groups were composed of friends. A group of six fifteenyear-olds came to Elspeth’s office over three weeks. Watching a music video we soon got into breast implants, butt implants and anal bleaching. One of the girls mentioned she’d like a breast implant. The others offered suggestions: ‘isn’t it better to feel happy about yourself?’ Another counselled her to wait till she was old, like 25 to see if her opinion would change. Another offered to bring in the bra her mother brought her. This is how she described it: Yeah, ok, I’ve bought silicone breasts on the weekend. They are the best thing that ever happened to me. They are, like, pure silicone, with a bit of um plastic around them, so they fit on your

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boobs and they make you one cup bigger. I can wear bikinis now. I can wear like halter tops, just stick em in. They’re fantastic. They have little nipples and they’re like permanently erect!

If wearing a silicon bra doesn’t make them ashamed, does sex make girls feel shame? Here’s one response: I think it’s because from a young age, we’ve been taught that our body is our temple and our body is sacred and I mean, even though there’s been the whole sexual revolution and everything, it’s still . . . I mean sex is a fun thing, and a good thing, and it makes you feel good about yourself, but it also has the power to make you feel absolutely disgusted at yourself and I don’t know why . . . I don’t know if it’s in here, or if it’s something in your body or . . . but I mean, sometimes, when you do stuff, especially when you’re really drunk, with guys, and they just treat you like you’re just nothing . . . they’re just like yep thanks, zip up, fuck off. You know, it just makes you feel disgusted, and I mean um, I think it’s because it’s such an intimate thing like sex is about two people, like it’s fun, but it’s also about two people . . .

Which prompted another: I met my second boyfriend and I had sex with him on the first night we met . . . we ended up going out for 4 months, but I still felt ashamed even though we were going out, that I’d had sex with him on the first night that we met . . . even though we were going out and everything was fine, and we were in love and everything . . . but um, I still felt a certain degree of shame that I’d given in . . . . . . it was weird, because I sort of maintained this whole thing like, oh yeah, I’m strong, and like I love sex and you know I just do it for me, but whenever I did it, it was sort of like I’d lost a little bit, like I’d sort of given in to this guy, like . . . and that’s why I felt really ashamed all the time, like . . . I don’t know about anyone else . . .

Another girl raised a different sort of shame: ‘Shame because you’re like . . . I don’t know this seems pretty minor compared to all the stuff you guys are bringing up, but if you’re like really horrible to one of your friends or something . . . oh, just regretting something you’ve said, that’s the worst thing . . . like if it was something small, or if it wasn’t meant . . . in that way, or you didn’t think about it, before you said it . . . and then you said it, and you felt really bad’. ‘That happens all the time, people just don’t think about what they say . . . ‘

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‘Yeah, but shame isn’t only on things that you’ve done, it’s on things that you haven’t done as well . . .’.

SEX AND CULTURE NOW From the girls we can see that reflection on sexuality prompts wide-ranging discussion. From false boobs to worries about sins of omission and of commission, it seems that being a sexual person today is to be a deeply reflective individual. For these girls, sexuality seems to go beyond a label or an identity, and the sometimes harsh realities of being a sexual person shed light on hitherto seemingly autonomous spheres of human activity. Or in Adkins’ description, what we see is the ongoing and lived result of the tension between a feel for the game and the rules of the game. As other research has found, the emphasis is increasingly on how girls negotiate their gender and sexuality. Deborah Tolman’s lead question in her research on adolescent girls is: ‘How do girls enter their sexual lives and learn to negotiate or respond to their sexuality?’ (Tolman, 2004: p. 88). She distinguished between girls’ sexuality and their sexual subjectivity, arguing that there are too few empirical studies on how sexuality is lived and embodied. There is, she says, ‘a missing discourse of desire’ (Tolman, 2004: p. 90). In Thorne and Luria’s account, ‘in the shift away from the less sexual definitions of gender [how] does sexuality become seen and experienced as an intrinsic “personal” characteristic?’ (Tolman, 2004: p. 85). They also identify that emotion plays a key role within groups of girl friends, arguing that best friends ‘become mutually vulnerable through self-disclosure’ (Tolman, 2004: p. 80). We should pay close attention to what has produced this culture of sexuality. As Marcel Mauss argued many years ago, ‘nothing is more essentially transmitted by a social process of learning than sexual behavior’ (cited in Kimmel and Plant, 2004: p. xiii). It is undeniable that girls in general are the objects of much more intensive sexual pedagogy.

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Through girl culture, which includes the media and also the particular nature of girls’ friendships, girls learn to recognize, interpret and discuss their sexuality more overtly and at a younger age than do boys. The conditions of possibility for the hyperawareness the girls have of their sexuality and its uses include many factors that conservatives find frightening, and which may well be worrisome to the parents of girls and boys. These include a much greater access to sexual information; from the wide availability of pornography on the Net (which they may be wilfully accessing or may stumble across), the explicitness of much primetime TV, a culture of TV therapy via talk shows, to the fact that teenagers now engage in sex at an earlier age than their parents. Changes in the representation of femininity, and gender in general, are also key here. For along with the more overt representation of sexuality in culture, there is also a shift in cultural representations of young women which means that they are now open to hitherto hidden knowledge about sex. With this gradual change as a backdrop, it is perhaps less surprising that girls seem incredibly emotionally mature when it comes to sex, and indeed when it comes to understanding the human condition. This offers an interesting paradox: with the statistics demonstrating that girls are sexually active at an earlier age come the calls for increased surveillance of their bodies, tastes and practices. Yet it is the general climate around sex, and especially the pedagogic nature of girls’ media (agony aunts in girls’ magazines, chat rooms to discuss any number of issues central to their lives, sex education in schools), that is, we argue, producing a much saner discourse about sex. To recall Thorne and Luria’s argument, becoming mutually vulnerable through emotional discussions about sexuality may be the key to a different form of sexual subjectivity. Sexuality has become the site through which girls seem to be learning about how to live in line with what Foucault or Giddens might argue is a fully reflexive and even ethical manner. But equally and following from Adkins’s argument, it is

clear that gender and sexuality understood as fields continue to reflect, inform and at times limit how sexuality is lived.

CONCLUSION As we have seen, from the very beginning research on sex has been deeply enmeshed in what we think culture is or should be. Read across a wide range of studies, the most salient point about sexuality is that it opens up what we think culture is, and the relation between culture and individuals’ lived experiences of culture. From the early attempts to introduce sexuality into history, the anthropological studies of ‘exotic’ sexualities, to the liberationist celebration in the 1960s, sexuality constantly compels ever more complex questions about culture. As the tools of cultural analysis themselves become increasingly complex, sexuality returns to remind us that it is how cultures are lived that is or should be the objective of our studies. From Foucault’s decisive intervention, we know that Western culture has become obsessed with confession, and that we routinely buy into the idea that confessing our sexual urges, desires or fears will set us free. A wealth of scholarship has followed Foucault and produced a vast critical account of the limitations of the equation of sexuality and confession. An equally impressive range of scholarship has focused on the intricacies of the closet, and the queer turns culture takes in the negotiation of sex. From Butler’s extension of the ways in which disciplinary techniques, such as confession and most especially discourses of sexuality, numerous studies have identified the iteration of sexuality as well as its excessive performative potential. While there is no doubt as to the enthusiastic and prolific nature of studies on sexuality, with Sedgwick we argue that there is a need to reflect on the affective role of sex in everyday lives. Sedgwick’s project is, as we have shown, anchored in close readings of cultural texts. Her attention to the specificities of culture can also inspire empirical research

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on how sexuality and the culture that it saturates is actually lived and experienced.

NOTES 1 See http://apq.anu.edu.au/ (accessed 10 September, 2005). See also the web journal Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context on http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/ intersections for interesting articles that are forging links in inter-institutional and inter-cultural research on sexuality. 2 Unpublished conference paper. See also Albury (2002, 2003b). 3 The interviews were also carried out by a very able group of research assistants, primarily Kath Albury, with help from Adam Eldridge.

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McIntosh, M. (1998) ‘The homosexual role’, in P.M. Nardi and B.E. Schneider (eds), Social Perspectives in Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 68–76. (previous edn, 1968.) McLelland, M. (2000) Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan: Cultural Myths and Social Realities. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon. McNay, L. (1992) Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self. Cambridge: Polity Press. McWhorter, L. (1999) Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Morton, D. (ed.) (1996) The Material Queer: A LesBiGay Cultural Studies Cultural Studies Reader. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Nardi, P.M. and Schneider, B.E. (eds) (1998) Social Perspectives in Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Norris, C. (1982) Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. London and New York: Methuen Press. Patton, C. and Sánchez-Eppler, B. (eds) (2000) Queer Diasporas. Durham: Duke University Press. Probyn, E. (1993) Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge. Probyn, E. (1996) Outside Belongings. New York: Routledge. Rabinow, P. (1997) ’Introduction: the history of systems of thought’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. New York: The New Press. Ramazanoglu, C. (ed.) (1993) Up against Foucault: Explorations of some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism. London and New York: Routledge. Rosario, V.A. (ed.) (1997) Science and Homosexualities. New York and London: Routledge. Rosario, V.A. (2005) ‘From hermaphrodites to SOX9: the molecular deconstruction of sex’. Paper presented in the History of Medicine Series, Royal Australasian College of Physicians, University of Sydney, 1 August. Sawicki, J. (1991) Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body. New York: Routledge. Schiebinger, L. (1987) ‘Skeletons in the closet: the first illustrations of the female skeleton in eighteenthcentury anatomy’, in C. Gallagher and T. Laqueur (eds), The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–41. Scott, J.W. (1988) Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Scott, J.W. (1992) ‘Experience’, in J. Butler and J.W. Scott (ed.), Feminists Theorize the Political. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 22–40.

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26 Cultural and Creative Industries David Hesmondhalgh

The term cultural industries has been circulating in cultural analysis and policy for many years and has more recently been joined by another version of the same phrase: creative industries. There is understandable confusion about the relationships between the two terms, and an objective of this chapter is to reduce bewilderment in this area. To address such questions is more than just an exercise in semantics, however. The two phrases emerge from quite different theoretical lineages and policy contexts. And, for all the considerable difficulties of scope and definition that they raise, it is clear that both concepts refer to a domain that no serious cultural analysis can afford to ignore: how cultural goods are produced and disseminated in modern economies and societies. A second objective of this chapter is linked to the importance of that domain. I aim to assess how various theoretical traditions associated with these terms understand the relations between culture and economy, and between meaning and production. My main claims are that the term ‘creative industries’ represents a refusal of the forms of critical

analysis associated with the cultural industries approach, and that unqualified use of the former now signals a considerable degree of accommodation with neoliberalism. But simply to accuse creative industries policy of complicity with neoliberalism is not enough. How might we critique creative industries policy and its theoretical underpinnings? In the final section of the chapter, I briefly explore one avenue of criticism, involving the nature of work in these expanding industries.1

THE CULTURAL INDUSTRIES IN THEORY A common misconception about the term cultural industries is that its use implies an adherence to Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of ‘the Culture Industry’(1977/1944). It is more accurate to think of the term as an attempt to pluralize and sociologize the conception of cultural production in Adorno and Horkheimer’s brilliant but flawed essay, and to question some of the simplifications arising in the adoption of the idea by student

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radicals and others in the 1960s/1970s counterculture. The French sociologist Bernard Miège, for example, introduced a collection of his translated essays in 1989 by outlining the main limitations, from his perspective, of the culture industry idea: its failure to see how technological innovations had transformed artistic practice; its paradoxical emphasis on markets and commodities rather than on culture as an industry, as a process of production with limitations and problems; and the implication in the term ‘culture industry’ that analysts were addressing a unified field governed by one single process, rather than a complex and diverse set of industries competing for the same pool of disposable consumer income, time, advertising revenue and labour. However, there is another distinction crucial to understanding the term. The term ‘cultural industries’ was not just a label for a sector of production, it was also a phrase that came to signify an approach to cultural production based on these and other principles, developed by Miège and other French sociologists, but also by influential British analysts, notably Nicholas Garnham. This cultural industries approach was connected to a broader set of approaches to culture that had come to be known as the political economy of culture. Political economy in its widest sense is a general term for an entire tradition of economic analysis which differs from mainstream economics by paying much greater attention to ethical and normative questions. The term is prefaced with the word ‘critical’ by analysts who wish to differentiate their work from conservative versions. Critical political economy approaches to the media and culture developed in the late 1960s amongst sociologists and political scientists concerned by what they felt were increasing concentrations of communicative power in modern societies – whether in the form of state control or business ownership. Proponents and opponents of political economy of culture often portray the field as a single unified approach but it is more complicated than that. In other work, building on Vincent Mosco’s important overview (Hesmondhalgh, 2007: pp. 33–37; Mosco, 1995: pp. 82–134),

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I have distinguished between, on the one hand, a tradition of North American political economy of culture, exemplified in the work of Herbert Schiller, Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman and Robert McChesney, and on the other, the cultural industries approach, introduced above. The latter tradition is more nuanced than the former, more able to deal with contradiction, and with historical variations in the social relations of cultural production, and most importantly of all, it provides – and indeed is founded upon – an analysis of the specific conditions of cultural industries. This is significant because it means that the cultural industries approach has been able to offer explanation of certain recurring dynamics, rather than polemically bemoaning the processes of concentration and integration that are a feature of capitalist production – including media production. Drawing upon industrial economics, cultural industries writers such as Garnham outlined the problems of capital accumulation distinctive to that sector. Their definition was restricted to those industries that use characteristic forms of industrial production and organization to produce and disseminate symbols. This was very much centred on the media. The problems of accumulation they identified included the especially high risks associated with capital investment in this area, which in turn derived from the difficulty, even in cases where substantial promotional and marketing budgets were available, of predicting which products (whether individual films, TV programmes or books) or creators (performers, musicians, writers, etc.) would achieve success. All capitalist production involves risk to a greater or lesser degree, but there was a substantial case for believing that the cultural industries were riskier than most. The cultural industries sociologists forefronted other important features too. Cultural goods had relatively high production costs, because each recording, each film, each book, is a kind of prototype, involving considerable amounts of investment of time and resources, even at the cheaper, lowbudget end. However, reproduction costs are usually very low. This high ratio of

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production to reproduction costs means that big hits are disproportionately profitable in cultural production, which helps explain such phenomena as ‘the blockbuster syndrome’, where massive amounts of money are spent in order to generate a mega-hit which can subsidize a company’s (inevitable) misses. Another feature of many cultural industries is the tendency for the cultural commodities they produce, not to be destroyed in use, but to act as what economists call ‘public goods’ – goods where the act of consumption by one individual does not reduce the possibility of consumption by others. This public good tendency creates particular problems for cultural producers concerning how to control the circulation of their goods. The recent furore over digitalization of content, heard most loudly in the debates over the sharing of music files over the Internet (sometimes known in the early 2000s as the ‘Napster’ phenomenon after the most famous early filesharing site), is a manifestation of this feature of the cultural industries. According to cultural industries analysts, capitalists seeking profits from culture respond in various ways to these various problems of accumulation in the sector. To counteract these conditions, many cultural industries build up a repertoire or list of products, in the hope that the hits will cancel out the inevitable failures. Because it is hard for consumers to know what kinds of pleasures will be available from cultural products in advance of experiencing them, cultural industries use ‘formatting’ (Ryan, 1992) in order to identify products with particular stars, or as particular genres, or as part of a serial. In order to counteract the public good nature of most cultural products, cultural businesses and governments try to impose artificial scarcity, through the careful control of release schedules, and via limitations on copying (copyright law is crucial in this respect). In particular, the cultural industries approach emphasized the importance of control of circulation – the distribution and marketing of products as opposed to their creation. This was the crucial nexus of power in the cultural industries.

In contradistinction to some versions of the critical political economy of culture, and to a great deal of left discourse about media production, the cultural industries approach avoids portraying cultural producers as monolithically powerful actors. Instead, there is an emphasis on contradiction and complexity. This arguably makes it more applicable to interventions in public policy than some other critical approaches. Unlike many of the economistic approaches that have come to dominate policy formation in recent years, however, the cultural industries approach does not lose sight of issues of power and inequality. I trace some of the ways in which the idea of the cultural industries has been applied in the next section.

THE CULTURAL INDUSTRIES IN POLICY The first impact of the cultural industries idea in public policy was through the auspices of UNESCO, which produced a substantial volume on the cultural industries in 1982 (UNESCO, 1982). Miège produced a report on ‘Problems which the development of national and international cultural industries presents for artistic and intellectual creation’ for that organization in 1983. Here the context was international inequality in cultural resources, exacerbated by the formidable investment in culture being undertaken by Western businesses (an issue to which we shall return). The most lasting legacy of the term ‘cultural industries’ in government policy, however, has been in local rather than international cultural policy. In advanced industrial countries after World War II, government cultural subsidy tended to go mainly to the ‘classical’, legitimated arts, the principal exceptions being public broadcasting and film. There were various struggles to include more groups in the ambit of funding, in the interests of democratization (see Looseley, 2004, on the French version of this). In the UK, for example, funding for the ‘fine arts’ was gradually expanded to the arts, and then to include

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traditional crafts such as pottery and ‘folk’ arts. In the 1970s, there were ‘community arts’ movements, and in the 1980s an increasing emphasis on multiculturalism. As a result of such battles, the content of subsidized ‘legitimated’ culture has shifted over time: for example, arts cinemas came to be subsidized alongside the opera and regional theatre houses. One of the reasons that Jack Lang became an internationally famous Minister of Culture in the 1980s and 1990s was that he attempted to extend French cultural policy funding to forms previously excluded, such as rock, hip hop and raï (Looseley, 2004: p. 19). The seminal introduction of the concept of the cultural industries to cultural policy in Britain represented a more radical revision of cultural policy than this democratic spreading of arts funding. This took place at the left-wing Greater London Council (GLC) from 1983 until the Council’s abolition by the British Conservative government in 1986. The GLC’s cultural industries policy was directed against elitist and idealist notions of art but it also was a challenge to those activists and policymakers who had concentrated on expanding the field of arts subsidy to include new groups. Instead, it was argued by some at the GLC, cultural policy should take full account of the fact that most people’s cultural tastes and practices were shaped by commercial forms of culture and by public service broadcasting. The aim was not to celebrate commercial production but simply to recognize its centrality in modern culture. One key position paper (written by Nicholas Garnham, and reprinted in Garnham, 1990) argued that, rather than on an artist-centred strategy that subsidized ‘creators’, policy should be focused on distribution and exhibition – the reaching of audiences. This argument reflected the emphasis on the centrality of circulation in the cultural industries tradition of political economy, and the importance of thinking about the distinctive characteristics of primarily symbolic production and consumption, as opposed to other forms (see above). The practical implications of such thinking, according to Garnham’s paper, were that ‘debates, organizational energy

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and finance’ ought to be redirected towards broadcasting, the ‘heartland of contemporary cultural practice’, towards the development of libraries (the recipient of over 50 per cent of all public expenditure on culture) and in providing loans and services to small and medium-sized cultural businesses in London for the marketing and dissemination of their products (Garnham, 1990: p. 166). There was a second major element to GLC cultural industries strategy, which saw public investment in this sector as a means to economic regeneration. As Garnham pointed out in a later retrospective (2001), this had no necessary connection to the quite separate argument about shifting the focus of policy from the artist to the audience. It was also less novel, in that the use of cultural initiatives to boost the image of cities was under way elsewhere (Bianchini and Parkinson, 1993). Such policies were often directed towards the boosting of tourism and/or retail in an area, or towards making an area attractive as a location for businesses, rather than towards the democratization of cultural provision. In the late 1980s and 1990s such strategies boomed and spread across the world. Notable cases included Glasgow’s remarkable success in becoming European City of Culture for the year 1990. Expensive flagship projects often based around adventurous architecture proliferated, the best-known of which was probably the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, opened in 1997, which succeeded in making post-industrial Bilbao a tourist attraction. Such projects have been controversial locally, but voices of criticism are rarely heard internationally. Because the GLC was abolished in 1986, its cultural industry policies were never implemented in London. Nevertheless, local cultural policy under the banner of the cultural industries was to have a big impact over the following decade. In many cities, cultural industries policies became bound up with broader strategies to use culture for urban regeneration. But the rise of local cultural industries policy, initially in the form of ‘cultural quarters’in post-industrial cities, was not entirely a result of the appeal of GLC’s

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pragmatic anti-idealist egalitarianism. In fact, in many cases, the idea of cultural industries policy chimed with a fast-growing desire in the 1980s and 1990s to think about all areas of public policy, including culture and media, in terms of a return on public investment. The key context here is the steady rise and general acceptance of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a word that is sometimes used too easily and too glibly. But it is still a useful term to describe an underlying rationale for government policy which proposes that ‘human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’ (Harvey, 2005: p. 2). Cultural industries policy was founded on a recognition, ultimately derived from a properly sophisticated reading of Marx, of the ambivalence of markets. This linked up with an increasing questioning, as a result of broader sociocultural changes, of the legitimacy of ‘high cultural’ forms. In this context, the use of money to promote ‘ordinary’ culture was seen as anti-elitist – and this contributed to the popularity of cultural industries policies with many leftwing councils in Europe. The problem was that, by the 1990s, as neoliberalism emerged triumphant, recognition of the importance of cultural markets could soon be turned, in practice, into an accommodation with the market, as the critical elements in the original GLC vision were lost. The roots of such policies in a more hopeful early 1980s context, based on bottom-up, grassroots interventions, gave a democratizing sheen to policies with very different aims. So it was that in the 1990s, the notion of the cultural industries or the cultural sector became increasingly attached, in a new era of local and regional development policy, to the goals of regeneration and employment creation. It was the second element of GLC policy that was often emphasized, not the first, now bound up not only with culture-led urban regeneration strategies, but also with an increasing emphasis on entrepreneurialism, in the private and public sectors. In a pamphlet

written for the think tank Demos, for example, Kate Oakley and Charles Leadbeater (a figure associated with the GLC, who by the late 1990s was closely linked to the British ‘New Labour’ project personified and led by Tony Blair) outlined their view that entrepreneurs in the cultural industries provided a new model of work and a key basis for local economic growth, in that their local, tacit know-how – ‘a style, a look, a sound’ – showed ‘how cities can negotiate a new accommodation with the global market’ (Leadbeater and Oakley, 1999: p. 14). The view that independent cultural production might be connected to wider movements for progressive social change, implicit in at least some of the GLC work, was by now being steadily erased, in favour of a view much more compatible with contemporary British neoliberalism. A very important further connection was with new developments in arts policy, whereby institutions increasingly sought to legitimize their funding on the basis of its contribution to a somewhat uncomfortable and potentially contradictory mixture of economic and social goals. An influential though controversial report by economist John Myerscough (1988), for example, put the cultural industries together with the arts, and analysed how they contributed to job creation, tourism promotion, invisible earnings and urban regeneration (see Belfiore, 2002, for a survey of arts policy developments in this domain in the UK). Alongside such developments, many arts policy-makers also sought to justify arts subsidy on the basis that the arts, and the cultural industries increasingly linked to them in policy discourse, could contribute to combating social exclusion – a new term which spread like wildfire through European social policy in the 1990s. Some analysts see social exclusion as a term which allows those who use it to avoid consideration of deep-seated structural inequalities, including class (see, for example, Levitas, 1998). These developments were to have an important effect at the national policy level, as we shall see. This is not to say that all such local cultural industries policies were ineffective,

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that they all represented an accommodation with neoliberalism, or with new centrist forms of policy. In some cases, policy-makers with a genuine desire to promote new and interesting forms of cultural activity within an area, and to provide support for struggling entrepreneurs and practitioners, could persuade local government to provide funding by talking about the regenerative possibilities of cultural industries development. In some cases (for example, in Sheffield, in the north of England) such policies were able to support local infrastructures, to the lasting benefit of symbol creators who wanted to work in the city (see Frith, 1993). But the economic and social effectiveness of local cultural policies oriented towards the cultural industries remains controversial. It surely made sense to emphasize the importance of the cultural industries to a news and entertainment hub city such as London, and such a policy direction may have had some coherence in some smaller but substantial cities where the cultural industries have some growing presence, but in other places the idea that investment in the cultural industries might boost local wealth and employment has proven more problematic. Mark Jayne (2004), for example, has written about the difficulties a local council had in developing an effective cultural industries development policy in Stoke-on-Trent, in the English Midlands, a city with an overwhelmingly working-class population. The issue of class is significant here. Much of the burgeoning policy discourse (and associated academic literature) seems implicitly to portray working-class populations as regressive, as holding back cities from entering into competition with the thriving metropolises of the West. This has led some commentators to wonder about the dangers of foisting inappropriately metropolitan policies on predominantly working-class or rural places. Nevertheless, cultural industries policies have made a contribution to people’s lives in ‘unlikely’ areas. Chris Gibson and Daniel Robinson (2004) have written about a small entertainment industry association on the far north coast of New South Wales, hundreds

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of miles from Sydney and other urban areas further south. They acknowledge that the effects of such an association on employment and economic activity are very hard to ascertain, because of the perennial data problems in this area. But they say that the association’s campaigns (keeping venues open, putting on events, getting better remuneration for musicians, publicizing activity through awards, and so on) helped to encourage young aspiring creative workers to stay, and thereby encouraged a sense that there might be an interesting and rewarding cultural life in the region. In other words, funding such grassroots cultural industries institutions may have other, less directly economic but nevertheless positive benefits.

THE RISE OF CREATIVITY: CITIES, CLUSTERS AND UK NATIONAL POLICY By the mid-1990s in Europe, two related concepts had begun to grow out of cultural quarter policies, each of which was the subject of a great deal of policy interest: creative cities and creative clusters. These terms represent an important shift in the policy vocabulary surrounding the cultural industries. The former idea was strongly associated with the Comedia consultancy group. In Comedia booklets and policy documents (for example, Landry, 2000), creativity was presented as the key to urban regeneration and the main reason given was that ‘the industries of the twenty-first century will depend increasingly on the generation of knowledge through creativity and innovation matched with rigorous systems of control’ (Landry and Bianchini, 1995: p. 12). In this new creativity discourse, television, software and theatre were examples of such industries, but so was dealing in stocks and shares – and they all needed creative cities to help them thrive. A number of examples of creativity in local planning and policy were offered by Landry and Bianchini, including the cultureled urban regeneration strategies referred to above. How these were to induce creativity in a city’s inhabitants was not made clear.

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But by the turn of the century, the cultural industries were being thoroughly incorporated into a more general notion of creativity as a boon to a city’s ills. The idea of creative clusters has been even more significant in local policy than that of creative cities. The concept of the business cluster is derived from the work of US economist Michael Porter, which attempts to explain how nations and regions gain competitive advantage over others. An important element, which distinguishes it from older theories, such as that of the nineteenthcentury economist Alfred Marshall, of why firms from the same industry tend to gather in the same places, is its emphasis on the notions of innovative entrepreneurialism and competitiveness fetishisized in neoliberal discourses of the ‘new economy’ (Martin and Sunley, 2003). This has made ‘business clusters’ a hugely influential concept in national and regional government policy across the world. Unsurprisingly perhaps, in the late 1990s, policy-makers concerned with the development of the cultural industries adapted the term by linking it to the rising cult of creativity in management, business and government and using the term ‘creative clusters’. For Hans Mommaas (2004: p. 508) ‘cultural clustering strategies represent a next stage in the on-going use of culture and the arts as urban regeneration resources’. Once all major cities had developed their festivals, major museums and theatre complexes in the culture-led urban regeneration boom of the 1990s, the action moved on to creating milieux for cultural production. However, like ‘business cluster’, the creative cluster is an idea built on a shaky conceptual foundation. Mommaas distinguishes between a number of discourses, which have tended to be merged together in policy discussions of the benefits of creative clusters, and which in his view are in danger of undermining and contradicting each other. These include promoting cultural diversity and democracy, place-marketing in the interests of tourism and employment, stimulating a more entrepreneurial approach to the arts and culture, a general encouraging

of innovation and creativity, and finding a new use for old buildings and derelict sites. Mommaas notes that while some clustering strategies are limited to artistic-cultural activities, most of them incorporate many other leisure and entertainment elements – bars, health and fitness complexes and the like. Development strategies based on the cultural industries have proliferated across the world in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It cannot be automatically assumed that such strategies are entirely about a dubious form of gentrification. They need to be assessed case by case and it remains important to distinguish between top-down versions of such strategies, which come close to simply making cities more accommodating for business-people who want a funky lifestyle, and bottom-up approaches which take account of the needs of people across a range of social classes and ethnic groups. Nevertheless, it seems to be the case that the democratizing intent in the original GLC strategy by this stage of cultural industries policy had become deeply submerged. Cultural policy analyst Justin O’Connor has recently reflected on this latest stage in local cultural industries strategy (manifested in initiatives across much of the world). He seeks to correct a number of misconceptions in what he sees as an overly celebratory literature concerning the insertion of local – especially urban – sites of cultural production into the global circulation of cultural products. One is the view that clusters of local cultural producers derive their success from creativity and other forms of local, tacit knowledge (including the genius loci). According to such views, which can be found in the work of the Comedia consultancy and elsewhere, cities and regions can gain competitive advantage because such knowledge cannot easily be codified and therefore transferred. In fact, says O’Connor, successful clusters are increasingly predicated not so much on the much-vaunted ‘creativity’ but on access to a range of formal knowledges, about global markets, about larger companies and about distribution networks. To miss this, says O’Connor, is to miss the reality of local

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policy: few of the agencies set up to help nascent cultural industries have this kind of knowledge (O’Connor, 2004: p. 139). But O’Connor is making a broader point too. The emphasis on using ‘creativity’ and urbanity for the competitive advantage of cities risks going beyond a reconciliation of economics and culture to being an annexation of the latter by the former (O’Connor, 2004: p. 146).

National creative industries policy By the late 1990s, the term ‘creativity’ had spread to the national policy level in the UK. Creative industries is a concept that has since been widely adopted in the spheres of cultural policy and higher education. Its first major policy use appears to have been by the British Labour government elected in 1997, though there were important precedents in other countries, notably the Australian Labor government’s Creative Nation initiative of 1994. In Britain at least, one basis for the adoption of the term ‘creative industries’ was that it allowed cultural policy-makers (whether concerned with arts, crafts or film production) to legitimize their concerns at the national level. This was an attempt to repeat at the national level the strategy of linking ‘the arts’ to the cultural industries, so that even these most refined of activities could be made to seem part of economic development, the sine qua non of most government policy in the era of neoliberalism. However, national creative industries policy goes further than this. Nicholas Garnham (2001: p. 25; see also Garnham, 2005) has identified two major claims implicitly made by the mobilization of the term ‘creative industries’ in the British context: that the creative industries are the key new growth sector of the economy, both nationally and globally; and that they are therefore the key source of future employment growth and export earnings. For Garnham, the use of the term ‘creative’ achieved a number of goals with regard to these claims. In the first instance, it allowed a very broad definition. Various documents issued by the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport

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(for example, DCMS 1998, 2001) included the industries labelled the ‘cultural industries’ by the political-economy cultural industries analysts (essentially, the media – see above) but also dance, visual arts and the more craftbased activities of jewellery-making, fashion and furniture design. This made it possible to link these subsidized sectors to the supposedly booming commercial creative industries of music and broadcasting. It also, crucially, included computer software, which made it possible to present the creative industries sector as a much larger and more significant part of the economy than would otherwise have been possible.2 According to Garnham, this broad definition in turn had two valuable policy consequences for the interest groups involved. First, it enabled software producers and the major cultural-industry conglomerates to construct an alliance with smaller businesses and with cultural workers around a strengthening of intellectual property protection. Crucial here was the way that the defence of intellectual property became associated with ‘the moral prestige of the “creative artist” ’ (Garnham, 2005: p. 26). Second, it enabled the cultural sector to use arguments for the public support of the training of creative workers originally developed for the ICT industry. This argument in turn had much wider implications in that it pushed education policy much more strongly in the direction of a discourse of skills, on the basis that future national prosperity depended upon making up for a supposed lack of creative, innovative workers. The result for Garnham is that UK creative industries policy is more than ever based on an ‘artist’-centred notion of subsidy, rather than an audienceoriented policy of infrastructural support – the very opposite, in other words, of the original GLC vision. The key point here is that while the terms ‘cultural industries’ and ‘creative industries’ superficially share a rejection of forms of cultural policy grounded on subsidy for the fine arts, and a concern with the specific dynamics of symbolic production and circulation, the terms – in the Northern European context at least – tend to denote very different modes

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of theoretical policy analysis. Those who prefer the term ‘cultural industries’ tend to be much more sober in their claims regarding the role of culture or creativity in modern economies and societies, and, as we shall see, considerably more sceptical about the benefits of marketization in the domain of culture, than what we might call the creativity or creative industries theorists. In the 2000s, policy using the terms cultural industries and creative industries has spread across much of the world, both at the national and sub-national (local or regional) levels. There has been a relentless flow of mapping documents and development strategies. There is no space here to trace in any detail the many and complex ways in which the terms have been taken up outside Northern Europe. Some governments have followed the ‘British model’ of creative industries in terms of definition and policy orientation. Some have preferred the term ‘cultural industries’ even while pursuing policies more akin to what, based on the dominant Northern European uses, I am here calling ‘creative industries policy’. Issues of translation and of local context mean that the terms have quite different connotations from Europe. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) provides one significant example. The 16th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2002 declared the development of cultural industries (wenhua chanye) as a key task in the tenth Five Year Plan. Jing Wang (2004: p. 16) explains that wenhua chanye has a very different set of connotations than its English equivalent, because chanye contains a double reference to chanquan (property ownership) and shiye (public institutions). The nearest equivalent to ‘creative industries’(chuangyi gongye), Wang felt, lacked these connotations, and diverted attention away from crucial issues about stock-market flotation and privatization and towards a less immediately relevant agenda of small and medium-sized enterprises, and artistic creativity (rather than innovation). In policy discussions in China, the English term ‘creative’ is often preferred. Nevertheless, Desmond Hui (2006: pp. 317–319) reports

that the Beijing Party Committee adopted the term ‘cultural and creative industries’ for its development strategy in December 2005. Such a conjoined use is likely to become more common in many non-European contexts. But for all these complexities, it remains the case that many non-European governments have looked to Northern European policies for inspiration as they seek ways to expand their cultural or creative industries – and that the terms cultural industries and creative industries represent quite different lineages.

CREATIVITY AND CREATIVE INDUSTRIES THEORY In the next section, I will look at the work of cultural researchers who are broadly advocates of the kinds of creative industries policy delineated above; I then proceed to examine attempts to critique the idea of the creative industries. These policy developments have meant that in recent years there has been a rising tide of academic interest in creativity and the creative industries. ‘Creativity’ is an even looser word than culture and there can be little doubt that this has enabled a number of analysts to put forward the kinds of claims summarized by Garnham, regarding the role of cultural production in modern economies. Policy consultant and journalist John Howkins, for example, claimed in an influential and widely read book that ‘the creative economy will be the dominant economic form in the twenty-first century’ (Howkins, 2001: p. vii). Howkins sustained this claim by defining the creative economy and the creative industries as those involved in intellectual property. This allowed him to include not only those industries based on copyright, which is the basis of the cultural industries as they are most usefully defined (as essentially the media industries – see above), but also those industries that produce or deal in patent. This meant that massive sectors such as pharmaceuticals, electronics, engineering and chemicals could be added into ‘the creative economy’ mix. Even the impossibly nebulous

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categories of trademark and design industries were incorporated. Howkins was right to stress the importance of intellectual property in modern economies, across both symbolic and scientific domains, but he extrapolated from this to make dubious claims about a transition to a new economy based on creativity. Perhaps the most ardent treatment of the role of creativity in modern economies has come from the US academic and policy consultant Richard Florida. Florida makes the cheering assertion that while most transition theories tend to see transformation as something that is happening to people, in fact society is mostly changing because we want it to, and the driving force of these desired changes is ‘the rise of human creativity as the key factor in our economy and society’ (Florida, 2002: p. 4). For Florida, the new centrality of creativity has led to a change in the class system itself, with the rise of ‘a new creative class’, comprising an astounding 30 per cent of all employed US citizens: a creative core of people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment; and then an outer group of creative professionals in business and finance, law, health care and related fields. As will be clear from this, the inflated claims about creativity again derive from lumping together a very diverse set of activities. But such claims clear the way for Florida to address himself to policymakers. In a version of the Comedia argument about creative cities, Florida says that creative people want to live in creative cities, and if cities want to attract these often wealthy and influential creative people to live, and to spend their hard and creatively earned money on local taxes and local services, then governments will need to foster ‘a creative community’ in their cities. Florida is without doubt the most important academic popularizer and legitimator of the idea that creativity is central to new economies. A more substantial attempt to ground this idea has emerged from a group of researchers at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia.

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John Hartley and Stuart Cunningham have explained their adoption of ‘creative industries’ (Hartley and Cunningham, 2001) as a key term in cultural policy – and indeed in cultural education. First, they say, it offers an opportunity to move beyond the elitist wastefulness of arts subsidy. Second, it moves beyond limitations in the concept of cultural industries which in their view (a mistaken one in my opinion) is a term associated with the old arts-oriented form of cultural policy. For them, by contrast, the term creative industries fits with the political, cultural and technological landscape of globalization, the new economy, and the information society. Echoing writers such as John Howkins, creativity and innovation are presented as the basis of the new economy. But governments need to look beyond science and engineering conceptions of innovation, say Hartley and Cunningham. Policy needs to combine the promotion of this growing sector of local economies with the fostering of creative urban spaces. Education needs to change too: arts and humanities faculties should be reoriented towards training students in the production of content. Cunningham and Hartley were writing a manifesto for policy-makers and higher education managers. Terry Flew, also at QUT, has provided a fuller rationale for an emphasis on creative industries in both cultural and educational policy (here I concentrate on one piece – Flew, 2005). Flew questions, from a perspective informed by Foucauldian governmentality theory, the emphasis on citizenship amongst social democratic policy-makers and academic advocates of reform. For Flew, ‘there is a need for caution in too readily invoking cultural citizenship as a progressive cultural goal’ (Flew, 2005: p. 244) because citizenship conceptions underestimate the degree to which culture has been used by states as part of top-down nationalist projects, and the degree to which rights have involved exclusions as well as reciprocal obligations between state and subject. Flew asserts that such policies – for example, in post-war France – have also tended to neglect the commercial sector in favour of elitist arts subsidy. What is more, globalization, the rise of new

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media technologies such as satellite and the Internet, and the increasing incorporation of culture into economic life mean a new set of challenges for policy institutions. In Flew’s view, rather than protecting national and local content, the aim should be to promote the ability of a nation to create content, in a way that avoids ‘top-down nationalism and preordained conceptions of cultural value’ (Flew, 2005: p. 251). Rather than grounding cultural policy in an opposition to the market or in cultural protectionism, Flew offers the Open Source software movement as an alternative paradigm, based on the decentralizing force of the Internet and on new conceptions of the public interest, where the state acts as a guarantor of competition, innovation and pluralism, rather than a buttress against the market, and the idea is to let a million multicultural and globalized publics bloom, rather than to advocate particular directions for cultural policy. Such an account raises some difficult issues. First, Flew and other advocates of new conceptions of the public interest place great faith in the democratizing impact of the Internet; but there are good reasons to wonder whether the Internet can validly be seen in this way: including, not least, marked inequalities in access, both within individual nation-states and between nations and regions. Second, although the idea of a policy that would move beyond the dubious imposition of cultural value is likely on its surface to be attractive to anyone but the most ardent cultural conservative, the problem of aesthetic value will not simply go away. If the role of cultural policy (and arts and humanities education) is to act as an R&D wing of the creative industries – which is the QUT group’s explicit goal – then it may well be that it is the market’s (i.e. in this case, the cultural or creative industries) conceptions of value which will prevail. Like those of nation-states, these values are multiple and contradictory, and indeed this is something emphasized by cultural industries theory. But in a context where massive corporations still control the circulation and dissemination of culture (even in the era of the Internet) we

may be unwise to opt too quickly in favour of a strongly market-oriented system over a ‘top-down nationalism’ which is portrayed in monolithic terms, characteristic of much globalization theory, as a force for oppression and exclusion. Third, Flew shows the influence of post-structuralist cultural studies, by focusing on questions of difference and identity, to the exclusion of systemic economic processes. There is a lack of attention to the way capitalist markets repeatedly (though not in any predefined way) work with other processes to produce inequalities of access and outcome – in the domain of culture, as in many other aspects of society.

CRITIQUING CREATIVE INDUSTRIES POLICY AND THEORY I have focused here on the work of a group of academic researchers based in Queensland because they provide the most coherent attempt to delineate what one might call a centrist or accommodationist position with regard to government policy on the creative industries. What I mean by this is that they broadly accept the position underlying the most influential forms of creative industries policy: that the creative industries are a key new growth sector of economies, both nationally and globally; and that they are therefore the key source of future employment growth and export earnings. The expansion of local cultural markets is therefore seen as the best way to combine both economic and cultural well-being. As I write, however, there is an increasing interest in developing critiques of the notion of the creative industries as it operates in contemporary policy discourse. In this next section, I want briefly to consider some versions of such critique, in order to assess how effectively they question developments in the role of cultural production in modern societies. My main concern here is theoretical – with criticism focused on the underlying principles and assumptions of policy. First, though, it must be recognized that theory is always, to a greater or lesser degree, based on empirical

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assumptions, whether stated or not; and that therefore some of the empirical assumptions underlying creative industries theory need scrutinizing. Kieran Healy (2002) has identified a number of questions that might be asked about the role of creativity in the new economy as identified by writers such as Howkins and Florida. In particular he separates out four claims concerning why the relationships between the so-called creative sector and the new economy might matter to policy-makers: • Claim 1: The ‘creative sector’ will continue to grow, justifying more policy research in this area. This is the easiest claim to defend, says Healy, but it establishes little in itself. What kind of policies? Can there be any shared policy agenda amongst the very varied interests involved? • Claim 2: The creative sector is a miner’s canary for the wider economy because of its uncertain labour markets, flexible collaboration and project-based work. But, Healy asks, is the project work of a project-based stage actor really relevant to those of a project-based systems administrator? Is the artistic labour force a good model given problems of labour markets there? • Claim 3: Creativity in general is becoming increasingly important to competitiveness. This, says Healy, is not established, and demand for different kinds of creative people will be very unequal across different industries and sectors. • Claim 4: The so-called ‘creative class’ is intensely interested in cultural goods of many kinds, so cities should invest in culture. As Healy says, this is unlikely to be uniform.

Healy’s scrutiny of the empirical claims underlying creative industries discourse is useful. However, such scrutiny leaves untouched a deeper set of questions concerning the way in which cultural production operates in modern economies, and this involves the status of culture itself, in relation to society and economy. What does the boom in creativity and the creative industries tell us about the relations between culture, society and economy at the beginning of the twenty-first century? One avenue for critiquing these developments (not the only one, but there is limited space here) has

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been to focus on the question of creative or artistic labour, which Healy draws attention to, above. There is certainly no space in the present context to address the detailed empirical and quantitative work that has been done on these labour markets (see Menger, 1999, for a very useful survey) but Ruth Towse (1992) has provided a neat summary of the findings of a wide range of studies of artistic labour markets. These have the following features, says Towse. Artists tend to hold multiple jobs; there is a predominance of self-employed or freelance workers, work is irregular, contracts are shorter-term, and there is little job protection; career prospects are uncertain; earnings are very unequal; artists are younger than other workers; and the workforce appears to be growing. By ‘artistic’, Towse means the subsidized arts sector, but these features would seem also to apply very much to artistic (and informational) labour in the cultural and creative industries. If that is so, then policies that argue for a radical expansion of these industries under present conditions, without attention to the conditions of creative labour, risk fuelling labour markets marked by irregular, insecure and unprotected work. This in turn suggests that cultural labour might indeed be one important way in which creative industries policy (and theory) might be criticized. In what follows, I will focus on three ways in which labour has become a part of a critical analysis of cultural policy under the sign of the creative industries: the idea of a ‘new international division of cultural labour’; the focus on creative work in autonomist Marxism; and a more sociological approach that helps to show some of the limitations of even the most sophisticated political economy critiques. My emphasis is on the theoretical and political problems plaguing these critiques. At the moment, it seems to me, serious attention to cultural work represents something of a gap in the analysis of creative and cultural industries. Critiquing some of the critiques of cultural work may help to construct a more secure foundation for both theory and policy.

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CREATIVE LABOUR AS THE BASIS FOR A CRITIQUE OF CREATIVE INDUSTRIES POLICY A new international division of cultural labour? In numerous publications since the early 1990s, the US-based academic Toby Miller, sometimes with collaborators, has developed the idea of a new international division of cultural labour, which he abbreviates to NICL. This concept is adapted from the Marxian idea of a New International Division of Labour (or NIDL).3 This purported to analyse the emergence of a new capitalist world economy, involving massive movements of capital from developed countries to low-cost production sites in developing countries, exploiting a huge global reserve of labour. Such mobility of capital clearly had implications not only for the power of labour, but also for the capacity of national democratic governments to act in the interests of its populations. Controversies over the idea of the NIDL rest on the degree to which such movements of capital really represent a new feature of contemporary capitalism. But how does this idea get translated into the cultural domain? In the latest version of the NICL idea, which appears in the book Global Hollywood 2 (Miller, Govil, McMurria, Maxwell and Wang, 2005) there seem to be four main manifestations of the phenomenon: the purchase of, or partnership with, non-US firms by US corporations and financial institutions; the use of cheaper sites overseas for animation; the harmonization of copyright law and practice; and runaway production – the practice of shooting Hollywood films overseas. Miller and his coauthors on the chapter on NICL (Wang and Govil) concentrate overwhelmingly on the latter, outlining the ways in which various national governments seek to attract such runaway productions (all the more so, under the creative industries policy that is now spreading through various countries). They do so not only for the local employment that location shooting provides, but also for the potential secondary effects of tourism.

The implication is that state policies are failing to set up their own dynamic bourgeoisies, but instead remain ‘locked in a dependent underdevelopment that is vulnerable to disinvestment’ (Miller et al., 2005: p. 140). Miller, Wang and Govil recognize that responses from US-based cultural workers to the loss of income and benefits involved in such offshoring of audio-visual production can sometimes descend into a chauvinistic Yanqui cultural nationalism. But they argue that there is some reason behind US cultural workers’ problems: the threat to their livelihoods, the loss of local US culture (as legitimate a concern as the arguments made in support of national cinemas, say Miller et al., though this may be arguable) and the massive control of corporations over their destinies. Miller, Wang and Govil’s treatment helps expose ways in which policies aimed at boosting national creative industries can affect workers elsewhere. It shows how nationalism can feed exploitation, insecurity and casualization. These seem to me to be important issues for any analyst concerned with questions of equality and social justice with regard to culture. And yet somehow the concept of the NICL does not seem to add much theoretical value to a consideration of cultural labour. What, for example, distinguishes the division of cultural labour from other divisions of labour? To what extent is this ‘new’ division of labour really new? And if it is really new enough to merit that epithet, what dynamics drove it? When and under what conditions did it emerge? The NICL seems to work more as a rhetorical device intended to draw attention to exploitation and injustice, rather than as a theoretical concept addressing complex dynamics and contradictions. While such rhetorical devices can be useful, for a theoretical understanding of cultural work adequate for grounding critique of creative industries policy, we will need to look elsewhere.

Autonomist Marxism In recent years, an attractive option for many intellectuals seeking theoretically informed

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critique of developments in contemporary capitalism has been autonomist Marxism, most famously the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their books Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004). These books offer an ambitious and very sweeping account of economic, political and social change. This includes, in Empire, considerations of changes in work, including reflections on the concept of immaterial labour – ‘labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: p. 290) – drawing upon the earlier work of Maurizio Lazzarato. For some analysts, the concept of immaterial labour, directed as it is towards the production of culture, knowledge and communication, offers promising terrain for a critical analysis of forms of work associated with the cultural and creative industries. For Hardt and Negri, the introduction of the computer has radically transformed work. Even where direct contact with computers is not involved, they say, the manipulation of symbols and information ‘along the model of computer operation’ is extremely widespread. Workers used to act like machines, now they increasingly think like computers. They modify their operations through use, and this continual interactivity characterizes a wide range of contemporary production. The computer and communication revolution of production has transformed labouring practices in such a way that they all tend towards the model of information and communication technologies. This means a homogenization of labouring processes. In this respect, Hardt and Negri are pessimistic about the ‘informationalization’ of the economy. But they also discern another face of immaterial labour, involving the affective labour of human contact and interaction. Here they seem to have in mind caring and health work, heavily gendered, and much analysed by feminists. Such affective labour, they claim, produces social networks and communities, and cooperation is immanent to such labouring activity (and also, it seems, in a typical moment of incoherence, to other more

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computer-driven forms of immaterial labour). Because wealth creation takes place through such cooperative interactivity, ‘immaterial labour thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism’ (p. 294). It is this combination of rampantly optimistic Marxism, combined with a poststructuralist concern with questions of subjectivity and affect, that has helped to make Hardt and Negri’s work so popular amongst contemporary left intellectuals. On the basis of their work alone, the notion of immaterial labour could not be the basis of a serious critique of the creative industries. But the autonomist Marxian tradition they have both drawn upon and radically popularized does have the advantage of drawing attention to some important ambivalences in the growth of creative or cultural labour encouraged (or demanded) by creative industries policy. Hardt and Negri’s ambivalence seems too polarized, founded on an opposition between the potential for commonality in networked forms of communication, and the insecurity of workers undertaking immaterial labour. These ambivalences are explored tentatively but with more regard for the specifics of policy institutions, in an article by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter (2005) on the concepts of precarity and precariousness. For Neilson and Rossiter, immaterial labour (and variants upon it) contain ‘potentialities that spring from workers’ own refusal of labour and subjective demands for flexibility – demands that in many ways precipitate capital’s own accession to interminable restructuring and rescaling’ (Neilson and Rossiter, 2005: p. 1). The term they use for this state is precarity, ‘an inelegant neologism coined by English speakers to translate the French precarité’. The term refers to many different forms of ‘flexible exploitation’, including illegal, seasonal and temporary employment; homeworking, subcontracting and freelancing; so-called self-employment. But the sense of the term extends beyond work to encompass other aspects of life including housing, debt and social relations. Importantly, precarity is not a term used

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exclusively by academics; it has been used widely by social movements as the basis of events and campaigns directed against the insecurity and casualization characteristic of modern forms of work – including the decline of welfare provision. Neilson and Rossiter in effect accuse creative industries policy of neglecting and effacing both sides of this precarity. One side is the precarious and insecure conditions faced by most workers, and absent from government policy. The other is the complexity and promiscuity of actual networks of cultural production, reduced in ‘mapping documents’ to value-chains and clusters.

A sociology of creative labour Autonomist Marxism’s greatest weakness is that it lacks an empirical engagement with the specifics of cultural production. It might be thought that sociologies of cultural production might fill this gap. The problem is that, while there have been many studies of individual industries, there have been very few sociologically informed attempts to understand cultural production as a whole (see Hesmondhalgh, 2005, for a survey). The most in-depth study of work in the cultural industries (as opposed to studies of working in a particular industry, such as television) is provided by Bill Ryan, in his book Making Capital from Culture (1992). Ryan’s perspective here is strongly influenced by the cultural industries version of political economy outlined earlier, but he analyses organizational dynamics in far greater detail than writers such as Garnham and Miège, using a Weberian framework. A Marxian influence is apparent in the way that Ryan bases his account on a historical understanding of the relations between artistic creativity and capital. For Ryan, capital cannot make the artist completely subservient to the drive for accumulation. Because art is centred on the expressive individual artist, artistic objects ‘must’ appear as the product of recognizable persons; the concrete and named labour of the artist is paramount and must be preserved. Artists appear to capital as the antithesis of labour power,

antagonistic to incorporation as abstract labour (which, in Ryan’s Marxian framing, is the capitalists’ prime concern because this determines exchange-value). Capitalists lengthen the working day or intensify the work process to achieve a relative increase in the unpaid component of abstract value (surplus value). Abstract and concrete labour are therefore in contradiction. Technology generalizes the concrete labour in the work process in many industries, but not in cultural industries. For Ryan, therefore, the artist, as historically and ideologically constituted, ‘represents a special case of concrete labour which is ultimately irreducible to abstract value’ (Ryan, 1992: p. 44). Art must always appear as unique, and so ‘artistic workers … cannot be made to appear in the labour process as generalized, undifferentiated artists’ (Ryan, 1992: p. 44). More than that, artistic labour demands an even more identifiable specificity. They must be engaged as ‘named, concrete labour’. For Ryan, the consequence of this contradiction is a certain relative autonomy for creative workers, with stars getting considerable freedom. In his view, this also helps fuel the irrationality, or at least the arationality, of the creative process. For capitalists, artists represent an investment in variable capital in a way that consistently threatens to undermine profitability. This also leads, according to Ryan, to contradictions in the cultural commodity itself, whereby ‘commoditization of cultural objects erodes the qualities and properties which constitute them as cultural objects, as use-values, in the first place’ (Ryan, 1992: p. 50), because it undermines the quest for originality and novelty that gives the art product its aura of uniqueness. For Ryan, capital’s response is to rationalize cultural production, both at the creative stage and the circulation stage. Indeed, most of his book is framed as an examination of the extent to which capital has succeeded in achieving such rationalization. This is achieved at the creative stage through ‘formatting’, and at the circulation stage through the institutionalization of marketing within corporate production, in order to

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produce a more controllable sequence of stars and styles. Ryan’s account of methods of rationalization provides a helpful way to explain certain recurring strategies of capitalists in the cultural sector, and he offers an impressive examination of these strategies across different industries. However, Ryan’s strong emphasis on rationalization as a response by capitalists to the irrationality produced by the art/capital contradiction leads to some limitations in his approach. Relatively autonomous work, generated by the art-capital contradiction, is implicitly portrayed as a progressive force, and rationalization is seen as something imposed by capitalists upon this freedom. But what if creative autonomy is itself a significant mechanism of power within certain forms of work – including much creative work in the cultural industries? This would have significant implications for considering the way creative industries policy seems to offer a certain freedom and self-realization for workers, but in fact offers this freedom under certain powerladen conditions. And it is a question raised not only by the cultural industries, but by developments in a wide range of work in contemporary capitalism. While relentless, physically exhausting and highly routinized work remains a feature of a great deal of work, an important and growing stratum of jobs purports to offer what Andrew Ross (2003) has called a ‘humane workplace’ and selfrealization through more autonomous forms of labour. Writing about work in the IT sector (a form of work which, as we have seen, is often unhelpfully blurred with artistic labour in the notion of the creative industries), Ross claims that, in the eyes of a new generation of business analysts in the 1980s, Silicon Valley ‘appeared to promote a humane workplace not as a grudging concession to demoralized employees but as a valued asset to production’ (Ross, 2003: p. 9). Angela McRobbie (2002) has addressed these dynamics specifically with regard to the British Labour Party’s dual endorsement both of the creative industries and of hard work as the basis of social well-being. Drawing upon her own work on

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young fashion designers, and other empirical studies, McRobbie notes (in Foucauldian vein) the way in which notions of passion for, and pleasure in, work serve as disciplinary devices, enabling very high levels of (self-) exploitation. She also notes the extremely low levels of union organization in most cultural industries.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS Ross and McRobbie’s work represent important openings, because they join theoretical sophistication with empirical sociological analysis of the specific discourses of creativity and self-realization in particular industries. There is room, in my view, to combine their approaches with historical analysis of changing discourses of creative labour, and with the sensitivity of the cultural industries approach to the specific conditions of cultural capitalism. Such a synthesis would allow for a critique of arguments for the expansion of creative industries, at the local, national and international levels. This is not the only possible route of critique. It might be allied, for example, to criticisms of prevailing notions of intellectual property at work in the cultural industries (and there has been no space here to explore such potential links). A coherent and empirically informed critique of cultural work under contemporary capitalism might help to prevent the danger in recent policy developments – that the original visions of reform that motivated the cultural industries idea might be permanently distorted and even inverted. While creative industries policy and theory share with cultural industries versions an emphasis on the specific dynamics of making profit from the production and dissemination of primarily symbolic goods, it tends to work with loose and sometimes dubiously broad definitions of ‘creativity’. And, as I have explained in this chapter, policy and theory using the term ‘creative industries’ tend to be based on arguments which all too often come close to endorsing inequality and exploitation associated with contemporary neoliberalisms.

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NOTES 1 Because this is intended as an overview of the idea of the cultural industries, this chapter inevitably draws upon material published in the two editions of my book The Cultural Industries (Hesmondhalgh, 2002 and 2007). However, the argument has been substantially developed from that material. 2 This of course raises the wider question of how to measure the changing role of culture, or of the cultural industries, in modern economies (see Hesmondhalgh, 2007: chapter 6). 3 By far the best-known formulation of this idea is The New International Division of Labour (Fröbel, Heinrichs and Kreye, 1980).

REFERENCES Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (1977/1944) ‘The culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception’, in J. Curran, M. Gurevitch and J. Wollacott (eds), Mass Communication and Society. London: Edward Arnold, pp. 349–383. Belfiore, E. (2002) ‘Art as a means of alleviating social exclusion. Does it really work? A critique of instrumental cultural policies and social impact studies in the UK’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 8(1): 91–106. Bianchini, F. and Parkinson, M. (eds) (1993) Cultural Policy and Urban Regeneration. Manchester: Manchester University Press. DCMS (1998) ‘Creative industries mapping document 1998’. London: UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport. DCMS (2001) ‘The creative industries mapping document 2001’. London: UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Flew, T. (2005) ‘Sovereignty and software: rethinking cultural policy in a global creative economy’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11(3): 243–260. Florida, R. (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books. Frith, S. (1993) ‘Popular music and the local state’, in T. Bennett et al. (eds), Rock and Popular Music. London: Routledge, pp. 14–24. Fröbel, F., Heinrichs, J. and Kreye, O. (1980) The New International Division of Labour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garnham, N. (1990) Capitalism and Communication. London: Sage. Garnham, N. (2001) ‘Afterword: the cultural commodity and cultural policy’, in S. Selwood (ed.), The UK

Cultural Sector. London: Policy Studies Institute, pp. 445–458. Garnham, N. (2005) ‘From cultural to creative industries: an analysis of the implications of the “creative industries” approach to arts and media policy making in the United Kingdom’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11(1): 15–30. Gibson, C. and Robinson, D. (2004) ‘Creative networks in regional Australia’, Media International Australia, 112: 83–100. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2004) Multitude. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hartley, J. and Cunningham, S. (2001) ‘Creative industries: from Blue Poles to Fat Pipes’, in Malcolm Gillies (ed.), The National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit: Position Papers. Canberra: Department of Education Science and Training. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Healy, K. (2002) ‘What’s new for culture in the new economy?’, Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, 32(2): 86–103. Hesmondhalgh, D. (2002/2007) The Cultural Industries. 1st and 2nd edns. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hesmondhalgh, D. (2005) ‘The production of media entertainment’, in J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds), Mass Media and Society, 4th edn. London: Hodder Arnold. Howkins, J. (2001) The Creative Economy. London: Allen Lane. Hui, D. (2006) ‘From cultural to creative industries: strategies for Chaoyang District, Beijing’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 9(3): 317–331. Jayne, M. (2004) ‘Culture that works? Creative industries development in a working-class city’, Capital and Class, 84: 199–210. Landry, C. (2000) The Creative City. London: Earthscan. Landry, C. and Bianchini, F. (1995) The Creative City. London: Demos. Leadbeater, C. and Oakley, K. (1999) The Independents. London: Demos/ICA/The Smith Institute. Levitas, R. (1998) The Inclusive Society? Basingstoke: Palgrave. Looseley, D. (2004) ‘The development of a social exclusion agenda in French cultural policy’, Cultural Trends, 50: 15–26. Martin, R. and Sunley, P. (2003) ‘Deconstructing clusters: chaotic concept or policy panacea?’, Journal of Economic Geography, 3(1): 5–35. McRobbie, A. (2002) ‘From Holloway to Hollywood: happiness at work in the new cultural economy?’

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in P. du Gay and M. Pryke (eds), Cultural Economy. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 97–114. Menger, P-M. (1999) ‘Artistic labor markets and careers’, Annual Review of Sociology , 25: 541–574. Miège, B. (1989) The Capitalization of Cultural Production. New York: International General. Miller, T., Govil, N., McMurria, J. Maxwell, R. and Wang, T. (2005) Global Hollywood 2. London: British Film Institute. Mommaas, H. (2004) ‘Cultural clusters and the postindustrial city: towards the remapping of urban cultural policy’, Urban Studies, 41: 507–532. Mosco, V. (1995) The Political Economy of Communication. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Myerscough, J. (1988) The Economic Importance of the Arts in Britain. London: Policy Studies Institute. Neilson, B. and Rossiter, N. (2005) ‘From precarity to precariousness and back again: labour, life

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and unstable networks’, Fibreculture, 5. Retrieved 10 May 2006 from http://journal.fibreculture.org. O’Connor, J. (2004) ‘ “A special kind of city knowledge”: innovative clusters, tacit knowledge and the “creative city”’, Media International Australia, 112: 131–149. Ross, A. (2003) No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ryan, B. (1992) Making Capital from Culture. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Towse, R. (1992) ‘The labour market for artists’, Ricerche Economiche, 46: 55–74. UNESCO (1982) The Cultural Industries. Paris: UNESCO. Wang, J. (2004) ‘The global reach of a new discourse: how far can “creative industries” travel?’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7(1): 9–19.

27 Cultural Technologies Celia Lury

INTRODUCTION ‘Cultural technologies’ has a very varied currency in the humanities and social sciences. As a term, it does not have a single history, nor even a single defining trajectory, but rather emerges, inflected in different ways at different moments, at the intersection of a number of lines of debate. What these lines of debate have in common is their critical engagement with the commonplace view that opposes technology to nature, and sees technology as a tool or mechanism for controlling and manipulating nature. In the debates on cultural technologies there is a specific concern with the impact of technology on human nature. On the one hand, there is a concern with the question of technological determination, where what is held to be most definitive of human nature (individuality, consciousness, the senses, memory and the body) is put at risk by something that is external to or other than the human. On the other hand there is a concern with the value of technological indeterminacy as the limits of the human subject as the natural source or origin of culture are considered. In this latter view, the recognition of the nonhuman – or

the inhuman – in the human is proposed as the basis for alternative alliances and ways of living. In these debates, the notion of cultural technology has acted as a marker of how the relations between culture, society and nature have been variously thought, opening up a discussion of kinds of agency – both human and non- or in-human.

FROM CULTURAL TECHNOLOGIES TO THE MEDIA One of the earliest discussions of relevance to the term cultural technologies is that provided in the discussion of the culture industry by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1982). As is well known, Adorno and Horkheimer developed a sustained critique of the introduction of instrumental rationality into the cultural sphere, documenting the growing standardization of cultural products. Their use of the term culture industry was intended to highlight an increasing tendency for cultural and artistic production to be absorbed into the wider economy, and for the accumulation of specific aesthetic conventions and procedures to be displaced.

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For Adorno and Horkheimer, these processes have led to the erosion of aesthetic value; so, for example, Adorno suggests, ‘The familiarity of the piece is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing as to recognize it’ (Adorno, 1991: p. 26). The emphasis in this critique is on the implications of processes of commodification and rationalization (thus he claims, ‘all contemporary musical life is dominated by the commodity form’ [Adorno, 1991: p. 33]), but some considerable attention is also played to the role of cultural technologies within this over-arching analysis. In this regard, Adorno is careful to place limits on how the term culture industry is to be understood: thus, he writes, . . . the expression ‘industry’ is not to be taken too literally. It refers to the standardization of the thing itself – such as that of the western, familiar to every movie-goer – and to the rationalization of distribution techniques, but not strictly to the production process. (Adorno, 1991: p. 87)

However, he clearly identifies a threat to the process itself, linked to challenges to the distinction he draws between technique and technology, as may be seen in the essay entitled ‘Transparencies on Film’. Here Adorno describes aesthetic technique as internal to its object; thus, he writes, ‘The concept of technique is concerned only with the internal organization of the object itself, with its inner logic’.1 However, while arguing that technique (in his terms, internal to the object) and technology (the distribution of an already completed, discrete, closed object) are analytically distinct, he also believes that they are coming to be increasingly imbricated in the practices of the culture industry. As Adorno summarizes the argument as made by fellow critic Walter Benjamin: ‘the cinema has no original which is then reproduced on a mass scale: the mass product is the thing itself’ (Adorno, 1991: p. 155). Mechanical (and other technological) reproduction is no longer external to the artistic object in the culture industry, but is, rather, internal. With this internalization of technological reproduction, techniques of the object lose

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their precarious autonomy while the masses are brought closer – incorporated – into the object itself. Both Adorno and Benjamin are concerned with the implications of this incorporation of mass – through the technologies of mechanical and other reproduction – for individuality and the human body, but they differ in the emphasis of their conclusions. Like other members of the Frankfurt School, including Siegfried Kracauer (1995), both Adorno and Benjamin describe the implications of the growth of the culture industry in terms of increasing boredom or distraction. However, Adorno is more consistently hostile to this development. He describes film as increasingly characterized by the intentional integration of the consumer ‘from above’. In considering popular music, he writes of its audience, Whenever they attempt to break away from the passive status of compulsory consumers and ‘activate’ themselves, they succumb to pseudoactivity. . . . There are, first, the enthusiasts who write fan letters to radio stations and orchestras and, at well-managed jazz festivals, produce their own enthusiasm as an advertisement for the wares they consume. (Adorno, 1991: p. 46)

In developing this analysis, he offers a series of metaphors by which the loss of individuality may be understood, provoked by the self-definition of jazz enthusiasts as ‘jitterbugs’. They call themselves jitterbugs, as if they simultaneously wanted to affirm and mock their loss of individuality, their transformation into beetles whirring around in fascination. . . . The ecstasy takes possession of its object by its own compulsive character. It is stylized like the ecstasies savages go into in beating the war-drums. It has convulsive aspects reminiscent of St Vitus’s dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals. (Adorno, 1991: p. 46)

Benjamin (1992) by contrast is much more ambivalent about the implications of the loss of distance between the object of art and the masses. This is in part because of a differing evaluation of what characterizes distinctively human nature, and in particular the significance and potential of self-knowledge in relation to such nature. For both Benjamin

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and Adorno there is a basic discrepancy between human physis and human senses: an inevitable inaccessibility of the body to sensory perception. And while for neither is this inaccessibility necessarily a weakness, Benjamin is more open than Adorno to the possibilities it affords. On the one hand, he speaks of the shock of experience associated with new technologies, and the resulting anaesthesia (Buck-Morss, 1991). On the other hand he also recognizes the way in which technologies such as photography have a double potential: both to close the individual to his or her environment and disperse him or her in openness. In a discussion of Kafka’s work, Benjamin notes the response of the experimental subjects who, watching themselves on film or hearing themselves speak on a gramophone, do not recognize their own walk or their own voice. For Benjamin, this moment of disturbance is a salutary misrecognition. Evoking neither a sense of completeness nor simply eliciting a distancing, it produces an inquiry into ‘the fragments of one’s own existence’ (Benjamin, 1992: p. 137). A less philosophical – and more historically embedded – approach to the implications of cultural technologies is adopted by a slightly later contributor to debates on culture: Raymond Williams. He too is concerned with the implications of technological development for what it is to be human. However, he poses this question by considering technology in relation not to (human) nature, but to society. As Williams puts the problem in his book Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), it is often said that technology has altered our world – but what does this mean? He acknowledges that ‘behind all such statements lie some of the most unresolved historical and philosophical questions’, in particular ‘whether it is reasonable to describe any technology as a cause, or, if we think of it as a cause, as what kind of a cause, and in what relation with other causes’ (Williams, 1974: p. 9), but argues that the answers to these questions are necessarily practical in the sense that they are being decided all the time in real practice, by real and effective decisions. In approaching

this question himself, he identifies two classes of opinion. The first he describes as ‘technological determinism’. In this view, as described by Williams, new technologies are discovered by an essentially internal process of research and development which then sets the conditions for social change and progress. The second view appears, initially at least, as less technologically determinist in that, by contrast with the first, it emphasizes other causal factors in social change. It then considers particular technologies, or a complex of technologies, as symptoms of change of some other kind. Any particular technology is a by-product of a social process that is otherwise determined: technology only acquires effective status when it is used for purposes that are already contained in this known social process. Williams claims that both these positions, in different ways, have abstracted technology from society. In the first, technological research and development are assumed as selfgenerating. New technologies emerge as if technological invention can occur in an independent sphere, and are only subsequently applied to create new societies or new human conditions. The second position – which Williams describes as a view of ‘technology as symptomatic’ – similarly assumes that research and development are self-generating, but in a more marginal way. What is discovered in the technological margin is then taken up and used. The alternative Williams proposes to both these positions is to ‘restore intention to the process of research and development’. By this he means to suggest that technology is looked for and developed with certain purposes and practices ‘already in mind’. His own view differs from what he describes as symptomatic technology in that the relation of technology to these purposes and practices is seen as direct: as already known social needs, purposes and practices to which the technology is not marginal but central. So, for example, he writes, The decisive and earlier transformation of industrial production, and its new social forms, which had grown out of a long history of capital accumulation and working technical improvements, created

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new needs but also new possibilities, and the communications systems, down to television, were their intrinsic outcome. (Williams, 1974: p. 19, emphasis added)

Williams’ own view might thus be described as a statement of strong social determinism or constructionism. However, his own analysis of the historical emergence of specific cultural technologies lacks some of the directness of the attribution of intent that supposedly distinguishes his approach as he outlines it in the abstract. In the case of cinema, for example, Williams notes that initial technological developments were in production, and that investment in technologies of distribution followed later as a way of controlling and organizing a market for given production. He then goes on to suggest that what distinguishes later developments in the media – in broadcasting, both in sound radio and later in television – is that major investment was made in the means of distribution, and was devoted to production only so far as to make the distribution technically possible and then attractive to the market. He writes, Unlike all previous communications technologies, radio and television were systems primarily devised for transmission and reception as abstract processes, with little or no definition of preceding content. . . . It is not only that the supply of broadcasting facilities preceded the demand; it is that the means of communication preceded their content. (Williams, 1974: p. 25)

The role of capital in the development of cultural technologies is thus forcefully acknowledged in the ‘intention’ to reach and make audiences into markets (and in this respect there is considerable overlap with the concerns of Adorno and Benjamin). Williams writes, ‘Most technical development is in the hands of corporations which express the contemporary interlock of military, political and commercial intentions’ (Williams, 1974: p. 134). However, his analysis is not confined to this attribution of direct intention but is broadened out to include a complex of direct and indirect processes that he characterizes in terms of a general social tendency, ‘mobile privatization’. Just as he is concerned to avoid technological determinism, then, Williams is

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also careful not to substitute for it an entirely determined technology. Determination in his view is not a wholly controlling set of causes,2 but is to be understood as a process in which ‘determining factors’ such as the distribution of power or capital ‘set limits and exert pressures’.3 Despite the undoubted sophistication of this account of determination and agency, it is largely lacking in understanding of the subject and his or her relation to technology. For this it is necessary to turn to the film theory which emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century, especially that influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis and its understanding of the subject as that which cannot not write itself. Importantly, the Lacanian psychoanalytic approach advanced a view of cinema and spectator as constituted in relation to each other, and not external to each other. In his foundational essay, ‘The imaginary signifier’ ([1975], 2000), Christian Metz provides a striking formulation of this approach. He describes cinema as a signifier whose presence is absence, that is the act of cinematic perception takes place in real time but the spectator is viewing an object that has been pre-recorded and thus is absent: in cinema ‘it is the signifier itself, and as a whole that is recorded, that is absence’ (Metz, 2000: p. 801). The cinematic apparatus presents the object’s ‘replica in a new kind of mirror’ (Metz, 2000: p. 802). Just how to understand this mirror – and the spectator in relation to this mirror – is the focus of what has come to be called ‘apparatus theory’ (see also Baudry, 1986; Comolli, 1986). Metz himself proposes that the spectator identifies not with specific characters but with the cinematic apparatus itself, and its re-creation of the act of looking: ‘the spectator identifies with himself, with himself as pure act of perception . . . as condition of possibility of the perceived and hence as a kind of transcendental subject, which comes before every there is’ (Metz, 2000: p. 413). For Metz, the identification of the subject with the cinematic apparatus takes place in the imaginary order, eliciting an imaginary completeness in the spectator as she or he is

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brought into the realization of the film’s space in a process of suture. In developing this notion of suture the film critic Stephen Heath (1977–1978) suggests that the film’s space is organized by its narrative into space ‘in frame’ and space ‘out of frame’. Crucially this organization of narrative is ordered by certain conventions of perception, including, for example, ‘central projection’, which Heath describes as the art of depicting three-dimensional objects upon a plane surface in such a manner that the picture may affect the eye of the observer in the same way as the natural objects themselves. For the effective suturing of the subject to be achieved, the spectator needs to be positioned at a central point in the perspective. A number of feminist writers also contributed to the development of apparatus theory, identifying the ways in which women in film function rather like the cinematic apparatus itself, that is, as a lure or fetish for the (male) subject (de Lauretis, 1984; Doane, 1987; Mulvey, 1975). However, in a critique of both the original statement of this perspective and of some feminist appropriations, other writers suggested that this formulation of the cinematic apparatus (in which term spectators are included) denies the subject any access to his or her subjectivity (outside the imaginary), and thus forecloses the questions of history and agency. As Mary Anne Doane puts it, The obsessiveness of this argument is linked to its espousal of the idea of a perfect machine. The problem with the theory of the cinematic apparatus is that the apparatus always works. It never breaks down, is never subject to failure. (Doane, 1987: p. 4)

In contrast, what remains striking in Williams’ work is his concern to locate technological developments in relation to what he describes as ‘intention’, to establish a direct set of links between technology and society, to be able to locate responsibility and attribute accountability. This concern is clearly motivated by the desire to develop a political analysis of contemporary media in relation to society as a whole, and to locate the future of television in ‘continually renewable social action and struggle’ (Williams, 1974: p. 134). This is

a mode of analysis that is characteristic of Williams’s work as a whole, that is, to think of the relation between culture and society (1987).4 In the case of his study of television, however, Williams’s formulation of intention seems in part to have an added motivation, namely his hostility to a contemporaneous theory of cultural technologies: that of Marshall McLuhan. Williams writes of McLuhan’s most well-known thesis, ‘the medium is the message’, that, It is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism, that is to say, which ratifies the society and culture we now have, and especially its most powerful internal directions. For if the medium – whether print or television – is the cause, all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history, are at once reduced to effects. (Williams, 1974: p. 127)

What Williams opposes in McLuhan then is an erasure of a history of practices. He is wary of the ways in which McLuhan’s support for technological developments can come to stand in for a critical evaluation of efficiency, competitiveness and progress and their social costs. McLuhan’s approach, so Williams says, has the effect of ‘dissolving not only specific but general intentions’. Despite some considerable support for this critique McLuhan’s work has remained influential, however, precisely because of his emphasis on the generative role of technology, or rather, of the medium (Bolter and Grusin, 1999; Castells, 1996; Moos, 1997; Poster, 1995, 2001). For McLuhan (1997 [1964]), media are not simply determining of social life, they are constitutive of the human. And while this view may indeed be seen as an example of a quite extreme technological determinism that forecloses questions of social and political purpose, in another interpretation it complicates these questions by introducing the technological into – and as always already part of – (human) intention. To put this strongly, intention is never fully human (social or natural) for McLuhan. As Michel Moos notes, for McLuhan the question of human self-presence is one of perception and, ‘what we take for our sense perception

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has to be fabricated first’ (in Moos, 1997: p. 159). In this view, consciousness is the semiotic material – the medium – out of which our bodies, like their extensions, are generated or re-membered. For McLuhan, we only ever apprehend ourselves in medias res: media as extensions of sense-making are also technologies of self-making (Moos, 1997: p. 160). And such technologies are to be seen as continually in process, always subject to revision, feedback and intermediation. In one famous example (‘The gadget lover’, 1997), McLuhan elaborates his argument by reference to the Greek myth of Narcissus, in which Narcissus mistakes his own reflection in a pool for another person and falls in love with him. In McLuhan’s interpretation of this myth, the reflection of Narcissus in the water is an extension of himself in a mirror. However, this extension has the effect of numbing his perceptions; he becomes, as McLuhan puts it, ‘the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image’(McLuhan, 1997: p. 41).5 The nymph Echo tries to win the love of Narcissus with fragments of his own speech, but in vain: Narcissus is numbed (the word narcissism derives from the Greek word narcosis or numbness). Narcissus adapts to an extension of himself and – in contradistinction to the view that McLuhan only ever considers the positive implications of mediation – becomes a closed system; in this example extension is also auto-amputation (or alternatively an anaesthetic). The point of the myth in the classical Greek period, so McLuhan says, is the fact that people become fascinated by the extension of themselves in material other than themselves. For McLuhan what is interesting about contemporary retellings of this myth is that we tend to think that Narcissus fell in love with himself, that is, we see such extension in terms of our already existing selves, not as someone (or something) other. For McLuhan, however, the promise (as well as the danger) of technology is that it is an extension that is also a translation. What we have to learn is how to live in translation. Or to put this another way, we need to see cultural technologies not just as devices, as means, but

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as media, that is, as translating devices, which do not simply reproduce us and our actions but transform us (and have always done so). In one account of the phrase ‘the medium is the message’,6 McLuhan says, ‘This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology’. Thus, in contrast to the view of technology as a reduction of humanity, McLuhan argues that technologies are ways of translating one kind of knowledge into another; they are a spelling out or making explicit of forms of knowledge. He says, ‘What we call “mechanization” is a translation of nature and of our own natures, into amplified and specialized forms’ (McLuhan, 1997: p. 56), and there is no beginning or end to this process of (human) mechanization.7 A commentator remarks, ‘The user is the content’, McLuhan often would say to me in the late 1970s . . . In a 1978 essay in New Yorker magazine, McLuhan further observed that ‘when you are “on the telephone” or “on the air” . . . . The sender is sent. . . the disembodied user extends to all those who are recipients of electric information’. (Levinson, 1999: p. 39)

In the electronic age, McLuhan suggests, human nature is increasingly translated into the medium of information, moving towards a new kind of technological extension of consciousness. For McLuhan, the development of electronic technologies means that we can translate more and more of ourselves into forms of expression that exceed ourselves. By putting our physical bodies inside our nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily heat controls – all such extensions of our bodies, including cities – will be translated into information systems. (McLuhan, 1997: p. 57)

It is in relation to McLuhan’s work on electronic technologies that commentators have been most divided, however. This is because – in addition to the problems identified by Williams – McLuhan suggests that this mode of extension is not a translation

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like any other: thus he claims that at electronic speeds, ‘media as extensions of our senses institute new ratios, not only among our private senses, but among themselves, when they interact among themselves’ (McLuhan, 1997: p. 53; emphasis added). McLuhan is making a number of claims here. One is the familiar one that electronic technologies (like all others in his view) move communication beyond an extension of the body; that they somehow exceed rather than merely extend the senses. A second – novel one – is that electronic media have the potential to interact among themselves, no longer requiring the mediation of the human body. On the one hand, this is recognized as a loss, though not one which McLuhan always seems to think very important (though see Moos, 1997). On the other hand, McLuhan clearly identifies – and is excited about – the radically new possibilities the development of electronic technologies may involve. Thus, he writes, Automation is not an extension of the mechanical principles of fragmentation and separation of operations. It is rather the invasion of the mechanical world by the instantaneous character of electricity. That is why those involved in automation insist that it is a way of thinking, as much as it is a way of doing. Instant synchronization of numerous operations has ended the old mechanical pattern of setting up operations in lineal sequence. (McLuhan, 1997: p. 349)

McLuhan believes that automation introduces real ‘mass production’, understanding mass not in terms of size or volume or in the critical perspective advocated by the Frankfurt School, but rather in terms of the possibilities of an instant, inclusive embrace (see Cooper, 2001).8 Instantaneity is held to make it possible that every body may participate in (ecstatic) communication with each other at the same time; it is the point in time at which individuality is lost and series and sequence yield to the simultaneous, a process that McLuhan describes in terms of implosion. Most strikingly, he argues that the development of electronic technologies transforms the terms of human/nonhuman interaction, disturbing the traditionally

asymmetric terms in which each is described. Thus, he writes, ‘Any process that approaches instant interrelation of a total field tends to raise itself to the level of conscious awareness, so that computers seem to “think” ’ (McLuhan, 1997: p. 351). This is not only the introduction of the technological into the human but also the human into the technological. It is a remarkable reformulation of the question of agency, intention and determination, and does not simply de-centre the human subject, but deploys a radical new conception of communication in which human and nonhuman forces operate within a relational field. Not simply intention but also meaning is put into question here. The critique made earlier by Williams continues to have considerable force, however.9 Put simply, McLuhan is reluctant to consider the ‘and’ in relation with which technology emerges: the intention, as Williams would have it, behind the development of electronic technologies. McLuhan often seems to accept without question the inflated claims associated with the development of electronic technologies, and implies a direct technological determination that works for the good of humankind. Yet, as numerous commentators have pointed out, while electronic technologies may indeed be used to speed up certain kinds of communication, they may be – and are – used as easily to divide and stifle as to foster an inclusive embrace. In this view, the global village is neither as well connected nor as contented a place as McLuhan can be seen to suggest. At the same time, his (important) claim that the biological body is always in mediation is relatively under-developed. Nevertheless, McLuhan’s work has endured because of his identification of a set of concerns that have gone on to dominate discussions of contemporary culture, perhaps most significantly those associated with the implications of information and information technologies. In what follows, an account will be given of other strands in thinking about cultural technologies, and in many cases there are resonances with as well as differences from McLuhan’s thinking.

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CULTURAL TECHNOLOGIES AND THE HUMAN As noted earlier, McLuhan’s understanding of media is closely linked to his understanding of the body; on the one hand technology translates and transforms our senses, and on the other the human body is not outside technology. Both elements of this analysis have – from a very different perspective – been developed in the work of Michel Foucault on technologies of the self, perception and the organization of attention. One important aspect of Foucault’s work describes the role of the human sciences in regulating and modifying the behaviour of individuals (Foucault, 1980). He argues that historically the management of subjects depended on the development of knowledge about them, as it emerges in the fields of medicine, biology, penology, psychology and childcare. Out of this knowledge came what Foucault calls ‘a very real technology, the technology of individuals’, which he says is ‘inscribed in a broad historical process: the development at about the same time of many other technologies – agronomical, industrial, economical’ (Foucault, 1980: pp. 224–225). In particular, he specifies four types of technology – technologies of production, of sign systems, of power, and of the self, the last of which he describes as those techniques which ‘permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’ (Foucault, 1988: p. 17). Foucault emphasizes that all four types of technology hardly ever function separately, although he associates each with a certain type of domination. He suggests, for example, that the technologies of power and the self are linked in the organization of knowledge, and shows how the fixing of quantitative and statistical norms of behaviour and the regulation of people (or the masses) as ‘populations’ were crucial to the development of new disciplinary techniques of the subject. So, for

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example, the assessment of ‘normality’ in medicine, psychology and other fields in relation to this notion of population has become an essential part of the disciplining of the individual to the requirements of institutional power. The subject is increasingly caught up in a process of subjectification, that is, a quest for self-knowledge in which subjectivity and objectification are mutually implicated. For Foucault this marks a significant shift in modes of governmentality, as the emphasis in importance of the twin imperatives of selfcare and self-knowledge moves from one to the other. In the context of the account being given here, however, what is important is the recognition of the ways in which the subject is constituted in iterative, reflexive processes in which subject and technology, the human and the inhuman cannot easily be separated (see also Lyotard, 1993; Stiegler, 1998). Following in this tradition other writers have sought to locate the development of cultural technologies – in particular visual technologies – in relation both to other forms of mechanized reproduction and to the broader processes of normalization and subjectification. Two writers are of special interest here: Jonathan Crary and Friedrich Kittler. In Techniques of the Observer (1996), Crary documents the historical emergence of a particular kind of observer in relation to a radical reconfiguration of vision. He describes the development of the techniques by which an embodied observer was constituted and maps two inter-related paths: the affirmation of the autonomy of vision on the one hand, and the increasing standardization and regulation of the observer on the other. An exemplary figure of the intertwining of these two paths is Gustav Fechner, a nineteenth-century Romantic and experimental psychologist. Crary writes, Like Turner’s art, Fechner’s work is grounded in an exhilaration and delirium made possible by a collapse of the dualities inherent in the camera obscura – its split between perceiver and world. . . . what [Fechner] wanted and spent years seeking, was a method of establishing an exact relationship between interior sensory experience and events in the world, to situate these two

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domains on the same field of operations. Whatever his intentions, the end result was to relocate perception and the observer within the reach of empirical exactitude and technological intervention. (Crary, 1996: pp. 143–145)

What is compelling about Crary’s account in this context is the way in which he is able to document the interplay between practices of observation on the one hand and the accumulation of technical knowledge in psychology, biology and physics on the other, documenting in precise detail the ways in which perception is technologically organized in relation to a disciplined body. In this history, technology is brought into the body, the senses and the processes of perception. Kittler too is concerned with history. He organizes his views in terms of a periodization, although the period he addresses is far shorter than that covered by McLuhan and more recent than that of Foucault (focusing largely on the last three hundred years and coming up to the present-day). Like McLuhan, Kittler’s emphasis is on media: ‘Media determine our situation, which – in spite of, or for that very reason – deserves a description’ (Kittler, 1999: p. xxxix), and he is like McLuhan too in that he is concerned with the ways in which cultural technologies may privilege one sense above others, divide each from the other, or bring them together in novel ratios. However, in contrast to McLuhan, he does not separate out the development of media from other social and cultural relations and externalize it; so, for example, Kittler is at pains to document the dependence of modern communications and the entertainment industry on technical developments made by the military.10 He is also, however, concerned to avoid the language of determination and intention. In their place, he develops the notion of a ‘discourse network’to designate the archive of what is inscribed by a society at any particular moment in time. In the use of this term, Kittler is clearly indebted to Foucault’s theory of discourse. Moreover, Kittler draws on Foucault to develop the ways in which discourse links bodies and micro-practices to institutions.

However, while neither Foucault nor Kittler assumes a causal or expressive model of discourse, Kittler differs from Foucault in his focus on the role of modern cultural technologies. His use of the term discourse network is intended to have the effect of showing that at any given moment in time, only certain data are selected, stored, processed, transmitted or calculated; thus he writes, ‘technologically possible manipulations determine what in fact can become discourse’ (Kittler, 1990: p. 369, quoted in Johnston, 1997: p. 10). This model is in implicit contrast to Foucault’s use of the term discourse, and, it has been suggested, reveals the latter’s technological (and historical) limits (Johnston, 1997; Moos, 1997). Kittler himself describes Foucault as ‘the last historian or first archeologist’ (Kittler, 1999: p. 5): the implication being that Foucauldian discourse analysis is not adequate for the modern period, in which new data-processing methods and technologies destroy ‘the alphabetic storage and transmission monopoly, that old-European basis of power’. Kittler implies that Foucault is insufficiently attentive to the productive role of the monopoly medium of writing: Even writing itself, before it ends up in libraries, is a communication medium, the technology of which the archeologist simply forgot. It is for this reason that all [Foucault’s] analyses end immediately before that point in time at which other media penetrated the library’s stacks. Discourse analysis cannot be applied to sound archives or towers of film rolls. (Kittler, 1999: p. 5)

Kittler’s difference from Foucault is not simply one of which technology each takes as their focus, but that Kittler believes his focus on modern and contemporary cultural technologies radically transforms the very terms appropriate for discourse analysis. Kittler argues that before the twentieth century written texts provided a central archive for the storage of all data: ‘. . . writing functioned as a universal medium in times when there was no concept of medium. For that reason the term medium did not exist. Whatever else was going on dropped through the filter of letters or ideograms’ (Kittler, 1999: pp. 5–6). As part of this monopoly

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of writing – and despite the naturalization of alphabetization – something miraculous occurs: ‘the body, which did not cease to write itself, left strangely unavoidable traces’ (Kittler, 1999: p. 6; note also the psychoanalytic aspect to Kittler’s thinking here). In the romanticism that he identifies as the discourse network of 1800, language (and in particular poetry) is invested with spiritual powers; it is the translation of a silent and wordless nature (Johnston, 1997). The sensuality and memory of words leads to a confusion of writing and experience: ‘[it] only leaves us the choice of either retaining words while losing their meaning or, vice versa, retaining meaning while losing the words’ (Kittler, 1999: p. 10). The monopoly of language on all the senses dissolves with the arrival of the gramophone, film and the typewriter, which Kittler describes as the first mechanical media. Photography, film and the phonograph record and store optical and aural data automatically with superhuman precision while the typewriter (described by Heidegger, as Kittler notes, as ‘something in between tool and machine’ [1997: p. 44]) mechanically removes writing from the domination of consciousness. With these devices, which can store and separate ‘sounds, faces and documents’, ‘The dream of a real, visible, or audible world arising from the words is over’ (Kittler, 1997: p. 44). What Kittler calls the modernist discourse network of 1900 begins to emerge. Around 1880 poetry becomes literature. It is no longer the red blood of a Keller or the inner forms of a Hoffman that have to be transmitted by standardized letters, it is a new and beautiful tautology of technicians. (Kittler, 1997: p. 44)

In a bravura analysis, Kittler brings together a discussion of the typewriter’s capacity to implement ‘a logic of chaos and intervals’, the entry of women into the workforce as secretaries and typists, experiments in psychophysics to measure the parameters of memory, sensory and motor response which exclude meaning as an independent variable, and Mallarmé’s ‘instant insight, [that] literature does not mean anything but

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that it consists of twenty-six letters’ (Kittler, 1997: pp. 44–45). Such changes indicate, he suggests, not just the subversion of the referentiality of language, but the referentiality of experience itself. This parallels the analysis made by Crary, who also shows the absence of referentiality in the new theory of specific nerve energies that developed at the end of the nineteenth century, in which they become the ground on which new instrumental techniques will produce for the observer a new ‘real’ world. As Kittler puts it, ‘Media “define what really is”; they are always already beyond aesthetics’ (Kittler, 1999: p. 3). In the discourse network of 1900, psychophysics, psychoanalysis and modernist literature – like film, the phonograph and the typewriter – disaggregate and redistribute constitutive elements of consciousness (and the reality such a consciousness apprehends) according to a multiplicity of particularized, autonomic functions: ‘there is no universal norm (inwardness, creative imagination, high idiom, Poetry) transcending the particular functions. Each has a standard only in relation to defined experimental subjects and conditions’ (Kittler, 1990: p. 214, quoted in Johnston, 1997: p. 18). This is a much more complex, compelling account of the introduction of technology into the human than that offered by McLuhan, conducted in such a way as to enable a precise understanding of shifts in the status and significance of the historical correlates of the human: consciousness, the senses and the body. It also, alongside the work of Crary, provides an account of the historical conditions for the emergence of simulation as a model of observation, a development that has had significant implications for both art and science (Baudrillard, 1994; Stengers, 2000).

POST-MEDIUM AND POST-HUMAN Things change again for Kittler (although the extent to which this might be the beginning of a third discourse network is not entirely clear) with the invention of the computer,

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heralded by Alan Turing’s Universal Machine of 1936, which adds a third capacity to the early twentieth-century media of storage and transmission – calculation (Johnston, 1997). The mathematical model of 1936 . . . is no longer a hermaphrodite between a machine and a mere tool; as a feedback system it beats all the Remingtons. For the sign on the paper ribbon, or respectively its absence, which is read, steers the next step, which is a kind of writing; it depends on the reading whether the machine keeps the sign or erases it or, vice versa, whether it keeps a space blank or puts a sign on it. And so on, and so on. (Johnston, 1997: p. 48)

The development of communication and information technologies consequent upon this and the emergence of a theory of information (in the writings of Claude Shannon) and cybernetics (in the work of Norbert Wiener) has allowed the translation of any medium (including the human body) into any other through the digitalization of all information. What is fundamental for Kittler here is a shift from the continuous (the analogous) to the discrete (or digital). In Kittler’s view digitalization is erasing the notion of medium itself.11 Before the end, something is coming to an end. The general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface. . . . Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound, or voice. And once optical fiber networks turn formerly distinct data flows into a standardized series of digitized numbers, any medium can be translated into another. With numbers everything goes. Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, storage, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping – a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium. (Kittler, 1999: pp. 1–2)

In this respect too, then, Kittler is similar to McLuhan: he appears to believe that current developments have a much greater potential to transform the way we live than ever before: ‘Instead of wiring people and technologies, absolute knowledge will run as an endless loop’ (Kittler, 1999: p. 2).12 But his vision is much more pessimistic, with an emphasis

on the loss of homologues or analogues of the human body: Electrics does not equal electronics. . . . Our media systems merely distribute the words, noises, and images people can transmit and receive. But they do not compute these data. They do not produce an output that, under computer control, transforms any algorithm into any interface effect, to the point where people take leave of their senses. (Kittler, 1999: p. 2)

This is not simply a restatement of his view we can only ever know about people what the media are able to store and transmit, but a view that technology now writes (computes or codes) the subject: ‘At the moment of relentless subjugation to laws – which is our case – man’s illusion as inventor of media vanishes’ (Kittler, 1997: p. 30). Kittler’s theory differs from that of McLuhan (and Williams) not only in so far as he draws on Foucault’s more sophisticated understanding of causality and history but also on more recent developments in information theory and its links to the study of non-linear dynamic systems, self-organization and emergence (Hayles, 1999). Indeed, in his use of the term discourse network he is clearly drawing on more recent thinking about technology itself, notably that of Gilbert Simondon.13 Simondon’s Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (On the mode of existence of technological objects), first published in 1959 (1989), has had a profound, if staggered, delay in the sociology of science and technology, and more recently still, in the sociology of culture (Haraway, 1991; Mackenzie, 2002; Shaviro, 2005). The most relevant elements of Simondon’s argument for the history being presented here are that technology is not an ensemble (and is thus not reducible to a series of tools or machines), and is a process of invention (and is thus neither static nor simply determined but dynamic and determining). For Simondon, a technology involves relations between machines, relations between machines and humans, and relations between machines and their environments. Together these relations comprise an ensemble: tools are connected, first, by the tasks they (are used to) perform, which are increasingly

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complicated and require coordination in time and space, and second, because of the conceptual schemes that generate them (Shaviro, 2005). These schemes, or designs, can be used across different contexts, in different environments, with the consequence that an ensemble of technology is transportable and transferable. It is both abstract (but not ideal) and concrete, and necessarily exceeds any narrow conception of purposes both in the sense that its purposes cannot be fixed by intention and in the sense that values do not reside elsewhere (in society, for example). As it expands, technology enables new relations between people and things, people and people, and things and things. It is a network (as in Kittler’s notion of discourse network), connecting the natural and the unnatural, the human and the inhuman in relations of feedback, distortion and mutual dependency. Technology, in this view, does not comprise a set of relations that can be understood in terms of an ‘and’ that connects two separate entities, technology and nature, or technology and society, but as an ‘and’ that produces the entities that it both connects and separates. In Simondon’s view, technology is not just passively used; it is continually revised in the process of use. Machines do not exist in isolation, but (like McLuhan’s human) are extended in use (in relations with other machines, humans and the environment). Technology is thus necessarily a continuing, inventive process, rather than a finished, discrete product; technology too, is always in translation. Simondon uses the term ‘concretization’ to refer to the technological process in which there is a discovery of synergisms between the particular functions technology serves and their niche environments (Mackenzie, 2002; Shaviro, 2005). For Simondon, the process of concretization has a progressive (evolutionary) character: technologies can be ordered in a sequence going from the most abstract to the most concrete according to technical criteria. But because technologies are always connected (always in-relation) for Simondon, concretization is not reducible to a simple developmental

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criterion such as growth in productivity, but is a more complex process, involving the reflexive accommodation of technologies to their social and natural (including human) environment (which itself is changing). Thus in contrast to pervasive and deeply rooted modern models of mechanism which regard machines as deterministic, Simondon views the relation between a machine and its milieu as structured by localized and singular indeterminacies. (Mackenzie, 2002: p. 26)

This view has been adopted and promoted by the work of Bruno Latour, and what has come to be called ANT or Actor Network Theory, an approach that adopts a principle of ‘generalized symmetry’ (a term that first Michel Callon and then Latour adapted from the sociologist of science David Bloor [1976]). In essence, this principle repudiates any a priori distinctions between human and the non-human, subject and object, the social and the natural. Instead it works from the assumption that humans and non-humans are always in a chain, a relay of relations or a network with each other, and the boundaries between them are not fixed, but are subject to change.14 ANT also refuses the presumption that agency is always human, and for this reason this approach tends to use the word actant rather than actor to define the entities that emerge in a network. For ANT, the intermixing of the human and the nonhuman is intrinsic to the constitution of the social and to the recognition of the social as an effect. One of its central interests is, therefore, to develop accounts of how this intermixing proceeds. Like Simondon, Latour does not believe that technology is neutral or value-free, but neither does he think it is solely to do with calculation and control. So, for example, he argues that norms are not merely subjective human intentions but are also realized in devices. What he is suggesting then is that technical devices embody norms that serve to enforce obligations. Importantly, this delegation of human agency (Latour, 1987) involves a translation, a mediation, or a modification of some kind.

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One of the most important aspects of Simondon’s thinking in this regard is the application of cybernetic theories of information, and his use of the term ‘transduction’ (Feenberg, 1999; Mackenzie, 2002; Simondon, 1992).15 This is the term that he develops to think further about the questions of determination, intention and meaning. Following information theory, Simondon understands ‘information’ to refer to the indeterminacy or contingency in a series of signals.16 In his development of this thinking, Simondon argues that technological devices transduce information, understood as a margin of unpredictability in a sequence of signals, into determined forms. In this use of the term transduction, Simondon may thus be seen to provide a more precise – a more technologically specific – understanding of the notion of translation proposed by McLuhan, and to complicate the notions of technological and social determination. In his emphasis on the indeterminacy at the heart of technology, and his insistence on the productive relations between the technological, the social and the natural Simondon opens (the black box of) technology up, so that the links that connect technology and society (and nature) are not external, but are rather internal to the entities that they connect and separate. Technology is in and of society and society is in and of technology but neither can be reduced to the other. What has made Simondon’s thinking so important to recent debates about cultural technologies has been what Lev Manovich (2001) calls the ‘computerization of culture’, specifically the convergence of media and computing. Manovich writes, ‘Media and computer – Daguerre’s daguerreotype and Babbage’s Analytical Engine, The Lumière Cinématographie and Hollerith’s tabulator – merge into one. . . . This meeting changes the identity of both media and the computer itself’(Manovich, 2001: p. 25). What emerges from this historical meeting, he suggests, is a series of ‘new media objects’. Such objects are understood by Manovich in terms of a set of general principles: they may be described in numbers, that is, by means of

numerical representation; as modular, that is, they are composed of discrete samples or parts; as highly automated; as variable, that is, they are not fixed once and for all, but can exist in different versions; and as able to transcode, that is, able to translate something into another format. Yet while Manovich provides a compelling analysis of what he calls the language of new media, and notes that new media ‘externalize and objectify the mind’s operations’ (Manovich, 2001: p. 61), his analysis does not offer a critique, and nor does he explore the implications of new media for the status of the human and its analogues. Instead, he is concerned only to identify the cultural possibilities of the computerization of culture. In his view this is no small task: ‘To use a metaphor from computer culture, new media transforms all culture and cultural theory into an open source’ (Manovich, 2001: p. 333). Certainly the convergence of media and computing has significant implications for the notion of cultural technologies, boosting their importance in the study of culture and society. This new significance is evident in the growing numbers of studies of specific technologies, such as the personal stereo (Bull, 2000; Du Gay et al., 1992; Hosokawa, 1984), the mobile phone and the computer (Stone, 1996; Turkle, 1996); studies of ensembles of technology, such as surveillance networks, database management and the Internet (Elmer, 2000; Levinson, 1999; Lyon, 2001); and more general studies of politics, the economy and society as they are said to be transformed by cultural and information technologies (Barry, 2001; Castells, 1996; Lash, 2002; Terranova, 2004; Zuboff, 1988). In many ways, however, cultural technologies have now become so pervasive that the term itself is no longer helpful. Nevertheless, one account of the relations between technology and culture continues to provoke debate, perhaps because it returns to the question of the human and the inhuman, the issue of agency, and whether and how it is possible to inhabit technology. In her ‘Manifesto for cyborgs’, Donna Haraway outlines the political possibilities of the cyborg, ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid

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of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’ (Haraway, 1991: p. 149). For Haraway, the cyborg is a recognition of the fact that we are not immediately present to ourselves; but instead are constituted medially. Cyborgs are not creatures either of determination or of intention but irresolution; cyborgs, she says, are committed to ‘partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity’ (Haraway, 1991: p. 151). Their ‘main trouble’ is that ‘they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism’ (Haraway, 1991: p. 151), but this ancestry does not define their destiny: From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war. From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. (Haraway, 1991: p. 154)

Haraway argues for the possibilities of cyborg writing, which ‘is about the power to survive not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other’ (Haraway 1991: p. 175); it is about noise and the pollution of the ‘one code that translates all meaning perfectly’ (Haraway, 1991: p. 176). In a critique of this view, Tim Dant (1999) locates the cyborg in a history of myths; he notes that the practice of the making of material stuff to fit into, replace or substitute for human beings or body parts has led to a cultural fantasy about the incorporation of objects. This myth, which has its origins in the part human, part animal monsters of antiquity (Pan, the centaurs and mermaids) via the myths of constructing nearly human forms from animals and cadavers (Dr Moreau, Frankenstein), provides cultural space for exploring the boundaries between the human being and the object made by a human.

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In seeking to find concrete examples of the cyborg he explores some ‘literal’ examples of fusion: the wet suit, prosthetics, piercing, art bodies, and comes to the conclusion that ‘the cyborg is a modern myth of the extension of the human being beyond the normal range of human capabilities’ (Dant, 1999: p. 191). In this view, the prosthesis remains an extension or an enablement that does not undermine the integrity of the human subject. The transgressed boundaries of Haraway’s cyborgs, he suggests, ‘are metaphysical rather than practical’: . . . she is not discussing the fusion of metal and skin or electronic sensors and nerves. Her discussion is of subjects in flux rather than subjects being merged with objects; the responsibility for the machines still rests with humans because we make them and as such they are ‘an aspect of our embodiment’. (Haraway, 1991: p. 192)

This is a restatement of the view put forward by Williams: that to understand technology – and make it accountable – we need to restore an analysis of (individual and collective) intention. An alternative view is that the cyborg is not a simple model of science fiction or science fact, the real and the constructed, the natural and the artificial, the human and the inhuman, but rather about the mixing of dichotomies. Prins (1995) has noted that the figure of the cyborg is a highly ambiguous character and suggests it accommodates two different ethical stances. On the one hand, there is a socialist-feminist ethic of solidarity, which might be thought to rely on an essence of humanity, some notion of something shared, and emphasizes ‘being’, and on the other there is an anti-humanist ethic which stresses heterogeneity and becoming rather than being. The Manifesto may either be seen as rather contradictory in this respect or as a purposeful irresolution that is politically enabling. As a figure, it requires us to consider whether and how the human and its analogues – individuality, consciousness, the senses, memory and the body – are adequate for the purposes of making and understanding culture and politics today.

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NOTES 1 He further suggests that the most plausible theory of film technique focuses on ‘the movement of objects’, giving as an example of a film that illustrates the power of this technique, Antonioni’s La Notte. But, so he goes on to say, the scope and power of this cinematic technique is limited by the representational tendency of the photographic process of film. This representational tendency is what explains the ‘retarding aspect of film in the historical process of art’. It ‘places a higher intrinsic significance on the object, as foreign to subjectivity, than aesthetically autonomous techniques’. Thus he says, ‘Even when film dissolves and modifies its objects as much as it can, the disintegration is never complete. Consequently, it does not permit absolute construction: its elements, however abstract, always retain something representational; they are never purely aesthetic values. Deleuze, however, will go on to argue that there is more to this technique than Adorno allows. While (photographic) film may, in some respects, be continuous with its object, in other ways – such as the framing of time – it is discontinuous (even if standardized). This discontinuity allows for a multiplicity of possible ways of constructing the object of a film; for Deleuze, cinema is not merely representational, it is – and can reveal itself as – matter-image, whether this is as movement-image or time-image (1986, 1989). 2 He also recognizes that intention has not only intended but also unforeseen or unintended effects, including ‘the desire to use the technology for oneself’ (1974: p. 133). And he has a rather more optimistic view than Adorno of the radical possibilities such uses may have. 3 The notion of articulation is perhaps more precise as a way of describing a set of forces for Williams than determination, and was taken up and developed in some of the most important texts in cultural studies that followed (Johnson, 1986; Du Gay et al., 1992). 4 Significantly, the question of the relation of technology and nature is not developed, as nature as in some sense subsumed in society (but see also Williams, 1985). Thus the strong notion of social constructionism Williams proposes may be seen to include a social construction not only of technology but also of nature. 5 In ‘Media as translators’ (in 1997) he compares this process of numbing with the Freudian notion of repression. 6 According to Levinson, the aphorism ‘the medium is the message’ made its first appearance in McLuhan’s 1960 typescript ‘Report on Project in Understanding New Media’; in 1964, the phrase had become the title of the first chapter of Understanding Media; and a variant was the title of a later book with Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (1967), with other uses including ‘the medium is the

mess-age’ and ‘the medium is the mass-age’ (1999: pp. 35–36). 7 McLuhan was always concerned with the process of re-mediation (Bolter and Grusin, 1999), and discussed both the retrieval of earlier media, and the reversal of contemporary media into those of the past. 8 See also Terranova’s account of the mass as a non-sociological category: ‘The masses are not specific social classes, but more of a generalized dynamics that takes over when you take away all attributes, predicates, qualities or references from a large number of people. The mass, that is, is a lowest common denominator, not in the sense of a loss of quality but as a kind of pre-individual and collective potential to be affected. This is about the physical capacity of a large number of bodies to form a kind of passive mass – a receptacle for the affective power of images’ (2004: p. 136). 9 In addition, numerous commentators have been critical of McLuhan’s ‘wayward and unkempt’ style (Edmundson in Levinson, 1999: p. 25), while he himself claimed that ‘I don’t explain – I explore’ (quoted in Levinson, 1999: p. 25). See Moos (1997) for an interpretation of McLuhan’s style as producing an interface of ideas. 10 As is widely known, the Internet grew out of the ARPANET, a decentralized control network for intercontinental ballistic missiles. 11 For an account of the loss of medium specificity in the art world, see Krauss, 1999. 12 Although he has always thought that, ‘We can only ever know about people what the media are able to store and transmit. What counts, therefore, are not the messages or contents with which communications technologies literally equip so-called souls for the duration of a technological era, but (strictly after McLuhan) only their circuit arrangements, those diagrams of observability in general’ (1997: p. 30). 13 In this sense, it is not just that culture is seen to be transformed by technology, but vice versa; that is, technology is also cultural, or at least informational. 14 Symmetry for Bloor refers to the principle that, when analysing a case-study in science, one should be consistent/symmetrical in explanation of true or false knowledge – both are subject to social explanation. The term ‘generalized symmetry’ is first mentioned in Callon (1986), where it means the use of an abstract and neutral vocabulary to understand the conflicting viewpoints of actors, entities or actants in a controversy or science in the making. These actors can be non-human, but the term is not simply bringing in non-social elements into the explanation, but eschewing explanation per se in favour of something like heterogeneous thick description. 15 In electrical and electronic engineering, transducers convert one kind of energy into another. 16 Put simply, the idea here is that more information is communicated by an unpredictable sequence of signals than by a predictable sequence.

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Information theory is a way of quantifying the level of unpredictability of communications within a given context.

REFERENCES Adorno, T. (1991) The Culture Industry. Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge. Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (1982) Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum. Barry, A. (2001) Political Machines. Governing a Technological Society. London and New York: The Athlone Press. Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Baudry, J-L. (1986) ‘Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus’ and ‘The apparatus: metapsychological approaches to the impression of reality in the cinema’, in P. Rosen, (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia University Press. Benjamin, W. (1992) Illuminations. London: Fontana Press. Bloor, D. (1976) Knowledge and Social Imagery. London: RKP. Bolter, J.D. and Grusin, R. (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Buck-Morss, S. (1991) The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press. Bull, M. (2000) Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. New York: Berg. Callon, M. (1986) ‘Some elements in a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and fishermen of St Brieuc Bay’, in J. Law (ed.), Power, Action and Belief. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 196–233. Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Comolli, J.-L. (1986) ‘Technique and ideology: camera, perspective, depth of field’, in P. Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia University Press. Cooper, R. (2001) ‘Interpreting mass: collection/dispersion’, in N. Lee and R. Munro (eds), The Consumption of Mass. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 16–43. Crary, J. (1996) Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. Dant, T. (1999) Material Culture in the Social World. Buckingham: Open University Press.

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Deleuze, G. (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement Image. London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. (1989) Cinema 2: The Time Image. London: Athlone Press. De Lauretis, T. (1984) Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Doane, M.A. (1987) ‘Remembering women: psychical and historical constructions in film theory’, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, 1(2): 3–14. Du Gay, P., Hall, S., James, L., Mackay, H. and Negus, K. (1992) Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. London: Sage. Elmer, G. (2000) ‘The politics of profiling’ in R. Rogers (ed.) Preferred Placement, Amsterdam: Jan van Eyck Akademie Editions, pp. 65–73. Feenberg, A. (1999) Questioning Technology. London and New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish. Tr. A. Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1980) in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1988) ‘Technologies of the self’ in H.M. Luther, H. Gutman and P.H. Hutton (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock, pp. 16–49. Haraway, D. (1991) ‘Manifesto for cyborgs’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women. London: Free Association Books, pp. 149–182. Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heath, S. (1977–1978) ‘Notes on suture’, Screen, 18(2): 48–76. Hosokawa, S. (1984) ‘The Walkman effect’, in R. Middleton and D. Horn (eds), Popular Music, Vol. 4: Performers and Audiences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 165–180. Johnson, R. (1986) ‘The story so far: and further transformations’, in D. Punter (ed.), Introduction to Contemporary Cultural Studies. London: Longman, pp. 277–313. Johnston, J. (1997) ‘Introduction. Friedrich Kittler: media theory after poststructuralism’, in F. Kittler and J. Johnston (eds), Literature, Media, Information Systems. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, pp. 1–26. Kittler, F. (1990) Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Tr. M. Metteer with C. Cullens. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kittler, F. (1997) in J. Johnston (ed.), Literature, Media, Information Systems. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International.

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Kittler, F. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Tr. and introduction G. Winthorp-Young and M. Wutz. Stanford: University of California Press. Kracauer, S. (1995) The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays. Tr. T.Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. Krauss, R. (1999) ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’: Art in the Age of the Post-medium Condition. London: Thames and Hudson. Lacan, J. (1979) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Tr. A. Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lash, S. (2002) Critique of Information. London: Sage. Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Levinson, P. (1999) Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. London and New York: Routledge. Lyon, D. (2001) Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press. Lyotard, J-F. (1993) The Inhuman. Reflections on Time. Tr. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby. Cambridge: Polity. Mackenzie, A. (2002) Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed. London and New York: Continuum. Manovich, L. (2001) The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McLuhan, M. (1997) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London and New York: Routledge. McLuhan, M. and Fiore, Q. (1967) The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, New York: Bantam. Metz, C. (2000) ‘The imaginary signifier’, in L. Braudy and M. Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 800–817. (1st edn, 1975.) Moos, M.A. (1997) ‘McLuhan’s language’, in M.A. Moos (ed.), Media Research: Technology, Art, Communication. Essays by Marshall McLuhan. G+B Arts International: Amsterdam, pp. 140–167.

Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 16(3). Murphy, P. (2005) ‘Psychoanalysis and film theory Part 1: ‘A new kind of mirror’, Kritikos, Vol. 2. Poster, M. (1995) The Second Media Age. Cambridge: Blackwell. Poster, M. (2001) What’s the Matter with New Media? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Prins, B. (1995) ‘The ethics of hybrid subjects: feminist constructivism according to Donna Haraway’, Science, Technology and Human Values, 20: 219–228. Shaviro, S. (2005) ‘Simondon on technology’. Retrieved January 5th, 2005 from www.shaviro.com/Blog. Simondon, G. (1989) Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Paris: Editions Aubier-Montaigne. Simondon, G. (1992) ‘The genesis of the individual’, in J. Crary and S. Kwinter (eds), Incorporations. New York: Zone, pp. 296–319. Stengers, I. (2000) The Invention of Modern Science. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time I. Tr. R. Beardsworth and G. Collins. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Stone, R.A. (1996) The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Terranova, T. (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press. Turkle, S. (1996) Life on the Screen. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Williams, R. (1974) Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana/Collins. Williams, R. (1985) The Country and the City. London: The Hogarth Press. Williams, R. (1987) Culture and Society, 1780–1950. London: The Hogarth Press. Zuboff, S. (1988) In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. New York: Basic Books.

28 Cyberculture and New Media Tiziana Terranova

INTRODUCTION This chapter will start by addressing some key questions about the relation between the study of new media and that of cyberculture. As widely used in the 1980s and 1990s, the term ‘new media’indicates a break within and from the modern mass media system.As the cultural expression of modern societies and as an instance of the industrial mode of production, the mass media system is said to produce a relatively uniform and standardized output. This output is targeted to an audience that is mainly conceived as composed of passive and homogeneous consumers of cultural products (for influential, albeit different, perspectives on mass communications see Adorno, 2001; and McQuail, 1994). Technically, the mass media are defined by their reliance on technologies of broadcasting and mechanical reproduction where a standardized message is transmitted/distributed from a few senders to a large body of receivers – as in the case of radio, broadcasting television, film and the press. The mass media system is also seen as mainly national, indeed it can be considered a major social actor in the production of modern national identities (Anderson, 1991).

Technological developments such as cable television, video cameras and recorders, personal audio devices such as the Sony Walkman and later technologies such as personal computers and the Internet have all, at different times, been dubbed ‘new’. There seem to be two key principles of this perceived quality of ‘newness’: inter-activity at the level of the medium, as compared to the passivity that is seen as inherent in the one-directional flow of broadcasting; and heterogeneity at the level of the audience, which can no longer be described as a homogeneous mass audience. In sum, the new media determine a segmented, differentiated audience that, although massive in terms of numbers is no longer a mass audience in terms of simultaneity and uniformity of the message that it receives. . . . Because of the multiplicity of messages and sources, the audience itself becomes more selective. The targeted audience tends to choose its messages, so deepening its fragmentation. . . . (Sabbah quoted in Castells, 1996: pp. 339–340)

The study of new media thus presents inevitable connections with the larger debate on postmodernism, which, in different ways, similarly stressed activity and difference as marking a cultural break with modernity (for examples of postmodern media studies

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see Ang, 1995; and Fiske, 1988). In this sense, new media are often seen as posing fundamental questions about the cultural politics of contemporary societies. And yet, as some have noticed, the adjective ‘new’ carries through into the postmodern age the modernist belief in the power of the ‘cutting edge’ or the ‘avant-garde’. These connotations of ‘the new’ are derived from a modernist belief in social progress as delivered by technology. . . . Calling a range of developments ‘new’ which may or may not be new or even similar, is part of a powerful ideological movement and a narrative about progress in Western societies. (Lister et al., 2003: p. 11)

It has thus been suggested that we should consider new media as a perspective rather than an object – a perspective that is concerned with a periodic re-occurrence of a mere representation of novelty: Rather than reserving the term ‘new media’ to refer to the cultural uses of current computer and computer-based network technologies, some authors have suggested that every modern media and telecommunications technology passes through its ’new media stage’ . . . we may look for certain aesthetic techniques and ideological tropes which accompany every new modern media and telecommunication technology at the initial stage of their introduction and dissemination. (Manovich, 2003: p. 19)

From this perspective, then, the newness of a medium would just lie in its representation as new, which implies a set of recurring tropes and techniques. On the other hand, the question of ‘what is new?’ cannot be reduced to a simple matter of representation or conscious perception. Indeed, the question of newness touches deeply on the discourse of history – and in particular on the relationship between processes of continuous, gradual transformation and the discontinuous irruption of singular events (Foucault, 1991a, 1995). The question of new media, then, implies an engagement with larger questions of historicity and temporality. An example of this tension is the debate around the cultural dimension of change involved in the shift from analogue to digital means of storing and accessing information.

Digitization is in fact considered as a key characteristic of new media at the turn of the millennium. Technically, in fact, modern media such as film, photography, records and radio draw on analogue techniques of representation, ‘in which a material surface carries continuous variations of tone, light, or some other signal’ (Lister et al., 2003: p. 393). With digitization, the continuous code of analogue media (exemplified by the grooves of vinyl or the chemical variations of tone of the analogue photograph) is translated into a series of numbers which are handled by computers in a binary system. Media processes are brought into the symbolic realm of mathematics rather than those of physics or chemistry. Once coded numerically, the input data in a digital media production can immediately be subject to the mathematical processes of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division through algorithms contained within software. (Lister et al., 2003: p. 386)

Digitization has thus the effect of turning the mass media into multi-media, that is it allows heterogeneous media belonging to different platforms to converge in what some have described as a single new medium of representation, a digital medium. The digital medium . . . may seem plural to us now, because it is so myriad in its forms – virtual reality CAVEs, the Internet, ‘enhanced’ television, videogames . . . a single new medium of representation, the digital medium, formed by the braided interplay of technical invention and cultural expression at the end of the 20th century. . . . (Murray, 2003: p. 3)

In the case of photography, for example, we can see this tension arising between different ways of approaching digitization. The question for some has been whether, by virtue of digitization, digital photography undermines the truth claims of analogue photography whereby the latter could claim to have a unique, authenticating relation to the reality that it represented. Some have argued that such ‘truth-value’ never really belonged to analogue photography in the first place, and that the latter always relied on a set of social and cultural codes in order to produce

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a realistic effect. Thus, digital photography has only amplified cultural awareness of the constructedness of the image in ways which imply a change of degree rather than kind (Lister, 1995). Others, however, have insisted that digitization of photography is actively reconfiguring the way we look at images as a whole (Mitchell, 1992).1 The study of ‘cyberculture’ also raises questions of a more general nature. In the early 1990s, the term cyberculture was used to refer to a far-flung, loosely knit complex of sublegitimate, alternative and oppositional subcultures [whose common project is the subversive use of technocommodities, often framed by radical body politics] . . . [Cyberculture] is divisible into several major territories: visionary technology, fringe science, avantgarde art, and pop culture. (Dery, 1992: p. 509)

Usually associated with the use of new media such as the personal computer and the Internet, but also with cutting-edge technologies such as genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and nanotech, cyberculture draws on a cluster of works, images and concepts appearing in the mid- to late 1980s. Key cybercultural references include the popular tropes of cyberpunk science fiction (a literary movement whose aesthetic sensibility also affected the look and themes of comic books, music, films, fashion and games); Donna Haraway’s postmodern cyborg; hacker and high-tech subcultures; and a cybercultural press including publications such as FutureSex, Mondo 2000 and Wired magazine. A late twentieth century/early twentyfirst century formation, cyberculture defines a heightened cultural sensibility to the pervasiveness of cybernetic science and technologies (Bukatman, 1993; Kennedy, 2000). The term, however, can also be used to refer to the larger cultural experience of living in a world that is increasingly saturated by cybernetic technologies, that is by technologies that operate through a very intimate and tactile interface with the human body. It can thus be defined as informing not only specific high-tech subcultures but all those aspects of contemporary culture that

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work by producing a symbiotic relationship to technology undercutting the division between ‘user’ and ‘tool’; ‘nature’ and ‘culture’; and ‘biology’ and ‘technology’. However, as we will see, cyberculture can also be considered in more abstract terms to identify a more general challenge posed by technology to the binarism inherent in the distinction between nature and culture, human and machine. Inasmuch as cyberculture highlights the co-causal, non-linear dynamics linking the human to the non-human, it defies the humanist notion that ‘considers agency to be the ultimately reducible preserve of human beings as cultural actors’ (Lister et al., 2003: p. 307). Shortly, studies of new media and cyberculture share a common emphasis on new technologies, but while the study of new media is concerned mainly with media technologies and refers to the larger field of media studies, the study of cyberculture is related to specific cultural preoccupations emerging in relation to a technoscientific paradigm (cybernetics) and a set of images and visions of the future (cyberpunk). Both fields, however, also express a specific theoretical challenge to more general assumptions around the nature of cultural and technological change.

NEW MEDIA AND CYBERCULTURE: A PARALLEL EMERGENCE In the senses defined above, new media and cyberculture are interrelated through a common reference to the technologies of digital computation and inter-networking. As such they are both connected to the scientific and technological milieu of the twentieth century – to the shift from classical to postclassical physics, and from thermodynamics to information and system theory. These paradigmatic shifts in scientific knowledge coincided with a process of increasing integration of scientific and technical knowhow often actively sparked off by military and industrial investment in technological innovation (what some social scientists and cultural critics have provocatively called

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‘technoscience’) (Aronowitz and Martinsons, 1995). Thus both new media and cyberculture are expressions of a long historical wave of scientific and technological innovation, driven by larger developments in the political economy of war and post-industrialization. As is well known, information and communication technologies underwent a qualitative transformation during the military effort in World War II when the digital computer was given its current architecture by scientists such as Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing and John Von Neumann (for a history of computing which takes into account its multiple points of emergence see Royas and Hashagen, 2002). A ‘war science’ was fundamental in harnessing funding and intelligence towards technological innovation. The emergence of the digital computer, for example, cannot be extricated from military interest in cryptography, as exemplified in the history of the first programmable digital electronic computer, the Colossus (Copeland, 2005). The latter in fact was devised as a means to accelerate the decodification of enemy messages, in a context where the element of surprise that is crucial to any war effort was amplified by the speed of radio, telegraphy and aviation (Virilio, 1989). Further developments in the architecture of computing were also linked to research into the atomic and hydrogen bombs, where computers were developed with the aim of performing complex calculations which simulated the chain reactions of the atom. This tight harnessing of scientific research to the war effort continued throughout the Cold War. Research and development of the first computer network, ARPANET, was also funded by the US Department of Defense as part of the Cold War arms race (Abbate, 2000). The emergence of dynamic milieus of technological innovation in the Silicon Valley region in the San Francisco Bay area was also heavily dependent on continued military investment (Kenney, 2000). This military scientific effort met the emerging dynamics of de-industrialization and the informatization of capitalism at key moments

of its development. University Departments of Computer Science with Department of Defense (DoD) funding often played a key role in translating military research into economic enterprises. The feedback loops between military and corporate research were crucial to catalysing the conditions for the production of key technological innovations in the field of microelectronics which provided the hardware for new media. This shift from a war economy to an informational economy as the driving force of new media development can be studied by referring to work on graphical user interfaces (such as that carried out in the 1960s by Douglas Engelbart and by the team at Xerox Parc) which was also influenced by contemporary speculation about the knowledge economy and postindustrial societies (Bardini, 2000). Finally, there is also an important connection with the entertainment industry, which often sponsored and benefited from research into computer simulations, leading some to talk about a ‘militainment’ establishment (Burston, 2003). Indeed, even as it is not possible to overlook the importance of military investment and support to the development of new media, it is also impossible to overlook the more complex dynamics that linked both new media and cyberculture to larger social and cultural change starting from the 1960s onwards. In many ways, much of the early history of new media and cyberculture is characterized by strong regional concentrations around key technological milieus of innovation in the USA (such as the San Francisco Bay area and route 101 in the Boston area). Among those regions, the West Coast of the USA has played an undoubtedly hegemonic role in determining the values, tropes and ideas of the emerging computer culture (Ross, 2000). Particularly characteristic of the importance played of the 1960s Californian counterculture is a recurrent trope in the representation of the shift to new media. This shift is often represented and experienced as one more general move away from a set of figures or characters to another: from the

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white-coated lab scientist to the scruffy, badlyfed early computer hacker (Levy, 2001); from the corporate suit-and-tie IBM-type employee to the bearded Homebrew Computer Club and Apple founders (Cringely, 1996); from the well-paid, middle-aged, sharply dressed professional broadcaster to the casual, informal and often less well-paid new media worker (Boczowski, 2004; Ross, 2003); or even from the full-time war journalist, often an appendix to the military war machine, to the volatile and exposed freelance ‘stringer’ reporting from the field through mobile satellite links and war blogs (Tumbler and Prentoulis, 2003). The emergence of new media and cyberculture often appears as a direct opposition between two figures expressing two distinct types of societies and cultures. Research into personal computing, then, strongly benefited from informal networks of scientific and technical knowledge which had connections to, but did not identify with, the institutional and corporate entities that dominated the field until the 1960s. Departments of Computer Science in the University sector played a key role. Indeed, while access to ARPANET was restricted for a long time to departments with DoD funding, a parallel, university-based computing culture emerged around the Unix operating system, which, albeit later superseded by Microsoft, was to find a new lease of life in the open-source movement (Stallman, 2002). The movement of ‘garage computing’, of which Apple computer was a symbol, was also fundamental in the shift from the big mainframes to the more accessible PC technology. Even following the entry of established corporations such as IBM and their partners of choice, Microsoft, into the field of personal computing, the culture of grassroots computing, often anti-corporate, has been crucial to ensure the success and diffusion of new media technologies such as computer networks. However, the spread of personal computing and networking outside the small circles of grassroots computer science cannot be considered as only a vehicle for the ideas

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and values of the 1960s counterculture. The spread of networking outside military and research institutions in the 1980s was also part of a larger movement of restructuration of capitalism at a global level, which, for autonomous reasons, quickly latched onto the potential of computer networking in order to solve problems of coordination of production and control of labour processes (Davis et al., 1997). And yet, throughout the late 1980s and most of the 1990s, in spite of their increasing corporatization, the culture of new media such as computer networks maintained a distinct countercultural flavour through publications such as Mondo 2000 and FutureSex, covering new technologies from a futuristic, subcultural angle (Sobchack, 1993). The launch of Wired magazine in 1993 conjugated such avant-gardist and countercultural themes to a neoliberal capitalist rhetoric, by focusing on the high-tech industry as a site of cultural and economic innovation. These publications found an eager audience not only among the early subculture of personal computer users and industry insiders, but also among artists, media practitioners and cultural activists involved in the burgeoning virtual communities which coalesced throughout the late 1980s to the early 1990s around bulletin board systems and mailing lists (Rheingold, 2000). Indeed this early moment of expansion of computer networking sees the rise of new ideological disputes between different segments of cyberculture with opposed visions of the nature and future development of the medium. The inflow of European media activists, artists and cultural theorists through networks of mailing lists contributed to a lively debate on the relation between new media, capitalism and social and cultural change which investigated the computer networks as cultural, political and social technologies (Bosma et al., 1999; Hudson, 1997). This social and cultural milieu was complicated and in places radically transformed by the popularization of the Internet as a medium, following the privatization of the Internet backbone in 1994, the lift of the ban on

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commercial use, and the rise of the World Wide Web as the multimedia version of the Internet. This change was heavily affected by the decision of the US government to favour investment in a new ‘information superhighway’ – although this investment was more symbolic than material. In spite of some early confusion between the ‘information superhighway’ (initially conceived on the model of interactive television) and the Internet, the announcement opened the floodgates for a new wave of mergers between old and new media corporations such as Times Warner and America OnLine, but also a flurry of investments into small new media companies (the so-called dotcoms), which many compared to a new gold rush (Cassidy, 2002).The burst of the dotcom bubble in May 2000, however, did not really affect the exponential rate of diffusion of the Internet, which rose not only within the G7 economies, but also more significantly in the Asian market (Ho et al., 2003). We can safely claim, however, that the post-1994 new media environment is characterized by a strong commercial presence of corporate media; a convergence of media platforms onto a digitally networked common medium; and a patchy, but definitely global mass diffusion of access.

CYBERCULTURE, CYBERNETICS, CYBERPUNK We have defined cyberculture, then, as characterized by an active relation to the cybernetic perspective on machines and to a cyberpunk vision of the future. The 1980s and 1990s are characterized by the emergence and diffusion of new types of media technologies which popularize the cybernetic integration of user and tool first tested in a military context. As theorized by scientists involved in military research during World War II, cybernetics, ‘the theory of messages’as defined by Norbert Wiener, extends to machines the idea of communication, thus promoting a systemic approach to the relation between human and machine. The machine is no longer

understood as a tool which is used by a human being but which remains ontologically distinct from it, but as an assemblage where the difference between human and non-human components is irrelevant from the point of view of control mechanisms based on feedback (Wiener, 1989). Cybernetics can be considered as an effort to unify the sciences of the twentieth century while also providing an important bridge towards practical applications in engineering. Cybernetic understanding of communication, control, command, information and feedback, for example, are foundational to the field of genetic engineering (or molecular cybernetics, as Jacques Monod called it; see Monod, 1972). Cybernetics has thus affected not only the way machines are built, but also contemporary understandings of what life is. The concept of feedback is the key to understanding cybernetic machines inasmuch as it instantiates a relationship between organic and inorganic components that is based on bidirectional flows of information sequences. This communication is bidirectional and actively transformative. Machines are not static, set entities, but they are capable of dynamic relations with the environment, which they can actively respond to. Early cybernetics, exemplified by the writings of Norbert Wiener, insisted on the primary importance of homeostatic or negative feedback. Negative feedback emphasizes all those processes by which a cybernetic system (human and nonhuman) keeps itself in a state of equilibrium by warding off the disintegrating influences of the external environment. Wiener judged positive feedback – which amplifies the instability of a system to the point of inducing qualitative transformations – a detrimental force, but the latter has lately become a central focus for research into the evolutionary emergence of mutations and variations and into the dynamics of open or chaotic biophysical system characterized by productive, and not simply reproductive, capabilities (see Hayles, 1999). The implementation of cybernetic understandings of communication to a wide range

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of technologies and machines emphasizes the relationship between the human and the nonhuman as a mutable continuum, marked by thresholds of organization and connected by feedback loops of information. ‘Cyberculture therefore combines cybernetics’ interest in technology and biology, in physical and living things, with . . . an interest in mapping the consequences of this conjunction of technology, nature and culture’ (Lister et al., 2003: p. 290). Cyberculture can thus be seen as a cultural formation which displays an active engagement with scientific ideas and technical artefacts derived by cybernetics. This active engagement is exemplified by the cyberpunk vision of the future – or what we might call the cyberpunk futuristic imagination. Cyberpunk describes the work of a group of North American writers who in the mid-1980s presented themselves as a movement for the renewal of the science fiction genre (Cavallaro, 2000; MacCaffery, 1991). Cyberpunk writers followed in the footsteps of the modernist avant-garde inasmuch as they claimed to introduce a radical break in the themes, tropes and style of contemporary science fiction. As described by Bruce Sterling in his introduction to the first official cyberpunk anthology of short stories, Mirrorshades (1988),cyberpunk writers insisted that most mainstream science fiction was out of touch with contemporary technologies. The dominant mainstream science fiction themes of starships and intergalactic travels were out of touch with a wave of technologies which presented qualitatively distinct features when compared to industrial technologies and space science. For the cyberpunks, the future feeds back into the present through the pervasive circulation of cybernetic technologies characterized by a close interface with the body’s kinaesthetic and sensorial capacities. These new technologies are miniaturized and ubiquitous, tactile and close to the body. New technologies are no longer industrial monuments to human ingenuity such as the train or the Hoover dam, but communication devices such as pace-makers and videogames that penetrate the surface of the body, extend it and modify it from the inside (Sterling, 1988).

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The cyberpunk/cybercultural imagination is characterized by two powerful themes: that of the cybernetically modified body or cyborg; and the cybernetically simulated space, or cyberspace. The figure of the cyborg (or cybernetic organism) well expresses some of the most interesting challenges involved in the study of cyberculture. The cyborg was first introduced in 1960 by two research scientists, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, in an article published in the journal Astronautics, ‘Cyborgs and Space’ (Clynes and Kline, 1995). The article called ‘cyborg’ a human being whose biological functions had been optimized for living in outer space. Altering man’s bodily functions to meet the requirements of extraterrestrial environments would be more logical than providing an earthly environment for him in space. . . . For the exogeneously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously, we propose the term ‘Cyborg’. (Clynes and Kline, 1995: pp. 29, 30–31)

This image of the cyborg as a body that optimally integrates organic and artificial elements is a strong feature of the cybercultural imagination and constitutes a challenge to our understanding of what a body is – and in particular what constitutes its identity and/or essence (Cadigan, 2005; Gibson, 1995). This problematization of identity and/or essence of a body also constitutes a strong connection with postmodern theory, and it is not by chance that most critical engagement with cyberculture, cyberpunk and cybernetics has been marked by the postmodern debate. One of the most influential moments of this cross-pollination of postmodern theory and cyberculture is expressed by Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ – a concept and image which Haraway borrowed from cybernetics and popular culture as a figuration for a postmodern identity politics (Haraway, 1991; Lykke and Braidotti, 1996). As a figuration, the cyborg expresses a more general interest in understanding the relationship between contemporary technological cultures and the mutations undergone by bodies and identities. Cybernetic thinking,

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in fact, is crucially concerned with the question of identity, which it addresses in two ways: on the one hand, by undermining any ontological distinction between human, animal and machine and insisting on the heterogeneous composition of any cybernetic assemblage; on the other by focusing on questions of autopoiesis – that is all those processes by which a particular cybernetic system maintains and reproduces its internal consistency over time (Hayles, 1999; Maturana and Varela, 1980). Haraway saw some potentially liberatory possibilities in the notion of a cyborg – a figuration that could help to figure out one of the thorniest issues taken on by postmodernism, the relationship between identity and difference. For Haraway, a cybernetic organism is made up of different parts, but it still feels like a self, albeit a partial one; it is not tightly bounded, but one can always alter, add or take away organs and parts; it does not experience any sense of ontological separation between the human, the animal and the machine; it is an anti-Oedipal figure, which was not born by means of reproductive sex; it offers a more adequate figuration to deal with the challenges of biotechnologies to reproductive sex (Lykke and Braidotti, 1996). The cyborg, then, expresses a postmodern engagement with the historical and cultural reconfiguration of bodies: Far from reflecting a given unquestionable truth, the cyborg revealed that the natural essence of a body rather derives from specific historical and cultural constructions (or representations) of nature establishing a natural association between feminine sex and sexual reproduction. Rather than being determined by sexual identity and sexual reproduction, the artificial world of the cyborg announces the new historical and cultural conditions of the posthuman body no longer able to find shelter in the natural world. For the postgender world of the cyborg, there is nothing natural about the human body, sex and reproduction. (Parisi, 2004: p. 8)

Cyberculture has thus spawned its own post-identity politics, which refuses the reduction of difference to an effect of binary relations and vindicates an active engagement

with science and technology from the perspective of women and ethnic minorities.2 Postmodern feminism has also had another important effect on the study of cyberculture: it has identified the study of embodiment as a primary issue in relation to cybercultural modes of sexuality. The critique of disembodiment was first moved against cyberpunk science fiction, pointing out the binarism between body and mind therein reproduced. In cyberpunk science fiction, in fact, the phenomenological body is often referred to in dismissive terms – contemptuously defined as ‘meat’. Cyberspace, and by extension the new electronic space of online communication, is represented as a space whereby to flee the body into a world of pure mind. This take on the body in cyberspace was for some shaped by the gendered composition of early cyberculture, which was heavily male and often also young. The famous disdain for physical appearance and nutrition of the male hacker was understood as a way to escape from the female body for a simulated world where pure logical control could be exercised (Springer, 1996). At the same time, however, the actual study of early cybercultural practices such as chatting and online gaming complicated this analysis further. As made clear in an influential study by psychologist Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen, the practice of online communication is shown to produce effects which cannot be understood simply as disembodying. Turkle described a cyberculture where identity-play is rife and where this play does translate back into the lived, experiential reality of the phenomenological body (Turkle, 1995). Rosanne Alluquére Stone also showed, by drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, that the body is not simply erased but actively reconstituted by technological prostheses such as print or television or the Internet (Stone, 1995). Cyberculture, then, concerns a larger range of issues than just the use of new media inasmuch as it addresses the bio-technological mutations of the body (see also the performative work of artists such as Orlan, Stelarc and the Critical Art Ensemble in

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Critical Art Ensemble, 2002; O’Bryan, 2005; and Smith, 2005). The other powerful theme informing most studies of cyberculture concerns the assessment of the spatial dimension of cybernetic technologies, that is the nature of cyberspace. The most common way to introduce the idea of cyberspace is through a citation from William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer. Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation (. . .). A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. (Gibson, 1995: p. 51)

In cyberpunk science fiction, cyberspace comprises two main aspects: it is a navigable world of data which visualizes an underlying architecture of information; it is an immersive simulated space, which cyberpunk characters access through direct neural interface – an idea inspired by the feeling of exclusive involvement experienced by keen computer users and videogame players. Gibson’s cyberspace anticipates the evolution of computer networks into a distinct topological space, which he imagines as a layered and complex virtual reality. This cyberspace possesses its own Cartesian geometry and immersive topologies, but it is also often characterized as ‘alive’. It is inhabited by peculiar inorganic life forms, from viruses to artificial intelligence constructs and downloaded minds of dead humans. In this, it refers to a strand of popular science books written by scientists engaged in work in artificial life, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology (see Drexler, 1987; Minsky, 1988; Moravec, 1988). This notion of cyberspace is central to many subsequent studies and assessments of cyberculture. If cyberculture is identified with a cultural formation that is actively involved in experimenting with electronic media and biotechnologies, cyberspace is where this limited formation is seen to intersect with contemporary culture at large. The experience of cyberspace, in fact, extends well beyond the concerns of subcultural formations, but it involves a more generalized

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relation to contemporary technologies of communication. When looking for example at the cultures of mobile telephony, PC and video games, computer-mediated communication, cyberspace allows one to go beyond the notion of an individual or social use of communication technologies. The concept of cyberspace, in fact, implies not so much the use of a technology but the emergence of a new spatial dimension – a groundless foundation of social experience.3 Indeed, geography as a discipline has been very concerned as a whole with this new type of spatial production, as especially evident in recent work on the network society and cyber-geography (Castells, 1996; Dodge and Kitchin, 2000). In relation to the study of cyberculture, then, different takes on cyberspace have produced different positions on contemporary culture. In different ways, for example, authors such as Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio have emphasized the destructive, almost nihilistic character of this kind of space. Whether understood as an effect of a radical new type of simulation or of speed, such space is seen to be characterized by the disappearance of reality altogether (which is either deterred from happening in a safe world made of ready-made models and repeatable commands; or which literally implodes as an effect of the collapse of distance). In this sense cyberspace is not seen only as less than real, but also as a threat to reality altogether.4 Baudrillard’s concept of simulation, for example, suggests that contemporary culture is a condition whereby the real is actively prevented from happening by a regime of signs, simulation, which codes it in advance (Baudrillard, 1995). The excessive semiotization of postmodern societies (of which electronic space is the ultimate expression) is thus identified with a deterrence of reality.5 Critics of postmodernism such as Fredric Jameson, however, have argued that the concept of cyberspace expresses a substantial contribution to any attempt to produce an adequate cognitive map of the postmodern condition. Writing in the mid-1980s, Jameson clearly perceived the importance of the spatial

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transformations undergone by late capitalist societies. He described postmodern culture as existing in a state of disorientation, a feeling actively generated by the evacuation by power into the world of computer networks and expressed in the hallucinatory buildings of postmodern architecture (Jameson, 1991). The study of cyberculture does often return to the theme of the ‘realness’ of cyberspace and the formations it supports. What is the status of online relationships and conversations – where the participants can only see each other through the mediation of screen and text? Where is the body in cyberspace, other than at the end of a screen or of a phone line? What is the relation between the online world of electronic communication and the offline world of increasingly segregated social spaces and rising levels of exploitation? Where some authors condemned this early cyberculture as an effort to actively escape the real into a solipsistic and unreal world, others have tried to understand cyberculture through other facets of postmodern theory. The relationship between the offline and online world, between what are often named the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’, has thus been the most recurrent theme in the study of cyberculture. Most research in the field has thus been concerned with reconstructing the specificity of cybercultural experiences. It thus attempts to map new modes of technological embodiment that reconfigure the phenomenological experience of the lived body (Stone, 1995; White, 2006).

THE QUESTION OF TECHNOLOGY If the study of cyberculture is informed by questions around the ontological relation between the human and the machine, the natural and the artificial, a key concern of new media studies is the causal relation between technology and society. Inasmuch as new media are always defined by some innovation in the technological means of reproduction and communication, then they also pose a more general question about the role of technology in social life. In many ways,

the emergence of ‘a new media system’ in the 1980s – with new media such as cable and satellite TV, the VCR, the Sony Walkman, and the camcorder – marks a recrudescence of a more general controversy in the study of the media as such. In the 1980s, the study of media and communications had split into at least three semi-autonomous fields of research often entertaining hostile or at least uneasy relationships with each other. These fields can be summarized as: mass communications research, more established in the USA, which focuses mostly on the study of media effects through empirical methods (McQuail, 1994); British cultural studies, focusing on the media as cultural technologies whose main function is the reproduction of social reality through the production and circulation of meanings and representations (see Hall, 1980); and political economy, which understands the economic relations of ownership and control in the media industry as the most fundamental dimension of media power (Golding and Murdoch, 1997; Herman and Chomsky, 2002). These main traditions do not obviously exhaust the range of work on the media as such, which have been taken as an object of study by almost all modern disciplines – from psychology to politics and sociology, from philosophy to the cognitive sciences. In this context, the study of new media has unsettled the consensus around an early dispute in media studies concerning the relationship between technology, culture and society. This consensus was shared across the three fields and emphasized the absolute primacy of cultural and social agency over technological determinations. All fields overall rejected the notion that media technologies have effects which cannot be ultimately reduced to the actions and interests of social and cultural actors. Such consensus emphasizes the power of social structures and human agency over technological determinism. This does not mean, of course, that the technological structure of the media is irrelevant to the purposes of social analysis. For example, the writings of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the post-World War II

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years had emphasized the role of the industrial organization of production in shaping the culture produced by the mass media industry. They argued that the modern mass media are an expression of an instrumental rationality – a mode of thinking where the natural world first, and human beings later, are turned into objects, that is means to an end. The Frankfurt School had understood media technologies as an expression of such rationality applied to human subjects through mechanical reproduction and communication – an extension of alienation from work to leisure time. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1997) In the 1960s, the popular work of Marshall McLuhan posed a less pessimistic view of this relation. McLuhan understood the media not so much as instruments of manipulation, but as ‘extensions of man’ (McLuhan, 1964). As extensions of man, the media express an active transformation of the relationship between space, time and perception. McLuhan dismissed mass communications research into media messages as irrelevant to understanding the true effects of the media. He suggested that what is important about different media is not what they say or what message they carry, but how they do it. He thus pointed out that there are substantial differences between the printed page and television, for example, which had very little to do with their content and much more to do with the modes of perception and the relationship of space and time that they instantiate. He thus saw the printed page as being characterized by a high degree of mechanical linearity that produced a specific type of social mind and culture – a culture of literacy and universalism, but also of uniformity and sensory deprivation. Television and other new media, on the other hand, favoured the emergence of a ‘lyricalassociative’ mind which could perceive patterns more clearly but was less inclined to abstract, linear thinking. A televisual culture, he also diagnosed, bore a different kind of universalism than a culture of print. On the one hand, it potentially disrupted the closed boundaries of national cultures and facilitated the emergence of a ‘global village’. On the other hand, it also retribalized the universal

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and stratified culture of modern media along new lines. Beyond such concrete examples, McLuhan proposed a method of cultural analysis of media technologies that saw them as producing almost subliminal effects inasmuch as such effects happen beneath the level of consciousness. Thus we may find our way of life altered by the use of technologies that we do not really fully understand. McLuhan suggested that the effects of media technologies can be observed and described albeit in a highly impressionistic way in order to undo the spell that they often cast on culture. McLuhan thought that these effects would be mostly visible at a time when ‘new technologies’ are still ‘new’, that is when the discontinuities that they introduce in culture are still perceivable and they haven’t really yet slipped into the background as pure perceptual and sensory habits (McLuhan, 1964). After years of semi-neglect, McLuhan’s work experienced a revival in the mid 1990s, when the cybercultural magazine Wired declared him its patron saint (Wolf, 1996). McLuhanesque themes could also be sensed across a range of popular accounts of new media which emphasized their revolutionary character and their essential capacity to bring about cultural and social change (Wark, 1999). This work could also draw on another strand of popular books on the information society and postindustrialism which attributed to new technologies a revolutionary role in changing the economy and hence society (see Bell, 1976; and Toffler, 1980). In the mid-1990s, much new media discourse combined McLuhan’s emphasis on the effects of media technologies and the postindustrial celebration of new technologies able to produce wealth while increasing individual freedom. New media thus became discursively associated with new technologies and both of them then with the notion of the free market (Dyson et al., 1994). McLuhan’s work, then, has both expanded our understanding of new dimensions of media power and also encouraged those approaches which tend to see technological innovation as the driving force of history.

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On the other hand, as an answer to such claims, many cultural theorists have returned to British theorist Raymond Williams’s critique of McLuhan in his book Television (Williams, 1990). In this book, Williams criticized McLuhan’s attribution of social agency to a technology. Williams read such attribution as an expression of a fatalistic technological determinism. In his analysis of television as a cultural technology, Williams argued that all its different stages, from that of innovation to that of social diffusion, could be seen to involve social and cultural forces that ultimately implied a human agency. At no stage of its development, Williams argued, can television be shown to exercise an independent and autonomous action – which is what he understood McLuhan to claim. Williams thus opened the way for the encounter of media studies and the social study of technology. Williams’s critique of McLuhan has thus been used by all those analyses that try to show that media technologies are only provisional outcomes in more complex social processes and that insist on how every use of a media technology is mediated by culture and society (Lister et al., 2003). Some critiques of Williams’s approach, however, have pointed out that such perspective does not really account for the role played by technologies as material assemblages or dispositifs. Williams, that is, seems to rely on a modern notion of agency which is located exclusively in the human and on a limited notion of causality, which he seems to limit to linear, one-directional mechanisms of cause and effect: The substantial argument, for example, behind Raymond Williams’ idea of what he calls ‘cultural science’ is that, since cause and effect explanations cannot be transferred from the effect of cue hitting billiard balls to matters of social change, or from science to history, the idea of ‘technological effect’ must be dropped altogether in favour of an account of social change that concentrates on the intentions and purposes of the groups who use technologies in the act of changing things. (Lister et al., 2003: p. 298)

According to the authors, this approach is ‘humanist’ because it locates agency

exclusively in human actions, ruling out the actions of anything else. While the culturalist perspective has been very useful in contesting the claims of those who would argue, for example, that there is a simple chain of cause and effect between watching a violent film or playing violent video-games and performing violent actions, it still appears inadequate as a whole. [T]he idea that human beings, who are after all equally physical as mental animals, are subject to no physical effects from phenomena they experience by way of the interaction between their senses and technologies, is as ludicrous and unsustainable as the idea that they are ‘caused’ to murder, maim and torture by viewing video-nasties. (Lister et al., 2003: p. 298)

According to such critique, we should reconsider the value of multiple, reversible and non-linear causalities (as in the cybernetic notion of the feedback loop) in overcoming some of the limitations inherent in seeing the human as the only source of agency ruling over an inanimate world. In this sense, more recent work in the sociology of science and technology, such as actor-network theory, has seemed to some to extend this understanding of agency to non-human actors without reproducing technological determinism (Law and Hassard, 1999). Following Michel Foucault, we can also understand technical machines as parts of larger social dispositifs which express mutations in the organization of power relations (Foucault, 1980, 1999b; Deleuze, 1986). An example of the challenge posed by the technological question to the study of new media is the technical organization of the Internet. Is the notoriously anarchic predisposition of Internet culture determined by its technical organization? Or is its technical organization determined by larger social and cultural factors? Is there something about this organization which expresses new mechanisms of power – that is new modes of domination and new possibilities of liberation? The technical organization of the Internet is strikingly innovative with relation to the modern mass media system (although it is far from lacking historical precedents

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such as in the postal system or in Citizen Band radio services). The Internet is often described as a distributed network. The difference between centralized, decentralized and distributed networks was first outlined by Paul Baran (and in a different way by Donald Davies) in 1964 in a paper written for the RAND corporation (Baran, 1964; see also Abbate, 2000). In this paper, Baran argued that networks can be categorized as centralized, decentralized and distributed. A centralized network is characterized by a centralization of command functions around a few nodes. For Baran, this concentration of command makes such networks vulnerable to attacks and takeovers. These dangers included, in the Cold War imaginary that drove early research into inter-networking, a possible nuclear attack, but we could also add that centralized networks are also more liable to being taken over by powerful economic and social actors. A decentralized network partially overcame some of this limitation by increasing the number of central nodes (as in satellite and cable television for example), but only a distributed network, where all nodes are potential broadcasters and all nodes can access all other nodes, is resilient enough to withstand possible attacks. Baran also demonstrated the feasibility of such a distributed network through the implementation of a communication protocol named ‘packet-switching’. In packetswitching messages are decomposed into packets or datagrams of equal size and sent off through a network of autonomous nodes and routers to find their particular destination. The model was first implemented in the ARPANET network, but it would become fully integrated into an inter-network architecture only in 1971. In 1974, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn proposed that a fully distributed network should also allow heterogeneous networks to communicate with each other seamlessly through a number of shared protocols (see Cerf and Kahn, 2001; Terranova, 2004). These principles have been supplemented by the success of hypertext protocols that underlie and organize the World Wide Web.

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Hypertext protocols define that organization of communication that allows for electronic documents to be connected transversally to each other through embedded links or ‘hyperlinks’.6 These features of the internetwork – radical delegation of command functions to decentralized nodes, layered structure, interoperability of heterogeneous components, associative indexing – were understood as inherently liberating by early Internet culture. One of the most popular statements about the Internet, in fact, is that it is constitutionally capable of resisting censorship by allowing information to multiply and spread nonlinearly. In this sense, it is claimed that Internet culture is radically informed by the value of ‘freedom of information’.7 Arguing against the temptation of technological determinism, other authors have also pointed out how such meanings and values were assembled within various cultures of use. They have thus pointed out the importance of the free exchange of knowledge in academic culture (Stallman, 2002); the influence of the 1960s libertarian counterculture on the technological milieu which produced personal computing and grassroots networking: and the 1980s doit-yourself punk ethos of the hacking milieu (Levy, 2001). On the other hand, we might say that the remarkable technical openness of internetworking technologies has facilitated the work of multiple chains of co-causality between culture and technology that have produced the Internet as a distinctive medium and culture.8 From this perspective, then, there is no single determination, but series of overlapping feedback loops linking symbolic, technical and social components in singular assemblages. Still this account of multiple, nonlinear co-causalities does not explain what is the relation between the technical organization of the Internet and larger transformations in the organization of power. In the next section, then, we will look at some of the critical connections between the technical structure of the Internet and larger transformations in the organization of civil society and capitalism.

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THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF NEW MEDIA: PUBLIC SPHERE OR COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE? The study of new media is open to research that investigates them as sites of ‘new’cultural and political potentials. The starting point in these studies is that the question of media and communication is key to social transformation in contemporary culture. The position of new media in this respect is strategic from at least two sides: on the one hand, inasmuch as they are ‘media’, they involve the problem of the strategic role played by communication in the reproduction of democratic societies and cultures. From another perspective, inasmuch as they are also ‘new technologies’, the study of new media also refers to the problems opened up by sociological analyses of the role played by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) within capitalist economies. The two larger questions of capitalism and democracy are thus central in organizing and shaping the questions asked of studies of new media. A key point of reference for the relation between new media and democracy is the debate that followed the introduction of the concept of the ‘public sphere’ by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Habermas, 1991). Starting from a phenomenological perspective, Habermas considers communicative action as key to the formation of social being inasmuch as it is the process by which conflicts and differences between partial interests can be mediated and transcended into a ‘public opinion’. In modern societies, the public sphere is the space of formation of public opinion. By ‘the public sphere’ we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body. . . . Citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion – that is with the guarantee of freedom of assembly and association and the freedom to express and

publish their opinions – about matters of general interest. (Habermas, 2001: p. 102)

As Habermas proceeds to argue, in a large public body the constitution of public opinion requires specific means for transmitting information – a function performed, in twentieth-century societies, by media such as newspapers, radio and television. However, for Habermas, this modern public sphere is quite different from its original expression – the bourgeois public sphere emerging around cafes and salons in late eighteenth-century Europe. The modern public sphere, in fact, is mass-mediated and is thus liable to interference by organized private interests who can thus distort the universality of communication and undermine the formation of a true public opinion. Habermas’s perplexity when faced with a modern, mass-mediated public sphere is reflected in the larger discourse of new media – when the latter are often opposed to modern media such as television. This opposition between old and new media is based on the notion that while old media such as TV are one-way, centralized and have mostly been monopolized by corporate interests, a new medium such as the Internet opens up new possibilities for the formation of a genuine public opinion. The notion of a ‘cyberdemocracy’, as proposed by Mark Poster, for example, starts from the idea that contemporary social relations seem to be devoid of a basic level of interactive practice which, in the past, was the matrix of democratizing politics . . . where is the public sphere, where is the place citizens interact to form opinions in relation to which public politics must be attuned? (Poster, 2001: pp. 263–264)

For Poster the Internet is not so much about the rebirth of the bourgeois public sphere in a purer (albeit paradoxically artificial) form, but about the formation of a postmodern public sphere. Unlike its modern equivalent, this new public sphere does not start from the notion of a preconstituted individual subject,

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but from a subject that fashions and refashions itself in speech. On the Internet, individuals construct their identities in relation to ongoing dialogues, not as acts of pure consciousness. . . . [The Internet connotes] a democratization of subject constitution because the acts of discourse are not limited to oneway address and are not constrained by the gender and ethnic traces inscribed in face-to-face communications. The ‘magic’ of the Internet is that it is a technology that puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms in the hands of all participants. (Poster, 2001: p. 267)9

From this perspective, the study of new media should emphasize and engage with those aspects of its culture that express a widening access to information and a more encompassing culture of debate and argumentation (civic networks, virtual social movements; blogging etc.). A question that needs to be answered, however, is what kind of structural transformation is entailed by this new expression of the public sphere. If the modern public sphere of the media system was structurally distinct from the bourgeois public sphere, what is the qualitative change introduced by new media? What new vocabulary or concepts need to be invented in order to do justice to some of its most innovative features? From this perspective, the studies of new media which have related them to structural transformations in late capitalist economies pose some other challenging questions. Inasmuch as the Internet or personal computers, for example, are technologies of consumption and production at the same time, they are also exposed to analyses that locate them within the evolution of capitalism (Dyer-Witheford, 1999). In particular, studies of new media have emphasized their connection to new modes of cultural production and new regimes of work (Ross, 2003; Terranova, 2004). In the work of sociologist Manuel Castell, for example, the Internet is a crucial expression of a larger socio-technical diagram ruling over the ongoing globalization of capital – the ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996).10 New media such as the personal computer and computer networks have also inspired

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theories that consider their implications for knowledge work. French anthropologist Pierre Levy, who was inspired by early computer pioneers such as Douglas Engelbart, argues that internetworking and computing allow for a new humanism, through the mobilization of technologies ‘that incorporate and enlarge the scope of self-knowledge and collective thought’. Thus for Levy, the technologies of the information age express a shift from a Cartesian model of thought based upon the singular idea of cogito (I think) to a collective or plural cogitamus (we think). What is collective intelligence? It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills. . . . The basis and goal of collective intelligence is the mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishised or hypostatized communities. (Levy, 2000: p. 13)11

An alternative perspective on the relation between internetworking and the transformations of capitalism is opened by the contemporary Marxist concept of ‘immaterial labor’. For Maurizio Lazzarato, immaterial labour refers to two different aspects of contemporary forms of labour. On the one hand, as regards the ‘informational content’ of the commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers’ labor processes . . . where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communication). On the other hand, as regards the activity that produces the ‘cultural content’ of the commodity, immaterial labor involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as ‘work’ – in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion. (Lazzarato, 1996: p. 133)

In this sense, the socio-technical diagram of the Internet can be considered as an expression of this larger mutation of work and its success can be related to the widespread social diffusion of such forms of labour – beyond those forms of waged work which can actually be described as ‘knowledge work’. On the other hand, far from being

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a simple expression of a new mode of production and work, the Internet has also been actively participating in the increasing interconnection and diversification of immaterial labour. The Internet highlights the existence of networks of immaterial labor and speeds up their accretion into a collective entity. The productive capacities of immaterial labor on the Internet encompass the work of writing/reading/managing and participating to mailing lists/websites/chatlines. These activities fall outside the concept of ’abstract labor’, which Marx defined as the provision of time for the production of value regardless of the useful qualities of the product. They witness an investment of desire into production of the kind cultural theorists have mainly theorized in relation to consumption. (Terranova, 2004: p. 84).

Finally the new technical possibilities for copying, distributing and accessing information opened by new media applications and platforms such as DVD, DViX, mp3 players, peer-to-peer networks and the like have also put at the centre of the debate the question of intellectual property and copyright (Lessig, 2003; Vaidhyanathan, 2003).

the many those who lack the means and are denied the rights to do so. Ten years after these claims, we are in a position to assess whether Castells had a point in warning against new media becoming another factor of social inequality. Figures point out that Western populations (in North America and Europe) are still disproportionately represented on the Internet, while a key continent such as Africa is still dramatically under represented when compared to its actual population.12 Still, the rates of growth of Internet access for Africa andAsia are still exponential, andAsian users are becoming a substantial presence in Internet global culture. Future research in new media and cyberculture will thus probably be confronted by what we might describe as a ‘polycentric’ Internet, characterized both by increasing heterogeneity of cultures and languages and increasing levels of interconnection and contact between different cultures.

NOTES FUTURE CHALLENGES: A POLYCENTRIC INTERNET? The study of new media and cyberculture is thus an extraordinarily rich field of research that touches on many aspects of contemporary culture. One of the most important challenges faced by such research at the moment of writing, however, is the increasing global diffusion of the Internet, which displaces the early hegemony of Western culture. In The Rise of the Network Society (1996), sociologist Manuel Castells outlined what he considered as the main challenge for the future development of a new medium such as the Internet. The danger, he argued, was that the world is going to be increasingly separated by a widening division between the connected few and the disconnected many – where by the few he identified those global elites who enjoy freedom of movement and access to global communication infrastructures and by

1 Another way to talk about the technology of new media and to avoid the tensions arising from allegations of technological determinism has been to focus on what we might call their morphogenetic principles – that is those structural features of new media which translate across a number of different applications giving them a kind of consistency and opening up aesthetic possibilities. In an influential book, for example, Lev Manovich has suggested that new media express the outcome of a historical process of convergence of two separate historical trajectories: computing and media technologies. This genealogy of new media sees them as a synthesis of modern media technologies (what we might call analogue media) and computation. Using ‘the theory and history of cinema as the key conceptual lens through which [to] look at new media’, Manovich proposes a method that he calls ‘digital materialism’. ‘Rather than imposing some a priori theory from above, I build a theory of new media from the ground up. I scrutinize the principles of computer hardware and software and the operations involved in creating cultural objects on a computer to uncover a new cultural logic at work’ (Manovich, 2001: p. 10). For Manovich, both the concept of digitization and interactivity appear too general and not really able to

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express the specificity of new media. As an alternative, he proposes a series of principles of new media which define the cultural logic of new media objects (such as numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding). 2 Of particular interest to cybercultural studies have also been the currents of cyberfeminism and afrofuturism – which formulated a cybercultural postidentity politics. On cyberfeminism as a cultural/social movement Reiche and Kuni (2004); on cyberfeminism as a perspective on the relation between women and digital technologies see Plant (1997); and Kember (2002). For different approaches to Afrofuturism see Eshun (1998); Nelson (2002); and Miller (2004). See also Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performative take on the ‘ethno-cyborg’ at http:// www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/egomez.html. 3 Thus William Bogard and Manuel De Landa (among others) have also emphasized the value of working at the conjunction of social science (or history) and science fiction, to produce social accounts of the present from the point of view of the future (see Bogard, 1996; and de Landa, 1991.) 4 For two different perspectives on cyberspace and simulation as a threat to the reality principle see Virilio (2000); and Robins (2000). 5 The set of issues raised by simulation are particularly important in theoretical attempts to understand the relation of videogame technologies, for example, with the cinematic apparatus in film theory (see Parisi and Terranova, 2001.) 6 The hyperlink was first theorized by Vannevar Bush in a seminal essay entitled ‘As we may think’ (1948) as a constituent element of a possible machine that he called ‘the memex’. A war scientist, Bush had come to wish for a machine able to store all kinds of documents in such a way that would make them easily accessible and modifiable. This machine would proceed by ‘associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing’ (Bush, 2001: p. 150). The hyperlink is a technical feature of new media with a wide range of applications, from videogames to digital television, and of course, especially the World Wide Web (see Berners-Lee, 1999.) This feature of new media has particularly interested literary scholars, who have looked at it as marking a further shift away from the power of the author to that of the reader which post-structuralist literary theory had already mapped. The distinction between ‘writerly’ and ‘readerly’ texts had already been introduced by Roland Barthes in a series of essays and books, although the most common references are to The Pleasure of the Text (1976); and to his most post-structuralist text S/Z (1990). On hypertext theory see Landow (1992); and for a different perspective Aarseth (1997).

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7 A key policy implication of new media thus lies in the area of copyright and intellectual property and the related theme of freedom of information. For an influential analysis of the questions raised by digitization and internetworking for intellectual property legislation and the future of culture see Lessig (2003). 8 Once again, we find here that this early Internet motif has been linked in the academic literature to post-structuralist philosophical concepts, such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s ‘rhizome’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988). The ‘rhizome’ is a term borrowed from botanics, where it describes a class of plants that grows horizontally, by offshoots, rather than vertically, like a tree. Deleuze and Guattari borrowed this term as a way to describe what they called the ‘other side’ of structure and organization. Starting from the notion of the assemblage, they saw each assemblage as entailing two sides: an organized, structured side made of points and positions, segments and strata, giving rise to binary oppositions such as subject and object and best described by the figure of the tree; and another side, a rhizomatic one, which is defined by the line of flight, by movements of deterritorialization and destratification, by the ceaseless arising of omnilateral connections which change its nature as it expands. The rhizome is thus a figure of multiplicity, a concept that, for Deleuze, had always constituted a challenge for Western metaphysics inasmuch as the latter has been unable to think the multiple as such (see Deleuze, 1994). The appeal of Deleuze and Guattari to theorists of interconnectivity is related to their list of ‘certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome’ such as: principles of connection and heterogeneity (any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other and must be); the principle of multiplicity without unity; the principle of a signifying rupture (‘a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines’) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: pp. 7/11). 9 Poster acknowledges his conceptual debt to Nancy Fraser’s discussion of the public sphere in her seminal text ‘Rethinking the public sphere’ (1990); and to Negt and Kluge (1993). 10 Manuel Castells (1996). 11 The concept of ‘collective intelligence’ also refers back to the controversial notion of a ‘noosphere’, derived from authors such as Vladimir I. Vernadsky (1863–1945) and Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). For these authors, the ‘noosphere’ is literally composed of all the interacting minds on earth (as the ‘biosphere’ is composed of all living organisms). See Vernadsky (1988): and de Chardin (1976). The idea that the Internet allows for the materialization of a collective intelligence departs from the idea that communication is essentially an intentional action performed by social actors for the purposes of achieving understanding. Its conception

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of communication is closer to that emphasized by cyberneticians and anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson who emphasized the limits of conceptualizing the individual self as the basis of the process of thinking: ‘Cybernetics would . . . recognize that the “self” as ordinarily understood is only a small part of a much larger trial-and-error system which does the thinking, acting, and deciding. This system includes all the informational pathways, which are relevant at any given moment to any given decision. The “self” is a false reification of an improperly delimited part of this much larger field of interlocking processes. Cybernetics also recognizes that two or more persons – any group of persons – may together form such a thinking-and-acting system’ (Bateson, 2000: p. 331/332). 12 For constantly updated data on Internet user statistics see Internet World Stats: Usage and Population Statistics (http://www.internetworldstats.com/ stats.htm).

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Parisi, L. (2004) Abstract Sex; Philosophy, BioTechnology and the Mutations of Desire. London: Continuum Press. Parisi, L. and Terranova, T. (2001) ‘A matter of affect: digital images and the cybernetic rewiring of vision’, Parallax, 21: 122–127. Plant, S. (1997) Zeros + Ones. Digital Women and the New Technoculture. London: Fourth Estate. Poster, M. (2001) ‘Cyberdemocracy: the internet and the public sphere’, in D. Trend (ed.), Reading Digital Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 263–264. Reiche, C. and Kuni, V. (eds) (2004) Cyberfeminism: Next Protocols. Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia. Rheingold, H. (2000) The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Robins, K. (2000) ‘Cyberspace or the world we live in’, in D. Bell and B.M. Kennedy (eds), The Cyberculture Reader. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 77–95. Ross, A. (2000) ‘Hacking away at the counterculture’, in D. Bell and B.M. Kennedy (eds), The Cybercultures Reader. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 254–267. Ross, A. (2003) No Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs. New York: Basic Books. Royas, R. and Hashagen, U. (eds) (2002) The First Computers: History and Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smith, M. (ed.) (2005) Stelarc; The Monograph. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Sobchack, V. (1993) ‘New age mutant Ninja hackers: reading Mondo 2000’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 92(4): 569–584. Springer, C. (1996) Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desires in the Postindustrial Age. Austin: University of Texas Press. Stallman, R.M. (2002) in Joshua Gay (ed.), Free Culture, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman. Boston, Massachusetts: GNU Press. Sterling, B. (ed.) (1988) Mirrorshades; The Cyberpunk Anthology. New York: Ace Books. Stone, R.A. (1995) The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Terranova, T. (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press. Toffler, A. (1980) The Third Wave. London: Collins. Tumbler, H. and Prentoulis, M. (2003) ‘Journalists under fire: subcultures, objectivity and emotional literacy’, in D.K. Thussu and D. Freedman (eds), War and the Media. London: Sage, pp. 215–230. Turkle, S. (1995) Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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Vaidhyanathan, S. (2003) Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity. New York: New York University Press. Vernadsky, V.I. (1988) The Biosphere: Complete Annotated Edition. Springer. Virilio, P. (1989) War and Cinema. New York: Verso. Virilio, P. (2000) The Information Bomb. New York: Verso. Wark, M. (1999) ‘Whatcha doin’, Marshall McLuhan?’ Posted to nettime, 21 Nov (http://amsterdam.

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nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-1-9911/msg00117. html). White, M. (2006) The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Wiener, N. (1989) The Human Use of Human Beings; Cybernetics and Society. London: Free Association Books. Williams, R. (1990) Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge. Wolf, G. (1996) ‘The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool’, Wired, 4.01.

PART III

Research Theory and Practice

The chapters gathered in this final part of the book move from the descriptions of current methodologies associated with particular disciplinary or interdisciplinary traditions of inquiry that are considered in Part I to critical reflections on the theory-practice nexus. We understand this in its broadest sense as concerning the relations between the theoretical, methodological, ethical and political issues associated with different traditions of cultural research. Given this, we have avoided the temptation to organize this part of the book on the model of a methods manual ranging across all of the methods that might be drawn on for the purposes of cultural analysis to focus on areas of debate and practice where the theory-practice nexus has been the source of the sharpest political contention. This has meant a bias towards the methodological traditions of the social and human sciences, bringing together the issues posed by text-based methodologies in the context of the reframing of these that is offered by the broader category of discourse analysis. While recognizing that the currency of ethnography is now a broad one, informing current research practices in sociology and cultural studies where it tends to merge with the broader category of ‘qualitative methods’,

Johannes Fabian and Vincent de Rooij focus their attention on debates concerning the role of ethnographic practice within anthropology. Beginning with a thumbnail sketch of the history of ethnography as a category and as practice, they question the force of the distinctions through which the fieldwork phase of anthropology sought to separate itself from its pre-scientific history in the earlier observational methods and forms of writing associated with the exploratory travellers of the early modern period. They do, however, see the emergence of the anthropological concept of ‘field’ as an intelligible object of study as closely tied up with the transition from an earlier phase of exploration and conquest to one of colonization and administration. Their attention then moves to the reformulations of ethnographic practice associated with the wide range of influences derived from the linguistic and, more generally, the cultural turns – from Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism to Clifford Geertz’s interpretative paradigm of ‘thick description’ – that began to impact on anthropology from the 1960s onwards. Pinning their own colours to the mast of a language- and text-centred conception of anthropology, Fabian and de Rooij urge the need to move away from inherited conceptions of ethnography as a process of

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data-gathering and observation with a clear distinction between the subjects and objects of study in favour of its conception as an intersubjective communicative practice that is oriented towards understanding different ways of acting and doing things through processes of organized exchange. In their consideration of the use of recording technologies in ethnographic investigations, Fabian and Rooij, by including film and photography among these, endorse Sarah Pink’s view that visual media and technologies have always formed a part of the processes through which anthropological knowledge is produced. However, while looking in some detail at the uses of film and photography in the fieldwork phase of anthropology, Pink’s more distinctive concern is with the more recent, largely post-1960s, development of visual anthropology as a distinctive subfield within anthropology with its own organizational structures and journals and its own distinctive set of problems and debates. These include the study of the visual aspects of culture and social relationships, the nature of vision itself and its relationships to other forms of sensory experience, and the visual representation of anthropological research using audio-visual media ranging from film and photography through to installation art and multimedia. In discussing these Pink opts for a ‘visual communications’paradigm of visual anthropology that is similar, in its theoretical underpinnings and its endorsement of an approach to the conduct and ethics of ethnographic research founded on principles of dialogic reciprocity, to the position favoured by Fabian and de Rooij. This prepares the ground for a broader discussion of the relationships between visual anthropology and the impact of the ‘visual turn’ on other disciplines – visual sociology and visual geography, for example – and the status of visual knowledge considered in its relationships to both other forms of sensory experience and other modes of representation. ‘Go forth and quantify’ is Justin Lewis’s concluding advice to his readers, urging the need for cultural analysis to be more receptive

to statistical methods and procedures if it is to engage with the need for systematic typologies and probabilistic analysis that is now often the precondition for effective public and policy engagement with debates about the role of the media, or the consequences of changing patterns of cultural consumption and lifestyles. Yet he recognizes from the outset that he has some persuading to do in view of the range of negative attitudes towards statistical analysis that have been expressed within cultural studies and, indeed, that have a broader currency in the contention – once voiced by Adorno, but widely shared – that culture, by definition, necessarily exceeds all attempts to measure it. He therefore pays careful attention to the two main lines of argument that have been made against the use of statistics for the purposes of cultural analysis. To those who point to the entanglements of statistics with the exercise of particular forms of power, he shows how forms of power can also be organized and reproduced through the failure to accord adequate attention to the analysis and interpretation of statistical data. And to those who stress the constructed nature of statistical procedure he urges that they should not fall into the trap of the empiricist illusion in imagining that there are any ways of producing knowledge of which this would not be true. Drawing his examples from the analysis of the impact of media on audiences, the role of the media in orchestrating the terms of public debate over the invasion of Iraq, and sociological analyses of cultural consumption statistics, and considering both content analysis and the analysis of survey data, Lewis demonstrates that statistics can powerfully enrich cultural analysis providing that the ‘explanations it allows us are interpretative and without guarantees’ (671). Lilie Chouliaraki takes a broad approach to the topic of discourse, defining it as ‘the capacity of meaning-making resources to constitute social reality, forms of knowledge and identity within specific social contexts and power relations’ (674). As such she traces the roots of discourse analysis to the influence of the ‘linguistic turn’ on the social and

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human sciences, but distinguishing carefully between the influence of structuralist and post-structuralist linguistics, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the distinctive approaches to the role of language in making up social worlds that derive from the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work. In a related discussion she outlines and assesses the differences between the three different approaches to discourse that have most influenced the development of critical forms of cultural analysis: the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida’s project of deconstruction, and the traditions of discourse analysis deriving from the work of Michel Foucault. While by no means underestimating the significance of Habermas’s and Derrida’s approaches, she argues that they fail to provide a satisfactory basis for understanding the ways in which discursive practices are always tangled up in particular power relations, and sees the Foucauldian concept of discourse as better able to meet this need. This is particularly so, she argues, when it comes to the implications of contemporary conditions of technological mediation for the analysis of discursive practices. Exploring the conditions that need to be satisfied to take account of these, she sees considerable potential in Foucault’s concept of discourse when considered in the light of his account of modern forms of governmentality. In the final chapter Pepi Leistyna’s concern with cultural activism focuses on how the

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activity of theorizing can be used as a form of social practice that inspires people to not only read the world critically, but to also act within and upon it in the context of short- and long-term strategies directed at radical but achievable democratic change. In pursuing this concern he explores some of the ways in which research traditions orientated towards the study of culture have developed a theoretical and political dimension, leading to a variety of action-based research paradigms that are associated with contemporary forms of cultural activism. He is particularly concerned here with the links between cultural research and the new antiglobalization movements, stressing both what is new about these movements and what they have to learn from the relationships between theorizing and action that were developed in earlier forms of activism associated with trade unionism and anti-colonial struggles. For Leistyna, as for Chouliaraki, the development of new communications technologies, and of the Internet in particular, poses compelling questions for the ways in which the relations between theory and activism should now be considered. Opening up new possibilities for popular mobilization, as the Zapatistas showed to great effect, such new media also require more open, flexible and adaptable articulations of the relations between theory and activism, and between theorists and activists, than those associated with earlier modernist approaches to such questions.

29 Ethnography Johannes Fabian and Vincent de Rooij

When anthropologists are asked to contribute a chapter on ethnography to a Handbook for Cultural Analysis one expects them to do just that: deliver something that is ‘handy’, concise, and solid enough to be of practical use. We aspire to conciseness and solidity but we would have to be mindless or deceitful if we gave the impression that what anthropologists know about ethnography can be packaged for easy consumption by others. At the same time it is impossible to write about ethnography and ignore the currency or, one might argue, the rampant inflation of the term. Trying to cover ethnography ‘at large’ would be a hopeless undertaking (even if we disregard, as we shall, ‘qualitative research’, a frequent synonym for ethnography).1 In sum, the purpose of our contribution cannot be to add another piece to the treatment of ‘ethnography’ in numerous encyclopaedias and handbooks. While trying to be helpful to the readers of this handbook we work with the premise that an interdisciplinary readership cannot learn (much less, simply adopt) what anthropology already knows about ethnography. It can learn, however, from the experiences anthropology has made in developing its discourse and practices

called ethnography. We would like to provide an aid for re-inventing rather than ‘applying’ ethnographic methods and practices.

THE CURRENCY OF ETHNOGRAPHY In a manner of speaking, anthropologists who resented and feared the methodologization of fieldwork have often said that ethnography is an art,2 a pronouncement that combined a certain plausibility and charm with a lack of clear meaning. Calling what we do ‘an art’ can have conflicting connotations that are not easily reconciled (cf. Wolcott, 2005). Some may put the stress on extraordinary or distinctive craftsmanship that distinguishes the ethnographer from other researchers in the social sciences, while others may emphasize the creativity, imagination, even aesthetic sensibility of the ethnographer, of the kind that enables us to discern patterns and structures. Thinking and talking about ethnography as a skilful art (or artful skill) that had to be acquired in the field explains why until the 1980s it was quite hard to find books on ‘doing ethnography’. That was to change, however, when the so-called ‘post-modern’

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crisis hit anthropology in the 1980s. The heightened sensitivity to methodological and epistemological issues in ethnography and its spread to other disciplines stimulated the ‘Verselbstständigung’ of ethnography. Critical examination of ethnography as a genre of writing and as a set of methods and practices of doing fieldwork made ethnography more visible to researchers in other disciplines. Traditionally, ethnography was practiced by anthropologists and, to a lesser extent, by sociologists. Nowadays, however, ethnography has found its way to cultural studies, media studies and other disciplines within the humanities but also to psychology (see e.g. Suzuki et al., 2005) and even market research3 (see e.g. Mariampolski, 2005). Not surprisingly, these developments triggered a steady flow of publications on ethnography. Among these, textbooks introducing ‘ethnography’ as a method or style of research that could be taught to students represented a new genre in anthropological publications.4 These textbooks typically devote serious attention to problematic aspects of doing ethnography (ethical, political, epistemological, methodological) but some articulate a much more critical, reflexive approach to ethnography than others.5 Apart from textbooks, we have also seen the launch of specialized journals (e.g. Ethnography in 2000 and the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography in 1987 as a continuation of Urban Life) and the publication of a number of monumental, encyclopaedic works trying to cover all major topics in, and approaches to, ethnography, or qualitative research in general.6 What recent publications on ethnography clearly show is that ethnography is very much alive and kicking. Ethnographic approaches to social science research are blossoming in many different forms not in spite of but thanks to the breakdown of doing business as usual in the 1980s.7 Ethnography’s currency not only poses practical problems of coverage in this chapter, it raises theoretical questions when one thinks about conditions that made such popularity possible. Much as ethnography may have

been tied to travel it is not a practice one expects to travel well outside the context for which it was developed. For ethnography to migrate to other disciplines it has to be cut off from its historical moorings in anthropology. It must be cleansed, as it were, of its historicity. Incidentally, a similar argument can be made regarding the anthropological concept of culture (Handler, 1998). Another way to make this point might be to take ethnography’s currency as a phenomenon of circulation presupposing commodification; or as a transformation of its use value into exchange value. Perhaps ethnography has currency because it is currency. If so, what does it buy and what are the prospects and limits of these analogies (ethnography as merchandise and money) for gaining a critical perspective? And what happens when ethnography is adopted as mere method, as a form without a substance, in short, as a style? Does it then not come close to being just another accessory of ethno-chic? Arguably, ethnography was prepared for its present wide circulation already by certain habits within anthropology. More often than not the term came with the claim that its meaning ‘went without saying’; ethnographers did not have to show credentials beyond having had their training at a reputable institution and having conducted research while ‘having been there’, in the field.8

THE MANY MEANINGS OF ETHNOGRAPHY Undoubtedly, such tacit understanding of ethnography has been aided by the lack of a generally accepted definition even among those who may be expected to know what they are talking about when they use the term. Within anthropology it has multiple meanings (see Fabian, 1991b: ch. 11). Here is a (nonexhaustive and open) list apt to disabuse those who may still think currency is equal to understanding or transparency: An ethnography may be the descriptive treatment (its literary form was called a monograph) of (1) a social, political or

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geographical unit (a clan, tribe, kingdom or a village, town, region), or (2) of an accepted topic (for example, kinship, ritual, art, mode of production and so forth), or (3) of a topos (primitivity, authenticity, orality). It also has been customary (4) to oppose ethnography (without an article) to theory. Ethnography then becomes a synonym for fieldwork or empirical research. A similar opposition has been operative when (6) ethnography was contrasted with ethnology. In both cases, this implies a hierarchical relation, analogous to that between data and analysis. The judgement that a dissertation was ‘just ethnography’could be fatal and even being considered a ‘good ethnographer’ could be a double-edged compliment implying an unspoken ‘but’ hinted at a lack of theoretical sophistication. Still within anthropology, revisions of research practices tied to circumscribed territories (the ‘fields’ in field research) have resulted in (7) pleas for reorientation such as ‘new ethnography’ in the 1960s and ‘multisited ethnography’ in recent years. If this is confusing, matters get worse when adjectival uses are considered. One of the strangest is (8) the phrase ‘ethnographic writing’ that comes easy only to those who don’t remember that ‘writing’ is already encoded in -graphy. And then there are (9) ethnographic objects, ethnographic collections and museums. Are they things and institutions that write? And what about (10) ‘ethnographic method’? As opposed exactly to what? Examples of more recent, often critical adjectival uses are found in (11) ‘ethnographic (or the ethnographer’s) authority’ or the ‘ethnographic gaze’. The semantics of ethnography/ethnographic is such a disorderly domain because it is the outcome of a history of uses. Not logical consistency alone but historical knowledge – perhaps one should say: consciousness of ethnography’s historicity – is needed if we seek a critical understanding, one that could promote ethnographic approaches in other disciplines without being oblivious of the mortgage they carry. While some of this history is common knowledge, much of it is rather arcane, and all of it too much even to

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attempt a comprehensive summary. Certain recent findings, however, can give a focus to what we called historicity and this will be helpful further on. At issue is the legitimacy of ethnography. Our premise is that this is by no means only a matter of demonstrating the effectiveness of a method. The point needs to be made precisely because one may assume that method is the primary connotation in interdisciplinary invocations of ethnography. Questioning ethnography not only pertains to the ‘how’, the manner in which knowledge is produced, but also to the ‘what’, the kind of knowledge one seeks, and the ‘what for’, the purpose such knowledge is made to serve. How, what and what for are intrinsically connected: buying into ethnography means buying into anthropology and its historical burdens.

A BRIEF HISTORY Knowledge of other peoples by description (the literal and seemingly neutral gloss for ethnography) has been produced for millennia and some early examples – Herodotus’s Histories is usually cited – continue to serve as a foil for critical treatments that are relevant for our current understanding of ethnographic practices.9 The early modern roots of ethnography in methodologizations of travel and in ‘statistics’, that is, state-related uses of information gained from travel with a method, have been uncovered above all by Justin Stagl. His findings regarding the ars apodemica are not only historiographically important; the connections he demonstrates between Ramist philosophy, the transformations of literacy due to the rise of print media and the politics and policies of nation-states also show the historical depth of many of the theoretical questions that are currently debated.10 The history of the term ethnography itself is interesting and pertinent. To acquire its inflationary currency it had to be purged of ideological elements it had acquired in successive contexts of use. The greatest obstacle to learning the lessons from that history has probably been a sort of

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disciplinary amnesia. When anthropologists find it necessary to trace the origins of their own ethnographic practices they name Bronislaw Malinowski as their inventor or at least innovator and modernizer (see Stocking, 1983, 1992). This disciplinary lore has a certain plausibility and Malinowski was a seminal figure but in a consideration of the inter- or supra-disciplinary significance of ethnography it would be irresponsible simply to re-tell what, to insiders, has been a good story. To begin with, the claim put on ethnography as anthropology’s own invention, understandable as it may be, given the problems our modern founders had to establish their field as a distinctive scientific enterprise, is unwarranted. One may argue that revisions of history, again suggested by fairly recent findings, will not once and forever reveal the truth but only another story – yet it may be one that is more fascinating and critically more productive than repeating the Malinowski legend. Here is the gist of it: the term ‘ethnography’ was coined some time before 1783; methods (but also objects, institutions, publications) labelled ethnographic were attributed to the predecessors of both anthropology and folklore studies. By the middle of the nineteenth century, production of ethnographic knowledge was promoted in a context of Empire – at least two generations before the period that is usually the target of critique denouncing anthropology and ethnography as handmaidens of imperialismcolonialism. In the light of these findings the recent popularity of ethnography in studies that appear to invert the anthropological gaze from a non-Western, exotic, pre-modern Other to modern Western society turns out to be much less of a novelty than it once seemed.11 Important as it is to acknowledge that the self-image of modern (well, pre-postmodern) anthropology may have to be qualified as ahistorical, hence as mythical, historiographic revisions alone remain ‘theoretical’ unless and until the newly gained insights inform disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) practices. The more important its history becomes for a discipline – and that certainly goes for ethnography as a distinctive anthropological

practice – the greater the danger that the fashioning of identity comes to depend on blatant forgetting. That is why occasions to remember have a great critical potential, provided we have a reasonably clear idea of what is to be criticized. One target worthy of critique and reexamination is the line that most histories of anthropology have been drawing between exploratory expeditions and stationary field work or, more precisely, between their literary records: travelogues and monographs. As our grasp of both exploratory travel and field research improves the demarcation between the two becomes more understandable and less tenable at the same time. To insist on the scientific nature of ethnographic research has been part of our discipline’s professionalization; that differences between travel and field work were, to say the least, exaggerated and continuities ignored or forgotten is of more than antiquarian interest. Reading once again the accounts of our travelling predecessors (Fabian, 2000) can be of great help in our current efforts – more about them later – to overcome conceptions of ethnography whose purported scientific rigour we now recognize as deceptive and disappointing. Ethnographic work is unsettled and unsettling; that is something that we share with our ‘unreliable’ travelling ancestors no matter how vociferous we get when we proclaim precarious practices of collection or ‘participant observation’ as methods. When histories of anthropology insist on a break between exploratory travel and professional fieldwork as evidence for scientific progress this may have been wishful thinking. But that the territorial image implied in the notion of ‘field’ could become dominant did reflect real changes from exploration and conquest to colonization and administration. A lesson to learn from this ‘practical history’ of ethnography is that its practicality has not limited its uses as a method of gathering information but always also involved the construction – operations that ranged from identification to outright invention – of subjects of research; and that adds another reason to the argument that ethnography

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cannot be imported by cultural studies as a ‘neutral’ method.12 A reasonably complete story of continuities and breaks in our discipline must include developments that began (or became prominent) in the 1960s. They informed approaches to ethnography that many experienced as new and exciting during a period that lasted until they were forced into the background in the mid-1980s when anthropology was afflicted by its post-modern crisis. Keeping in mind that beginnings are usually diverse and inconspicuous it is nevertheless possible to distinguish two movements, both initiated in American anthropology. One, announcing itself as ‘new ethnography’, was, roughly, based on the Lockean assumption that culture as mankind’s distinctive way of relating to the world is, much like language, in terms of – and here this phrase had a literal meaning – systems of classification. A culture as a whole, but certainly specific domains of cultural knowledge, could be regarded, and recorded, like dictionaries, lexica of terms. The task of ethnography became to document cultural taxonomies whose logic and meaning could then be determined by formal semantic analysis. This approach had already been practised in studies of kinship systems (a preoccupation of anthropology going back to its modern origins in the nineteenth century). In the 1960s, it was above all the influence of structural linguistics and phonology that held the promise of scientific rigour in the midst of ethical and political debates that threatened the postcolonial survival of anthropology. The practical results were numerous studies of ethno-zoology, -botanics, -pharmacology, -astronomy, all of them presenting themselves as ‘ethnoscience’. Ever since, though often joining the trend from other directions, the prefix ethno- has been spreading like a conceptual fungus in labels such as ethnolinguistics, ethnomedicine, ethnomusicology, ethnohistory, ethnoarchaeology, ethnophilosophy and ethnomethodology. There is rhyme in this but not much reason. What ethnosubsumes (the pseudo-domain suggested by a common prefix) is neither logically consistent nor semantically meaningful; what

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ethno-distinguishes has to be determined in each case. Ethnoscience may have been a rather specialized and esoteric pursuit. The contrary was the case of a distinction it helped to propagate, the one of ‘emic vs. etic’ approaches in ethnography. It, too, was derived from structural linguistics (Pike, 1954), looked like a reasonable idea at first, and became immensely popular – runner-up, in this respect, to ‘participant observation’ or ‘paradigm shift’. In the end it generated more heat than light. The ‘emic vs. etic’contrast was a figure of speech built on an analogy with the distinction between phonemic analysis of the (limited number of) sounds that a given language combines to meaningful utterances vs. phonetic description of the physical characteristics of sounds. What made this distinction so attractive beyond its linguistic and anthropological applications was the promise it seemed to carry of ways to describe another culture from the inside in contrast to, but not in conflict, with description from the outside, that is, in terms that are scientifically justified but do not have to be meaningful within the culture described. This is not the place to demonstrate that the emic vs. etic distinction amounts to side-stepping theoretical problems (such as communication between cultures, or translation from one to another). Nevertheless, it undoubtedly contributed to the inflationary currency of ethnography as an epistemological panacea. Ethnoscience had entered the scene with a programmatic collection of papers in 1964 and so did the ‘ethnography of speaking’ associated above all with Dell Hymes.13 Both movements represented a ‘turn to language’ (one of several in the history of anthropology) taking opposite directions. While in the ‘New Ethnography’ concern with ethnography as a practice was eclipsed by fascination with (linguistic) formalism, ‘Ethnography of Speaking’ started with critique of formalism (in structural and soon also in generative linguistics) and approached language as speaking in social context. Speech events and communities of speech were the key concepts guiding the study of communicative practices

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by means of ethnography, also conceived as a communicative practice. Philosophically this movement was indebted to pragmatism; in social science theory it was closely related to George Herbert Mead’s symbolic interactionism in America and to the emerging critique of positivism in Europe, for instance in the work of Jürgen Habermas. Without denying the intellectual pleasure afforded by methods such as ‘componential analysis’ and the formal elegance of description produced by New Ethnography, it can, nevertheless, be said that initial excitement did not last. Perhaps this was to be expected from an approach taking pride in an ethnography that, to use a term made current by Clifford Geertz, was ‘experience-far’ in that its methodological strategy involved eliminating, at least ideally, interaction, communication and practical contexts. In contrast, the basic principles (more than the various forms it inevitably took when it underwent methodologization) of the Ethnography of Speaking continue to influence conceptions of ethnography as socially, historically and politically situated practice, such as the one we represent in this chapter. As if following the logic of levels of analysis in linguistics from sound to word to sentence to text, the ‘turns to language’ taken in New Ethnography and the Ethnography of Communication were eventually followed by the interpretive turn (‘hermeneutics’ appeared on anthropology’s horizon; see Rabinow and Sullivan, 1979) until the carousel came to a halt, for the time being, with a ‘literary turn’ (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; and Geertz, 1988).14 Was this reorientation of anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s, if not caused then accompanied by changes in ethnographic practice? One would wish to answer with a simple Yes or No. Neither would be correct. Ignoring the issue is not an option either because it would be strange to talk about ethnography in this handbook without addressing innovations in anthropology – movements towered over as well as haunted by Clifford Geertz – that probably did more than others to raise interest in ethnography

outside our discipline. So we will have a go at it, beginning with more questions and keeping the answers as short as possible. First, why distinguish between an interpretive and a literary turn, since interpretation and literature seem to be two sides of a coin? Because they were taken at different times, for different reasons, and with different goals. Hermeneutics was advocated as the appropriate approach to culture, now defined as an ‘ensemble of texts’. Texts also were the object of the literary turn, not so much as models of, or metaphors for, culture but as the representations of culture in the writings of ethnographers. Second, what did these movements do to reorient or advance ethnographic practices? The short answer is: not much. Both were essentially theoretical projects of reflection and critique; both came ‘after the fact’(Geertz, 1995); and, in both, ethnographic texts, in the literal sense to be discussed later, were spectacularly absent. But, as we know at least since Marx, no theory is only theory. Interpretive hermeneuts and critical (re)writers of culture undoubtedly contributed to the demise of the monograph as the once-authoritative genre and, since the monograph as a presentation of knowledge was always also a project for producing knowledge, a method of collecting information, the interpretive and literary turns did have, albeit indirectly, an impact on conceptions of ethnography. Calling the impact ‘indirect’ is here a statement of fact which may or may not be accurate. It is only fair to note that it also fits an argument: it is of the essence of (anthropological) interpretation that it cannot be directly translated into (ethnographic) method for the simple reason that interpretation, always contingent, historically situated, never complete or definitive, is not repeatable in the sense in which a procedure must be if it is to qualify as a method, strictly speaking. What we mean by methods, loosely speaking, is the reasoned and disciplined habits developed while toiling at making knowledge. As far as ethnography is concerned such habits ‘stick’ to the toilers and their tasks. Theories may travel easily; methods, as just defined, don’t.

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After this briefest possible account of ethnography’s history15 in anthropology we can now turn to a more systematic review, first, of the position that informs our treatment and, second, of epistemological themes and issues and the uses ethnography may have in the production of knowledge for intents and purposes that are not limited to those of anthropology.

2

ETHNOGRAPHY TODAY: TAKING A POSITION Following the editors’ invitation we attempt to formulate our contribution from a position. Ours is that of a language- and text-centred anthropology. We are confident that such an approach is not idiosyncratic; we are also aware, as the reader should be, that it is not generally accepted (and practised). Much of what we have to say remains a matter of controversy and debate.16 Theoretically, the communicative and pragmatic view of ethnography is indebted (at least) to two paradigm changes in cultural anthropology. The first one occurred when the idea of anthropology as ‘natural history’ and a positivist conception of ethnography as ‘observation’ (mitigated, but never really abandoned by adding ‘participant’) proved untenable and led to the demise of functionalism, functionalism-structuralism and structuralism as dominant theories. The second one came about when ‘culture’, the guiding concept that had established (cultural) anthropology as a discipline, came under attack as ‘culturalism’. Thought began to move from culture as a system of symbols to culture as practice. The reorientation17 of anthropology and ethnography that these changes entailed can be summarized as follows.

3

4

5 1 A first step responded to the need for new conceptions of, or foundations for, empirical research. If ethnographic research is inquiry into practices, conceptions of fieldwork as collecting ‘data’ had to be abandoned. Gaining access to practices (ways of acting, doing things), without

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which undertaking fieldwork would make no sense, is made possible through inter-acting with those we study. It was argued that a new kind of ethnographic objectivity could be built on communication, intersubjectivity, and language as the medium of both. In other words, the weight shifted from observing, collecting and participating to speaking and communicating. This epistemological stance was assumed with polemical fervour. During the decades that followed it was tempered and broadened, partly in response to theoretical advances but mainly due to experiences made in the course of translating language- and communication-centred projects into ethnographic practice.18 Among other things this meant that a classical requirement of fieldwork – the researcher’s participatory presence – could now be recast in the terms of an ‘ethnography of speaking’. The information to be had from the people studied becomes available through talking with them. ‘Learning their language’, the time-honoured first rule taught future fieldworkers, is no longer just a matter of acquiring a ‘tool’; it involves partaking in the communicative practices of a speech community. And since speaking is practiced in culturally defined speech events19 the distinction between means and ends, mastering a language and understanding a culture, disappears. ‘Linguistic competence’ becomes communicative competence. Given the aims of ethnography it is neither desirable nor possible to keep the form and content of communication separate. In this perspective, the task ‘collecting information or data’ becomes, above all, one of documenting communicative exchanges as (and when) they occur in speech events. Ethnographers have always taken ‘fieldnotes’ and kept logs and diaries. As soon as the technology became available they also made sound and visual recordings. Sound recordings transcribed and translated then become texts and the ‘spoken word and the work of interpretation’ (Tedlock, 1983) is the core task of a text-centred, interpretive anthropology, in a sense quite different from the procedure invoking text and interpretation in anthropology’s hermeneutic turn which we described earlier. The shift in emphasis from information to communication was followed by another one, this time to performance. It occurred when ethnographers realized that performances were not only objects of inquiry (they had always been studying them as feasts, rituals and the like) but also modes of knowledge. Much of culture

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does not come as information stored but as ideas and emotions performed. Put differently, much of what an ethnographer can learn does not come as answers to his or her questions but as events that he or she witnesses, participates in and actually stages. As Victor Turner put it (although he had a narrower view of performance than the one taken here) the ethnographer becomes an ‘ethno-dramaturg’. As a consequence ‘ethnography of’ can become ‘ethnography with’.20 Like communicative exchanges, cultural performances become documents by being recorded and eventually made available as texts for analysis and interpretation. 6 Finally, to conclude the list of shifts that contributed to the position taken here, we should mention one that may look, at first, like a curious return to anthropology’s beginnings: the rediscovery of objects. The difference is that we now come to recognize the importance of things, less as objects of collection, classification and display, than as material mediations of experience and communication. Speech events, performances and material objects may remain separate foci of inquiry but the tendency will be to include all of them in ethnography (for an example, see Fabian, 1996).

ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE MAKING OF KNOWLEDGE: QUESTIONS OF EPISTEMOLOGY Epistemology, the Kantian project laying ‘foundations’ of knowledge, as it were, once and forever may have a bad name in philosophy (Rorty, 1980). When, in this chapter, we nevertheless continue to point to epistemological issues we do this for practical reasons. We need to look at what we do as ethnographers. That includes ‘methods’ but also practices. All methods may be practices, but not all practices are methods (that elementary distinction alone should make us stop talking about participant observation as a method). Does simple thinking about methods and practices qualify as ‘reflexivity’ or maybe even as ‘theory’? This cannot be the case if we assume that we do whatever we do (as ethnographers) thinkingly (or at least with some degree of self-awareness). Thought becomes reflexive when we think

about what, and why, we think about what we do. Epistemology can then be conceived as public reflection on how we think we can legitimize, put up for critique and discussion, what we offer as knowledge based on ethnography. The ‘writing culture’ debate in anthropology, sometimes misunderstood and maligned as gratuitous breast-beating, has been an example of such public reflection. While it is impossible to cover all of the issues raised in recent years we can identify now some epistemological questions that should command the attention of those who consider taking ethnographic approaches in fields other than anthropology. First a remark on ethnography and alterity. Calling the ethnographer a ‘professional stranger’sounds plausible and may be more or less correct sociologically. Epistemologically, it falls short for two reasons. Being a stranger (except in the trivial sense in which everyone is a stranger outside his or her own community) is no longer a prerequisite for doing ethnography in practice. Theoretically, alterity (or whatever it is that makes us grapple with the notion of Otherness) is not to be equated with strangeness.21 The spectacular increase of ethnographic research anthropologists have been conducting in societies that may be considered their own (or of their own kind) certainly supports such a claim. A symptom of this development has been that the division of labour between ethnology/anthropology and folklore studies, firmly established as a distinction of academic disciplines in the nineteenth century, is now on the verge of disappearing. The researcher’s presence is the distinctive mark of ethnographic inquiry. Keeping this in mind we can now group topics that should be addressed around a number of time-honoured categories. As regards (movement in) space we just found that travel to foreign parts is no longer a predominant practice, let alone a requirement, of doing ethnography. Neither is settling in, and ‘covering’, a territory once called ‘the field’.22 Ever since direct imperial colonization ended and post-colonial schemes of development began to crumble, illusions of laboratory-like conditions among

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the primitives have been shattered. Like their predecessors, the explorers, anthropologists often find themselves on the road again. They follow ‘routes’ (Clifford, 1997) and speak of ethnography as ‘multi-sited’ (Marcus, 1995).23 Time, we have argued before, is at the heart of ethnography: above all, as an epistemological condition (without shared time, coevalness, communicative interaction would be impossible) but also as a pervasive constituent of all phases of ethnography, starting with the learning processes researchers go through (moments can be important, timing may be crucial, time is needed for conversations and performances) to the work of documentation, interpretation and representation that begins when fieldwork starts, though it may take years or decades to produce published results. A focus on time inevitably also leads us to consider the role of memory in ethnography, again in all its phases from recognizing others, to keeping notes and records, to producing ethnographic texts and ‘writing up’ our findings.24 Reflecting on presence and time leads us to consider person. Those whom we have kept calling our ‘informants’ are now recast as participants in the speech events that are at the core of communicative approaches; they are our interlocutors whose voice and (co)authorship in the work of ethnography must be recognized, not only in the customary acknowledgements we give them in our writings but also in our struggle with representing the dialogical nature of field research.25 In one sense, emphasis on dialogue took some attention away from the field worker as the sole agent, in another, it affirmed (inter)subjectivity in the making of ethnographic knowledge. There is no ethnography that is not also (auto)biography. As it was perhaps misguided to confuse recognition of dialogue with representing dialogue as a literary genre so it does not follow that acknowledging the ethnographer’s self as a ‘means of production’ should make us present our accounts as autobiographies (nor, to mention another topic of recent debate, is it required to represent the poetic

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elements of knowledge making by writing poetry). Neither criticism heaped on anthropologists as heroes or navel-starers nor warnings uttered against the dangers of subjectivism should keep us from pondering autobiography in ethnography. Above all, it makes us aware of internal connections between several seemingly disparate theoretical issues, all of them discussed as mediations of knowledge: the role of the body, hence of gender, hence of materiality, hence the rediscovery of the senses; hence also the appreciation of ethnography’s historicity.26 That ethnographers bring moral and political values, if not agendas, to their work has been realized and stated ad nauseam; we still have to understand more fully what it means that historicity is one of the conditions under which we produce knowledge. Recognizing historicity, for instance, may be one of the deeper reasons for yet another turn in anthropology, the one to history, usually, if it is not simply seen as a return to our discipline’s beginning, attributed to Marxist influences or the reception of historiographic methods.27

ETHNOGRAPHIC ‘DATA’: PRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS It is quite problematic to think and talk about doing ethnographic field research in terms of ‘collecting data’ since the ethnographic materials we work with are not simply out there to be recovered, a notion inherent in the Latin plural ‘data’, meaning literally ‘that which is given’. In fact, nothing is ‘given’ in ethnographic research. That is why it is more appropriate to talk about ethnographic ‘materials’ or ‘objects’ instead of ethnographic ‘data’. All research materials ethnographers work with are the product of communicative processes. Recordings of conversations (including interviews) are the products of communication with interlocutors in the field. Field notes28 made by the ethnographer are produced while being (inter)actively engaged with the field, and the same goes

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for photographs, video and film recordings. Even material objects (including written documents, either published or unpublished, but also movies and music on various information storage media circulating in the field) cannot be considered as simply given. Working with these objects, the ethnographer has to ask himself how, where and why he ‘collected’ them and also, crucially, how and by whom they were produced and consumed. Analysing them necessitates close interaction with people in the field or, when away from the field, making use of knowledge constructed in the field. In a non-trivial way, then, the ethnographer, even when he is physically removed from the place(s) where he did his research, is never really outside the field when analysing his research materials. Interpreting these materials, the ethnographer has to recontextualize them with the help of other materials and by invoking the voices of his interlocutors in the field. In this sense, interpretive analysis is always of an intertextual, performative and dialogical nature (Fabian, 1993; de Rooij, 1998). All ethnographic objects or materials have to be processed in some way before submitting them to analysis. This processing consists of selecting materials for further analysis and transforming documents from one form to another. Both activities can be considered processes of first-stage analysis. Selection is necessary because a typical ethnographic project produces enough materials to keep oneself busy for several lifetimes. One has to decide not only which objects but also which aspects of these objects will be analysed. In the case of recordings of conversations, for instance, one selects a certain number of conversations (or fragments thereof) relevant to one’s research questions that can be transcribed within the time frame one has set for this task. Selected fragments are then transcribed, or transformed from one medium to another. The process of transcription in turn entails many – often quite difficult – choices. Typically, one decides beforehand what, and what not to transcribe but during the transcription process one is constantly confronted with unexpected phenomena that may

force one to review and revise transcription conventions. It should be clear that transcribing is not a neutral process of transposing the spoken record to a written form. Researchers who attach great value to the function and meaning of language form will choose to transcribe phonetic variation, pauses and any number of prosodic (intonation and rhythm), paralinguistic (sighing, laughing, etc.) and non-verbal phenomena (e.g. gestures and finger-tapping). Many others will – often naively – be content with transcribing lexical form. While the latter may be justified for good reasons, one should always be aware of its (often concealed) theoretical motivations and its political implications (Bucholtz, 2000; Cook, 1990; Mishler, 1991; Ochs, 1979; Tedlock, 1983). Making phonetic variation invisible in the transcript by transforming non-standard speech into standard usage, for instance, not only precludes the possibility of investigating the meaning of style-shifting or code-switching but it can also be read as a normative statement implying that nonstandard speech is improper or deficient. Some researchers (e.g. Nelson, 2003) argue that the transcribed speech of their interlocutors should be ‘purged’ of ‘local accents, poor grammar or repeated stumbling (Nelson, 2003)’ because not doing so would be disrespectful to the speakers involved. Of course, this is turning things upside down: by ‘cleaning up’ the transcript, the transcriber implicitly aligns himself with those who attach negative social stereotypes to nonstandard usage and disfluencies. Showing speakers proper respect should be done by pointing out the situational meaningfulness of non-standard usage and conversational features such as disfluencies and inarticulateness on specific topics. Although transcription is a crucial stage in the analysis of ethnographic materials, it is, of course, only a first stage. After transcription29 of the selected recordings, the researcher is usually faced with several hundreds of pages of transcript. Reading through one’s transcripts and fieldnotes, one usually starts to index or code passages that are in some way

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interesting or intriguing. In the past,30 this was done by hand using index cards on which one wrote or typed passages that one deemed important, and by assigning a descriptive label or code to them. On each card, one wrote down the place of occurrence to be able to consult the context of the passage in a later stage of analysis. Other essential information, such as speaker’s name, type and topic(s) of the conversation from which the passage was taken, was also noted. One then started sorting these cards, making stacks of cards with identical or similar codes. The next step would be to make sense of how the passages in one stack of cards are interrelated and how the coded passages in different stacks are interrelated. Analysis of ethnographic materials often does not involve a strict indexing or coding procedure. Many researchers only select key texts or passages for further analysis without rigorously coding a corpus of text materials as is usual in the tradition of ‘grounded theory’ (see Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Glaser, 1998). Taking a rigorous coding approach to texts, one may easily lose sight of their interactive temporal nature and their (inter)textual and narrative structures. In text-centred anthropology, classical hermeneutic approaches or less classical discourse analytical methods of analysis are therefore more prominent than analysis based on rigorous coding.

TECHNOLOGY AND EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHIES Technologies of photographing, filming and audio recording have been used in ethnographic research from its early modern beginnings. Photography in particular was eagerly adopted as an ‘objective’, ‘scientific’ method of ‘data collection’. Limitations of early photography (in particular the necessity for long shutter times) contributed to the distancing and objectification of the ethnographic Other. With the development of more compact equipment, film and photography practices became more reflexive and experimental. Nowadays, filming and photographing are

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often done in direct collaboration and interaction with people in the field or take the form of visual auto-ethnography, in which the ethnographer’s experiences and emotions take centre stage.31 The extremely rapid development of the personal computer, which took off with the release of the Apple II in 1977 and the IBM PC in 1981, opened new and exciting possibilities in the analysis and presentation of ethnographic materials of a visual and textual nature. Video-editing software and software for qualitative data analysis32 have been brought to the researcher’s desktop and have become increasingly popular over the past two decades. The combined effect of powerful desktop computer software and the rise of the Internet in the 1990s has led many researchers to experiment with hypertext and hypermedia ethnography (see, for instance, Fabian, 2002a,b; Kersenboom, 1995; Mason and Dicks, 1999, 2001; Pink, 2003). Dozens of hypermedia projects are now accessible through the Internet.33 One of the main characteristics of such web presentations is that they offer the user multiple paths to explore the material. Traditional print publications are of a predominantly linear nature and ask the reader to go through the text from beginning to end.34 Traditional ways of presenting ethnographic work, such as print publications and exhibitions, will, and indeed are, increasingly accompanied by some form of presence on the Internet. One particular form of experimental ethnography not yet mentioned is, of course, the ethnography of the Internet35 and other new media technology such as mobile telephones. Studying people using these new media brings into sharp focus problematic issues and concepts in contemporary ethnography: identity, community, field, place and time. In ‘offline’ research settings, the ethnographer is always bodily present and, hence, always interactively engaged with his interlocutors. Being present in this way, one is able to acquire cultural knowledge not only through talk but also by witnessing and experiencing events through the bodily senses.

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In ethnographic research online, physical face-to-face contact with the people studied is missing. Acquiring cultural knowledge, building involvement with interlocutors and making oneself present to them can only be achieved through intensive, long-term linguistic interaction (Baym, 2000).

ETHICS Long-term involvement with interlocutors or participants in the field is perhaps the key to any sound ethics in ethnographic research. Working with people for extended periods means creating non-trivial social relations with them, getting to know them and showing them respect. A conscientious ethnographer will always do everything possible to avoid harming the interests of his interlocutors in the field, and try to make sure that participants will in some way appreciate or benefit from the results of his research. The researcher should explain his research plans to his interlocutors. As stated in the Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association (American Anthropological Association, 1998), she/he should also obtain informed consent from his or her interlocutors. Participants should be informed about the ways in which research materials will be used and should be asked whether and how they wish to be acknowledged. Obtaining informed consent is, therefore, often achieved in an informal manner. The Code of Ethics of the AAA explicitly recognizes this unique and complex nature of any ethnographic fieldwork and presents itself as ‘a framework, not an ironclad formula, for making decisions’ (AAA, 1998). Unfortunately, researchers in countries where projects have to be formally approved by ethics review boards will find it impossible to carry out fieldwork if they strictly adhere to formally imposed rules of ethical conduct based on procedures followed in clinical research.36 It is simply not possible or desirable to obtain advance informed consent from everyone one observes or talks to in the field. Ethical problems can only be satisfactorily addressed

reflexively in situ (cf. Guillemin and Gillam, 2004). We should take codes of ethics very seriously indeed but at the same time we have to come to terms with the fact that we have to make compromises with idealized ethical norms (Fine, 1993). In order not to inflict harm on participants, one will often have to decide not to use certain research materials or to hide the identity of participants in publications. The latter, we argue, should be avoided as much as possible because making participants’ identities invisible decontextualizes and objectifies research materials, a major problem in earlier ethnography which we have been trying to overcome in recent decades. Another undesirable effect of anonymizing participants or using pseudonyms is that this denies their contributions as well as their status as historical actors. More often than not, participants do not have access to, or lack the competences to read, publications based on their collaboration with researchers. Researchers should make it a point to make their publications accessible to participants. The Internet provides new opportunities to make research materials and published work available to lay audiences that do not have access to traditional scholarly resources. Publishing transcripts of field recordings (as well as other ethnographic materials, such as photographs and audiovisual recordings) on the Internet raises urgent questions of authorship and ownership (see the editorial statement Texts and Ownership on our website Language and Popular Culture in Africa). Since publishing through the Internet generates a form of circulation, reproduction and re-use that is more difficult to control than traditional types of publication, even greater care should be taken to ensure that participants will not be affected in a negative manner by publication. Publications may, of course, always have unforeseen undesirable effects but this risk can be minimized by relying on acquired deep cultural knowledge and sympathetic understandings of participants’ private and public interests. The main point we have tried to make here is that ethnography cannot and should

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not be seen as a universally applicable agreed-upon set of methods and practices. Making ethnographic knowledge requires sharing time and presence with interlocutors in the field. Depending on the ethnographer’s personality and competences, field conditions, social relations with one’s interlocutors in the field and research questions, every researcher makes his or her own reasoned choices in how this can be achieved. All too often, hit-and-run research typically consisting of one-time, highly structured interviews is passed off as ethnography. Doing ethnography is more than that. It entails deep, often prolonged, involvement with people through communicative presence and it calls for radical reflexivity in all stages of research. Anthropology shaped its identity as a discipline through practices of field research but it can no longer lay exclusive claims on ethnography. Excellent ethnographic work has been produced in other disciplines where researchers are facing challenges both similar to and different from those that anthropologists have been struggling with. It is up to them to come to terms with these challenges from their own disciplinary background.

NOTES 1 A look at just one publisher’s recent catalogue (Sage) shows how current ethnography is. Titles range from handbooks (Atkinson et al., 2001) to treatments of thematic approaches (Denzin, 2003) and no fewer than three specialized journals: Ethnography (Loic Wacquant and Paul Willis, eds), Field Methods (H. Russel Bernard, ed.), and Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (Robert D. Benford, ed.), not counting Qualitative Inquiry (Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln eds) and Qualitative Research (Paul Atkinson and Sara Delamont, eds). 2 Of course, ’art’ itself has been among the objects of anthropology ever since its modern beginnings, usually as evidence (displayed in museums) for cultural evolution or diffusion. There have been efforts to establish an anthropology of art in its own right. Most recently, ’ethnography as (an) art’ seems to have found its match in ’(contemporary) art as ethnography’, involving exchanges between ethnographers and artists, anthropologists and art theorists that should be of interest to cultural studies. An international conference on ‘Fieldworks: Dialogues

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between Art and Anthropology’, September 26–28, 2003, was organized by the University of East London and The Tate Modern (for more on this topic, see Coles, 2000; Marcus and Myers (eds) 1995; Moravánszky, 2002; Schneider, 1996). 3 Needless to say, the what, how and what for of doing ethnography in market research differ from what we are used to in the social sciences and the humanities. 4 Hammersley and Atkinson (1983) can be seen as a trendsetter here. Spradley’s The Ethnographic Interview (1979), and his Participant Observation (1980) should also be mentioned as key publications in the ’Verselbstständigung’ of ethnography. Spradley and McCurdy (1972) is one of the earliest systematic introductions to ethnographic research. Interestingly, two-thirds (155 pp.) of this book consist of brief ethnographies of people close at home. 5 See De Welde (2003) for a review of three textbooks on ethnography or fieldwork that typify these differences. 6 The most prominent among these include Atkinson et al. (eds) (2001); Bryman (ed.) (2001); Bryman and Burgess (eds) (1999); Denzin and Lincoln (eds) (1994, 2000, 2005). 7 A mix of worried and optimistic opinions (and everything in between) on the present and future state of ethnography is presented in Reflections at the Millennium’s Turn, two special issues of the journal Ethnography (1999, Volume 28, Nos 5 –6) edited by Donileen R. Loseke and Spencer E. Cahill. 8 An example of ethnography having become ‘tacit knowledge’ is Voget’s (1975) massive A History of Ethnology where the term is mentioned neither in the glossary nor in the index. On ‘the formation and breakup of ethnographic authority’ see Clifford’s essay (1988: ch. 1). 9 See Hartog (1980). In many histories of anthropology origins of ethnography are traced back to Herodotus and other Greek cosmographers. For a comprehensive treatment of these ancient sources see Müller, 1972. 10 Most of Stagl’s important essays are available, in English, in a collection published in 1995 (Stagl, 1995a). The classic work on Ramist philosophy is Ong (1958), a book that also influenced anthropologists, and ethnographers, in their discoveries of the epistemological significance of literacy in ‘writing culture’. 11 On the origins of the term see Stagl (1995a: ch. 6); his candidate for inventor is August Ludwig Schlözer of Göttingen. Stagl also traces the adjectival use of ethnographic as being indicative of an understanding of ethnography as method (Stagl, 1995a: p. 236). Several ethnographic works, thus designated, began to be published after the middle of the nineteenth century, culminating in the so-called Kronprinzenwerk, a monumental, richly illustrated, ethnographic survey of the Austro-Hungarian empire sponsored and actively directed by Crown Prince

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Rudolf (Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild; see Stagl (2002), and what looks like an English version of that essay (Stagl, 1998); also Zintzen, 2002). With his knack for uncovering piquant detail, Stagl points to an unsuspected connection between this thoroughly forgotten episode and modern anthropology. He reminds us that one of the many contributors to the ‘Kronprinzenwerk’ was Lucian Malinowski, Bronislaw’s father, suggesting that the son not only inherited the term ethnography but also the holistic approach to ethnographic description for which he later became famous as a protagonist of British functionalist anthropology (Stagl, 2002: p. 178; see also 1995b on ‘Malinowski as an Austrian’). 12 The practical nature of ethnography is documented in several of the volumes edited by George Stocking (for example 1984, 1991) and especially also in a wide-ranging collection of essays by Pels and Salemink (1999). 13 The two publications were Sturtevant (1964) and Gumperz and Hymes (eds) (1964). The ethnography of communication took off somewhat earlier with Hymes’s essay ‘The ethnography of speaking’ (Hymes, 1962). 14 Informed readers will probably miss yet another movement on our list: symbolic anthropology. An anthology/reader edited by Dolgin, Kemnitzer and Schneider (1977) was a valiant attempt to establish sub-disciplinary status for the ‘study of symbols and meanings’. It was motivated by and helped to deflect the onslaught of sociobiology and cultural materialism that anthropology experienced during those years. But the project was too hectic and diffuse to become consolidated, perhaps also because Clifford Geertz, who first made it into a key figure – after all he had favoured a ‘semiotic’ orientation – eventually decided to keep his distance from such a patently ad-hoc enterprise (Geertz, 2000: p. 17). 15 ‘Briefest possible’ is no exaggeration. We hope that our story is fair and helpful but we are painfully aware of the short-cuts and simplifications it contains, especially in the last section. Aware of the rules of the genre, we decided not to burden this handbook chapter with issues that were hardly touched on, such as the turn to language taken by F. Boas more than a century ago, with important consequences for the concept of culture and practices of ethnography. Nor did we give the ‘other’ Malinowski, the one who took a pragmatic approach to language (1935), the attention it deserved. The same goes for uses of anthropology found for semiotics (Lewis, 1992), semantics (Parkin [ed.], 1982) and the theory of metaphor (Sapir and Crocker, 1977). 16 For diverging positions in that debate compare Ellen (1984) with Atkinson (1990). 17 Stronger terms were used at the time. Dell Hymes edited a volume of essays calling for a ‘reinventing’ of anthropology (1974 [1972]); see

especially the contribution by Bob Scholte, who was closest to the position taken here. 18 For the initial statement see Fabian (1971), reprinted in 1991b: ch. 1, ‘updated’ in Fabian (1991a), reprinted in 2001: ch. 1. 19 Cultural definitions and rules of speaking are never absolutes but they may clash with those the ethnographer brings along (all ethnography calls for creative resolution of such conflicts). The greatest challenge may be posed when the people we study do not recognize the ‘interview’, by far the most popular research tool, as a culturally appropriate speech event (cf. Briggs, 1986). 20 Examples of performance-centred ethnography may be found in Fabian (1990), or Kratz (1994). There has been a steady growth, in quantity as well as in quality, of ethnographic accounts based on various kinds of performance (dance, theatre, music, story telling). 21 The phrase ’professional stranger’ comes from the title of Michael Agar’s ’informal’ introduction to ethnography (1980, see also 1986). More formal claims for the ’anthropologist as a stranger’ had been made earlier by I.C. Jarvie (1969) at a time when epistemological legitimations of anthropology were widely discussed. Quite likely inflationary use of talk about Otherness and inflationary recourse to ethnography are linked. In terms of the position we take, invoking an other is part of acknowledging intersubjectivity and coevalness as conditions of communicative ethnography. 22 Cf. the contributions in Amit (ed.) (2000). 23 Another change, too vast and diffuse to be treated here, should at least be mentioned and kept in mind by advocates of ethnography. Once generally accepted social definitions of objects of research had to be abandoned or modified (tribes and clans became problematic, even cults and movements) anthropology responded with notions such as networks and there are good arguments now for describing the social setting of what we study as organizations (sometimes quite literally as, for instance, in Born, 2004, an ethnographic study of the BBC), (urban) scenes, and arenas (of contestation). 24 Aspects of time in ethnographic communication and the role of memory are discussed in Fabian (1979), reprinted in 1991: ch. 5, 1999, reprinted in 2001: ch. 9, and an essay scheduled for publication (MS). Anthropologists have begun critically to examine one of their oldest habits, keeping ‘field notes’ (see, for example, Sanjek, 1990). 25 There has been much critical discussion of this aspect of fieldwork (Dwyer, 1977; Tedlock, 1979; Friedrich and Attinasi, 1995 as well as some generic experiments, for instance, Dwyer, 1982). 26 On autobiography and the ’rhetorics of selfmaking’ see Battaglia (1995) and Okely and Callaway (1992); on the ’senses’, Howes (ed.) (1991); Howes (2003); Stoller (1989, 2004); Stoller and Olkes (1986);

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Taussig (1993); on ’ecstatic’ aspects of ethnography, Fabian (2000); on issues of gender and sex in the field, Warren and Hackney (2000) and Markowitz and Ashkenazi (eds) (1999). 27 Two examples of works encompassing most of the issues raised in this and the preceding paragraph are Friedrich (1986) and Schrire (1995). 28 For more on fieldnotes in ethnographic research, see Emerson et al. (1995) and Sanjek (1990). 29 Language-centred ethnographers in particular will return to their recordings more than once and will revise their transcripts many times. 30 Nowadays, software for qualitative data analysis is often used for the procedure described here (see note 32). 31 The literature on visual ethnography is too vast to be summarized here. Critical readings include Pink (2001) and Ruby (2000). Good examples of experimental visual ethnographic studies are Bloustien and Baker (2003) and Pink (2003), both published in a special issue of the journal Social Analysis on Envisioning Visual Ethnography – Exploring the Meanings of the Visual in Research, edited by Bloustien (2003). 32 Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) offers great possibilities for building concordances, doing systematic data searches, data retrieval, and discovering patterns in large sets of ethnographic materials. However, novice users should realize that CAQDAS does not do the work of coding the data and interpreting patterns in the data, which is the true essence of qualitative analysis. A good starting point for more information on, and documentation of, CAQDAS is the homepage of the CAQDAS Networking Project at the University of Surrey: http://caqdas.soc.surrey. ac.uk/. Demo-versions of CAQDAS packages can be downloaded from the following websites: Qualis Research Associates http://www.qualisresearch.com/ (Ethnograph), QSR International http://www.qsr. com.au/ (Nvivo, N6), the ATLAS.ti website http:// www.atlasti.de/ and Scolari, the software division of Sage Publications, http://www.scolari.co.uk . For a comparison of these and other packages and how and why to use CAQDAS, see König s.a. (a,b). 33 Examples of such projects include our own website Language and Popular Culture in Africa http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/lpca/, Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America http:// ailla.dev.lib.utexas.edu/site/welcome.html, and Paul Wesch’s developing digital ethnography nekalimin. net http://www.mediacultures.net/nekalimin/ 34 It should be noted that also in print publications we have seen authors producing texts that lack straightforward ‘plot lines’, experimenting, for instance, with collage techniques (cf. Taussig, 1987). 35 For opposing views on how to study the use and meaning of the Internet, see Miller and Slater (2000), who stress the importance of studying onand offline worlds as an integrated whole, and Hine

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(2000), who presents an argument, more or less recanted in Hine (2004), for concentrating on the offline, ‘virtual’ world. A good overview of issues in the ethnography of the Internet is Wilson and Peterson (2002). Green (1999), is a fascinating discussion of problems of doing ethnographic research of virtual realities. 36 See Haggerty (2004), who gives a quite alarming account of the situation in Canada.

REFERENCES Agar, M.H. (1980) The Professional Stranger. An Informal Introduction to Ethnography. Homewood, IL: Dorsey. Agar, M.H. (1986) Speaking of Ethnography. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. American Anthropological Association. (1998). Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association. Retrieved May 14 2005 from http://www.aaanet. org/committees/ethics/ethcode.htm. Amit, V. (ed.) (2000) Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World. London: Routledge. Atkinson, P. (1990) The Ethnographic Imagination. Textual Constructions of Reality. London: Routledge. Atkinson, P., Coffey, A., Delamont, S., Lofland, J. and Lofland, L. (eds) (2001) Handbook of Ethnography. London: Sage. Auyero, J. (ed.) (2005) ‘Symposium on Loïc Wacquant’s “Body and Soul”’, Special Issue of Qualitative Sociology, 28(2). Battaglia, D. (ed.) (1995) Rhetorics of Self-Making. Berkeley: University of California Press. Baym, N.K. (2000) Tune in, Log on: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Bloustien, G. and Baker, S. (2003) ‘On not talking to strangers: researching the micro worlds of girls through visual auto-ethnographic practices’, Social Analysis, 47(3): 64–79. Born, G. (2004) Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC. London: Secker & Warburg. Briggs, C.L. (1986) Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Interview in Social Science Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bryman, A. (ed.) (2001) Ethnography (4 volumes). London: Sage. Bryman, A. and Burgess, R.G. (eds) (1999) Qualitative Research (4 volumes). London: Sage. Bucholtz, M. (2000) ‘The politics of transcription’, Journal of Pragmatics, 32(10): 1439–1465. Cassell, J. and Jacobs, S. (eds) (c.1987). Handbook on Ethical Issues in Anthropology, Special Publication

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of the American Anthropological Association, 23. Washington: American Anthropological Association. Available online at: http://www.aaanet.org/ committees/ethics/toc.htm. Clifford, J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, J. (1997) Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.E. (eds) (1986) Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coles, A. (2000) Site Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn. London: Black Dog Publishing. Cook, G. (1990) ‘Transcribing infinity: problems of context presentation’, Journal of Pragmatics, 14: 1–24. Denzin, N.K. (2003) Performance Ethnography. Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture. London: Sage. Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln, Y.S. (eds) (1994) The Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln, Y.S. (eds) (2000) The Handbook of Qualitative Research. 2nd edn. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln, Y.S. (eds) (2005) The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. 3rd edn. Thousand Oaks: Sage. De Welde, K. (2003) ‘The Brouhaha of ethnography: not for the fainthearted’ (Review Essay), Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 32(2): 233–244. Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild. (1886–1902) 24 vols. Vienna: K. K. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei. Dolgin, J.L., Kemnitzer, D.S. and Schneider, D.M. (eds) (1977) Symbolic Anthropology. A Reader in the Study of Symbols and Meanings. New York: Columbia University Press. Dwyer, K. (1977) ‘On the dialogic of fieldwork’, Dialectical Anthropology, 2: 143–151. Dwyer, K. (1982) Moroccan Dialogues. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ellen, R.F. (ed.) (1984) Ethnographic Research. A Guide to General Conduct. London: Academic Press. Emerson, R.M., Fretz, R.I. and Shaw, L.L. (1995) Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Fabian, J. (1971) ‘History, language and anthropology’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1: 19–47. Fabian, J. (1979) ‘Rule and process: thoughts on ethnography as communication’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 9: 1–26. Fabian, J. (1990) Power and Performance. Ethnographic Explorations through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater

in Shaba (Zaire). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Fabian, J. (1991a) ‘Ethnographic objectivity: from rigor to vigor’, Annals of Scholarship, 8: 381–408. Fabian, J. (1991b) Time and the Work of Anthropology: Critical Essays 1971–1991. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers. Fabian, J. (1993) ‘Keep listening: ethnography and reading’, in J. Boyarin (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 81–97. Fabian, J. (1994) ‘Ethnographic objectivity revisited: from rigor to vigor’, in A. Megill (ed.), Rethinking Objectivity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 81–108. Fabian, J. (1996) Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fabian, J. (1999) ‘Remembering the other: knowledge and recognition in the exploration of Central Africa’, Critical Inquiry, 26: 49–69. Fabian, J. (2000) Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fabian, J. (2001) Anthropology with an Attitude. Critical Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fabian, J. (2002a) ‘The times of the “Vocabulaire”: commentary on a conversation with Baba Ngoie Léon’, Journal of Language and Popular Culture in Africa 2(1). Retrieved June 28 2005 from http:// www2.fmg.uva.nl/lpca/jlpca/vol2/fabian.html. Fabian, J. (2002b) ‘virtual archives and ethnographic writing’, Current Anthropology, 43(5): 775–786. (MS) Ethnography and Memory. Contribution to a workshop on ‘Ethnographic Practice in the Present’, organized by Helena Wulff and George E. Marcus at the September 2004 conference of the Association of European Social Anthropologists in Vienna. Fine, G.A. (1993) ‘Ten lies of ethnography: moral dilemmas in field research’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 22(3): 267–294. Fischer, M.M.J. (1999) ‘Emergent forms of life: anthropologies of late or postmodernities’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 28: 455–478. Friedrich, P. (1986) The Princes of Naranja. An Essay in Anthrohistorical Method. Austin: University of Texas Press. Friedrich, P. and Attinasi, J. (1995) ‘Dialogic breakthrough: catalysis and synthesis in life-changing dialogue’, in D. Tedlock and B. Mannheim (eds), The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 33–53. Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

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Geertz, C. (1988) Works and Lives. The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Geertz, C. (1995) After the Fact. Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Geertz, C. (2000) Available Light. Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gille, Z. and Ó Riain, S. (2002) ‘Global ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 28: 271–295. Glaser, B.G. (1998) Doing Grounded Theory Analysis: Issues and Discussions. Mill Valley: Sociology Press. Glaser, B.G. and Strauss, A.L. (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine. Green, N. (1999) ‘Disrupting the field: virtual reality technologies and “multisited” ethnographic methods’, American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3): 409–421. Guillemin, M. and Gillam, L. (2004) ‘Ethics, reflexivity, and “ethically important moments” in research’, Qualitative Inquiry, 10(2): 261–280. Gumperz, J.J. and Hymes, D. (eds) (1964) ‘The ethnography of communication’, Washington DC: American Anthropological Society. Published as special issue of American Anthropologist, 66(6) Part 2. Gumperz, J.J. and Hymes, D.H. (eds) (1972). Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Haggerty, K.D. (2004) ‘Ethics creep: governing social science research in the name of ethics’, Qualitative Sociology, 27(4): 291–414. Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. (1983) Ethnography: Principles in Practice. London: Tavistock Publications. Handler, R. (1998) ‘Raymond Williams, George Stocking, and Fin-de-Siecle Anthropology’, Cultural Anthropology, 13: 447–463. Hartog, F. (1980) Le mirroir d’Herodote. Paris: Gallimard. Hine, C. (2000) Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage. Hine, C. (2004) ‘Social research methods and the Internet: a thematic review’, Sociological Research Online, 9(2). Retrieved May 14 2005 from http:// www.socresonline.org.uk/9/2/hine.html. Hollander, J.A. (2004) ‘The social contexts of focus groups’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 33(5): 602–637. Howes, D. (ed.) (1991) The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Howes, D. (2003) Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hymes, D. (1962) ‘The ethnography of speaking’, in T. Gladwin and W.C. Sturtevant (eds), Anthropology

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and Human Behavior. Washington: Anthropological Society of Washington, pp. 13–53. Hymes, D. (ed.) (1974) Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Vintage Books. (1st edn, 1972.) Jarvie, I.C. (1969) ‘The problem of ethical integrity in participant observation’, Current Anthropology, 10(5): 505–508. Kersenboom, S. (1995) Word, Sound, Image: The Life of the Tamil Text. Oxford: Berg. König, T. (s.a. a) CAQDAS Comparison. Retrieved June 28 2005 from http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ mmethods/research/software/caqdas_comparison. html. König, T. (s.a. b) CAQDAS: A Primer. Retrieved June 28 2005 from http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ mmethods/research/software/caqdas_primer.html. Kratz, C.A. (1994) Affecting Performance. Meaning, Movement, and Experience in Okiek Women’s Initiation. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Language and Popular Culture in Africa (1999) Texts and Ownership, LPCA Editorial. Retrieved June 28 2005 from http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/lpca/ownership. html. Lewis, J.L. (1992) Ring of Liberation: Deceptive Discourse in Brazilian Capoeira. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Loseke, D.R. and Cahill, S.E. (eds) (1999) ‘Ethnography: reflections at the millennium’s turn’, Special double issue of Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 28(5–6). Malinowski, B. (1935) Coral Gardens and Their Magic. (2 vols.) London: Allen and Unwin. Marcus, G. (1995) ‘Ethnography of/in the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 95–117. Marcus, G.E. and Myers, F.R. (1995) The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mariampolski, H. (2005) Ethnography for Marketers: A Guide to Consumer Immersion. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Markowitz, F. and Ashkenazi, M. (eds) (1999) Sex, Sexuality, and the Anthropologist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mason, B. and Dicks, B. (1999) ‘The digital ethnographer’, Cybersociology, 6. Retrieved June 28 2005 from http://www.socio.demon.co.uk/ magazine/6/dicksmason.html. Mason, B. and Dicks, B. (2001) ‘Going beyond the code: the production of hypermedia ethnography’, Social Science Computer Review, 19(4): 445–457. Miller, D. and Slater, D. (2000) The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg.

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Mishler, E.G. (1991) ‘Representing discourse: the rhetoric of transcription’, Journal of Narrative and Life History, 1: 255–280. Moravánszky, A. (ed.) (2002) Das entfernte Dorf. Moderne Kunst und ethnischer Artefakt. Wien: Böhlau Verlag. Müller, K.E. (1972) Geschichte der antiken Ethnographie und ethnologischen Theorienbildung. Wiesbaden: Steiner. Nelson, S. (2003) ‘It’s I mean like uh disrespectful’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 1582 (March 28): 16. Norman, K. (2000) ‘Phoning the field: meanings of place and involvement in fieldwork “at home”’, in V. Amit (ed.), Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World. London: Routledge, pp. 120–146. Ochs, E. (1979) ‘Transcription as theory’, in E. Ochs and B. Schieffelin (eds), Developmental Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, pp. 43–72. Okely, J. and Callaway, H. (eds) (1992) ‘Anthropology and autobiography’, ASA Monographs 29. London: Routledge. Ong, W.J. (1958) Ramus. Method and the Decay of Dialogue. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parkin, D. (ed.) (1982) Semantic Anthropology. London: Academic Press. Pels, P. and Salemink, O. (eds) (1999) Colonial Subjects. Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Pike, K. (1954) Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior. Vol. 1. Glendale: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Pink, S. (2001) Doing Visual Ethnography. London: Sage. Pink, S. (2003) ‘Representing the sensory home: ethnographic experience and anthropological hypermedia’, Social Analysis, 47(3): 46–63. Rabinow, P. and Sullivan, W.M. (eds) (1979) Interpretive Social Science. A Reader. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rooij, V.A. de. (1998) ’Problems of (re-)contextualizing and interpreting variation in oral and written Shaba Swahili’, in M. Mahmoudian and L. Mondada (eds), Le travail du chercheur sur le terrain: Questionner les pratiques, les méthodes, les techniques de l’enquête (Cahiers de l’ILSL 10). Lausanne: Institut de Linguistique et des Sciences du Langage de l’Université de Lausanne, pp. 105–126. Rorty, R. (1980) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ruby, J. (2000) Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Sade-Beck, L. (2004) ‘Internet ethnography: online and offline’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 3(2), Article 4. Retrieved May 8 2005 from http://www.ualberta.ca/∼iiqm/backissues/3_2/pdf/ sadebeck.pdf. Sanjek, R. (ed.) (1990) Fieldnotes. The Makings of Anthropology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sapir, J.D. and Crocker, J.C. (eds) (1977) The Social Use of Metaphor. Essays on the Anthropology of Rhetoric. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schneider, A. (1996) ‘Uneasy relationships: contemporary artists and anthropology’, Material Culture 1: 183–210. Scholte, B. (1974) ‘Toward a critical and reflexive anthropology’, in D. Hymes (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Vintage Books, pp. 430–457. Schrire, C. (1995) Digging Through Darkness: Chronicles of an Archeologist. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Spradley, J.P. (1979) The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Spradley, J.P. (1980) Participant Observation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Spradley, J.P. and McCurdy, D.W. (1972) The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in a Complex Society. Chicago: Science Research Associates. Stagl, J. (1995a) A History of Curiosity. The Theory of Travel 1550–1800. Chur: Harwood. Stagl, J. (1995b) ‘War Malinowski Österreicher?’, in B. Rupp-Eisenreich (ed.), Kulturwissenschaft im Vielvölkerstaat. Zur Geschichte der Ethnologie und verwandter Gebiete in Österreich, ca. 1780–1918. Vienna: Böhlau, pp. 284–299. Stagl, J. (1998) ‘“The Kronprinzenwerk” – representing the multi-national state’, in B. Balla and A. Sterbling (eds), Ethnicity, Nation, Culture. Central and East European Perspectives. Hamburg: Krämer, pp. 17–30. Stagl, J. (2002) ‘Das “Kronprinzenwerk” – eine Darstellung des Vielvölkerreiches’, in Á. Moravánszky (ed.), Das entfernte Dorf. Moderne Kunst und ethnischer Artefakt. Vienna: Böhlau, pp. 169–182. Stocking, G.W. Jr. (ed.) (1983) Observers Observed. Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Stocking, G.W. Jr. (1984) Functionalism Historicized. Essays on British Social Anthropology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Stocking, G.W. Jr. (1991) Colonial Situations. Essays on the Conceptualization of Ethnographic Knowledge. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Stocking, G.W. Jr. (1992) The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Stoller, P. (1989) The Taste of Ethnographic Things. The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stoller, P. (2004) ‘Sensuous ethnography, African persuasions, and social knowledge’, Qualitative Inquiry, 10(6): 817–835. Stoller, P. and Olkes, C. (1986) ‘Bad sauce, good ethnography’, Cultural Anthropology, 1(3): 336–352. Sturtevant, W. (ed.) (1964) ‘Studies in ethnoscience’, American Anthropologist, 66(3) part 2. Suzuki, L.A., Ahluwalia, M.K., Mattis, J.S. and Quizon, C.A. (2005) ‘Ethnography in counseling psychology research: possibilities for application’, Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52(2): 206–214. Taussig, M. (1987) Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taussig, M. (1993) Mimesis and Alterity. A Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge. Tedlock, D. (1979) ‘The analogical tradition and the emergence of dialogical anthropology’, Journal of Anthropological Research, 35: 387–400. Tedlock, D. (1983) The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tedlock, D. (1999) ‘Poetry and ethnography: a dialogical approach’, Anthropology and Humanism, 24(2): 155–167. Van Den Hoonaard, W.C. and Schouten, J.W. (2004) ‘Review symposium: handbook of ethnography’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 33(4): 488–496. Voget, F.W. (1975) A History of Ethnology. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

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Wacquant, L. (2004) Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. New York: Oxford University Press. Warren, C.A.B. and Hackney, J.K. (2000) Gender Issues in Ethnography. 2nd edn. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Wilson, S.M. and Peterson, L.C. (2002) ‘The anthropology of online communities’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 31: 449–467. Wolcott, H.F. (2005) The Art of Fieldwork. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Zintzen, C. (2002) ‘Enzyklopädische Utopie: Ethnographie als Stiftung von Einheit im Diversen. Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild’, in Á. Moravánszky (ed.), Das entfernte Dorf. Moderne Kunst und ethnischer Artefakt. Vienna: Böhlau, pp. 183–205.

Selected journals Ethnography. L. Wacquant and P. Willis (eds), London: Sage International Journal of Qualitative Methods. http:// www.ualberta.ca/∼ijqm/english/engframeset.html J. Morse (ed.), Edmonton: University of Alberta. Field Methods. H. R. Bernard (ed.), London: Sage. Forum: Qualitative Social Research. http://www. qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs-eng.htm K. Mruck (ed.). Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. R.D. Benford (ed.), London: Sage. Qualitative Inquiry. N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (eds), London: Sage. Qualitative Research. P. Atkinson and S. Delamont (eds), London: Sage. Qualitative Sociology. J. Auyero (ed.), Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

30 Visual Anthropology1 Sarah Pink

Visual anthropology is a branch of social anthropology (cultural anthropology in the USA). However, more generally it is an international sub-discipline, the practitioners of which are spread globally. In the latter twentieth century their meeting points were through travel and attendance at international ethnographic film festivals. This is still an important part of the ‘culture’ of contemporary visual anthropology with festivals held regularly in the USA, Britain and across Europe, in France, Romania, Italy, Scandinavian countries and Germany to name but a few; although today work is often shared and networks activated electronically through email and on-line, CD-ROM and DVD exhibitions of visual practice and writing. The subdiscipline is also represented by its publications, networks and professional associations. These include the Society for Visual Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, the Visual Anthropology Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and the Commission on Visual Anthropology, as well as the journals Visual Anthropology and Visual Anthropology Review. This chapter examines historical and contemporary uses of the

visual in anthropological research, analysis and representation of culture, society and individual experience. Visual anthropology has an identifiable theoretical approach and its own ‘history’. Recent definitions have referred back to the ‘anthropology of visual communications’ approach established by Sol Worth in the 1970s. Set out by Ruby and Chalfen this approach stated: Visual anthropology should be conceptualized broadly enough to include, (1) the study of human nonlinguistic forms of communication which typically involves some visual technology for data collecting and analysis, (2) the study of visual products, such as films, as communicative activity and as a datum of culture amenable to ethnographic analysis, and (3) the use of visual media for the presentation of data and research findings – data and findings that otherwise remain verbally unrealized. (Ruby and Chalfen, 1974)

This definition continued to be reiterated throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, by Ruby himself, and notably by Morphy and Banks (1997: p. 6). To rephrase and expand this for the twentyfirst century I define visual anthropology as: (1) the use of audio-visual and digital

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media and technologies in the processes through which we produce anthropological knowledge, (2) the study of visible material and intangible visual aspects of culture and social relationships, (3) the study of vision itself and its relationship to other aspects of experience, (4) the visual representation of anthropological research using audiovisual media including film, photography, drawing, installation art and multimedia. During the 1970s and 1980s the journal Studies in Visual Communication and following this a series of other publications represented the three strands of Worth’s approach and many visual anthropologists share this vision of the sub-discipline. However the ‘public image’ (from within and outside anthropology) and dominant practice of visual anthropologists internationally throughout the twentieth century was the production of visual representations of ethnographic research in the form of ethnographic film, and less frequently photography. Morphy and Banks’ edited volume Rethinking Visual Anthropology (1997) marked a step away from the emphasis on ethnographic film to focus on instances of visual cultural forms in different contexts. This followed several publications that also outlined non-filmic practices in visual research and representation, including: Elizabeth Edwards’ (ed.) (1992) critical study of photographic practice during the colonial era; Lucien Taylor’s eclectic edited collection of articles from the journal Visual Anthropology Review (1994) covering a range of visual anthropology practices; and articles outlining the merits of photography as a research method, such as Heidi Larson’s (1988) discussion of learning through photography during fieldwork with Asian girls in London. More recent publications also emphasize this strand of Worth’s approach – the use of visual media as part of anthropological research methodology (Banks, 2001; Pink, 2001; Pink et al., 2004). These developments, discussed in the first and second sections, bring visual anthropology practice into

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line with its broader definition as the anthropology of visual communication. They also have implications for the contribution of visual anthropology to other disciplines and mainstream anthropology. Visual anthropology is usually characterized as a subdiscipline of social anthropology and will be treated as such for the main part of the discussion below. However, the question of whether visual anthropology should be a subdiscipline and the consequences of a shift towards its fuller integration into mainstream anthropology will be confronted in the third section. Finally the question of what vision actually is has been little discussed by visual anthropologists, although some anthropologists working outside the subdiscipline have approached this question. In the fourth section, which focuses on the limits of visual knowledge, I suggest this is an important question for visual anthropologists and should form part of visual anthropology’s agenda for the twenty-first century. The reason why this chapter takes visual anthropology as its main focus, and discusses cognate subdisciplines of visual sociology, visual cultural studies and visual strands in geography and education studies in more comparative terms, is two-fold. First visual anthropology is the more historically embedded of these subdisciplines, and it is often by appropriating key historical works in visual anthropology that other subdisciplines encounter their own starting points for both methodological developments and critical points of departure (Pink, 2006). Although visual sociology has developed in its own right with distinctively sociological methodologies, approaches and historical examples, it shares early reference points in the visual anthropology of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead (e.g. 1942) and John Collier (e.g. 1967). Other visual subdisciplines developed much later; indeed it was not until 2001 that Martin Lister and Liz Wells outlined a programme for visual cultural studies (Lister and Wells, 2001) and Gillian Rose, a geographer, published her own approach to visual methodology (see Rose, 2001).

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Below in the first section I examine how visual anthropology developed historically to demonstrate how the theoretical and methodological issues at the centre of visual anthropology and its cognate subdisciplines emerged during the twentieth century. In the second section I discuss the contemporary context of visual anthropology practice and the debates and issues that dominate it. In the third section I explore the interdisciplinary context visual anthropology is practised in to examine how methodological and theoretical principles from visual anthropology are employed in other disciplines from the social sciences to arts practice, how they depart from visual anthropology and what visual anthropologists might learn from this. In the fourth section I discuss the limits of visual knowledge through an exploration of two key issues. The first concerns the inability of (audio)visual texts to participate in existing written academic debates on the terms already established by the mainstream. I propose visual researchers thus need to develop new textual forms that work effectively in relation to mainstream anthropology. Second, I argue that visual scholars need to pay more attention to the question of what the visual and vision actually mean.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Rather than attempting the impossible task of recounting the complete history of visual anthropology what follows is a selective version of this history that comments on a series of projects, publications and debates that illustrate how the troubled relationship between visual and mainstream anthropology developed throughout the twentieth century. In Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920 (1992) Elizabeth Edwards and the contributors to her volume practise an anthropology of the visual to discuss the production, uses and meanings of photographs produced by colonial photographers and administrators. These photographs are of anthropological interest because they reveal the power relationships of colonialism

and how these were articulated and constituted visually through photographic conventions and the construction of systems of classification of the ‘other’ to form what has become known as the colonial archive. If they were considered anthropological in the sense of constituting an anthropological study in their own right it would be because they formed part of the anthropometrical tradition of the study of other peoples that informed the development of an early anthropology during that period. However, as the critique that forms the key narrative of Edwards’s volume demonstrates, such photography does not represent what is today considered to be an anthropological methodology. Nevertheless these colonial beginnings of visual methods for studying other cultures are important for several reasons: first, because much of what is now contemporary mainstream and visual anthropology developed as a response to and critique of the colonial origins of the discipline; and second, because anthropology’s colonial legacy has lingered in some inappropriate interdisciplinary critiques of both visual anthropology and the mainstream (see Pink, 2006). During this period initial British, Australian and US scientific anthropological uses of photography and film were also developing. In the USA Franz Boas used photography (and later film) throughout a range of projects from 1883 to 1930 (Jacknis, 1984: pp. 4–8). In Australia from 1894 Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen made innovative uses of photography and film in the participant observation of Australian Aboriginals, producing ‘photographs of ritual events as they occurred’, developing photographs in the field and using these for elicitation and filming un-staged events such as a fight and women arguing (Morphy, 1996: pp. 140–141). From Britain Alfred Cort Haddon and the team composing his Torres Straits expedition in 1989 produced photographs and film that have been extensively discussed (Long and Laughren, 1993). This work was inextricably linked to evolutionary paradigms that informed both early anthropology in the late nineteenth century and the colonial photography of

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the period. Anna Grimshaw describes how ‘Photographs of “types” or “specimens” played a prominent part in mid-nineteenth century anthropological debate, when questions of race were paramount. During this period the physical characteristics of people were taken to be indicators of their place in an evolutionary hierarchy’ (Grimshaw, 2001: p. 21). They sought to be objective and tended to be of individuals with little reference to cultural context, photographed in profile or facing the camera and in close up, and the photographs from the Torres Straits study followed these conventions (Grimshaw, 2001: p. 22). In contrast though, Grimshaw links Haddon’s use of film to ‘theatrical conventions’ in which the ‘camera remains fixed while the world is animated around it’, characterizing this as a ‘primitive cinema’ with ‘a marked emphasis on display or exhibition’ in which events seemed to have been staged for the camera (Grimshaw, 2001: pp. 22–23).2 Curiously, as Grimshaw (2001: p. 24) notes, these uses of film and photography seem to be contradictory and potentially mutually undermining. The former is staged and subjective, the latter is concerned with being scientific and objective. Indeed the use of film by Haddon, Spencer and Boas, as Griffiths (2002) shows, was regarded not only as raw research data but as material with commercial potential that was of interest to popular audiences. In fact, as I show below, the question of whether film or photography should be subject to measures that reinforced its subjectivity, or should use aesthetic and cinematic devices, was to be a key issue throughout the twentieth century. Although Haddon’s was the first British anthropological use of photography and film as part of a field trip, it is not usually considered to constitute a precursor of what is today defined as visual or mainstream anthropology. Most historians of anthropology locate the origins of what are now called social (in Britain) anthropology and cultural (in the USA) anthropology in the period just after World War I, influenced by the work of a set of four key scholars (see for example Eriksen and Nielsen, 2001) – Bronislaw

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Malinowski, Franz Boas, Marcell Mauss and A.R Radcliffe Brown.3 Of particular interest here are Malinowski, who is credited with the invention of the long-term fieldwork method which anthropology still to some degree clings to as its mark of distinctiveness in an interdisciplinary context, and Boas, who is seen as largely responsible for the development of relativism and the comparative method in anthropology, along with an emphasis on the importance of fieldwork. During this period the stress on relativism and cross-cultural comparison and cultural translation (an outright rejection of the evolutionary paradigm), the work of the lone individual fieldworker (in contrast to the large multidisciplinary research team that formed Haddon’s expeditions – see Long and Laughren, 1993) signified important departures from the ideas about cultural and racial difference that informed the early anthropology and the colonial project of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed both Malinowski and Boas used photography extensively in their research, Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands from 1915 to 1918 (Young, 1998), and Boas over a much longer period from 1883 to 1930, mainly amongst North American Indians (Jacknis, 1984). However, neither of their approaches were to lay the foundations of an anthropology that had a place for photography. Malinowski’s methodology was not compatible with photography because it was based in romanticism and relied on ‘the cultivation of human sensibility or passion’ which ‘involved the repudiation of technology, mechanical skill and the trappings of industrial civilization’that were part of photographic practice (Grimshaw, 2001: p. 54). Boas ‘regarded the visible world of material culture as playing a severely restricted role in anthropology’ (Jacknis, 1984: p. 33) because he had a ‘distinct distrust of the phenomenal state of the visual world captured by photographs’ (Jacknis, 1984: p. 44). The result was a mainstream anthropology where long-term participant observation would play a major role but in which photography would not play a major role. In the following years of the twentieth century anthropology was

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established as a scientific academic discipline while the appeal of photography gradually decreased. Although it was common for anthropologists to take a camera as part of their fieldwork kit, it was uncommon for British anthropologists to even include photographs in their monographs, let alone understand photography itself to be a research methodology.4 These early anthropologists also made use of film (as did Spencer in Australia [Dunlop, 1983]), producing footage of ceremonial and other activities. This film was not edited into documentaries but kept as an observational record. However, during the same period, in 1922, what has been heralded as the first ethnographic film, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, was released. Flaherty’s film, made collaboratively with Nanook, an Inuit, was effectively a reconstruction of aspects of Inuit traditional everyday life (such as fishing and igloobuilding). Although thoroughly researched during long periods of living with his film subjects, Flaherty was not an anthropologist. However, this film and some aspects of Flaherty’s style were to have a lasting influence on future ethnographic filmmakers intent on communicating the experience of living in another culture filmically. By the mid-twentieth century leading anthropologists of the day were engaged in establishing the identity of social anthropology as an objective theoretical science. In this context there were attempts to reconcile anthropological filmmaking and photography with such a project. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead’s Balinese Character (1942) was the first systematic anthropological photographic study of culture and an example of what, post-Malinowski, the fate of photography in anthropology was to become. When Balinese Character was published the scientific, comparative anthropological method, based on long-term participant observation, was well under way. There was usually little space for photography or filmmaking within this project, yet Bateson and Mead found room for both in their work in Bali. Balinese Character (1942) is a photographic

study of human behaviour as it can be understood, recorded and analysed through its visible manifestations, based on the idea that the Balinese ‘way of being . . . was reflected in the visible world that they created through their behaviour . . . and that aspects of that world could be sensed through photography in a way that it was impossible to convey through the written word alone’ (Morphy and Banks, 1997: pp. 10–11). The book consists of a series of photographic plates, each published with an accompanying text that explicates the theme developed photographically. Although the book was in many ways successful, and its influence in visual anthropology is lasting, it did not succeed in integrating Bateson’s and Mead’s photographic method more fully into the mainstream anthropological practices of its time. ‘Unfortunately, perhaps because they generated so much data they never completed the analyses that would have convincingly demonstrated the theoretical power of the method they were advocating’ (Morphy and Banks, 1997: pp. 10–11). This is ironic since the uses of photography Mead advocated conformed to the scientific approach to anthropology that she subscribed to throughout her career and that informed her personal campaign for the closer integration of visual methods into anthropological research. Mead believed a systematic and objective approach to anthropological photography and film could produce images that would be scientifically valid. To ensure this she recommended measures that would capture events as they happened and would reduce the possibility of photographer or filmmaker subjectivity – such as using fixed cameras on tripods and photographing at timed intervals (e.g. Mead, 1995 [1975]). However, until the publication of John Collier (Jnr.)’s (1967) text Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method there was relative silence about the role of photography in anthropological methodology as well as little published evidence of its practice until the launch of Studies in Visual Communication in the 1970s. Collier, similarly to Mead, proposed a visual methodology that fitted

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with the concerns of the anthropology of his era, in short the need to be objective, systematic and informed by the assumption that one could learn about culture through the visual recording of observable visible aspects of human action and behaviour. Although critiqued as a manual of ‘method and analysis working within a largely unmediated realist frame’ (Edwards, 1997: p. 53), we should recognize first, that this book was a product of its era, and second, as the only textbook in visual research methodology that was available throughout the twentieth century, that it had an important and lasting influence on the development of visual research methods in anthropology and its cognate disciplines during that period. Collier’s book was based on a wealth of first-hand experience of developing visual anthropology projects based largely in America.5 The history of ethnographic film is slightly different, in that it fared better than photography. Ethnographic film continued to be produced internationally, becoming the dominant strand of the emergent subdiscipline of visual anthropology. The favouring of ethnographic film created a subdiscipline, popular amongst some, but that was nevertheless rejected by elements of the anthropological academy. Ethnographic films were used in teaching; however, the main forum for their screening was the cycle of international ethnographic film festivals held across the USA and Europe. The idea of a scientific, objective and ‘truth’based anthropological cinema (especially as advocated by Heider, 1976) contributed to debates in ethnographic filmmaking in the second half of the twentieth century. This did not lead to the incorporation of ethnographic film into mainstream anthropology. Nor did it dictate the ethnographic film styles of the era, as during this period a series of distinctive styles emerged, some of which followed some aspects of the style set by Flaherty’s Nanook rather than scientific requirements. By the 1970s the range included the montage style of Robert Gardener (see Coover, 2003), the cinema verité of Jean Rouch, the observational cinema of the television broadcast genre

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developed in Britain by the Disappearing World (Granada Television) and Under the Sun (BBC television) series, and the reflexive filmmaking or observational cinema developed largely by David MacDougall from the 1970s onwards. The school of ethnographic filmmaking that survived and continues to have a lasting impact on mainstream anthropology is a reflexive observational cinema – what David MacDougall (1998) has called a collaborative and ‘participatory cinema’. This approach aims to communicate other peoples’ and the researcher’s own subjectivity audiovisually, rather than trying to visually represent an objective vision of culture as it is performed. The contemporary acceptability of observational cinema can be explained partly by changing approaches to anthropology that developed around the time of and as a response to the ‘crisis of representation’ of the 1980s, known sometimes as the ‘writing culture debate’ and led by the work of scholars such as James Clifford and George Marcus, and Lucien Tyler (see for example Clifford and Marcus, 1986). This body of work challenged many of the premises that underlie the anthropological project of the twentieth century. It emphasized amongst other things that the truth claims that were written into anthropological texts and ethnographic accounts of other people were a falsehood, substantiated by the textual constructions of ethnographic writing strategies. This called for a new approach to anthropological writing that recognized the impossibility of accessing and representing in written form other people’s realities as they were experienced and that made explicit the role of the anthropologist in the processes by which anthropology was researched and represented. This shift to a reflexive anthropology in which subjectivity was recognized as a key element at all stages of the anthropological process and a focus on the particular as opposed to the making of generalizing truth claims came into vogue, and opened a space in which previous arguments against ethnographic film on the basis of its subjectivity and specificity lost their

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validity. This new climate was a stark contrast to Heider’s (1976: p. 50) view that ‘the task of ethnography is to achieve a truthful and realistic description and analysis of cultural and social behaviour’, and her requirement that ethnographic film should also attempt to measure up to this goal in such a way that it would become an acceptable and useful anthropological enterprise. It created much more parity between the aims of mainstream anthropologists and the possibilities that were offered by ethnographic film. By 2001 not only was film more acceptable, but visual anthropology was taking a new turn and visual research methods were at the top of publishing agendas. Two significant texts sought to emphasize new agendas for both visual anthropology as a subdiscipline and ethnographic filmmaking – Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy’s (1997) Rethinking Visual Anthropology and David MacDougall’s (1998) Transcultural Cinema. Banks and Morphy shifted the emphasis away from ethnographic filmmaking as their contributors discussed a range of questions related to the visual aspects of culture and anthropological practice, including uses of photography (Edwards, 1997), television (Hughes-Freeland, 1997; Martinez, 1997), body painting (Dussart, 1997), gardens and visual culture (Hendry, 1997) and the anthropology of art (Thomas, 1997), as well as film (Grimshaw, 1997; Loizos, 1997; MacDougall, 1997). MacDougall (1998) proposed a role for ethnographic film that challenged mainstream anthropology through its capacity to represent the individual and to communicate transculturally through a focus on the commonalities rather than differences between people living in different cultural contexts. Visual ethnographic research methods were largely off the agenda for most of the twentieth century6 ; however, shortly afterwards, in 2001, two volumes that outlined the use of the visual as a method of ethnographic research and representation were published (Banks, 2001; Pink, 2001), completing the three-part agenda set by Worth three decades earlier and re-asserting the role of photography as a method of anthropological research and representation.

CONTEMPORARY THEORY AND PRACTICE Contemporary visual anthropology practice is diverse and practised in many contexts. In this section I draw out the most significant contemporary issues and debates in visual anthropology to explore the development of current theory and practice within the subdiscipline. Ever since visual anthropology has been established as a subdiscipline its proponents have argued that the visual should be integrated into mainstream anthropological practice. Suggestions about how this might be achieved took two opposing forms. On the one hand Heider (1976) and Mead (e.g. 1995 [1975]) argued that film and photography could support the scientific project of twentieth century anthropology by introducing measures that ensured objectivity. Later in a new theoretical and methodological climate MacDougall suggested that rather than ‘campaigning for the creation of a mature visual anthropology with its anthropological principles all in place’ we should turn to the rather different question of what ‘principles emerge when fieldworkers actually try to re-think anthropology through a visual medium’(MacDougall, 1997: p. 293). More fully in Transcultural Cinema (1998) MacDougall argues that visual anthropology, specifically ethnographic film, challenges the premises and practices of mainstream anthropology by bringing the individual, the particular and the reflexive process to the fore. As such (to summarize MacDougall’s argument) he suggests that ethnographic film, because it communicates transculturally by emphasizing the commonalities between individuals (rather than their cultural differences) and reveals the specific and particular, rather than the general, aspects of human experience, foils the generalizing and cross-culturally comparative project of mainstream written anthropology.An acceptance of the visual, and its ability to represent knowledge that cannot be expressed in written words, by the mainstream would thus constitute a new approach to anthropology. Similarly Grimshaw (2001)

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has argued for integration in terms of what visual anthropology might add to mainstream approaches; in her sense ‘the potential of a new visual anthropology lies not merely in the recognition of what is different in pursuing questions of ethnographic knowledge and understanding through an interrogation of the vision. It depends, too, on the reflexive use of such insights to expose critically other ways that we, as anthropologists, engage with the world’(Grimshaw, 2001: p. 173). These recent approaches imply that a visual approach to anthropology might challenge and transform the discipline for the better. However, as I outlined above, the discipline of anthropology has already undergone something of a transformation since the 1980s; ‘post-modern’ approaches to anthropological writing evidenced dissatisfaction with existing forms of representation in anthropology, MacDougall (1997: p. 288), invoking an academic climate where visual representation might be better received. At the beginning of the twenty-first century we are certainly entering a period where closer integration of visual and mainstream anthropology might be achieved. However, I do not see this as happening as a one-way flow in which either visual anthropology accommodates the demands of the mainstream in order to be accepted, or transformation of the mainstream through the challenge of the visual occurs. See this rather as a dialogic process whereby each accommodates the theoretical and practical demands and forms of knowledge of the other. A review of current ‘visual’ work by both those who consider themselves visual anthropologists and those who do not demonstrates changes in contemporary practice in both mainstream and visual anthropology, especially in the development of innovative methodologies that involve visual research and representation. Anthropologists who do not necessarily categorize themselves as visual anthropologists are making increasing use of visual media and methods. They have begun to ‘rethink anthropology through a visual medium’ (MacDougall, 1997: p. 293), but, I think, in a way that is compatible with and enhances

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the forms of reflexive and subjective anthropology they are already practising, rather than in a way that revolutionizes their approaches. The visual – both as an object of analysis and a research method – is becoming increasingly embedded in mainstream anthropological practice and theory. For example, not all of the contributors who write about visual anthropology methods in the Working Images volume (Pink et al., 2004) went to do their fieldwork as ‘visual anthropologists’. Gemma Orobitg (2004) came upon the use of visual methods accidentally during her fieldwork, first because she was asked by a television company to take some photographs to support their idea of producing a documentary film in the area of Venezuela she was working in, and second by asking her informants to draw their dreamland experiences for her so that she might better understand these. Ana Isabel Afonso (2004), who researches historical border relationships between villages on the Spanish-Portuguese frontier, collaborated with Manuel João Ramos, an anthropologist and illustrator, who produced drawings of the contraband activities and processes described by Afonso’s informants as part of a method of collaborative reconstruction (see Figure 30.1). Simultaneously some visual anthropologists are creating new texts that link more closely with the mainstream. An interesting example of a project that engages with the work of written anthropology is Jay Ruby’s Oak Park Stories. Ruby is representing his research about the Oak Park Community in the USA as a series of CD ROMs, the first of which, The Taylor Family, was completed in 2004. The Taylor Family presents a video portrait of one African-American family living in Oak Park, a community that has embraced racial and sexual diversity in an exemplary way. The portrait is based on Ruby’s interviews with the Taylors and inter-cut with their own contemporary and biographical family photographs which they discuss during the interview. However, this CD-ROM is not just a video project, it is divided into three main sections each with a set of subsections all accessible through the project’s navigation bar via

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Figure 30.1 This drawing, by Manuel João Ramos, represents how Afonso’s informants crossed the river using the ‘the rope engine’: it is based on informants’ descriptions and the drawings were modified according to their comments

drop-down menus. The other sections contain a variety of texts that range from written texts to slide shows and photo-essays. They cover theoretical, methodological, historical, policy and other contextualizing areas, thus linking this visual anthropology project to a series of key issues and debates that have been developed over the past years in written form (see Pink, 2006, for a full review of this work). In this sense Ruby’s project achieves what it I consider to be the key aim of a new visual anthropology (see Pink, 2006, for a full development of this argument): that is, a visual anthropology that can engage with and participate in mainstream academia (see Figure 30.2). Other leading visual anthropologists have argued for developments that achieve similar aims. Paul Henley (2004) argues that ethnographic film cannot stand alone to communicate anthropologically and David MacDougall (2000) has suggested that new forms of anthropological cinema working with digital video and beyond the constraints of television conventions can lead to the production of video texts that are closer to anthropological practice. Both also comment

on the potential of CD ROM and DVD for achieving this. These examples demonstrate how boundaries between visual and mainstream anthropology are becoming less sharply defined. One can practise visual anthropological methods of research and representation within projects led by questions and debates that contribute to mainstream anthropology. Likewise visual anthropologists are intent on producing projects that can participate in mainstream anthropology debates. The importance of these innovations is multiple. First the trend towards exploring hypermedia as a means of communicating visual knowledge to a mainstream audience signifies an alternative genre of representation to ethnographic film. The past two bi-annual Royal Anthropological (RAI) International Ethnographic Film Festivals7 have included new media sessions where visual anthropologists presented multimedia work on CD ROM or on-line. Second, the increased use of visual methods outside visual anthropology signifies a context where anthropologists are recognizing that the visual is an integral part of any fieldwork context, and often

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Figure 30.2 This page from Ruby’s CD ROM The Taylor Family shows the navigation system along the top of the page and the way he has combined written texts with photographs and slide shows to create an anthropological text that communicates using multiple media

this means that visual knowledge (tangible, material or invisible) and visual phenomena are better explored and represented through visual methodologies. Visual ethnographic practice is becoming more widespread across the discipline. Third, visual encounters during fieldwork imply a need to engage both practically and theoretically with the visual and its potential for communication and the construction of meaning. An anthropology of the visual is key to understanding how social relationships and cultural meanings are constituted and enacted. Above I emphasized how fieldworkers need to engage with the visual as part of the everyday practices of their informants. The anthropology of the visual was embedded in the ‘anthropology of visual communications approach’ outlined in the first section and has not been entirely absent since the mid twentieth century. For example, Richard Chalfen has focused on themes in what he

calls home media (Chalfen, 2002), ranging from family photography (Chalfen, 1988) to more recent work about Japanese displays of snapshot photographs in pet cemeteries (Chalfen, 2003). Other recent work has focused on a range of topics, from Chris Pinney’s Camera Indica (1997), an anthropological study of Indian photographic practice, to Edwards’ Raw Histories (2002), which examines historical photographs to analyse the roles of photography in articulating history, and Terence Wright’s (2004) critical analysis of the use of video footage in television media coverage of the Afghanistan refugee crisis. The examples discussed above demonstrate that three of the strands of visual anthropology practice as I defined them in the introduction to this chapter – visual anthropology as a research methodology, the anthropology of the visual and the visual representation of anthropological research – are thriving and

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developing in innovative forms. The question of ‘what is vision’ has been explored less and I shall return to this in the final section, where I discuss the limits of visual research. What, however, are the principles that underlie contemporary visual anthropology practice? In the first section I outlined how anthropology had shifted from a scientific discipline to one that recognizes subjectivity, the situatedness of knowledge and the invalidity of universal truth claims. Contemporary visual anthropology also subcribes to these ideas and in the following paragraphs I outline how they form key themes that guide its research methodology, understanding of images and methods of representation. Recent texts on visual ethnographic methodology emphasize themes of reflexivity, collaboration, ethics, the non-fixity of visual meanings and the relationship between content, social context and materiality of images. The idea of a visual ethnography stands for an ethnographic research process that recognizes the role of the visual in both the production of knowledge as a fieldwork methodology and within the culture and experience of the people being researched (thus it encompasses an ‘anthropology of the visual’ approach). The methods developed are broad (see Banks, 2001; Pink, 2001; Pink et al., 2004, for a wide coverage of these) and include photo-elicitation (using photographs in an interview context to evoke responses from informants), video recording, photographing and drawing representations of cultural events and activities or of interview or conversational situations with informants, ‘directed’ photography, video or drawing in which informants guide the anthropologist/image producer as regards the images that should be created, and asking informants to produce images themselves. Such research might involve a range of media and technologies from a pencil and paper to the most advanced digital video camera and laptop computer: very different from the scientific approaches to visual research developed in the last century and epitomized in the work of Mead (discussed in the first section). Fundamental to the approach that

informs these methods is the assumption that one cannot produce objective images, rather the anthropological value of these images is to be found in understanding how they are created and/or interpreted through our own and our informants’ subjectivity. Integral to this is a reflexive approach to understanding the production of anthropological meanings, which requires the researcher to maintain an awareness of the roles that she or he and the informants play in the production of knowledge; as such the research relationship is seen as an intersubjective relationship and the visual and other knowledge it generates is produced through that relationship. Within this it has been argued that for such research to be ethical it needs to be constructed as ‘collaborative’. Indeed it is hard to see how visual research of this nature could not be collaborative, since it is necessary to acquire both the consent and the cooperation of one’s informants in order to engage in it at all and, as Banks points out, ‘the researcher’s very presence amongst a group of people is the result of a series of social negotiations’ (2001: p. 119). This condition rules out covert visual research (of the kind that Emmison and Smith [2000] suggest) as unethical, and also signifies a move away from observational research towards participatory research. The emphasis on collaboration is applied not only to the process of doing the fieldwork but also to its representation. Here the benefits of continuing the dialogue between researcher and informant into the process of representation become clear for both ethical and academic reasons. If informants have time to and are willing to comment on our visual representations of them this will help to ensure (1) that their subjectivities are represented in a way that is loyal to their own self-perceptions, and (2) that they are not offended or endangered by the way they are represented visually in a public domain. The integration of visual methods into the ethnographic research process and the anthropological interpretation of images (which may or may not form part of the same project) involve a particular understanding

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of the way visual meanings are constructed. Fundamental to this is the idea that visual meanings are not fixed in the content of an image, but are contingent on the context in which they are viewed and the (inter)subjectivity of those viewing at the specific point in time they view, and these are all subject to change. The importance of context and subjectivity for the production of visual meanings operates at numerous levels in anthropological research. One example of this is the work developed in Edwards’ (1992) volume Anthropology and Photography, discussed in the first section. Edwards and her contributors analyse photographs of ‘natives’ produced during the colonial period from the perspective of a post-colonial critique of the power relations and evolutionary theory that guided the understandings and treatment of people from other cultures during that period. Their analysis encompasses two sets of meanings: first, the meanings these images had at the time of their production, when they were used as a means of classifying and categorizing the weak by the powerful, and facilitated the anthropometric study of their physical characteristics; second the meanings the same images have today as they have come to represent a critique of the very relationships of power and sets of knowledge through which they were produced. Other examples of the importance of attention to context and subjectivity can be seen in the research process itself as we observe how the same images might be interpreted differently by different informants within the same culture. For example, when I was doing anthropological research in bullfighting culture in southern Spain I was interested in the different ways people would interpret visual representations of a woman bullfighter. I found that depending on which of several local narratives about how women’s bullfighting had developed historically and how it should be classified in the 1990s my informants interpreted photographs of Cristina Sanchez, the leading woman bullfighter of the day, as demonstrating different aspects of the identity they constructed for her, such as her skill as a bullfighter, lack

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of strength, or feminine attractiveness as a woman (see Pink, 1997). Finally, to end this section on contemporary theory and practice in visual anthropology, an area of visual anthropology that is currently coming to the fore deserves mention. Visual anthropologists do not only undertake academic research; rather, since the mid twentieth century visual anthropological methods have been used in applied projects that are aimed at making social interventions of some kind. For example, since the 1960s John Collier Jnr (mentioned above in connection with his [1967] methodology text) worked as a visual anthropologist on a number of projects in the anthropology of education, aimed at revealing the problems in the way national education systems were applied to native peoples (see for example Collier, 1973) and his work represents an important example of the practical application of the visual in applied work. Currently, the application of visual anthropology has become increasingly popular in a range of public, NGO and private-sector research contexts. This can be explained partly by the easier availability, lower cost and user-friendliness of visual media and technologies, as well as the growing popularity of ethnography in such circles as a way of knowing and understanding other people’s experiences (other people in this sense means user groups, clients and customers). Applied visual anthropology has various differences from the visual anthropology described above. For example, it has a different target audience, aims to make social interventions that will lead to change of some kind, and does not usually seek to contribute to academic theoretical or methodological debate (unless the work is subsequently produced in a different form for an academic audience (see Pink, 2004a). Examples of applied visual anthropology can be found in a wide range of contexts such as consumer research, research in medical and clinical contexts, development projects (see Pink, 2004b, and Pink, 2006, for further details of this). In this section I have demonstrated that the gap between visual and mainstream

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anthropology that loomed large throughout the twentieth century is now closing and the contexts in which visual anthropology methods are being used are diversifying. However, I have argued that for closer integration to be achieved there must be a two-way process that does not simply involve visual anthropology adapting its goals and principles to fit with mainstream anthropology, or the latter simply being transformed by accepting the premises or challenges of a visual anthropology. Rather, visual anthropologists need to re-think how they might integrate new strands in anthropological theory into their own strategies for research and representation so that they might produce texts that enable knowledge that can only be expressed visually to participate in those debates that are conventionally expressed in words. I elaborate on this in the section on the limits of visual knowledge.

THE INTERDISCIPLINARY CONTEXT The increasing acceptance of and interest in the study of visual processes, images and media and the development of visual methods of research and representation is not limited to anthropology. A visual ‘strand’ has developed across social science and humanities disciplines. For instance the long-established visual sociology is widely recognized and valued and visual methodologies that both draw and depart from visual anthropology have been developed in cultural geography, cultural studies, queer studies and other cognate social science disciplines. In turn artists have been taking a close interest in visual anthropology and ethnography as theoretical and methodological influences in their work that also feed back to inform visual anthropology practice. In this section I review the more significant of these developments and consider what this means for a ‘visual interdiscipline’, how the different visual disciplines both differ and draw from one another and how the development of visual anthropology might benefit from this context. Visual sociology has long since existed as a distinct visual subdiscipline with its own

history and methodologies. It does, however, share common interests and practices with visual anthropology and in the past has faced rejection by the sociological mainstream for similar reasons related to its subjectivity and being ‘unscientific’. Elizabeth Chaplin suggests that in the past ‘most sociologists . . . may have shunned the use of photographs’ (Chaplin, 1994: p. 199). Although in the late-nineteenth century photographs were published in the American Journal of Sociology (1994: pp. 204–205), Chaplin describes how, when in 1914 Albion Small took over its editorship, photographs were excluded from its pages ‘for Small believed that the presence of photographs in a sociological text threatened the theoretical status and purpose of sociology itself’ (Chaplin, 1994: p. 198). Chaplin suggests that the belief that photographs should not participate in sociological discourse persisted at least until the mid twentieth century (Chaplin, 1994: p. 199). Throughout the twentieth century various sociological approaches to the visual, mainly involving photography, did develop, influenced by the anthropological work of Bateson and Mead (1942) and Collier (1967) discussed in the first section. Notable amongst these are Erving Goffman’s work on ‘gender advertisements’, which analyses the visual content and composition of advertising photographs representing the relationships between men and women that were embedded in the contemporary culture (Goffman, 1979), and Howard Becker’s (1981) Exploring Society Photographically, which contains a series of 12 image and text pieces, including work by Douglas Harper, a leading visual sociologist who works largely with photography (see Chaplin, 1994: pp. 218–222). Established in 1918 (Chaplin, 1994: p. 222) the International Visual Sociology Association has played a leading role in promoting visual sociology, through both its journal Visual Sociology (now Visual Studies) and annual conferences. Although in the past visual sociologists have been best known for the analysis of photographs and the use of photography as a method of research and representation, they now increasingly work

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with video and digital media (e.g. Mason and Dicks, 2001).Although the theoretical, critical and empirical objectives of visual anthropology and sociology are often distinct their areas and locations of substantive research (e.g. gender relations, the home, modern Western culture), media (e.g. photography, video, hypermedia) and methods (e.g. photoelicitation, video diaries, informant-directed photography) now frequently overlap. The other ‘visual subdisciplines’ cited above do not share this history with visual anthropology and visual sociology. They have a more recently established literature and have developed as a critical response to a lack of awareness of the significance of visual meanings and processes within distinct disciplines. Geography (like twentieth-century scientific anthropology) has made great use of the visual in the form of the visual representation of territories and terrain in maps and diagrams, the use of computer-generated visualization systems (such as Geographical Information Systems [GIS]) to visually represent environmental information, demographic data and, for example, uses of public space. However, such approaches, like the use of kinship diagrams and territorial maps in twentiethcentury anthropology, are a means of objectifying reality as it is produced and experienced. In contrast Gillian Rose, a geographer who is interested in visual culture and visual research methodologies, works on questions paying attention to the way people produce, store and display images.8 Rose’s book Visual Methodologies (2001) is ‘a basic introduction to a range of methods that can be used to interpret visual images’ (Rose, 2001: p. 2). Rose argues for a critical visual methodology that ‘thinks about the visual in terms of the cultural significance, social practices and power relations in which it is embedded’ (Rose, 2001: p. 3). The visual methodologies she expounds are those used across media studies, film studies, psychology and sociology for the study of the visual, rather than the use of the visual as a method of research or representation. Rose’s work has two key features in common with recent

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work in visual anthropology (see the second section) and sociology. First she argues for a reflexive approach to visual research that ‘considers your own [i.e. the researcher’s] way of looking at images’ (Rose, 2001: p. 16), but does not engage as fully as visual anthropologists have (see the second section) with the roles of intersubjectivity and the importance of reflexivity at each of the stages of the production, interpretation and representation of visual knowledge (e.g. see Pink, 2001). Second, Rose proposes that research about images should focus on three areas: visual production; the image itself; and ‘audiencing’ – the way the image is viewed (Rose, 2001: p. 32). In short, in common with recent visual anthropology approaches to the analysis of images, she suggests we focus on how the image is created, its visual content and how it is interpreted by others, acknowledging within this approach that visual meanings are not essential or fixed, but will depend on the interplay between these three fields through which context-dependent meanings are socially and culturally produced. Similar themes run through another recently defined visual subdiscipline: visual cultural studies. This is a visual branch of ‘methodologically eclectic’ (Lister and Wells, 2001: p. 64) cultural studies, with all of its contingent theoretical and critical underpinnings. Although the study of ‘visual culture’ was largely born within photography and art history studies in the 1970s in Britain, it is also now linked strongly to cultural studies (Evans and Hall, 1999: p. 6). Lister and Wells tell us that ‘With the late twentieth century’s explosion of imaging and visualizing technologies (digitization, satellite imaging, new forms of medical imaging, virtual reality etc.), they [the proponents of visual cultural studies] suggest that everyday life has become “visual culture”, calling for a new field of study of both images themselves and “the centrality of vision in everyday experience and the production of meaning”’ (Lister and Wells, 2000: pp. 62–63). Evans and Hall similarly refer to the ‘visual culture’ in which we now live, which is ‘pervaded at all levels by a host of cultural technologies

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designed to disseminate viewing and looking practices through primarily visually mediated forms’ (Evans and Hall, 1999: p. 7). As is clear from the contents of Evans and Hall’s reader on Visual Culture (1999) the interests of this subdiscipline have a firm and particular historical and regional focus: modern industrial society and its transition into post-modernity. Visual culture scholars are thus interested mainly in the visual aspects of just one particular type of culture. The subdiscipline has nevertheless been influenced by anthropology. Evans notes that in 1996 the editors of the cultural theory journal October carried out a questionnaire regarding the concept of ‘visual culture’ and came to the conclusion that ‘the interdisciplinary project of visual culture is no longer organized on the model of history (as were the disciplines of art history, architectural history, film theory etc.) but on the model of anthropology’ (October 1996: p. 25, quoted in Evans and Hall, 1999: p. 6). In common with anthropological approaches to the visual (as well as Rose’s approach above) the agenda for a visual cultural studies that Lister and Wells (2001: pp. 62–65) outline focuses on ‘an image’s social life and history’. This includes ‘the cycle of production, circulation and consumption through which . . .[images’]. . . meanings are accumulated and transformed’; the material properties of images and how their materiality is linked to social and historical processes of ‘looking’; and an understanding of images as both representations through which meanings might be conveyed, and as objects in which humans have a pleasure-seeking interest. It also includes the idea that ‘looking’ is embodied – ‘undertaken by someone with an identity’ and visual meanings are thus both personal and framed by the wider contexts and processes outlined above. However, visual cultural studies has its own distinctive project, embedded in the theoretical and critical agenda of cultural studies that is different from that of anthropology. Part of the justification for visual cultural studies is that we now live in an increasingly visual world, with the advent of new visual technologies.

Does this make modern Western culture and institutions more visual than those of ‘other’ cultures? I would suggest that it does not. Rather it makes their visual culture work in different ways, with new modes and practices of production, image content, dissemination and interpretation. We should not assume that some cultures might be more visual than others, or are becoming increasingly visual. Instead what we are likely to find is that different cultures have developed different visual practices and conventions that are employed in different ways. Therefore the idea that in the modern West we live in a ‘visual culture’ which is, as Evans and Hall (1999) put it (see above), ‘pervaded at all levels by a host of cultural technologies designed to disseminate viewing and looking practices through primarily visually mediated forms’ (Evans and Hall, 1999: p. 7), does not mean that in other cultures where other technologies are used people do not live in a culture that is equally visual. To gain a broader vision we should stand back from visual culture studies to compare different visual cultures and the different histories of similar visual forms. To do this we need to return to visual anthropology. An excellent example is the anthropological case study of the development of studio photography and other art forms in Ghana (see Wendl, 2001). In addition to the growing interest in the study of the visual and in visual research methods discussed above there have recently been interesting developments in the relationship between visual anthropology and arts practice. This is evidenced in two main contexts: first in the work of individual artists who collaborate with anthropologists and/or draw from anthropological practices and theory to develop their own work; second through the recent establishment of dialogues between anthropologists and artists through conferences and publications. While there are many artists whose work is of anthropological interest there are fewer who engage explicitly with anthropological methods and theory in their artistic practice. Exceptions are the photographer Olivia da Silva and the documentary and multimedia artist Rod Coover.

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Olivia da Silva’s photographic project ‘In the Net’ is a photographic comparison of the fishing communities of Matosinhos in Northern Portugal and Grimsby in the North East of England represented through a series of portraits of different members of these communities taken against the backdrops of studios Silva constructed at their places of work, in their homes, bars and in different work settings (see Silva and Pink, 2004).9 Silva’s photographs are constructed portraits that depart from the realist documentary tradition that has dominated photographic styles of visual anthropologists and sociologists. Instead Silva, who worked with each sitter for some time before the portrait, exploring her or his biography, photographic collections and identity, collaborated with the people she photographed to construct images composed of not simply the person but a background and sets of material artefacts that contributed to visually construct and represent her or his identity within the photographic frame. This, set within Silva’s wider study of the visual and photographic cultures that she was working in, constituted a visual ethnography of local photographic conventions, expectations and practices that allowed her to produce portraits that were both loyal to local people’s feelings about themselves and that fit with local cultures, while communicating ‘outwards’ to represent these identities to a wider audience and in a comparative context. Silva’s ‘In the Net’ is not a work in visual anthropology; however, she certainly drew from anthropology and made use of visual anthropological methods to inform her artistic practice. Her work also, however, offers an interesting example of how visual anthropological practice might depart from its conventional use of realist photography to learn from arts practice (see also Edwards, 1997, for a discussion of anthropology and art photography). Rod Coover’s innovative multimedia work offers a similar lesson. Coover’s CD ROM ‘Cultures in Webs’ (2003) is composed of three narratives, two that represent film and photographic projects he undertook in France and Ghana and that he describes

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as ethnographic, and the other a theoretical text that engages with anthropological film practice (see fig. 30.3). In this ethnographic text Coover explores different forms of hypermedia narrative and organizes different relationships between video, sound, photographs and different types of written texts. While Coover’s visual research can be seen as ethnographic in that it involved his longterm engagement with people and cultures, I would not class it as anthropological because it does not engage with existing anthropological issues and debates. However, he is concerned with the question of how best to represent cross-cultural ethnography and in doing so with using digital hypermedia to integrate both different types of visual and audio recordings and ‘differing approaches to writing’(Coover, 2004: p. 199). In doing so he not only draws from anthropology to achieve his goals as an artist but provides an example which, like Silva’s, visual anthropologists might learn from as we move increasingly towards hypermedia representation (as I have noted in the second section). Coover’s CD ROM also demonstrates the importance of being able to include film clips in an essay about film: the audience is able to experience visually what he is writing about (see Pink, 2006, for a detailed analysis of the achievements of Coover’s CD ROM).

THE LIMITS OF VISUAL KNOWLEDGE In the previous sections I have discussed the relevance of the visual to anthropology in terms of its ability to contribute knowledge that cannot be experienced or communicated in written words. Visual research methods offer a route to subjective experience and knowledge (both our own and that of others) that would be inaccessible through simple participant observation or tape-recorded interviewing. Visual representation allows us to communicate elements of embodied experience, emotions and performative practices that cannot be described equally well in writing. Moreover, filmed in a reflexive style, ethnographic video constitutes a text that can

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Figure 30.3 The best way to comment on the way Coover combines image and text is to include a screen capture of a page from his CD ROM. This page is from the strand entitled ‘Concealed Narratives’ based on his research in Ghana. It shows a combination of written text, a photographic background and three video clips that can be played along the bottom of the page

reveal the intersubjectivity and relationships through which knowledge is produced. The analysis of images also brings to the fore aspects of cultural and individual experience and discourse that may not or perhaps cannot be spoken. Nevertheless there are also constraints in how the visual can be used in academic research and representation as, while visual representations can be informed by theory, they cannot participate fully in theoretical debate because they do not engage on the same terms as the established tradition of written theoretical discussion. This raises the question (which has relevance across all the social science disciplines) as to how visual knowledge might best participate as a critical force in the debate and theory-building that constitute the practices of written academic work. In this section I suggest this question might be resolved by a closer focus on the

nature of visual knowledge and its relationship to written knowledge: how can each best represent specific types of knowledge and how might they work best together. Coterminous with this question is the issue of what type of text might best nurture this visual/verbal or image/word relationship. I shall suggest that to take advantage of the unique possibilities for the communication of visual knowledge we need to reconceptualize cultural research and representation as a practice that combines (audio)visual and verbal texts and that explores new media such as hypermedia. The potential of the visual in anthropology is also hindered by another issue, the question of how we might define vision as an element of human experience. This, I suggest, forms a key question for the future of visual anthropology. The question of the relationship and difference between visual and written anthropology

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has had a lasting presence throughout the twentieth century and is in many ways central to the historical development of the relationship between visual and mainstream anthropology I described in the first section. To sum up recent opinion on this issue, visual anthropologists (those who do not identify with the subdiscipline have not tended to write on the issue) generally agree that, in contrast to film, written anthropological text tends to be more theoretical, to have a greater capacity for generalizing, cultural contextualization and cross-cultural comparison and to always represent ‘after the event’ – that is, in the past, which as such denies the validity of the style of writing in the ‘ethnographic present’ that previously dominated. The visual, in contrast, has been noted for its specificity, its ability to focus on human experience and emotion as it unfolds in particular circumstances and for particular people, its ability to represent sensory experience, and its tendency to be ethnographic in that although it can be informed by existing theory developed in written texts it does not tend to be used to make theoretical arguments10 (see for example Henley, 2004; MacDougall, 1998). To some extent these differences set up a false dichotomy. Existing texts have demonstrated that anthropological writing has also very effectively been used to represent the individual and sensory embodied experience and emotion. In fact the key difference between the ways anthropologists have used film and writing to represent their work lies in the relationship of both to theoretical debates in anthropology and their different capacities to actually communicate experience in different ways and to contextualize ethnographic description, be this within narratives of personal individual experience or cultural circumstances. There are also some important differences between viewers’/readers’ experiences of film and printed text as film is viewed as a linear text, while printed text tends to follow a data-base model (see Cook, 2004) which allows for multiple points of entry and reader navigation. The key limits of written text are that it is unable to directly reflexively represent the

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processes by which knowledge was produced in the way film can and it cannot capture the audio-visual symbolism, metaphors for experienced reality, and cues for the evocation of empathetic understanding across cultures that are represented filmically. However, film is also limited because, although it can communicate on this level where written anthropology cannot, it cannot set these elements either within the cultural context that is crucial for us to know about to understand the experienced reality it represents or within an established critical discourse that might contribute to existing anthropological debate and theory-building.11 In the second section I noted how, increasingly dissatisfied with the ability of ethnographic film to participate in mainstream debates, visual anthropologists have begun to call for new forms of visual anthropology text. Hypermedia, presented on CD ROM, DVD or on-line, offers one way forward. It is multimedia, multi-linear and interactive (see Pink, 2001) and will allow visual scholars to combine audio-visual footage, still images and written words in the same text. In the second and third sections I described examples of Ruby’s and Coover’s hypermedia representations of ethnography, highlighting how these features might be developed in different types of project. Hypermedia will not replace film or books, and has a quite different user experience to each, but its advantage is that it allows us to combine the qualities of visual and written text to create academic arguments that can be rooted not only in written debate, theory and description but in the visual ethnographic representations of knowledge production and the specificity of human experience and emotion that are embedded characteristics of ethnographic film practice (see Pink, 2001, 2006). The second limitation of visual knowledge is rooted in the way the visual has been conceptualized in visual anthropology, and across the disciplines that engage in visual methods, visual analysis and representation. The visual has been taken for granted as a source of knowledge that can be treated in isolation from its status as a dimension of

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sensory experience. A reading of recent work in the anthropology of the senses, however, undermines this assumption by emphasizing two points: (1) vision exists as part of what is a broader field of multi-sensory experience (Ingold, 2000) and as such cannot be satisfactorily isolated from other sensory modalities; and (2) the modern Western division of sensory experience into the five modalities of vision, smell, touch, sound and taste is not cross-culturally applicable – in other cultures other sets of sensory classification vary from this model. This means that to make any sensible use of visual knowledge in research across the social sciences and humanities we need to keep in mind that, as visual anthropology has developed to date, it is limited in two ways. First, it refers to a culturally and temporally specific model of the visual and visual knowledge. When film communicates visual experiences, meanings, knowledge and sensations cross-culturally the way they are understood by a modern Western academic audience may differ from the understandings they evoke for the film subjects. Second, by isolating the visual from other sensory modalities the idea of using visual knowledge fails to account for the interconnectedness between the visual and the other senses and the mutual interdependence between them in the processes of perception through which people turn sensory experience into meaningful knowledge about the realities they live in. One solution to this would be to produce hypermedia projects that contextualize the sensory experiences represented visually through written analyses. Another would be to produce research and representation that is no longer simply visual anthropology but a sensory anthropology that demonstrates the interplay between visual and other sensory knowledge through performance and other new forms of anthropological representation.12

CONCLUSION Visual anthropology has developed from its roots in late nineteenth-century expedition

film and photography, lived, though, through a troubled relationship with a scientific and objective mainstream anthropology, and emerged into the twenty-first century as a mature and reflexive subdiscipline with a distinct identity and a capacity to move beyond its identification with the production of ethnographic films. With this, visual anthropological approaches to the analysis, production and representation of visual knowledge and to social intervention, practised in the form of the anthropology of images and through visual ethnographic practices of fieldwork and representation, along with recent engagements with new visual and digital media, create a bridge not only between visual and mainstream anthropology but between visual anthropology and related visual subdisciplines in sociology, cultural studies and other fields.

NOTES 1 This chapter, as an introductory overview of the subdiscipline of visual anthropology, necessarily contains references to arguments and case studies that I have developed elsewhere. An outline of a visual ethnography is presented in Doing Visual Ethnography (Pink, 2001), case studies in the contemporary development of visual methods of research and representation (including the work of Afonso, Orobitg, Ramos, Silva and Coover discussed in this chapter) can be found in Working Images (Pink et al., 2004), a discussion of and collection of articles on applied visual anthropology are published in Visual Interventions (Pink, 2007), and an analysis of the present condition of visual anthropology and an agenda for its future development is developed in The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses (Pink, 2006). 2 Stills from Haddon’s film footage can be found on the pages for the Haddon on-line catalogue of archive ethnographic film footage, maintained by Marcus Banks at Oxford University at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/external/isca/haddon/all footage.html, accessed 27th July 2004. 3 Although Morphy (1996) convincingly argues that Spencer and Gillen’s collaborative work in Australia is an unacknowledged precursor of this method that fused fieldworker and theorist, usually attributed to Malinowski. 4 While photographs occasionally illustrated monographs, this was infrequent and portraits of

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individuals tended to be used to represent whole categories of people (e.g. see Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer volumes, 1940, 1956). It was not until the late twentieth century that more innovative and subjective uses of photography were introduced. 5 Collier’s work usually had an applied focus and social intervention context (see Pink, 2007, and Pink 2006, for in-depth discussion of this aspect of Collier’s work). 6 Exceptions can be found in the work of a number of visual anthropologists who have used photography and video in their research during the latter part of the twentieth century, such as Jay Ruby, Paulo Chiozzi and others, including projects published in articles in Visual Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Review, and Studies in Visual Communication. However, to compile these works from such diverse sources is time-consuming and they do not exist as an immediately accessible body of literature to students and researchers working in his field. 7 Held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (2001) and the University of Durham (2003). 8 See http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/staff/ grose/, accessed 3rd August 2004. 9 Part of the ‘In the Net’ project is represented in an on-line exhibition linked to the web pages for the Working Images volume at http://www.lboro.ac.uk/ departments/ss/workingimagesbook/Olivasilva.htm, accessed 9th August 2004. 10 These features of visual representation are not advanced as essential features of the visual, but rather are based specifically on the way the visual has been used by visual anthropologists in anthropological representation. 11 The limits of ethnographic film are summarized here into a concise argument; however, they are discussed in full over two chapters in Pink, 2006. 12 The relationship between the anthropology of experience, the senses and visual anthropology is a key theme of The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses (Pink, 2006).

REFERENCES Afonso, A.I. (2004) ‘New graphics for old stories: representation of local memories through drawings’, in S. Pink, L. Kürti and A.I. Afonso (eds), Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography. London: Routledge. Banks, M. (2001) Visual Methods in Social Research. London: Sage. Banks, M. and Morphy, H. (eds) (1997) Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

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Bateson, G. and Mead, M. (1942) Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. New York: New York Academy of the Sciences. Becker, H. (1981) Exploring Society Photographically. Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Evanston: Northwestern University. Chalfen, R. (2002) ‘Snapshots “r” us: the evidentiary problematic of home media’, Visual Studies,17(2): 141–149. Chalfen, R. (2003) ‘Celebrating life after death: the appearance of snapshots in Japanese pet gravesides’, Visual Studies, 18(2): 144–158. Chaplin, E. (1994) Sociology and Visual Representation. London: Routledge. Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (eds) (1986) Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Collier, J. (1967) Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Collier, J. (1973) Alaskan Eskimo Education. Winston, New York: Holt, Rinehart. Collier, J. and Collier, M. (1986) Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Cook, S. (2004) ‘Between the book and the cinema: late Victorian new media’, Visual Studies, 19(1): 60–71. Coover, R. (2003) Cultures in Webs. CD ROM. Watertown: Eastgate Systems. Coover, R. (2004) ‘Working with images, images of work: using digital interface, photography and hypertext in ethnography’, in S. Pink, L. Kürti and A.I. Afonso (eds), Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography. London: Routledge. Dunlop, I. (1983) ‘Ethnographic filmmaking in Australia: the first seventy years (1898–1968)’, Studies in Visual Communication, 9(1): 11–18. Dussart, F. (1997) ‘A body painting in translation’, in M. Banks and H. Morphy (eds), Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Edwards, E. (ed.) (1992) Anthropology and Photography 1860 –1920. New Haven and London: Yale University Press (in association with the Royal Anthropological Institute, London). Edwards, E. (1997) ‘Beyond the boundary’, in M. Banks and H. Morphy (eds), Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Edwards, E. (2002) Raw Histories. Oxford: Berg. Emmison, M. and Smith, P. (2000) Researching the Visual. London: Sage. Eriksen, T.H. and Neilsen, F.S. (2001) A History of Anthropology. London: Pluto.

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Evans, J. and Hall, S. (1999) The Visual Cultures Reader. Sage: London. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1940) The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1956) Nuer Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Flaherty, R. (1921) Nanook of the North. New York: Revillion Freres (documentary film). Goffman, E. (1979) Gender Advertisements. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. Griffiths, A. (2002) Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Grimshaw, A. (1997) ‘The eye in the door: anthropology, film and the exploration of interior space’, in M. Banks and H. Morphy (eds), Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Grimshaw, A. (2001) The Ethnographer’s Eye. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heider, K. (1976) Ethnographic Film. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hendry, J. (1997) ‘Pine, ponds and pebbles: gardens and visual culture’, in M. Banks and H. Morphy (eds), Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Henley, P. (2004) ‘Beyond observational cinema...’ in S. Pink, L. Kürti, A. Afonso (eds), Working Images. London: Routledge. Holliday, R. (2000) ‘We’ve been framed: visualising methodology’, The Sociological Review, 48(4): 503–522. Hughes-Freeland, F. (1997) ‘Balinese on television: representation and response’, in M. Banks and H. Morphy (eds), Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment. London: Routledge. Jacknis, I. (1984) ‘Franz Boas and Photography’, Studies in Visual Communication, 10(1): 2–60. Lister, M. and Wells, L. (2001) ‘Seeing beyond belief: cultural studies as an approach to analysing the visual’, in T. van Leeuwen and C. Jewitt (eds), The Handbook of Visual Analysis. London: Sage. Loizos, P. (1993) Innovation in Ethnographic Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Loizos, P. (1997) ‘First exits from observational realism: narrative experiments in recent ethnographic films’, in M. Banks and H. Morphy (eds), Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Long, C. and Laughren, P. (1993) ‘Australia’s first films: facts and fables. Part six: surprising survivals from Colonial Queensland’, Cinema

Papers, 96: 32–37. Retrieved July 29 2004 from http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/external/isca/haddon/ article.html#R20. MacDougall, D. (1997) ‘The visual in anthropology’, in M. Banks and H. Morphy (eds), Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. MacDougall, D. (1998) Transcultural Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Martinez, D.P. (1997) ‘Burlesquing knowledge: Japanese quiz shows and models of knowledge’, in M. Banks and H. Morphy (eds), Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Mason, B. and Dicks, B. (2001) ‘Going beyond the code: the production of hypermedia ethnography’, Social Science Computer Review, 9(4): 445–457. MacDougall, D. (2000) ‘Social aesthetics and the Doon school’, Sights. Online. Available http: (accessed 12 November 2004). Mead, M. (1995) ‘Visual anthropology in a discipline of words’, in P. Hockings (ed.), Principles of Visual Anthropology. 2nd edn. The Hague: Mouton. (1st edn, 1975.) Morphy, H. (1996) ‘More than mere facts: repositioning Spencer and Gillen in the history of anthropology’, in S.R. Morton and D.J Mulvaney (eds), Exploring Central Australia: Society, Environment and the Horn Expedition. Chipping Norton: Surrey Beatty and Sons. Morphy, H. and Banks, M. (1997) ‘Introduction: rethinking visual anthropology’, in M. Banks and H. Morphy (eds), Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Orobitg, G. (2004) ‘Photography in the field: word and image in ethnographic research’, in S. Pink, L. Kürti and A.I. Afonso (eds), Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography. London: Routledge. Pink, S. (1997) Women and Bullfighting. Oxford: Berg. Pink, S. (2001) Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research. London: Sage. Pink, S. (2004a) Home Truths. Oxford: Berg. Pink, S. (ed.) (2004b) Applied Visual Anthropology. A guest-edited issue of Visual Anthropology Review. Pink, S. (2006) The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses, Oxford: Routeldge Pink, S. ed. (2007) Visual Interventions, Oxford: Berghahn Pink, S., Kürti, L. and Afonso, A. I. (eds) (2004) Working Images. London: Routledge. Pinney, C. (1997) Camera Indica. London: Reaktion Press.

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Pinney, C. and Peterson, N. (2003) Photography’s Other Histories. London: Duke University Press Ramos, M.J. (2000) Histórias Etíopes: diário de viagem. Lisbon: Assírio and Alvim. Ramos, M.J. (2004) ‘Drawing the lines: the limitations of intercultural ekphrasis’, in S. Pink, L. Kürti and A.I. Afonso (eds), Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography. London: Routledge. Rony, F. (1996) The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham: Duke University Press. Rose, G. (2001) Visual Methodologies. London: Sage. Ruby, J. (2000) Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ruby, J. (2004) The Taylor Family. CD-ROM, part of the Oak Park Stories series. Ruby, J. and Chalfen, R. (1974) ‘The teaching of visual anthropology at Temple’, The Society For The

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Anthropology Of Visual Communication Newsletter, 53: 5–7. Silva, O. and Pink, S. (2004) ‘In the net: anthropology and photography’, in S. Pink, L. Kürti and A.I. Afonso (eds), Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography. London: Routledge. Taylor, L. (1994) Visualizing Theory. London: Routledge. Thomas, N. (1997) ‘Collectivity and nationality in the anthropology of art’, in M. Banks and H. Morphy (eds), Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Wendl, T. (2001) ‘Entangled traditions – photography and the history of media in Southern Ghana’, Res Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, 39: 78–101. Wright, T. (2004) ‘Collateral coverage: media images of Afghan refugees, 2001’, Visual Studies, 19(1): 97–111. Young, M.W. (1998) Malinowski’s Kiriwana: Fieldwork Photography 1915–1918. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

31 Thinking by Numbers: Cultural Analysis and the Use of Data Justin Lewis

There will be readers for whom the very title of this chapter will be off-putting: many will regard the prospect of reading about numbers and methods as, at best, tiresome, and at worst, an irrelevance. They will be tempted to move on to something more familiar. But my concerns in this chapter are less with the technicalities of quantification than with the broader questions of the purpose and method of cultural and media studies. In many areas of cultural enquiry, quantitative data have often been the elephant in the room – superficially ignored, but undeniably present. And yet the conceptual tools informing most forms of cultural analysis – such as race, gender, class and popular culture – derive their meaning and import partly from statistical forms of analysis. One could say that even the most qualitative form of analysis – a piece of film criticism for example – is never more than a few degrees of separation from an assumption based on numbers. We can see, across the field, both a creeping

acceptance of this as well as a residual resistance. Either way, both the embrace and the rejection of statistical forms of analysis have cultural origins and effects. What follows then is not merely an acknowledgement but a consideration of the elephant in the room.

THE CULTURAL STUDIES CRITIQUE OF QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH There are, broadly speaking, two different kinds of critique of quantitative research that have emerged from within and around cultural studies. There are, first of all, political critiques, based on the way statistics can be used to bolster certain dominant ideas or forms of power. Even an apparently transparent, simple figure, such as an election result, can be seen to play an ideological role. So while elections are generally presented as having a ‘natural’ meaning, in that they express the will of the people, they might also be seen

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as rituals that legitimate a narrow set of political options – especially in countries such as the USA, where the political and cultural economy of elections means that it is difficult for candidates to win without the support of business interests (Edelman, 1964, 1988; Salmon and Glasser, 1995; Lewis, 2001). In this sense, a simple statistic can conceal the various ways in which elections are structured and constructed to produce certain outcomes that favour dominant groups.1 This is very much the gist of Martin Barker and Julian Petley’s book, Ill Effects, in which traditional ‘effects’ research into media violence – often associated with the use of statistical or ‘scientific’ methods – is seen as bound up with reactionary assumptions about morality or censorship (Barker and Petley, 2001). As David Gauntlett puts it, ‘assumptions within the effects model are characterized by barely concealed conservative ideology’ (Gauntlett, 2001: p. 54). The authors contributing to the collection differ on the degree to which they accept that such research has other possibilities – Martin Barker, for example, makes it clear that his critique is of specific kinds of media ‘effects’ research, and uses other forms of quantitative research to make his point (Barker, 2001). David Gauntlett’s more comprehensive attack – one that implicates the methodology itself – goes several steps further (see also Gauntlett, 1998), and I shall return to it shortly. The political critique of statistics has been bolstered by the influence of Michel Foucault, whereby the gathering of statistics can be seen as a form of social surveillance (Foucault, 1977). Statistics thereby become a form of mass observation, one that allows or leads to power being exerted by the observers over the observed, amounting to what John Hartley refers to as a ‘technology of control’ (Hartley, 1996: pp. 64–65). Similarly, Ian Hacking’s historical excavation of the notion of probability – an idea that is central to most forms of statistical analysis in the social sciences – explores some of the ways in which statistical analysis makes possible forms of social regulation (Hacking, 1990).

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Once we wrest the use of statistics from a pure or empiricist scientific realm and thrust it into a cultural domain, we can see the ways in which it becomes interlaced with forms of power. So, for example, we can observe the ways in which state or corporate power is extended by market research and other forms of statistical observation, in ways designed to further the interests of the observers rather than the observed. Thus the purpose of most market research, while ostensibly measuring people’s preferences, is to inform strategies for the profitable manipulation of those preferences. But we need to be careful here about where such analysis leads us. If statistics play an important role in stories of control, dominance or hegemony, that is because they are a tool of storytelling, not because there is anything intrinsically hegemonic about the use of numbers. So, for example, we can unravel the way in which some of the conceptual frameworks of classical sociology – notions such as normality, average or deviance – emerge from the use of statistical calculation (Hacking, 1975). But this does not mean that freedom comes when we dispense with them. As Bennett et al. argue (1999), statistics are also necessary for more progressive political projects. So, for example, governments seeking to create effective redistributive mechanisms – such as the allocation of resources to those with the greatest need – invariably need statistical information to enact them. There are, secondly, methodological critiques, which emphasize the ways in which statistical or ‘scientific’ models have failed to grasp the complexity of social life. So, for example, various quantitative approaches in media studies have been seen as too crude or blunt to tell us about the contextual nature of media content or media influence. Quantitative researchers, it is argued, will often focus on statistical issues while ignoring more profound interpretative assumptions. So, for example, Martin Barker takes effects research on media violence to task for simplistic assumptions about the symbolic nature of media content

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(Barker, 2001) – a point also made by Stuart Hall in his famous encoding/decoding essay (Hall, 1980). This critique can be applied to much of the quantitative academic literature, which could be accused of missing the big picture in the search for what is deemed to be good statistical practice. Much of the analysis of the media coverage of polling data, for example, has ignored broader ideological or sociological questions in its concern for statistical niceties. Thus Reed Welch has criticized the US press for neglecting to give the kind of technical details that a pollster would regard as standard. ‘The typical article,’ he concludes, ‘does not give information on the sample size, when the poll was conducted, methods, question wording, and other “minimal essential information” ’ – as defined by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (Welch, 2002: p. 113). In a similar vein, Stephanie Larson complains that journalists show little understanding of sampling error in reporting polls, and as a result make inaccurate statements about what the data mean (Larson, 2003). The problem here is not the desire for standard statistical procedure, but that a focus on issues such as ‘sampling error’ miss a larger point about the larger ideological and discursive constraints in which polls are produced or mediated (Lewis et al., 2005). Although the constructed, ideological aspects of polling have been much discussed (Herbst, 1993; Salmon and Glasser, 1995), it is fair to say that political science often reverts to an implicit belief in the objectivity of polling data. This is not to dismiss polling, but simply to point out that the process of gathering and representing statistical data is neither innocent nor neutral (although, in an ironic twist, cultural studies has largely ignored the whole phenomenon of polling, preferring to see it as bad social science rather than as a form of representation – Lewis, 2001). All methodologies are bound up in cultural practices, of course, but cultural studies has paid particular attention to the tendency of quantitative forms of analysis to reduce the

complexity of discourse into uniform units. So, for example, it is argued that the debate about media violence is complicated by the fact that we cannot assume that violence on the screen is read literally rather than figuratively (Barker, 2001; Buckingham, 2001; Hall, 1980; Livingstone, 1998). To assume that all representations of violent acts are equivalent is seen as especially reductive for a discipline that has devoted time and effort to the complex analysis of texts. Central to these political and methodological critiques is the understanding that statistical or scientific methods are forms of ideological or discursive production, with their own premises and assumptions. Quantification depends upon categories – such as class, race, and so forth – and there will always be an arbitrary element both to those categories and to the ways we constitute them. The stories they allow us to tell are a product of our attempts to impose sense upon social reality, to structure it into stories and explanations. There is nothing intrinsic, natural or inevitable about these structures, they are our impositions. Lurking behind this insight, however, is a set of cultural conditions that bolster the distrust of statistics within media and cultural studies, leading to the failure to treat numbers with the kind of intellectual verve reserved for words and images (Kritzer, 1996). There are some interesting exceptions to this, such as Franco Moretti’s flourishing of statistical data – rather than tracing what he calls the ‘tiny dots in the graph’ (Persuasion, Oliver Twist etc.) – in his analysis of the history of the novel (Moretti, 2003). But what makes Moretti’s analysis surprising – even invigorating – is partly a lack of statistical training or understanding in the humanities (which many will privately admit to), which in turn fosters a general suspicion of numerical forms of analysis. In a very practical sense, for many it is much easier to ignore these forms of analysis – especially when the political and methodological critiques appear to give license to do so. This creates the conditions for slipping away from an understanding of the cultural nature of statistical analysis

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towards a rather more opaque disinterest and hostility. Either way, cultural studies has tended to favour qualitative research methods – or indeed, sometimes methodologically imprecise forms of textual analysis. While there can be much to gain from these approaches, I would argue that this has limited the scope of cultural studies research and created a bias against forms of analysis – such as political economy, content analysis or surveys based on representative samples – that often require it. In short, there is nothing intrinsically incompatible about the use of statistical data and a non-empiricist cultural analysis. So, for example, Pierre Bourdieu’s work is highly critical of the way survey data are used in opinion polls, while nonetheless drawing upon survey data in his analysis of cultural taste (Bourdieu, 1979, 1984). And although cultural studies research is often qualitative, it nearly always contains quantitative assumptions (Lewis, 1996). When cultural studies scholars ignore statistical issues, it severely limits the claims they can make, as well as making them methodologically incoherent. In other words, there is often an assumption within cultural studies that qualitative research is somehow exempt from methodological constraints. As a result, researchers have often used qualitative work to argue from the specific to the general, and thereby lapse into untenable claims and generalizations. It is, in this sense, useful to consider not only the cultural origins of the use of statistics, but the conditions and consequences of the rejection of quantification. For just as the use of statistics has a discursive history, so does the antagonism towards them.

WHEN THINGS DON’T ADD UP The well-worn cliché about the mendacious use of statistics is appealing to a culture in which numerical forms of analysis are often poorly understood. For many, there is something almost comforting about the failure of statistics to paint clear, unambiguous

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pictures of the world. Witness, for example, the almost ritual moment of confusion when the British news media report on crime statistics, as in this extract from Sky News: New crime figures out today suggest that crime could be going up, or down, depending on which set of statistics you choose to believe. Now one of them is from the British Crime Survey which asks some 10,0002 adults about their experiences of crime whether they reported them or not. Now these are the statistics that the Government likes to use but then there’s the actual number of crimes recorded by the police. (Sky News, 1 pm, July 22, 2004)

Or as BBC News 24 more succinctly put it: Violent crime increased by 12% last year and offences overall went up by 1%. That’s according to new figures recorded by the police. But the British Crime Survey, which the Home Office regards as a more accurate measure, suggests that both violent crime and crime in general has fallen, continuing a downward trend that started 9 years ago. (News 24, 1 pm, July 22, 2004)

The apparent contradiction between two sets of figures – one showing crime going up, one showing crime going down – becomes a question of, as Sky News put it, ‘which set of statistics you choose to believe’. The news media are then caught between two competing impulses: to highlight the more dramatic police figures – the route chosen by Sky News – or to perform a classic journalistic balancing act, offering roughly equal space to two competing interpretations – the route chosen by BBC News 24 (Lewis, Cushion and Thomas, 2005). If the BBC’s approach is the more laudable, it offers its viewers impartiality without clarity. By giving its audience both sides, it allows them, in theory, to decide which set of figures they trust. But on what basis can such a decision be made? Without understanding how such a discrepancy is possible, we have to resort to articles of faith (do we trust the Home Office’s view, for example, or do we regard it as self-serving and therefore unreliable?). What is rarely attempted by broadcasters is any explanation of why the figures appear contradictory. And yet, as any criminologist will know, this is easily done.

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The police figures are based on recorded crime, and are therefore subject to changes in policing methods or public willingness to report crimes (so that, for example, a police clampdown on a certain kind of crime should lead to an increase in reported figures). The British Crime Survey uses a large sample (40,000) to find out about people’s experience of crime, regardless of whether those crimes have been reported. In short, they are measuring two quite different phenomena. This allows, for example, Tricia Dodd and her colleagues to suggest that: Police statistics provide a good measure of trends in well-reported crimes, and are an important indicator of police workload. They can also be used for local crime pattern analysis. For the offences it covers, and the victims within its scope, the BCS gives a more complete estimate of crime in England and Wales since it covers both unreported and unrecorded crime and provides more reliable data on trends. (Dodd et al., 2004: p. 12)

Put in this context, we can see that the two sets of figures are not contradictory at all, and that the increase in reported violence reflects a decreasing tolerance for domestic violence (one of the traditionally most underreported types of violent crime) – not least by the police. At a time when BCS figures which show violent crime going down, it could be argued that the rise in reported violent crime is less a cause for concern than for celebration, since they suggest that crimes such as domestic violence are being taken more seriously. The general absence of this kind of interpretation in media discourse is partly a reflection of journalism’s preference for dramatic or adversarial forms of explanation, and for comment rather than analysis (Lewis, Cushion and Thomas, 2005). But my reason for using this example is that it also speaks to two broader, countervailing cultural tendencies – a simultaneous acceptance and dismissal of quantitative data. On the one hand, it implies a kind of straightforward empiricism, whereby statistical facts are taken at face value, regardless of how they may be collected. In this instance, journalistic shorthand requires that

methodological differences between police statistics and the British Crime Survey are erased – an erasure that renders both sets of figures broadly equivalent, and hence contradictory. At the same time, the ‘failures’ generated by this empiricist view – amidst a world of contradictory statistics – create moments of disillusionment with the whole enterprise. Rather than examining the conditions under which the statistics have been produced – and thereby accepting the contingent specificity of their meaning – we accuse the statistics themselves of lying to us (hence there are lies, damn lies. . .). Media and cultural studies has, in many instances, taken care to avoid the first of these tendencies – cultural studies, after all, has such a long-standing critique of empiricism that it is almost taken for granted. But, as we shall see, it is far from immune to its own kinds of premature acceptance and dismissal. Perhaps the best example of this is in the way audience research is commonly understood within the cultural studies field.

CONTRADICTORY OR JUST DIFFERENT? THE MEANING OF EVIDENCE ABOUT MEDIA INFLUENCE You have doubtless read many times – as I have – that in the great debate about the power of media to influence people, the research data are contradictory. This assumption is then used to support various propositions, one of which is that the use of statistics to provide evidence – one way or another – is a fruitless enterprise. And yet its premise is often accepted uncritically. Once we begin to explore the data, it becomes clear that the idea that ‘the evidence about media influence is contradictory’ is, like the journalistic treatment of crime figures, partly based on a failure to seriously examine both the evidence and the way it has been produced. If we take the time to dwell on issues of method and context – as commentaries on this topic rarely do – many of the contradictions

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melt away. Part of this involves a rejection of absolutist positions, and accepting that there may be moments when the media have an influence and moments when they may not. It also involves a comprehensive understanding that the meaning of data is contingent upon the methodological apparatuses that produced them. Nearly 50 years ago, Carl Hovland conducted a review of the research now described as being in the much maligned media ‘effects’ tradition (Hovland, 1959). He argued that the outcome of the research into media influence depended partly on the methodologies used. Thus, he argued, experiments – based on classic social psychological techniques of measured and controlled exposure to media – tended to show a measurable degree of media influence (as they continue to do – see Livingstone, 1998, pp. 15–16). On the other hand, studies using what he called ‘sample survey methods’, such as those used in the famous Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet study of the media and political attitudes (The People’s Choice, 1944), tended to report only ‘minimal effects’. Hovland accounts for these differences by pointing out that the two methods construct very different samples under very different conditions: as a consequence the data they produce are not necessarily contradictory at all. So, for example, a controlled exposure to certain kinds of television programme may well produce measurable short-term effects. Yet when these programmes are simply part of the media sphere, their longer-term effects upon audiences in general – who may or may not be paying attention – are likely to be less measurable (and, one might add, more difficult to reduce to measurable forms). Hovland himself was steeped in methodological traditions that have subsequently been much criticized. Sonia Livingstone, for example, summarizes the general problem with experimental methods, the most obvious one being that people do not consume media in controlled conditions, and that media influence is likely to be gradual and longterm (Livingstone, 1998: p. 16). Indeed, although researchers such as Hovland were

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more aware of some of these issues than some of the potted histories allow, the methodological limits of the ‘effects’ tradition in general are well inscribed within the history of media and cultural studies (Hall, 1980, 1994; Lewis, 1991; Morley, 1980; or more recently, Gauntlett, 1998). But Hovland’s general point – that different approaches produce different outcomes – is one that is understood within cultural studies, but often ignored. Indeed, the issue here is not merely one of method. The ‘contradictions’ in audience research – like the differences in crime statistics – are often simply a function of different things being measured in different ways. So, for example, a series of interviews might establish how people – a group of ‘fans’ perhaps – can use creative resources to interpret particular television programmes to suit their circumstances (e.g. Hills, 2002; Hodge and Tripp, 1986; Jenkins; 1992). The same group of people may – when asked about the risk of crime or which issue most concerns them – unproblematically reproduce dominant media frames (e.g. Gamson, 1989, 1992; Iyengar, 1991; Kitzinger, 2000; McCombs, 1981). The fact that these findings suggest different things about media interpretation and influence does not make them contradictory. Far from it: they allow us to understand the contextual and specific nature of the relationship between media and audiences – thus we may record engagement and creativity in one context and acceptance in another. In short, the meaning of data is historical and contingent, rather than absolute. This appreciation allows us to understand data in the context of their production, rather than to simply chalk it up on one side of the argument or another. This is to challenge a widespread empiricist orthodoxy, and to assert that data are a form of representation – a discourse about the world rather than a transparent reflection of it – and that the production of data involves imposing a framework of understanding upon the subject of analysis. These statements are, from a cultural studies perspective, uncontroversial.

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And yet there are a number of tendencies within cultural studies that conspire to blunt this understanding.

EMPIRICISM AND METHOD: UNDERSTANDING QUANTITATIVE FORMS OF DATA PRODUCTION There is, first of all, a suspicion that statistics or other ‘scientific’ methods – such as the use of experiments – carry a greater burden of social construction than other forms of data production. We can, of course, debate the degree to which different research methods construct the subjectivities they report. Watching television with people in their home, for example, may be seen as less obtrusive than putting people in a laboratory, while focus group interviews may allow participants to set the agenda in a way that quantitative surveys do not. But all research into human activity will play a role in shaping either that activity or the way it is reported. All methods are, in this sense, a form of artifice. In this context, to single out certain methods as being problematic is itself problematic. This is not an argument for abandoning method, merely for appreciating the nature of its limits. So, for example, in a broadside against ‘effects’ research, David Gauntlett takes experimental studies on the influence of television on children to task, on the grounds that ‘participation in an experiment, and even the appearance of the adults involved in the study, can radically alter children’s behaviour’ (Gauntlett, 2001: p. 56). Quite so: but one could say much the same about some of the methods he proceeds to advocate – such as encouraging ‘children to make videos themselves as a way of exploring what they got from the mass media’ (Gauntlett, 2001: p. 59). This may be a different kind of intervention, but it is an intervention nonetheless (and, one might argue, one that is no less intrusive or instrumental, in its way, than conducting an experiment). There is also an irony here, since the assumption lying behind this criticism is that

‘effects research’tends to show that people are ‘negatively affected by the media’ (Gauntlett, 2001: p. 57). While this may be true of some studies, the classic era of effects research (apart from the experimental studies Hovland refers to) argued against rather than for the idea of media influence. A re-reading of classic ‘effects’ studies such as The People’s Choice makes the off-repeated criticism that effects researchers treat audiences as passive cultural dupes seem decidedly misplaced. On the contrary, their work appeared to reveal the limits of media power and the strength of existing social networks. Indeed, from a cultural studies perspective, the problem with ‘effects’ is partly its failure to investigate the ideological influence of the media. So while most cultural studies researchers are lined up squarely against empiricism, the critique of statistical or experimental methods often carries the subtle implication that there are certain privileged methods that allow us to observe the empirical world in its natural state. This is, in practice, rejecting one form of empiricism to reinstate it with another. What needs stating emphatically is that empiricism is not a method, nor a consequence of methodological decisions. We cannot say, for example, that quantitative surveys are empiricist while textual analysis or ethnography is not. Empiricism is a way of understanding data – one that assumes the data have a transparency in which the real world is revealed. This should be antithetical to a cultural studies approach, which sees data as a signification rather than a reflection of the world. Too often, however, this understanding is applied rigorously in some instances and forgotten in others. There is no reason why we cannot appreciate surveys, statistics and experiments in ways that understand the limits of how that research was produced, just as we could, if we so wished, apply empiricist assumptions to ethnographic or any other kind of qualitative methods. There is, in other words, a danger of imagining there is some kind of authentic realm of human experience that certain more naturalistic methods allow us to observe – of

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demarcating between methods that take us ‘closer to reality’ and those that do not. We may conduct interviews with groups of people who are familiar with one another in their own homes, in order to encourage people to talk as they would normally do with their family or friends (e.g. Gillespie, 1995; Jhally and Lewis, 1992; Morley, 1986). Since many people spend a great deal of time in these spaces, it is reasonable enough to attempt to explore its discursive dimensions. But this does not mean that this is the special place where people’s real opinions and understandings of the world reside, or, because it is more commonplace, that this place is necessarily the most important site of public interaction. A response to an opinion survey may be a less typical manifestation of public opinion than a day-to-day conversation. It is, after all, a highly scripted encounter that offers little space for freedom of expression (Lewis, 2001). As Pierre Bourdieu suggests, ‘the opinion poll would be closer to reality if it totally violated the rules of objectivity and gave people the means to situate themselves as they do in real practice’ (Bourdieu, 1979, pp. 127–128). But the manner in which people respond to opinion questionnaires may have identifiable political consequence in ways that what we say to our friends and families does not (and vice versa). The conventional response from cultural studies – which is inclined to dismiss polls as telling us little about what Bourdieu calls ‘real practice’ – misses this point. So, for example, it may be that there are instances when news has little impact on our day-to-day conversations, and only becomes relevant on those rare occasions we are asked to respond to a questionnaire. But the potential importance of those poll responses in public discourse means that this is a form of media influence worth taking seriously. So, for example, while polls suggested that the British people were, overall, at best divided and often opposed to the 2003 war with Iraq in the months before and after, the surge in support recorded during the initial phase of the war itself helped to legitimate it at a crucial time.

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The fact that this surge was not necessarily a collective change of mind, and that it concealed a number of ambiguities – as well as reflecting a change in media coverage (Lewis, 2004) – is important to understand. But while we may challenge a simplistic reading of these data, we must also acknowledge that this representation of public opinion is a matter of consequence. More generally, many would argue that the lack of clarity in the way cultural studies deals with data suggests a wider problem with cultural studies, which is that it is often methodologically weak. So, for example, Edward Herman attacks the ‘active audience’ approach for giving ‘great weight to what a tiny sample of viewers say about their perspectives on TV . . . fitted into a framework that takes the existing programming offerings as a given’ (Herman, 1999: p. 278). While I would defend some qualitative audience studies for their methodological probity, one does not have to look too far to find generalizations being made on the basis of small, select samples without proper consideration being given to the role of methods in producing certain outcomes. There is a large volume of quantitative data that is often ignored by accounts of the field from within cultural studies – presumably on the grounds that it is tainted by flawed theoretical assumptions – while smaller studies with glaring methodological limits are often seen as revealing clear and identifiable truths. But if we accept that all inquiries have their limits – regardless of whether those conducting them acknowledge them – we can proceed to interpret the data accordingly.

CLASS, UNITY AND CULTURAL CONSUMPTION Part of the problem here, I would suggest, is the way the presentation of statistical forms of analysis inclines towards an emphasis on unity rather than fragmentation. Statistics are, first of all, often seen as the product of – and are articulated through – structural unities: such as income, social class, public opinion or other

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forms of classification. However much one may appreciate the complexity of social life, there is inevitably a tendency, when summarizing data, to use descriptions that dwell more on what is common or typical, and to express this in ways that could be seen to amplify a tendency into a rule. So, for example, there is often a slippage in discussions of public opinion towards the use of the singular, so that a majority response is referred to as a manifestation of the public mind, rather than as the articulation of a number of publics. These publics, in different contexts and for different reasons, may momentarily converge upon a particular response, but this convergence is constructed by the poll itself, and does not mean a unity of origin or purpose. Bennett et al. make a similar point in their analysis of cultural consumption in Australia: In the ‘narrative’ modes of presentation that we, like anyone else who attempts to describe and interpret social processes, have necessarily used, we have tended to shift imperceptibly from talking of probabilities to talking of the characteristics of a population: from ‘there is about a 10 per cent greater likelihood of men (defined by gender alone without reference to other dimensions of social being) reading newspapers daily than of women (similarly defined) doing so’, to ‘men read newspapers more frequently than women’. We substantialise a set of statistical variations, thereby producing typifications. (Bennett et al., 1999: pp. 257–258)

As they acknowledge, this tendency to ‘typify is to reduce complexity’ (Bennett et al., 1999: pp. 257–258) had not only ignores those – sometimes majorities – who don’t express statistical trends, but neglects the other social forces at play that do not work to support the relationships suggested by the statistical trend. So, to use their example, gender differences in newspaper readership operate within and outside a whole variety of social indicators. At the same time, the percentage difference between men and women in newspaper reading may well be statistically significant – 10 per cent, for example – while ignoring the fact that most men and women conform to similar patterns of newspaper readership.

The trick here is to consider the significance of the 10 per cent difference in the context of ‘multi-dimensional matrices’ against the backdrop of the complexity of social life. This, indeed, is very much the thrust of their analysis, which seeks to develop Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural practices and preferences in a way that acknowledges not only the importance of popular culture but the complexity of class formations, as well as the other forms of difference such as gender, race and ethnicity. Bourdieu used surveys to demonstrate ways in which the distribution of cultural preferences was linked to social class. In so doing, he was not attempting to construct a series of statistically significant causal links to find the ultimate causal variable. Much like Stuart Hall’s move from the notion of determination to articulation (1996) he uses data to establish clusters and associations in ways of thinking or behaving (the ‘habitus’). He was thereby able to theorize a notion of ‘cultural capital’ – a non-economic form of distinction that nevertheless exists alongside economic and social class relations in a relationship of mutual reinforcement. His analysis showed how arbitrary cultural distinctions – what is good, what is bad – became embedded in class hierarchies, articulating and reproducing class distinctions (Bourdieu, 1984). While Bourdieu’s sociological analysis was situated outside cultural studies, his analysis struck a powerful chord within it. Indeed, Bourdieu’s use of data made tangible one of the key strands in the formation of British cultural studies, which, through the work of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, displaced the essentialism of a Leavisite view of cultural value (Leavis, 1930). Bourdieu’s work does more than counter the Leavisite tradition (in which a privileged minority are exalted as the arbiters of cultural value), it explains it, showing how the Leavisite view of culture worked to sustain and legitimate class distinctions. Other surveys in Britain, two decades later, produced similar findings, suggesting that cultural capital was, in its way, every bit as robust as economic capital (Lewis et al., 1986).

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They suggested that, despite egalitarian aims, even progressive local authorities – such as the Greater London Council in the 1980s – while removing economic barriers to participation, had often failed to dislodge cultural practices that favoured those with certain forms of cultural capital (Lewis, 1990). The point of such surveys was both critical as well as administrative, designed to support a progressive cultural politics that acknowledged, challenged and even dismantled the distinctions described by Bourdieu. While Bourdieu’s work in Distinction (1984) clearly informs cultural studies, its lack of engagement with popular and mass cultural forms and its emphasis on a single axis of distinction (class) are clearly out of kilter with a post-structuralist cultural studies concerned both with multiple sources of power and differentiation (of which class was but one) and with the detailed analysis of popular and mass cultural forms. Bennett et al., inspired by a critical engagement with Bourdieu, also use surveys in their mapping of cultural preferences and tastes in 1990s Australia, but they do so in a post-structuralist context, as well as the contextual shift from 1960s France to 1990s Australia. Despite what they call a ‘weakening of taxonomic boundaries’ (Bennett et al., 1999: p. 13), they remain committed to the use of surveys to excavate patterns and distributions of cultural consumption. What their data analysis indicates, indeed, is a partial displacement of social unities in the analysis of cultural taste. So, for example, their surveys suggest important distinctions between groups often clustered together in class groupings, notably between employers and managers on the one hand and professionals on the other. While professionals possess cultural capital in abundance, this does not typify a more general class position. Their data suggest that employers and managers – arguably more powerful class groupings, in economic terms – appear less attached to the use of culture as a form of distinction. Employers, in particular, are less interested in the cultural capital derived from an emphasis on ‘art and musical training’ in school or

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from ‘high-cultural activity which [is] not expensive or socially prestigious’ (Bennett et al., 1999: p. 261). They do not share, in this sense, the professionals’ interest in cultural capital in its own right. For them, cultural capital is important only when linked to ‘social capital’, derived from such things as a private-school education or a ticket to the theatre or the opera. Thus, while acknowledging the privileges that enhance the acquisition of cultural capital by professionals in an information society, Bennett et al. argue that ‘it is economic and social capital that play the major role in the generation and reproduction of class inequality in Australia’ (Bennett et al., 1999: p. 268). What their survey shows, in other words, are points at which the cultural, social and economic capitals overlap and points where they diverge. In so doing, their use of surveys, far from creating structural unities, allows a more situated and nuanced understanding of the relationship between power, class and cultural taste.

MEDIA POWER REVISITED: PROOF, PLAUSIBILITY AND THE MEDIA SPHERE Part of the problem with the use of statistical data in cultural analysis is that regardless of the methods used, there is a tendency to adopt a principle of certainty common in mathematics and the natural sciences. In these domains, it is possible to control conditions and isolate variables in ways that make the notion of ‘proof’ appropriate as a measure of success. In the social sciences – especially when we are dealing with something as elusive as human consciousness – it may be possible to isolate certain variables, but any attempt to control conditions (as for example, in an experiment) is itself problematic. And yet there is still an assumption that we think in binaries of ‘proven’ or ‘not proven’, when we might be better off identifying how best to explain the patterns we find. So, for example, it is a point often made that a correlation – no

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matter how well established – does not prove causality. A correlation between choosing to view violent programmes and enacting violent behaviour does not prove that the first causes the second – or vice versa. What we should ask, in the context of all that we know about culture and society, is what are the most plausible explanations for this relationship? So, for example, a study by Stephen Kull and colleagues at the Program on International Policy Attitudes (Kull, 2003; Kull et al., 2003) found that there was a correlation between watching Fox News and belief in certain myths about Iraq (assuming, for example, a direct connection between Iraq and the September 11th terrorist attacks). After conducting a regression analysis, the author’s found that: Fox is the most consistently significant predictor of misperceptions. Those who primarily watched Fox were 2.0 times more likely to believe that close links to al Qaeda have been found, 1.6 times more likely to believe that WMD had been found, 1.7 times more likely to believe that world public opinion was favourable to the war, and 2.1 times more likely to have at least one misperception. (Kull et al., 2003: p. 589)

These links held up regardless after exploring a number of other plausible explanations. So, for instance, the correlation could not be explained by the fact that Fox viewers were more likely to support President Bush: For example, 78% of Bush supporters who watch Fox News thought the US has found evidence of a direct link to al-Qaeda, but only 50% of Bush supporters in the PBS and NPR audience thought this. On the other side, 48% of Democrat supporters who watch Fox News thought the US has found evidence of a direct link to al-Qaeda, but not one single respondent who is a Democrat supporter and relies on PBS and NPR for network news thought the US had found such evidence. (Kull et al., 2003: p. 583)

What was particularly striking, in this context, was that in ‘the case of those who primarily watched Fox, greater attention to news modestly increased the likelihood of misperceptions’ (Kull et al., 2003: p. 586). Moreover, they found that people who held these misconceptions were, as we might expect, more likely to support the 2003 war in

Iraq (similar kinds of findings were reported by Morgan, Lewis and Jhally, 1992, in their analysis of support for the 1991 war with Iraq). These data, in conjunction with studies of content – which show that Fox paid less attention to criticisms of pro-war arguments than other networks (Rendell and Broughel, 2003) – suggest that one of the most plausible conclusions we can draw is that Fox News played a role in misinforming the public about Iraq, and that these misconceptions are likely to have made it easier for people to support the case for war. And yet to make such an assertion seems alarmingly bold in a culture where the benefit of the doubt falls against such an assertion of clear media influence. Since these correlations do not prove causality, the most plausible explanation for these findings – one that strongly suggests a very specific form of media influence – can be simply dismissed as ‘case not proven’. At the same time, other explanations for the correlation are not subject to the same degree of proof or plausibility. In short, inquiries into media influence tend to begin with the prevailing judicial assumption that influence must be proved, while noninfluence must not. It was for this reason that, after their report caused a stir in the US media, Stephen Kull felt obliged to muddy the waters, and offer other kinds of explanation for the data. As he put it in an interview with the press, their data did not necessarily mean that Fox’s coverage was creating misconceptions: ‘It can be that they (Fox) attract a kind of viewership that doesn’t like to pay attention to disconfirming evidence. Their audience is more prone to self-delusion. That’s a possibility’ (The San Diego Union-Tribune, October 14, 2003). A possibility indeed – but is this explanation more or less plausible? And surely, even if we accept other possibilities, to suggest that Fox News played no part in fostering misconceptions about Iraq is, in the context of these data, highly implausible. Part of the problem here is that the correlations found in surveys are nearly always tendencies rather than certainties. So, for example, in explaining why 60 per cent

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of heavy television viewers think X, how do we account for the 40 per cent who do not? As Bennett et al., point out: ‘much of what is most interesting in our data . . . happens nontypically: adolescents who read extensively or listen to classical music; manual workers who watch stock-car racing and play the violin . . .’ (Bennett et al., 1999: p. 258). In short, while the typicalities suggest patterns and relationships, the non-typical reveals their fragility. Quantitative social science likes to uncover rules and relationships that allow it to predict outcomes, but these predictions will usually be about what is likely rather than what is inevitable. The notion of plausibility is, of course, neither abstract nor vague. My use of it here is in contrast to ideas such as ‘common sense’, or ‘conventional wisdom’, which can be self-justifying and tautological, and which are often offered instead of a theoretically informed body of evidence (Parry, 1992). There are no absolutes here: plausibility simply implies an attention to the weight of evidence and a knowledge of appropriate theoretical models, forms of enquiry and analysis. In sum, this is an area where scientific forms of ‘proof’ are likely to be elusive, and where there will nearly always be patterns and relationships that do not fit the explanations we uncover. So, for example, since we are never going to be able to watch media influence happening before our very eyes, and since the ubiquity of media makes the use of control groups difficult, a plausible explanation is about as close as we can usually get. Because it is so difficult to control conditions and isolate media impact in ways that show causality, we have, for too long in my view, either erred on the side of caution or assumed that what is difficult to measure is probably not there anyway. On a broader level, one of the reasons why so many different assertions are made about media influence is that we lack the kind of systematic meta-analysis – one sympathetic to a cultural studies approach to the contextual and historical meaning of data – that Carl Hovland attempted in the 1950s. While I would not

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want to pretend that my own reading of the field is comprehensive, I would argue that we now have enough information to appreciate many of the complexities of the relationship between media and audiences. This means abandoning the binaries of the debate about media and culture, whether it takes the forms of ‘active audiences’ versus media effects, or cultural imperialism versus localized meaning-making. In other words, it is reductive – and implausible – to simply see evidence in terms of whether it adds weight to the case for or against a relationship. In the case of media influence, for example, we need to abandon, once and for all, the question of whether the media are influential and use our interpretative skill to examine how they are influential. Thus we need to move beyond the idea that the evidence is contradictory, and begin to assert the various contexts in which media influence is likely – or unlikely – to manifest itself. There is a body of work that already does this: indeed, this is very much the spirit of Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model (Hall, 1980) and David Morley’s well-known articulation of it (Morley, 1980) over a quarter of a century ago. Indeed, it has been argued that the emphasis on active audiences in cultural studies has, regardless of its merits, dragged the debate backwards towards old binaries. Part of the problem, perhaps, is the focus within cultural studies on the semiotic relationship between texts and audiences (which is the concern of both the encoding/decoding model and active audience theory). As important and intriguing as this relationship is, it deals with only one moment of media influence, and thereby pushes an empirical focus onto individual texts. In so doing, it shares some of the limits of the psychological experiment. In an increasingly media-saturated world, this emphasis is harder to sustain. While it is hardly new to say that media influence is likely to be long-term and diffuse (Dyer, 1982), it also likely that media are influential in their collectivity rather than in isolation. So, for example, the ability of an individual media text to be influential partly depends upon

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its position in the whole media sphere. This was one of the advances made by cultivation analysis, which sought to move away from a text-based model of effects and create a statistical, sample survey model that might overcome some of the flaws of the traditional ‘mimimal effects’ studies. What mattered, according to cultivation theory, was not individual television programmes, but those stories repeated across television as a whole (Signorielli and Morgan, 1990). However, despite television’s continuing importance, even this idea relies on a distinction between television (and hence ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ TV viewers) and other media – a distinction that is increasingly difficult to sustain. If, for example, cultivation analysis finds little difference between ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ TV viewers, this is put down in the column against media influence. And yet the ‘light’TV viewer may be getting much the same messages from other media (new or old) as the heavy viewer gets from television. This will lessen the differences between the two groups, while allowing for the possibility of a more comprehensive form of media influence (i.e. one that is not limited to television), that acknowledges, as John Corner puts it, ‘media’s consequentiality within society’ rather than ‘media’s consequentiality upon society’ (Corner, 2000: p. 394). Indeed, as research into the political economy of the media suggests, the proliferation of media outlets has coincided with a concentration of ownership, so that light television watchers may well encounter much the same content elsewhere (McChesney, 2000). This, in turn, diminishes our ability to isolate television in explorations of media influence. The problem with cultivation analysis, in this sense, is that it is only equipped to measure television’s influence in those cases where the stories television tells are consistently different from those stories told by other media. Unfortunately, life gets much more difficult for the cultural analyst if we move away from media texts to an examination of the whole media sphere – or alternatively, to tracking which parts of the media sphere tend to be used by particular social groups

(as the Kull et al. (2003) study attempted to do). Not only does it increase the size of the object of analysis to an almost unmanageable degree, it makes it even more difficult to isolate variables across the media sphere. This stacks the deck against attempts to reveal media influence in action: there will always be something outside the remit of a research study that might provide another explanation of the findings. So, for example, it is possible that cultivation analysis, by focusing on those aspects of media content that distinguish television from other media, tends to downplay its influence as part of the broader media sphere. And yet, to date, criticisms of cultivation tend to want to limit the claims cultivation can make, rather than argue that their methods may actually understate media influence (e.g. Hirsh, 1980). Once again, our watchword should be plausibility rather than proof. But it is also here that numbers and statistics become not only useful but necessary. In short, if we are to grasp the relationship between large audiences and the media sphere, we must begin to look for numerical patterns. The same might be said for cultural analysis in general. While there may be much to observe at the level of the individual instance, if we are interested in culture we must also be interested in what these instances do – or do not – amount to. This is not an argument for abandoning more qualitative forms of analysis, but for complementing them with quantitative forms of investigation. In the final section, I revisit two forms of quantitative analysis that might be relevant to such an exercise (both forms that cultural studies has tended to ignore): content analysis and survey questionnaires.

THINKING BY NUMBERS 1: CONTENT ANALYSIS Content analysis has often been regarded as too crude a device to tell us much about the nature of media texts, whose complexity is seen as irreducible to a series

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of simple descriptive categories. So, for example, translating a textual entity into statistical patterns, as content analysis tends to do, does not tell us how the various textual elements form a narrative, or how they combine to create contexts or impressions (what, for example, Teun van Dijk refers to as the ‘local coherence’ and ‘global coherence’ of a text – van Dijk, 1991) . And yet the limits of content analysis tend to be self-imposed, partly because content and textual analysis play by a very different set of rules. Because, as John Hartley puts it, textual analysis is ‘not a scientific method . . . with testable observations and generalizable, predictive results’, but rather an approach that allows us to investigate ‘questions of power, subjectivity, identity and conflict’ (Hartley, 2002: p. 31), it allows the analyst a degree of freedom. This is not merely poetic licence: our understanding of narrative structure, visual imagery, and the full complexity of elements that create moods and impressions – from editing techniques to the use of music – gives us access to forms of understanding and appreciation that are difficult to reproduce in simple formulae. So, for example, it takes a high degree of cultural competence to understand a statement as ironic (irony often being a subversion of appearance). For this reason, the absence or presence of irony in a scene may be a consequence of nuances that are too contextual or incidental to find their way onto a coding sheet. Textual analysis, being less obviously concerned with scientific procedure, allows us to use our cultural skill to immediately see the difference. In this sense, the ‘subjectivity’ of textual analysis can be an advantage, since subjectivity here is not necessarily a question of doing as we please, but of making full use of our skill as cultural subjects. Textual analysis may use structures or methods – such as discourse analysis or semiotics – but their purpose is to deepen rather than confine exploration. Content analysis, on the other hand, is burdened by notions of objectivity, and thus tends to avoid categories that involve a high degree of evaluative judgement or that might involve ambiguities. The notion of

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‘inter-coder reliability’ means that the more open, ambiguous or complex aspects of a text – where the rules of interpretation are more sophisticated – tend to be ignored. As a consequence, the more difficult aspects of media texts are generally left to textual analysis. But if we free ourselves from some of the rigidities of procedure, the difference between content and textual analysis is not a question of subjectivity and objectivity: both forms are interpretative, and both make truth claims. Both approaches, in some ways, attempt to speak about the significance of a text in the culture, and both, therefore, succeed or fail by the same standard. The difference between them is essentially one of language: to use a metaphor from new media, we might see textual analysis as an analogue form and content analysis as a digital form. The textual analyst is dealing with the raw text itself, with chunks of faithful transcription, while content analysis is trying to transform the text into a set of binaries. Both are trying to represent an original object, but they use very different languages to do so. The point of this metaphor is that a binary system – one that can turn a symphony into a computer language and back into a symphony again – is not necessarily reductive, and is capable of great complexity. There is, in other words, nothing about content analysis as a technology that prevents it from embracing the complexities explored by textual analysis. It is difficult, certainly, just as it is difficult to design a computer programme to beat a highly skilled chess-player (whose expertise allows them to take all sorts of shortcuts to see a move, while the machine must run all the computations). It is, in theory, possible to design a content analysis with enough subtlety to spot something as culturally specific as a moment of irony. Indeed, content analysis is only a partially digital form, since it is performed by people equipped with the cultural resources to tick the irony box. What content analysis does require is the anticipation of significant content and a common set of understandings about its interpretation. At its best, content

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analysis is simply a textual analysis that can be reproduced across a number of texts. Indeed, it could be argued that the whole point of textual analysis in cultural analysis (as opposed to, say, literary criticism) is precisely its reproducibility – its ability to tell us not just about a single text but about textual moments that are spread more widely across the culture. So, for example, van Dijk’s analysis of news discourse attempts to shed light on the way news in general works ideologically (e.g van Dijk, 1988), while Jonathan Gray’s analysis of The Simpsons is intended as an exploration of the political and cultural significance of parody (Gray, 2005). What content analysis allows us to do is to explore the degree to which this is so, to begin to map the media sphere to see which ideas and discourses are repeated, which are presented as normative or natural and which are marginalized or excluded. Without this kind of quantification, we have no way of establishing the typicality, prominence or purchase of ideas or discourses. Although a traditional content analysis is often about body counts – who is being represented and how – it is equally capable of being discursive. When colleagues and I conducted a content analysis of the war in Iraq, for example, we were concerned not only with the conventional categories for coding news (such as the use of news sources) but with the way in which the coverage encouraged or discouraged certain assumptions. In particular, we wanted to see whether two key aspects of the prowar discourse – the assumptions that Iraq possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’, or that the Iraqis themselves were happy to see the US-led forces overthrowing the regime – were reinforced or questioned by the coverage. In so doing, we were obliged to consider the different discursive forms these assumptions might take, and to turn this rhetorical analysis into quantifiable data. Thus our analysis enabled us to establish the extent to which the coverage was more likely to reinforce than undermine pro-war assumptions (Lewis and Brookes, 2004).

The Glasgow Media Group’s approach to content analysis has, for some time, attempted to use an understanding of ideological context and textual structures to capture certain kinds of discursive elements in news broadcasts (e.g. Glasgow Media Group, 1976). While they are rarely credited for doing so, their approach moved studies of media ‘bias’ far away from the simplicity of stopwatches (to measure, for example, whether both sides have equal say) to a more sophisticated analysis of the way in which ideology is inscribed within texts. Their analysis of the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, established that Israeli attacks on the Palestinians were often referred to in news reports as in response to or in retaliation for earlier Palestinian attacks, while Palestinian attacks were rarely described in this way (Philo and Berry, 2004). This is the kind of inflection that we might find in a discourse or rhetorical analysis, since it shows how the use of language in specific socio-political contexts has ideological consequences (thus, without showing any overt bias, journalists may be conveying the impression that one side is more rational and more justified than the other). But their ability to quantify this inflection makes their data relevant not just to an individual text, but to the media sphere (and hence less speculative about the information available to citizens). This more discursive form of content analysis makes the labour of coding less routine and more interpretive – something that various institutional traditions tend to work against. So, for example, textual analysis is generally regarded as a product – and measure – of academic expertise. The interpretive work of coding for a content analysis, on the other hand, is seen as more mundane and routine – skilled labour certainly, but lower down the pecking order, and not the province of experts or accomplished scholars. There are practical reasons for this – not least, because the repetitions that allow content analysis to produce statistical data can become routine. The notion of intercoder reliability then acts as an incentive to

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limit the amount of interpretive skill required for the work – a lowest common denominator designed not to exploit human ingenuity but limit human error. One way to avoid this tendency – and allow greater scope for content analysis – is to make the process of coding a more collective, reflexive practice. This involves making inter-coder reliability part of the process, rather than simply a separate form of scientific control. The coding team – including those who designed the coding frame – can thus work collectively to establish procedures for interpreting textual features during the process itself, allowing them to interpret ambiguous or complex moments consistently (see, for example, Lewis et al., 2005). This is a departure from the standard scientific practice, with its emphasis on isolating (rather than including) control mechanisms, but it also allows us to understand the terms by which reliability is defined. Part of the issue here, of course, is that all these procedures are, in the end, readings of a text, and therefore subject to the multidimensionality of audience interpretation. Neither form of analysis is any guarantee of the way in which these texts are received, understood or used, which is why an understanding of media reception will enrich a textual or content analysis.

THINKING BY NUMBERS 2: SURVEYS The relationship of surveys to more qualitative approaches to research (such as ethnographic studies or focus group interviews) is much like the relationship between content analysis and textual analysis. Cultural studies has tended to prefer the more qualitative methods while seeing the more quantitative approaches as reductive. And there is no doubt that a pre-coded questionnaire creates a highly contrived, tightly scripted conversation, dominated by the concerns of the researcher rather than the respondent (Lewis, 2001). It is also clear that qualitative methods are likely to reveal far more than survey questionnaires

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about the way culture works or is used and understood. What survey questionnaires allow is a way of understanding the extent and ideological specificities of cultural practices and understandings – something that is generally beyond the reach of qualitative methods. This includes some of what Robert McChesney calls the ‘big issues’ in media and cultural studies, such as an investigation of which ideas and assumptions media foster or encourage and which they do not (McChesney, 1996). So, for example, once we accept – on the basis of the available evidence – that media influence is neither monolithic nor marginal, the question becomes one concerning the role of media in the nitty gritty politics of everyday history. In short, what role do the media play – right here, right now – in shaping the way we understand the world? As cultural studies, cultivation analysis and agenda-setting research all insist, the question of media influence works in conjunction with an understanding of media content (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan and Signorielli, 1980, 1986; Iyengar and Kinder, 1987). This relationship is symbiotic rather than linear, since our understanding of the significance of media content – and thus what to look for – comes from an appreciation of how that content is understood. Indeed, part of the problem with surveybased audience research in the past has been its lack of engagement with media textuality and content. Thus, in traditional effects research, the emphasis has often been on the way outcomes – opinions or behaviours – may or may not be correlated with media consumption, without exploring the nature of media content or how that content might be used (Lewis, 2001). There is, I suggested earlier, nothing intrinsically wrong with this approach, but it does mean that attempts to fill in the gap between consumption and outcomes are far more speculative than they might be. So, for example, research on news suggests that, in the absence of specific knowledge about an issue, we are informed less by

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specific programmes or narratives and more by oft-repeated templates, frameworks, associations or juxtapositions (Iyengar, 1991; Kitzinger, 2000; Lewis, 2001). Once we have absorbed these frameworks and associations, with only a limited stock of information available, we use them to understand the world in ways that may go beyond their use in media texts. When we are asked to think about social causality (or, as Shanto Iyengar puts it, who is responsible), we can sometimes reproduce a thematic link as a causal link. In other words, the news media do not have to assert a causal relationship for one to be understood. So, for instance, research suggests that the depletion of the ozone layer and climate change are often juxtaposed in media discussions of the environment – as two man-made and hazardous forms of environmental change. When asked about the primary cause of climate change, most people in Britain do not have specific knowledge of the mechanics of the greenhouse effect, and therefore tend to assume that one is the cause of the other – that global warming is a consequence of heat getting through the hole in the ozone layer (Hargreaves et al., 2003). We thereby use oft-repeated associations as building blocks to make knowledge claims which may exceed anything found in media content. Similarly, the fact that many people in the USA assumed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks on September 11th, 2001 (Kull, 2003) was not necessarily because they were told this was the case (although some members of the US administration undoubtedly did propose such a link at various times), but may have been because Iraq and the September 11th attacks were often simply juxtaposed in speeches and discussions about terrorism.Audience activity is often assumed to be empowering, but in this instance it is simultaneously both productive and reductive. It can also be predictable, rather than idiosyncratic and imaginative. Once we understand how this works, we can use content analysis and surveys to trace the relationship between media content and audience understanding.

This is quite different from a simple transmission model of media influence, which assumes no audience activity beyond the ability to reproduce the messages they receive. What questionnaires allow us to do is to explore, across social groups, the informational context in which attitudes and opinions are formed (Lewis, 2001). Indeed, it is when opinion pollsters stray into the realm of people’s knowledge claims – rather than just their opinions – that they are most likely to provide an insight into the relationship between media consumption and opinion. So, for example, it seems plausible to link the negative campaign against asylum seekers in sections of the popular British press (Speers, 2001) with increases in public concern about asylum seekers. But it was when Mori asked people what they knew about asylum seekers that this relationship became more tangible. Mori found that most people tended to significantly overstate the proportion of asylum seekers in Britain, as well as the amount they receive in benefit (Mori, 2000). We therefore have an informational context that favours the development of negative attitudes towards what is perceived as liberal policy on this issue. It is not so much that sections of the press have foisted their opinions on people, but that they have informed a climate in which certain opinions become more plausible. Thus we can see that press coverage has tended to focus on the idea that both the numbers of and state support given to asylum seekers and refugees is excessive, and it is this information that appears to have informed public perceptions. This, in turn, gives us a persuasive explanation of the relationship between media coverage and public opinion. It is in this context that one of the most interesting data sets produced in recent years has come from the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. The focus of many of their studies has been to try and sketch out the knowledge claims and assumptions that inform public opinion in the USA: to look, for example, at the different ways in which those who voted for Bush and those who voted for Kerry

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in the 2004 election understood the world. This gives us a much closer glimpse of the way in which opinion formation works – and thus, potentially, the precise nature of media influence – than the more opaque data sets produced by opinion polls.

GO FORTH AND QUANTIFY In an episode of the BBC’s satirical sitcom In the Thick Of it, a Minister and his political advisers decide to ‘focus group’ (for this is a world where the noun has become a verb) a rather hastily developed policy proposal. The focus group has a star performer – one who has appeared in many previous focus groups – a woman who is identified as being the typical voice of ‘middle England’. Indeed, her ‘voice’ is seen as such an authentic expression of a key demographic that the political advisers decide to dispense with the other members of the focus group entirely, and interview the woman on her own. When she offers enthusiastic support for their proposal, they decide to proceed, confident that it will have public support. Later it becomes apparent that she is, in fact, an actress and not a ‘real person’ at all, leaving the policy process in disarray. The episode is intended as a commentary on modern political life, but it also parodies a certain form of analysis, in which the quantitative tools of social science are replaced by other, less methodical forms of expertise. This is taken to apparently absurd limits when one woman is seen to represent an entire social group (‘middle England’), a group that, because of its perceived political importance, is regarded as emblematic of the nation. In short, policy is based on research with a sample of one. It would be wrong, however, to see this as simply an argument for the use of representative samples. On the contrary, part of the problem here is the way in which quantitative assumptions are used. The idea that there is a key group of voters inhabiting – either literally or figuratively – a place called ‘middle England’ is based

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more on a set of hunches than any sustained analysis. The forms of analysis best equipped to puncture the myth of ‘middle England’ (or, for that matter, ‘middle America’) are, like the concept itself, quantitative. An analysis of opinion poll data, for example, suggests that the notion of ‘middle England’ tends to highlight only those moments when majority opinion tends to be moderate or conservative, while ignoring a number of instances where majorities favour more progressive political positions (Lewis et al., 2005). The notion of ‘middle England’ has partly been constructed by those newspapers – such as the Daily Mail – which claim to speak on its behalf. But this notion can only be contested by interrogating the statistical claims being made, and recasting the meaning of collective opinions. Thus we might compare various collectivities – such as the opinions of Daily Mail readers and the opinions consistently expressed by the newspaper. In this way, quantitative data sets become part of a cultural analysis that tries to understand, at the level of society and the broader media sphere, the ‘questions of power, subjectivity, identity and conflict’ that John Hartley refers to (Hartley, 2002: p. 31). This means retaining and using, rather than abandoning, the insight provided by qualitative forms of analysis, and refusing the essentialism that fixes theory to method. As Bennett et al. suggest, ‘the problem for all social analysis is to find a way between the overwhelming, disparate, chaotic . . . mass of particulars and the narrative of forces, causes and directions which constitutes the logic of social explanation’ (Bennett et al., 1999: p. 258). Quantification is one important way to begin this process. For without quantification there are no comparisons, no typicalities, no patterns, no probabilities. While we can observe social forces without these things, it is hard to assess their significance. But, as with all forms of analysis, we must not be seduced by the neatness of its lines or its structural solidity. The explanations it allows us are interpretative and without guarantees.

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NOTES 1 Although, of course, we need data – about campaign funding and so forth – to make this case – a point I shall return to. 2 Perhaps appropriately, this figure is incorrect – the BCS interviews 40,000 people.

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Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M. and Signorielli. N. (1980) ‘The mainstreaming of America’, Journal of Communication, 30. Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M. and Signorielli, N. (1986) ‘The dynamics of the cultivation process’, in J. Bryant and D. Zillman (eds), Perspectives in Media Effects. New Jersey: Erlbaum. Gillespie, M. (1995) Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change. London: Routledge. Glasgow Media Group (1976) Bad News. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Gray, J. (2005) Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. London: Routledge. Hacking, I. (1975) The Emergence of Probability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hacking, I. (1990) The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, S. (1980) ‘Encoding/decoding’, in S. Hall et al. (eds), Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson. Hall, S. (1994) ‘Reflections upon the encoding/decoding model: an interview with Stuart Hall’, in J. Cruz, and J. Lewis (eds), Reading, Viewing, Listening. Boulder: Westview, pp. 253–274. Hall, S. (1996) ‘The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees’, in D. Morley and K.-H. Chen. (eds), Stuart Hall, Critical Developments in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Hargreaves, I., Lewis. J. and Speers, T. (2003) Towards a Better Map: Science, the Public and the Media. Economic and Social Research Council. Hartley, J. (1996) Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture. London: Edward Arnold. Hartley, J. (2002) ‘Textual analysis’, in T. Miller (ed.), Television Studies, London: BFI. p. 31. Herbst, S. (1993) Numbered Voices. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herman, E. (1999) The Myth of the Liberal Media. New York: Peter Lang. Hills, M. (2002) Fan Cultures. London: Routledge. Hirsch, P. (1980) ‘The “scary world” of the non-viewer and other anomalies – a re-analysis of Gerbner et al.’s findings in cultivation analysis, Part 1’, Communication Research, 7(4). Hodge, B. and Tripp, D. (1986) Children and Television. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hovland, C. (1959) ‘Reconciling conflicting results derived from experimental and survey studies of attitude change’, The American Psychologist, 14: 8–17. Iyengar, S. (1991) Is Anyone Responsible? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Iyengar, S. and Kinder, D. (1987) News that Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jenkins, H. (1992) Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.

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Jhally, S. and Lewis, J. (1992) Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream. Boulder: Westview. Kitzinger, J. (2000) ‘Media templates: patterns of association and the (re)construction of meaning over time’, Media, Culture and Society, 22(1): 61–84. Kritzer, H. (1996) ‘The data puzzle: the nature of interpretation in quantitative research’, American Journal of Political Science, 40(1): 1–32. Kull, S. (2003) Misperceptions, The Media and the Iraq War. Program on International Policy Attitudes: University of Maryland. Kull, S. (2004) The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters. Program on International Policy Attitudes: University of Maryland. Kull, S., Ramsay, C. and Lewis, E. (2003) ‘Misperceptions, the media, and the Iraq War’, Political Science Quarterly, 118(4): 570–598. Larson S. (2003) ‘Misunderstanding margin of error’, The Harvard Journal of Press/Politics, 8(1): 66–80. Lazarsfeld, P. and Katz, E. (1955) Personal Influence. Glencoe Free Press. Lazarsfeld, P., Berelson, B. and Gaudet, H. (1944) The People’s Choice. New York: Columbia University Press. Leavis, F.R. (1930) Mass Civilization and Minority Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, J. (1990) Art Culture and Enterprise: The Politics of Art and the Cultural Industries. London: Routledge. Lewis, J. (1991) The Ideological Octopus: Explorations into the Television Audience. New York: Routledge. Lewis, J. (1996) ‘What counts in cultural studies’, Media, Culture and Society, Winter, pp. 83–98. Lewis, J. (2001) Constructing Public Opinion. New York: Columbia University Press. Lewis, J. (2004) ‘Television, public opinion and the war in Iraq: the case of Britain’, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 16(3): 295–310. Lewis, J. and Brookes, R. (2004) ‘How British television news represented the case for the war in Iraq’, in S. Allan and B. Zelizer (eds), Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime. London and New York: Routledge. Lewis, J., Cushion, S. and Thomas, J. (2005) ‘Immediacy, convenience or engagement? An analysis of 24-hour news channels in the UK’, Journalism Studies, 6: 461–477.

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Lewis, J., Inthorn, S. and Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2005) Citizens or Consumers: The Media and the Decline in Civic Participation. McGraw-Hill. Lewis, J., Morley, D. and Southwood, R. (1986) Art – Who Needs Its? The Audience for Community Arts. London: Comedia. Livingstone, S. (1998) Making Sense of Television. London: Routledge. McChesney, R. (1996) ‘Is there any hope for cultural studies?’, Monthly Review, 47(10): 1–18. McChesney, R. (2000), Rich Media, Poor Democracy. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. McCombs, M. (1981) ‘The agenda-setting approach’, in D. Nimmo and K. Saunders (eds), Handbook of Political Communication. California: Sage. Moretti, F. (2003) ‘Graphs, maps, trees – abstract models for literary history, New Left Review, 24. Morgan, M., Lewis, J. and Jhally, S. (1992) ‘More viewing, less knowledge’, in H. Mowlana, G. Gerbner and H. Schiller (eds), Triumph of the Image: The Media’s War in the Persian Gulf – A Global Perspective. Boulder: Westview Press. Mori (2000) Are We an Intolerant Nation?, http://www.mori.com/polls/2000/rd-july.shtml. Morley, D. (1980) The Nationwide Audience. London: British Film Institute. Morley, D. (1986) Family Television. London: Comedia. Parry, R. (1992) Fooling America. New York: Morrow. Philo, G. and Berry, M. (2004) Bad News from Israel. London: Pluto Press. Rendell, S. and Broughel, T. (2003) ‘Amplifying officials, squelching dissent’, Extra!, May/June. Retrieved from www.fair.org/extra/0305/warstudy.html. Salmon, C. and Glasser, T. (1995) ‘The politics of polling and the limits of consent’, in C. Salmon and T. Glasser (eds), Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent. New York: Guilford Press. Signorielli, N. and Morgan, M. (1990) Cultivation Analysis. California: Sage. Speers, T. (2001) Welcome or Over-reaction?: Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the Welsh Media. Wales Media Forum. van Dijk, T. (1991) ‘The interdisciplinary study of news as discourse’, in K.B. Jensen, and N. Jankowski (eds), Qualitative Methodologies for Mass Communication Research. London: Routledge. van Dijk, T. (1988) News as Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Welch, R. (2002) ‘Polls, polls, and more polls: an evaluation of how public opinion polls are reported in newspapers’, Press/Politics, 7(1): 102–114.

32 Discourse Analysis Lilie Chouliaraki

Discourse analysis, to begin with a claim of broad consensus, poses the question of how to analyse culture not as a question of behavioural variables or objective social structures, but as a question of understanding culture ‘from within’, providing the cultural analyst with a concrete object of investigation – the text. Its premises draw upon Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’ and upon Foucault’s theory of ‘discourse’, both of which view language as a constitutive component of the social world. Culture is constituted by the resources of meaning-making, language and image, which are available for use in a community of social actors at any given time. Historically specific and locally variable as these symbolic resources of meaning-making are, they always function to crystallize and to change social beliefs, relationships and identities in the form of texts. The term discourse refers precisely to the capacity of meaning-making resources to constitute social reality, forms of knowledge and identity within specific social contexts and power relations (Hall, 1997: p. 220). In claiming that texts are implicated in their social contexts and, thereby, come to shape various forms of knowledge and identity, discourse analysis

has been instrumental in developing a more dynamic and historically sensitive mode of critical inquiry into culture – what is broadly known as post-structuralism. In this context, it is important to emphasize that behind the post-structuralist analysis of discourse lies a Saussurian theory of language as a meaning-making system that is organized around relationships of opposition and combination. For Saussure, meaning comes about from the possibility of linguistic signs to be different from one another and yet to complement each other in intelligible relationships within the system of language. At the same time, post-structuralism goes beyond Saussure’s theory of language to argue that these relationships of meaning-making are not purely systemic, that is appertaining to the language structure itself, but also social – having their ‘conditions of possibility’ in the historical and political relationships in which they are embedded. In Foucault’s terminology, linguistic relations appertain to particular systems of ‘power/knowledge relations’ specific to their historical juncture (Foucault, 1982; 1988). In this sense, the Foucauldian concept of discourse sets up a constitutive relationship between meaning and power in social

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practice. Every move to meaning-making comes about from a position of power – power both structuring and structured by the social positions available within the practice. And every move to meaning-making makes a claim to truth precisely from that power position that enunciates it; this is not the truth but always a truth effect, a truth that seeks to re-constitute and re-establish power through meaning.1 Foucault does not, however, postulate that meaning and power pre-exist in an inseparable state as causal conditions of existence for social practice – as ontological a prioris of the social world. What he claims, rather, is that meaning and power are always already encountered in complex grids of coarticulation within every social practice – they are the historical a prioris of the social world. He therefore prefers to consider meaning and power as analytical dimensions of the social, which can be subject to systematic study in terms of their historical conditions of emergence and their effects upon social subjects. It is these effects of subjectification, whereby discourse calls into being forms of social identity at the moment that it simply claims to represent them, which have been the focus of Foucault’s discourse analysis (Foucault, 1982: p. 208). Even though, as Detel says (2005: pp. 6–36), the common view is to classify Foucault’s analytical work into separate categories or periods – for example, with discourse analysis taking place in the framework of an archaeology of knowledge, and the analysis of power in the framework of genealogy and in the study of ethical techniques of the self – it would be more appropriate to think of Foucault’s discourse analysis as combining the two. In engaging with texts, that is to say with practical forms of language use, discourse analysis simultaneously engages with questions of power, that is to say with the relationships and practices within which discourse is produced. This situated conception of discourse analysis further implies that, far from considering discourse as a deterministic structure that eliminates agency and brings about the death of the subject, Foucault thinks of discourse

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as a productive technology of social practice, which subjects people to forms of power while, at the same time, providing them with spaces of agency and possibilities for action. I take this Foucauldian definition of discourse, where power and meaning always appear in a creative tension between agency and constraint, as a normative standard for critically evaluating Habermas’ and Derrida’s views on discourse in the second and third sections below. Whereas the situated and relational nature of meaning-making is today commonplace in the analysis of culture, there are differences as to how discourse-analytical perspectives conceptualize the relationship between meaning and power and, consequently, as to how they conceptualize the dynamics of agency and change in cultural analysis. It is these tensions that create varying impressions as to what discourse analysis can or cannot do. My discussion in this chapter then focuses on two key conceptualizations of discourse in cultural analysis, in order to clarify the possibilities and limitations of this approach to the study of culture. My argument is in three steps. In the first section, Language, Discourse and Power, I discuss the epistemological premises that inform post-structuralist discourse analysis, namely the ‘linguistic turn’ with its major ramifications, phenomenology, hermeneutics and their critical appropriations in the terrain of social constructionism. In the second section, Traditions of Discourse Analysis, I assess Habermas’s discourse ethics and Derrida’s deconstruction. Each represents a key position within the antagonistic field of discourse analysis, proposing a different connection between meaning and power in cultural life. I argue that whereas Habermas emphasizes the negative effects of power on meaning-making, Derrida thematizes text and signification at the expense of broader questions of social power; neither of the two, however, adequately resolves the tensions involved in the concept of discourse. Finally, in the third section, Discourse Analysis and Contemporary Culture, I argue that one major concern in the study of culture today is to conceptualize and analyse discourse under

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conditions of technological mediation – about which both Habermas and Derrida have valuable insights to offer but which, again, neither adequately addresses. I conclude that the discourse analysis of culture today should reflexively navigate between and beyond the two positions, across all three dimensions of cultural analysis: the diagnostic (is mediation good or bad for our culture?), the epistemological (which conception of power and meaning is effective for cultural criticism today?) and the methodological (how to analyse language and image as inherent properties of our mediated culture?).2

LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE AND POWER Wittgenstein’s analytical philosophy, which introduces the ‘linguistic turn’ in social research, and the appropriation of phenomenology and hermeneutics in a theory of power are the key epistemological developments that lead to a post-structuralist conception of discourse in the study of culture. It is these developments that I briefly review in this section.

The linguistic turn The term ‘linguistic turn’refers to a major shift in social scientific research from studying the world as an objective entity that exists ‘out there’ to studying the world as a languagemediated process that exists in discourse. It was Wittgenstein who reversed this order of inquiry from objective reality to language, when he asserted that there is no reality that exists independently of language (Harris, 1990: pp. 27–45; Thompson, 1984: pp. 67, 281–282). Wittgenstein’s concept of the ‘language game’ is premised upon the idea that the social world consists of different types of language activity, each of which is governed by rules specific to its context (Wittgenstein, 1958: sec. 23). The rule-bound nature of each language activity suggests that, much like a game of chess, every linguistic utterance makes sense not on its own but only as part of

the whole activity – hence the metaphor of the ‘game’. It is, in other words, the positioning of each utterance in the strategic system of the language game that gives the utterance its meaning, rather than any inherent feature of the utterance as a linguistic sign, or the intentions of the speaker (Blackburn, 1984; Kripke, 1982, for a critical appraisal of Wittgenstein’s position on the sociality of meaning production). Language, Wittgenstein asserts, is not a private but a social entity and, in its social capacity, language is not only about representing the world in words (the referential force of utterances) but also about doing things with words (the performative force of utterances).3 In a manner reminiscent of Saussure, as we shall see, the metaphor of the language game introduces to philosophical inquiry the idea that meaning, far from fixing a stable relationship between the human mind and an external object, is itself inherently unstable and contingent upon the social rules of human interaction. Consequently, the reductive linguistic analysis of early analytical philosophy, whereby ‘true’ meaning was discovered through the formal study of sentences, is replaced by a heuristic analysis of how meaning is produced in context – in ‘reflexive’ linguistic analysis, where the analyst describes in detail how patterns of language use emerge as people talk and interact with one another (Habermas, 1967: pp. 133–135). Because the social world consists of many different patterns of use, describing each one of them presupposes that the analyst not only understands the rules of each language game but is also able to move between games and through the various and incompatible logics of linguistic activity. At the same time, in drawing attention to the incompatibility between language games, Wittgenstein is criticized for overemphasizing difference at the expense of regularity across linguistic activities and, consequently, for regarding communication as an impossible achievement, rather than seeking to understand how communication can be achieved through difference. The epistemological relativism of cultural analysis, which begins with Winch’s anti-positivism (1958) and

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culminates in Lyotard’s ‘delegitimation’ of the discourse of science (1984: p. 40), is premised precisely on the idea that there are as many incompatible cultural forms of life and scientific rationalities as there are language games, and that these are so different from one another that no comparison or evaluation is possible among them. Against this type of relativism, it can be argued that the social relations of all language games are relations of power and that the rules of the language games are more or less institutionalized in specific fields of power – not least in science, where the production of knowledge is a game of competing and conflicting interests among paradigms. By regarding all games as on a par with one another and yet as radically different from each other, the Wittgensteinian perspective not only makes the evaluation of cultures and rationalities impossible, it also promotes a conception of culture that is devoid of dialogue, conflict and mutual influence, that is to say, of the basic dynamics of transformation inherent in every culture.

Phenomenology The major premise of the ‘linguistic turn’, namely the language-mediated quality of the social world, is shared by another influential approach to the analysis of culture, the phenomenological analysis of everyday life. This is because phenomenology, too, emphasizes the role of meaning in constituting social reality and relationships. Whereas philosophical phenomenology postulates that it is human consciousness that construes the world and, therefore, remains pre-linguistic in its conception of human action, sociological phenomenology postulates that it is human interaction that construes the world as common to all social actors (Schultz, 1967).4 The commonness of the world, or its ‘intersubjectivity’, is the key research focus for the group of phenomenological research traditions known as action theories: ‘how can two or more actors share common experiences of the natural and the social world and,

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relatedly, how can they communicate about them?’(Heritage, 1984: p. 54).Action theories include the traditions of ethnomethodology and conversational analysis, both heavily influential in social research. Despite their differences (Cicourel, 2006), these traditions introduce to the study of culture the concept of linguistic performativity – a concept which, echoing Wittgenstein, refers to the power of language not only to represent but also to act upon the world in ways that have concrete effects on people. Language here ‘performs’ cultural identity, say gender or ethnic, through the use of speech acts and the management of utterances in specific interactions – an insight that, as we shall see in the second section, also informs Derrida’s post-structuralist view of discourse. The sociological inquiry into intersubjectivity, it follows, is not a theoretical but a practical project, which seeks to establish how people jointly produce and organize their lifeworld through local acts of conversation (Giddens, 1993: p. 34). Consequently, the methodology of action theories is empirical, invariably involving the analysis of conversational texts through which social actors work towards a common understanding of the situation. Discourse analysis categories that are extensively used and draw upon action theories include the ‘sequential organization of speech’ (the overall logic of a stretch of talk), ‘turn taking’ (who speaks in which order), ‘adjacency pair’ (exchange units of dialogue, such as question-response) and ‘indexicality’ (language that refers to social realities beyond the text itself, by use of pronouns, adverbials of place and time) – for a critical overview of the methods and vocabulary of action theories, see Thompson (1984: pp. 98–118). It is their insistence on things not as they ‘really’ are but rather as they are performed in language that brings the ‘linguistic turn’ and phenomenology together. Their common ground is a conception of reality that rests on the interpretations of its actors and a conception of science that does not seek a foundational ‘truth’ about how the world is. The difference between the two is that

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phenomenology locates the source of meaning and of human action in the language use of individual actors, rather than in the social rules of the language game. From a post-structuralist perspective, then, the main criticism to be made of the phenomenological analysis of culture is that it tends to reduce the social world to the linguistic representations of its actors; in Bourdieu’s words, phenomenological science is ‘the purest expression of the subjectivist vision’ (Bourdieu, 1990: p. 125). In its emphasis on the subjective dimension of social interaction, the criticism goes, phenomenology ignores historical and structural aspects of the social world, which may act upon social actors but which actors may not be able to directly perceive (for Foucault’s ambivalent connection with phenomenology, see Han, 2002; Oksala, 2005; Rajan, 2002). This may be because phenomenology has a somewhat ‘individualist’ view of meaning, which conceives of language as a resource possessed and used by the individual at his/her own will. Rather than being a historical resource that positions social actors in social contexts of power, language is something that speech participants apply to their own purposes and effects – although always jointly and in interaction. As a consequence, social reality is not structurally prior to the individual but always re-invented from the particular horizon of the speech participant. Society in phenomenology is constituted egocentrically rather than socially, as Habermas puts it (1967/1988: p. 107).

Hermeneutics In contrast to the methodological ‘egocentrism’ of phenomenology, Gadamer’s hermeneutics, one of the most influential research paradigms of the social sciences, considers meaning to be an ontological condition of social life that pre-exists the individual and defines the individual’s perception of self and others. In line with the ‘linguistic turn’, hermeneutics claims that there is no such thing as the ‘social’ before our ability to put it into language. It is the historical

nature of language or, more accurately, the horizon of interpretation that linguistic communication has historically constructed, that provides the conditions for understanding our world – what Gadamer calls ‘tradition’. Tradition introduces into the study of culture a historical macro-perspective on language as a generalized resource of symbolic definition that shapes our sense of social reality. In this, it corrects Wittgenstein’s conception of the language game that ignores the ‘macro’ in favour of a ‘micro’-perspective on what is specific, distinct and different from others in each language game (Outhwaite, 1987: p. 69). At the same time, the understanding of language in terms of broad historical structures of meaning also challenges the phenomenological approach to culture as the sum of subjective acts of interpretation. By expanding the concept of culture beyond the local procedures of meaning-making, hermeneutics introduces into cultural analysis the idea that language is itself bigger than culture, encompassing ‘everything, not only the culture that has been handed down through language, but absolutely everything’ (Gadamer, 1976: p. 25). Social, political and even economic realities are here considered to be parts of human experience mediated through language much like a ‘mirror’ that ‘reflects everything that is’ (Gadamer, 1976: p. 31). The study of culture, it follows, coincides with the study of linguistic communication that, located as it is in the historical horizon of tradition, always involves an analysis of texts from within the limits of tradition.5 In the absence of an outside point of view, cultural analysis inevitably moves within the ‘hermeneutic circle’ of understanding, which uses the linguistic resources available in culture at any point in time, in order to reach deeper insights into human societies. The ‘hermeneutic circle’, however, can easily turn into a vicious circle of relativism. Hermeneutics may rightly draw our attention to the inescapable situatedness of understanding, but it does not locate the act of understanding in concrete power structures that provide the specific positions from which cultural interpretations emerge. If everything

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is constituted within the totalizing whole of language and of tradition, there is no way of formulating normative criteria according to which different types of interpretation are evaluated against one another. Hermeneutics, in other words, acknowledges difference, linguistic or cultural, but it does not evaluate it. From a Foucauldian perspective, we may consider the lack of a normative dimension in the hermeneutic analysis of culture to be related to its rather idealistic view of language (Outhwaite, 1987: pp. 61–71). As the primary order of experience, language is somehow located beyond actual social contexts and above the dynamics of history or the politics of social groups. Rather than producing specific and differentiated effects of power, language serves simply to mediate the world, constituting what Gadamer calls ‘the totality of our experience in the world’ (Gadamer, 1975: p. xiii). Yet, if we accept that language is inherently implicated in struggles over power, then we cannot regard it as simply a benign means of reflecting ‘everything that is’ because not all that there is may be reflected. Rather, language is also a means of exercising power and it is itself a site of competing representations of the world (Habermas, 1967/1988: p. 172).6 Despite its interest in the broader conditions of meaning-making, hermeneutics shares with action theories an ultimately subjectivist view of the social world as existing in so far as it is perceived to exist by its actors – albeit not from the perspective of the individual consciousness but from the perspective of the collective consciousness of tradition (Outhwaite, 1987: p. 74).

Social constructionism: post-structuralism and critical theory Post-‘linguistic turn’ approaches to cultural analysis constitute, broadly, the terrain of social constructionism. This is the terrain of a set of powerful epistemologies which break with science as the reflection of a positive reality and view science as itself a

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language game that constructs its objects of study through its own linguistic practices. In so doing, social constructionism not only opens up a critical outlook on to the modes of rationality through which scientific knowledge is produced, but also shifts the agenda of social research towards the study of human action as an inherently linguistic endeavour (Giddens, 1993: p. 75; Outhwaite, 1987: p. 10). There is, however, a problem with these social constructionist epistemologies. All of them acknowledge, or even celebrate, difference between language games, between individualized acts of conversation or between traditions and cultures as an inherent trait of meaning-making that resides in the very structure of forms of life (in Wittgenstein), patterns of interaction (in action theories) or historical structures of meaning (in hermeneutics). None of them, however, acknowledges the existence of difference in social relations of power as an integral part of the work of language in constituting the social world. As a consequence, none of these social constructionist epistemologies is able to account for experience that goes beyond the appearance of the world in the speakers’ language, nor can they explain cultural change that takes place through conflict and competition rather than free will and consensus among social actors. The idea that power penetrates and organizes the practices of language use is established in the social sciences through two major perspectives: the post-structuralist perspective, which I outlined earlier with reference to Foucault, and the critical perspective, which is broadly associated with neo-Marxism and with the Frankfurt School. Their common argument is that linguistic difference is difference between social groups and cultures and that such difference is consolidated in historical processes of struggle rather than being a benign feature of tradition that can be overcome through dialogue. The two perspectives differ in their conceptualizations of the relationship between meaning and power. For post-structuralism, this relationship is inherent to the very idea of discourse and linguistic practice, since for

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Foucault, let us recall, there is no meaning without a power position that enunciates it. As a consequence, for post-structuralists, culture is a regime of ‘power/knowledge’ – the slash signifying the inseparability of the two – and social change can only occur as a tactical shift in the regime’s power/ knowledge relations rather than as the utopia of a power-free culture. This constitutive link between meaning and power, in poststructuralism, has led to versions of discourse analysis that equate culture with meaning, power with the ‘plays’ of textual difference, and social change with novel combinations of textual signs (Bennett, 1992: pp. 24–29; 2003: pp. 47–63 for a criticism). In the next section, I critically discuss Derrida’s deconstruction as an exemplary case of ‘textualist’ discourse analysis. For neo-Marxism and the Frankfurt School, in contrast, language and power are organized around economic and political structures of domination and, therefore, changes in such structures also entail the promise of power-free communication. For neo-Marxist approaches, the relationship between meaning and power takes the form of ideological domination. Gramsci’s term ‘hegemony’, one of the most influential concepts of power in cultural studies, focuses precisely on language as an instrument for constructing the ‘common sense’ of culture, rather than taking economic interest to be the driving force of social dynamics. Breaking from Marxist determinism, this line of thinking introduces a cultural-linguistic perspective into political analysis and renders culture a significant terrain for social and political change. Influential in British cultural and media studies as well as political theory and critical discourse analysis, especially during the 1980s and 1990s, neo-Marxist concepts such as ‘hegemony’, ‘articulation’ and ‘rule by consent’ are today an integral part of the critical vocabulary of the social sciences.7 The Frankfurt School has, similarly, focused upon the analysis of social power and culture, with important contributions to the study of mass popular culture and the emergence of consumer and media culture

in capitalist modernity. But it does so at the expense of engaging with the role of language in social life. The exception is Habermas’s seminal theory of ‘communicative action’ and his thesis of discourse ethics, which I here take as the exemplary approach of a poweroriented discourse analysis in the study of culture. The second section, Traditions of Discourse Analysis, discusses the discourse approaches of Habermas and Derrida, in order to argue that, whereas neither adequately addresses the duality of discourse as both meaning and power, a dialogic juxtaposition of the two can contribute important perspectives to the critical analysis of culture.

TRADITIONS OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS Far from exhaustive, the approaches of this section illustrate two key positions in the study of contemporary culture from the perspective of discourse. Habermas represents a poweroriented analysis of discursive communication in public life and Derrida represents a textualist approach to discourse analysis. For different reasons, these approaches to culture do not ultimately manage to account for the dual dimension of discourse both as power and as meaning – both as social and historical relations and as material technologies of text. I wish to argue that cultural analysis today would benefit from a dialogic approach that keeps in creative tension the textualist interest in the production of meaning with the interest in power and its specific and material articulations in discourse. As I claim in the third section, given that our culture is today thoroughly mediated by diverse technologies (from print and electronic to digital media) and types of mediation (mass, interactive or personalized), the analysis of culture needs to incorporate a more historicized view of discourse both as embedded in the material technologies of texts, bringing together the semiotics of language-image-sound, and as embedded in asymmetrical relationships of

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media interaction, engaging social actors in subtle forms of agency and subjectification.

Habermas’s ‘discourse ethics’ Habermas’s theory of discourse stems from his own critical engagement with hermeneutic research, where he advocates that hermeneutics has to be complemented by a reflection upon the limits of the hermeneutic project itself (Habermas, 2006a: pp. 294–329). Discourse ethics is just such a reflection. Following hermeneutics, Habermas recognizes that knowledge formation takes place within the limitations of language and simultaneously, pushing hermeneutics to its limits, he recognizes that relations of power constrain and shape the production of knowledge (Outhwaite, 1987: p. 61). Discourse ethics is, in this sense, Habermas’s attempt to analyse communication, subjective and power-laden as it always is, through a set of inter-subjective rules of evaluation that are themselves not distorted by power – and therefore able to identify the degree to which the four main validity claims to speech are upheld in any communicative practice. Discourse, in this context, is that particular form of communication which is comprehensible, truthful, sincere and appropriate for all participants independently of their status (Searle, 1969). Because power is always implicated in real communicative encounters, however, Habermas’s discourse only refers to an ‘ideal speech situation’ that is free of the pressures of hierarchical relations and therefore can apply the ‘universal’ principles of fair conversation (for criticisms see Butler, 1997: pp. 86–88; Hoy and McCarthy, 1995: pp. 177–188; Thompson, 1984: pp. 273–274). For this reason, we should not view Habermas’s discourse as being about linguistic practices as such. Discourse, or Diskurs, refers rather to an analytical norm that defines the degree to which actual linguistic practices distort communication, by systematically ignoring the validity claims of speech. Despite mainstream classifications, Habermas’s discourse ethics and the Foucauldian concept of discourse

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are not purely antithetical. Their convergence (Hanssen, 2000: pp. 1–14) lies precisely in Habermas’s refusal to think of language independently of power. It lies moreover in his belief that cultural change is constituted through the dynamics of discourse as communicative action. Discourse ethics, similarly to Foucault, is therefore grounded in a view of discourse as praxis, as the procedure rather than the ‘content’ of communication. Where Habermas differs from Foucauldian poststructuralism is in his insistence that, after all, language and power can and should be dislocated, in the realm of the ‘ideal speech situation’. Habermas’s concept of discourse then may be called paradoxical, in so far as it both points to the inseparability of language and power in contemporary culture and, at the same time, anticipates their separation in the ideal of power-free cultural encounters. From this perspective, Habermas’s discourse analysis is not simply a proposal for the scientific analysis of culture beyond hermeneutics. It is also, importantly, a proposal for the conduct of cultural life today, in his theory of the public sphere – discourse ethics pointing precisely to the ethics of public conduct that this theory of discourse seeks to formulate. Consequently, the ambivalence in Habermas’s concept of discourse throws into relief another paradox – a paradox in Habermas’s concept of culture. Habermas’s view of discourse has two implications for his view of culture. First, in evoking the ‘ideal speech situation’, Habermas poses a strict normative standard as to how our public life should look: it should be culture without power. Indeed, even though the concepts of public sphere and culture cannot be conflated, Habermas does not strictly differentiate the two. In defining the public sphere as the sphere of lifeworld relations enacted in a public space of deliberation, Habermas’s view of culture emerges as a hybrid concept. Culture brings together, on the one hand, the practices of everyday life and the figure of the private person (the lifeworld) and, on the other hand, the practices of civil society and the figure of the citizen (the public). In this view of culture,

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it is the citizen who brings everyday life under the public spotlight and turns the private into a legitimate object of collective deliberation, under conditions of rational-critical discourse (Fraser, 1989: pp. 113–143; Gardiner, 2004: pp. 28–46). Whereas it may be argued, conversely, that it is purely the lifeworld, that is to say ‘the linguistically organized stock of interpretive patterns’ (Habermas, 1987: p. 124), which constitutes culture as a collective resource for people’s everyday acts of understanding, in fact Habermas’s insistence on the norm of communication without power necessarily always brings into his definition of culture the rationality of the ‘ideal speech situation’ – a public rationality, par excellence. This is because the lifeworld, protected as it is from institutional authority and expert systems, consists primarily of sedimented ideologies and unexamined values and interpretations. How else, then, could these ‘doxas’ of the lifeworld become amenable to intersubjective judgement and, thereby, lead to a fairer conduct of dialogue, unless they were elevated to the rational critical discourse of the public sphere and became subject to the test of the validity claims of speech? The first problem, therefore, with Habermas’s discourse ethics is an ambivalence in his conceptual account of culture. Culture is, on the one hand, lifeworld relations (theoretically) immune to the erosion of systems of power but full of unreflexive ‘doxas’, and, on the other hand, a characteristically civil phenomenon that is capable of subjecting these ‘doxas’ to rational criticism (Fraser, 1989: pp. 122–129; Gardiner, 2004: p. 41; Thompson, 1984: pp. 273–274). However, culture, as we shall see below, is better conceptualized as the co-articulation of the two – that is, forms of knowledge and belief in the lifeworld together with the forms of rationalization in public life – and cultural analysis is, therefore, about rendering explicit the boundaries of tension between the two, Habermas remains unhelpfully suspended between asserting their clear differentiation and, simultaneously, eliding their articulation (Fraser, 1989: pp. 113–143).

It is evident that the elision between lifeworld and the public has to do with Habermas’s belief that communication without power, Diskurs, is the most desirable form of communication in our culture. Yet, from a Foucauldian perspective, Habermas’s discourse ethics unduly imposes one specific norm of communication, power-free communication, as the ‘universal’ norm of public ethics – a norm for all times and all societies. Rather than considering power to be a productive economy of culture, both (potentially) positive in that it makes possible all forms of communication in the lifeworld and the public, but also (potentially) negative in that it creates hierarchies between the lifeworld and the public or between the private person and the citizen, Habermas only thinks of power as something negative, a distortion that we must eliminate (Calhoun, 1995: p. 75; Fraser, 1997: p. 76). Habermas’s ‘universal’ norm of discourse brings me to the second implication of his concept of culture. Culture, for him, should be about communication in face-toface encounters; about dialogue that requires the presence of participants in speech. This is no longer an argument about the validity conditions of communication, or Diskurs, but an argument about the historical conditions under which our culture came to lose its public life and, with it, the promise of undistorted communication. This historical understanding of the conditions of communication today, however, still evokes the ideal of undistorted communication as the ‘paradise lost’ of contemporary culture and blames the mass media for this loss. The mass media, Habermas argues, are responsible for transforming what used to be a public space of active deliberation over lifeworld matters into a mass culture that thrives on the passive consumption of spectacle.8 Drawing on the critical legacy of the Frankfurt School, Habermas accuses the media, particularly television, of manipulating public opinion for political power and for economic profit. Culture, in this account, is seen as increasingly conquered by systems of power that corrode critical

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discourse through the trojan horse of mediated entertainment. The second problem with Habermas’s discourse ethics, then, lies in an ambivalence in his historical account of culture. How can the ideal of undistorted communication survive in a culture where the vast majority of public talk takes place in and through the media? Is mediated lifeworld a dimension of culture still ‘protected’ by systems of power or is it colonized (‘re-feudalized’ as Habermas says) by them? And is the mediated public a dimension of culture that could promise the ideal of civil judgement or does it only serve specific political and economic interests? As before, Habermas does not seem to see the two sides of each tension as a matter of particular articulations in specific contexts and moments in time. These tensions of culture remain as unresolved paradoxes throughout his work. It is evident that Habermas’s problem with the pervasive mediation of culture today has to do with his idea that face-to-face communication is more desirable than the mediated. Indeed, the key argument of Habermas’s account of the transformation of the public sphere associates the decline of face-to-face communication, in the eighteenth-century public debates of the Viennese coffee house, with the rise of electronic technologies that promote one-way communication flows – a form of ‘quasi-interaction’ in contrast to the ‘dialogic interaction’ of physical proximity (Thompson, 1995, for the vocabulary). From a Foucauldian perspective, again, Habermas’s discourse ethics can be criticized not only in so far as its conceptual account of culture takes power-free communication to be a ‘universal’ norm of communication, but also in so far as its historical account of the present elevates face-to-face dialogue to a ‘universal’ norm of public life. At a time when contemporary culture is constituted by mediation, Habermas insists on looking back to unmediated dialogue as the one desirable norm for communication for all societies and all times. In summary, a discourse ethics seeks to provide the analysis of culture with a measure

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that distinguishes ethical from unethical, fair from unfair, manipulative from genuine communication. However, his approach has a rigidly normative orientation that fails to acknowledge both the positive role of power in enabling the ongoing production of culture through communication and the presence of mediation in contemporary culture. As a consequence, his discourse ethics gives rise to pessimistic accounts of contemporary culture and, importantly, it does not provide a perspective on change in a culture that is increasingly saturated by media technologies and communications. Derrida’s deconstruction builds upon a less universal and more situated account of discourse and, thereby, develops a more optimistic view of contemporary culture. But, again, this is not without costs for cultural analysis.

Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ Derrida’s theory of discourse stems from a critical engagement not with hermeneutics, as does Habermas’s, but with structuralism. Following Saussurian linguistics, Derrida recognizes that all forms of knowledge arise out of the meaning relations – relations of opposition and combination – inherent in language structure; simultaneously, pushing structuralism to its limits, Derrida claims that these relations of meaning have a capacity for re-combination that transcends the closed structure of language. In this sense, Derrida is concerned less with language as a system of signs and more with discourse understood as an open field of meaning relations, which cannot be fully predicted by its system and which constitutes our experience of the world. Discourse, in Derrida, is therefore something very different from Habermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’. Discourse is the condition of possibility for any speech situation, in so far as it is a loose quasi-structure that enables the mobility of all linguistic signs in infinite combinations of text. Meaning, it follows, is always an unfinished business because these signs constantly alter their relationship to

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other signs as they travel from context to context. Traces of signs exhibit a minimal sameness in the different contexts in which they appear, yet they are slightly modified in these new contexts (Howarth, 2000: p. 41). It is the capacity of the sign both to appear different and to be recognized as the same, the ‘iterability’ of discourse, that lies at the heart of Derrida’s project of deconstruction. Deconstruction is an analytical project which aims at demonstrating that all dominant systems of thought emerge through discourse and, therefore, are contingent and fragile constructions rather than absolute truths. The key deconstructive practice is to subject texts to analysis of their discursive elements, in order to show how these texts privilege certain meanings at the expense of others and, in so doing, manage to construe specific regimes of meaning as ‘the’ truth. The discourse analysis of deconstruction proceeds in two moves. First, it involves a re-description of the linguistic features of the text in order to show, in an ‘interior’ reading, how these features are put together in a coherent whole, by suppressing the meaning potential inherent in the oppositions of language – such as self-other, white-black, male-female. Second, it seeks to establish, from an ‘exterior’ position, how the text succeeds in producing its specific topic in meaning by fixing ‘points of undecidability’, that is by imposing one dominant meaning over other possible alternatives – self over other, white over black, male over female. This second move is key to deconstruction. It shows that, whilst every text is produced at the expense of suppressing the iterability of discourse, it is also always undermined by these very oppositions of meaning that, in seeking to suppress, the text inevitably carries. The idea that the text is an inherently ambivalent construct is the most important tenet in Derridean discourse analysis and, broadly, in post-structuralist thinking. In opposition to Habermas’s ‘universalism’, where the removal of differences of power guarantees ideal forms of speech, Derrida tells us that the production of meaning never escapes the constraints of its

context – meaning is radically historical and, therefore, always partial and incomplete. How exactly does the concept of culture figure in Derrida’s conception of discourse and what implications does this conception have for the analysis of culture? As in the discussion of Habermas, I address a conceptual and a historical dimension of Derrida’s definition of culture.9 First, the conceptual dimension. Derrida’s concept of discourse implies that culture does not pre-exist the performative force of signification. It is, therefore, impossible to fix people’s identities, as private or public, before they are performed in discourse, and it is equally impossible to assume people’s sense of community with others as pre-existing its construction in discourse. Central to this performative conception of culture is Derrida’s deep suspicion towards speech – a mode of communication that favours the proximity of face-to-face over the written word. Derrida’s broader critique of Western modernity as ‘logocentric’challenges precisely the key role that speech plays in our understandings of culture as a matter of ‘being-together’ and of the public as a conversation among equals – the Habermasian view. At the same time, Derrida’s critique of ‘logocentrism’ is a re-appraisal of the written mode of communication and its dual function: to produce meaning, as speech does, but also, in so doing, to inscribe meaning onto various materialities, from stone to paper to analogue and digital surfaces (Derrida, 1976: pp. 27–64). It is this capacity for inscribing and, thereby, reproducing meaning through various media of representation that is essential, for Derrida, in constituting any form of sociability, including our current cultural and political communities (Howarth, 2000: pp. 36–42). The mediation of meaning through technologies of recording is, by this token, also constitutive of culture because mediation enables the dispersal of discourse beyond the locales of immediate interaction and de-couples communication from any particular person as the sovereign and embodied author of discourse. Derrida’s culture, in this

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sense, consists of spaces of discourse that are constantly disarticulated and rearticulated through those technologies of meaning that bring them into being as, specifically, political or cultural, public or lifeworld. This view of culture manages to avoid Habermas’s normative standard that our public life should involve culture without power. It is evident that Derrida does not consider social differences, reflected as they are in communication practices, to be a problem that, once eliminated, would lead to the elimination of inequalities in the conduct of public life. Yet, precisely because difference for him is primarily a systemic category that originates in language – society itself being structured ‘like language’ – Derrida does not adequately deal with social relations of power (Butler, 1997: pp. 150–151; Caputo, 1997: p. 104; Said, 1978: p. 703). Power in deconstruction appears only as a constraint upon the workings of the text. And because it never transcends the materiality of semiotic codes, power never becomes something that is located in specific contexts of human action with their own institutional and material character. A consequence of this thorough textualization of culture is that Derrida further fails to install analytical distinctions between spheres of human practice, such as culture, society or politics (Rose, 1999; Bennett, 2003). These historically distinct domains of social practice are subsumed under the all-encompassing category of discourse and their analysis is reduced to the indiscriminate deconstruction of texts in terms of their ‘play of differences’ and linguistic effects. This brings me to the historical dimension of Derrida’s concept of culture. To be sure, Derrida’s diagnosis of contemporary culture as thoroughly mediated is more positive than Habermas’s. For Derrida, the transformations that the media bring about in our cultural experience today, either in global broadcasting or new media interactivity, are simply a radicalization of iterability; after all, the deferrals and shifts of meaning across media and their contexts of use have always been a part and parcel of communication.

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Questions of truth and authenticity, proximity and distance, self and ‘other’, which have always haunted the debate on cultural publics and political communities, Derrida argues, today return with a vengeance, demanding new answers in the contexts of electronic and digital media. Nevertheless, this positive narrative does not go with a concrete historical account of the relationship between media and culture. How can we best conceptualize the power of the media today and how can such conceptualizations contribute, as Derrida himself envisages, to the critical project of imagining ‘global cultures’or ‘cosmopolitan subjects’? How can we understand the impact of interactive texts of new media technologies on new cultural collectivities – as an expansion of consumption or as an emerging sense of publicness? Derrida does not address such questions. He does not offer adequate insight into the material conditions and the specific logics of power which make our mediated culture what it is today. This neglect is probably due to the general detachment that characterizes Derrida’s project of deconstruction towards the specificity and historicity of practices of cultural life (Howarth, 2000: p. 46). As a consequence, deconstruction also demonstrates a certain indifference towards the discourse analysis of contemporary texts of mediation that go beyond traditional forms of signification, such as the moving image or multi-media interfaces – even though Derrida acknowledges the semiotic complexity of such texts and gestures towards the importance of developing a new analytics of the image (Derrida, 2002: p. 263). In summary, Derrida offers a situated account of our culture as discourse, which rests on the capacity of signification to bring culture into being and on the affirmation that mediation, far from a necessary evil, is the very condition of possibility for contemporary culture. Derrida’s account, however, does not include an understanding of power as a social category that organizes relationships between groups and individuals, and, therefore, his account tends to reduce power to linguistic oppositions within texts and to limit social

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agency to the regimes of action provided by texts themselves. While Habermas’s discourse ethics privileges social relations of power over the performativity of discourse and, thereby, reduces discourse to a ‘universal’ norm in the service of his ideal of power-free culture, Derrida’s deconstruction privileges performativity over social power and, thereby, ignores the historical and material constraints of culture that always already regulate the performativity of discourse. What I suggest, in the third section, is a dialogic navigation between and beyond the two, which avoids the shortcomings of discourse ethics and deconstruction whilst, simultaneously, it recognizes the constitutive role of mediated discourse in our culture and the pressing dilemmas that such discourse confronts us with today.

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE Discourse ethics and deconstruction disagree in their conceptual approaches to discourse. Yet, their accounts of contemporary culture agree that discourse today is thoroughly mediated. Mediation is a key dimension of our culture and discourse analysis can now barely address the dynamics of culture independently of its contexts of mediation. In this section, I take my point of departure in the mediated quality of our culture and address three dimensions of cultural analysis that the discursive perspective can usefully address. These dimensions are the diagnostic (in Diagnostics of culture and phronetic research), the epistemological (in Analytics of culture: difference within and outside the semiotic) and the methodological (in The discourse analysis of culture: critical and multi-modal perspectives).

Diagnostics of culture and phronetic research At the heart of both accounts of culture, in discourse ethics and in deconstruction, lies

the question of the ethics of mediation.10 Habermas’s pessimism expresses disillusionment with the promise of the mass media to reinvent the conditions of proximity necessary for public dialogue and, thereby, to deliver the goods of a democratic politics and an inclusive culture.11 If Habermas’s ethical problem with mediation refers primarily to the cultural space of the Western nationstate, the ‘democratic sovereign’ as he calls it, Derrida poses the ethical problem of mediation in a more cosmopolitan manner. In Derrida’s optimistic account, the question of ethics is essentially one about how we Western spectators manage our encounter with the ‘arrivant’, the cultural ‘other’ who enters our homes through the media and demands our attention, emotion and even action (Derrida, 2002: pp. 11–16). A key concern in both accounts is the ‘de-territorialization’ of experience that mediation brings about in our culture: the experience of connecting us with dispersed locations and people around the globe without, at the same time, giving us the option to communicate with or act upon them, in any meaningful way.

Normative values and cultural theory This is not a new problem. The majority of cultural theory acknowledges that the discursive power of the media lies precisely in their power to enable spectators witness distant realities and events otherwise unavailable to them (Ellis, 2001; Peters, 1999; Silverstone, 1999, 2006; Tester, 2001). This witnessing function of mediation is the most profound moral claim upon contemporary cultural identities, dividing cultural theory into two types of diagnosis concerning the role of the media as agents of moral responsibility: an optimistic and a pessimistic diagnosis (Chouliaraki, 2006: pp. 23–29; Tester, 2001). The optimistic diagnosis celebrates the proliferation of mediated signs, linguistic and visual, because this diffusion of messages facilitates our engagement with other places and people across the globe and brings about a ‘democratization’ of responsibility and a new

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cosmopolitan disposition (Giddens, 1990, 1991; Thompson, 1990, 1995; Tomlinson, 1999). This is, essentially, a positive interpretation of Derrida’s idea that the media accentuate the natural iterability of discourse – an interpretation that becomes, eventually, appropriated in a ‘happy story’ of ethical action. The pessimistic diagnosis, by contrast, laments the fact that the media sensationalize or exoticize distant places and people and turn their realities, often realities of suffering and war, into spectacles for consumption (Miller, 1971: p. 183; Tester, 2001: pp. 1–9). This cultural pessimism echoes Habermas’s criticism of the media, on the grounds that they entertain the illusion of engaging with public life when, in fact, they commodify information and aestheticize politics. Evidently, these two diagnostic positions concerning the ethics of mediation today draw upon normative claims about the role of discourse in culture: mediated discourse is treated as either inherently good, under the influence of a Derridean view, or as inherently bad, under the influence of, among others, a Habermasian view.12 The Foucauldian perspective on discourse, however, understands the mediation of culture as a ‘power/knowledge’ regime – a regime of meanings with its own historical relations of power, which defines how specific media produce ethical discourse in their institutional contexts of operation. This Foucauldian position challenges the diagnostic ethos of cultural theory on the grounds that it is prematurely normative: it already entails an implicit evaluation of discourse, optimistic or pessimistic, before it empirically investigates concrete practices of mediation.

Normative values and discourse analysis The Foucauldian position on discourse maintains that the potential of mediation to cultivate a sensibility beyond the ‘at home’ is neither de facto possible, as in the optimistic diagnosis, nor a priori impossible, as in the pessimistic diagnosis. The potential of mediation to deterritorialize our ethical sensibilities, as much as it deterritorializes our technological contact with the ‘other’,

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has its own historical and social conditions of possibility. This diagnostic ethos in cultural analysis is characteristic of the Aristotelian practice of phronesis (practical or everyday reason), which deals with the question of culture and ethical norms from the concrete perspective of praxis.13 Phronesis approaches ethics as the situated enactment of values in the discursive practices of culture, rather than as a priori norms that regulate our narratives of culture (Flyvebjerg, 2001: pp. 53–65). Phronetic discourse analysis, in this sense, is a form of critical inquiry that regards texts as particular instantiations of those public values and norms that, at a particular moment in time, happen to be dominant in our culture – hence their ‘universal’ status. The normative perspective of phronetic discourse analysis, it follows, neither presupposes Habermas’s ‘universal’ value of power-free culture, rendering any account of mediated culture pessimistic, nor does it dissolve media power into the Derridean ‘plays of difference’on the surface of particular texts. Rather, the normative perspective of phronetic discourse analysis seeks to show that every text entails its own struggle of ‘universal’ vs. ‘particular’ meanings and that the dominance of certain meanings as ‘universal’ is an effect of the relations of power in which the text is embedded. Phronetic discourse analysis, therefore, begins with the question of ‘how’: how do the texts of mediation manage to ‘universalize’ certain ethical meanings whilst suppressing others as ‘particular’? Whereas this formulation of discourse analysis is reminiscent of Derridean deconstruction, the concern with power, to which I return below, provides a critical corrective to the diagnostic capacity of Derridean discourse analysis. In place of the various diagnoses of culture, with their implicit normativity, phronetic discourse analysis proposes a diagnostics of culture: a procedure of critical engagement with concrete texts, which, in their cumulative production and consumption, come to shape our present as a particular historical moment.

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Analytics of culture: difference within and outside the semiotic A diagnostics of culture takes its point of departure in the claim that our involvement in culture, mediated and de-territorialized as it is, rests upon ethical values that appear as ‘universal’ but are, in fact, construed by the semiotic choices of texts of mediation and by the relations of power that these practices of mediation articulate and reflect. What this means is that the shift towards a phronetic discourse analysis of culture is not only a shift from normative diagnoses of culture towards situated practices of mediation – texts. It is also a shift in understanding the role of power in culture and the ways in which power may appear in the form of texts. This poses a problem of epistemology for cultural analysis, because it has implications as to how we conceptualize power as an analytical category.

Difference within and outside the semiotic For Derrida, let us recall, power resides in meaning itself and is conceptualized as difference within the semiotic system of language. This leads to a textualist bias, which often tends to understand cultural politics as a play of linguistic difference. Informing the majority of post-modern cultural studies, particularly the paradigm of audience studies, the textualist emphasis often tends to celebrates pleasure, consumption and individual empowerment – what McGuigan calls ‘cultural populism’ (1992). For Habermas, on the other hand, power resides outside semiotic systems and is conceptualized as difference in society; difference, here, either traverses social relations between people, and can be bracketed out in the ‘ideal speech situation’, or lies in the political-economic relations of technology, and distorts public communication. This type of ‘universalism’ harmonizes with traditional political economy studies of media industries, which emphasize the dependence of mediation on economic interest and, in a deterministic manner, deny the possibility that the media produce critical discourse.

What we need for an analysis of mediation that avoids textualism and universalism is a view of power which refers simultaneously to both types of difference: difference that is textual or difference within the semiotic, following Derrida, and difference that is social or difference outside the semiotic, following Habermas. Useful, to this end, is the distinction between discourse as a power/knowledge regime, which – as we have seen – places emphasis on the textual or semiotic side of discourse, and discourse as governmentality, which places emphasis on the side of discourse as a contemporary form of power that seeks to govern populations and individuals through the ‘micro’-practices of their everyday conduct. Whereas both sides of the distinction (power/knowledge and governmentality) take into account text and power, as Foucault would insist, there are differences of emphasis between the two and, therefore, in their conceptualization of cultural agency and change. If discourse as a power/knowledge regime comes closer to a view of culture as text, giving rise to the analytical traditions I reviewed earlier, discourse as governmentality comes closer to a view of culture as an ensemble of material technologies and practices that seek to promote specific modes of being, relating and acting upon oneself and others.

Discourse and governmentality Mediation, I wish to argue, needs to be understood and analysed as a technology of governmentality, that is as a technology of contemporary rule that does not exercise direct authority on people but acts indirectly on the qualities of connectivity and interactivity among media publics so as to cultivate certain types of identity and agency. It is the fact that action in the media is always action at a distance that most forcefully thematizes the dimension of mediation as governmentality. Because of the practical impossibility of ‘being there’ in the de-territorialized space of the media, the forms of engagement that the media make

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available have less to do with immediate, practical action and more to do with patterns of identification on the part of media users (Barnett, 2003: p. 102). This is the case not only with electronic media, such as television and its options for identification through its multiple genres and narratives, but also with new media, such as blogs and msn spaces, where the potential to create a virtual civic society rests precisely on the capacity of media users for imaginary identification, deliberation and action at a distance (Dahlgren, 2007). In this sense, we should regard mediation as a process of technological meaning production and dissemination which is firmly located in the global relations of information technology – both in the asymmetrical patterns of global viewing and in the unequal access to new media technologies. The question of who watches and who suffers, to take an example from Habermas’s and Derrida’s concerns with the ethics of mediation, captures a fundamental aspect of this asymmetry, which, grounded as it is in differences in economic resources and political regimes, becomes refracted and reproduced through mediation in the hierarchies of place and human life that divide our world.14 Through this example, we can see that the definition of mediation as a technology of governmentality capitalizes on the semantic ambiguity of the term technology as a materiality that enables not only the process of mediation itself, in the technical devices of recording or digitalizing information, but also the exercise of power, in the reproduction of global relations of viewing. In its governmental capacity, the example tells us, mediation mobilizes regimes of meaning in order to shape the conduct of particular media publics in terms of who cares about whom or who acts for whose benefit. It therefore begs for an analysis of power that focuses specifically on how the media selectively report on human affairs around the world and, in so doing, manage to promote (or not) certain cultural sensibilities, those of the ‘cosmopolitan philanthropist’ or the

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‘global citizen’, under conditions of cultural deterritorialization.15 The view of mediation as a technology of governmentality is fully compatible with the phronetic spirit. Neither celebrating the audiences’ capacity to re-articulate the ‘play of differences’ in media texts nor a priori precluding the capacity of the media to engage audiences in critical discourse, governmentality conceptualizes cultural agency as conditional freedom. Conditional freedom refers to the function of media texts to regulate, but by no means determine, our capacities for engaging with other people, by opening up multiple ethical positions for us to identify with. This multiple economy of identification is inherently ambivalent. It is positive, because we can only relate to others on the condition that we are already constituted as free subjects that draw selectively upon an existing repertoire of identity resources – those of the philanthropist, the activist or simply the voyeur (Boltanski, 1999). And it is negative, because the systemic ‘bias’ in the possibilities for identification across Western media ultimately reproduces an exclusively Western sensibility towards people who are culturally closer to us at the expense of those who are not – Derrida’s ‘arrivants’. It is this ambivalence in the economy of identification of the media that makes the relationship between media text and media users an ethical relationship, par excellence, and a crucial stake in the shaping of a cosmopolitan culture today. Foucault uses the Aristotelian concept of ‘analytics’, in order to distinguish his own study of power as a double economy of freedom and subjectification from an abstract ‘theory’ of power. Discourse analysis, I would argue, is a form of an analytics of culture, in so far as it accounts for this duality of power; in so far, that is to say, as it describes in detail the operations of mediated meanings (or difference within the semiotic), so as to show how these meanings engage human beings with specific technologies of rule and place them in concrete relationships of power to one another (or difference outside the semiotic).

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The discourse analysis of culture: multi-modal and critical perspectives I consider the duality of the concept of difference to be a key distinction for the methodology of the analytics of mediation in contemporary culture. In difference within the semiotic, focus falls on each technological medium and its meaning-making affordances, such as the telephone and the privileging of the verbal vis-à-vis, say, television and the privileging of the image, or interactive media and the privileging of a mix of the verbal and the visual. In difference outside the semiotic, focus falls on the work of language and image that these technologies perform in representing the social world and in formulating proposals of moral involvement with the social world – implicitly or explicitly. In practice, of course, technological and semiotic mediation are not separable, but the distinction helps us draw attention to the moment of their articulation, say of a camera position and its images, and how such articulation works as a technology of power – zooming in on and personalizing the other or zooming out and keeping a distance from her or him.

Multi-modal discourse analysis Difference within the semiotic refers to difference that resides in the very system of language or the image (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001; van Leeuwen and Jewitt, 2001, for the grammar of the visual; see also van Leeuwen and Jaworski, 2002; Perlmutter and Wagner, 2004; Schroeder, 2002). The analysis of mediation as difference within the semiotic is multimodal analysis. Multi-modal analysis is not a radical break from the analytical frameworks that I have examined, which centre on the analysis of language as the main meaning resource. Multi-modal analysis is, rather, an opening of discourse analysis to the semiotic mode of the image. In recognizing that the visual is ‘an independently organized and structured message – connected with the verbal text, but in no way dependent on

it’ (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996: p. 17), multi-modal analysis focuses on the ways in which media technologies bring image and language together in hybrid texts, on various types of screens – from television to the PC or the mobile phone – and in various modes of interactivity – from no to quasito full interactivity. In so doing, multi-modal analysis draws creatively upon a variety of traditions, including aesthetic theory and art history, phenomenology of the image, social semiotics and iconographic analysis, formulating a distinct and increasingly popular approach to cultural analysis.16 The methodological principle of multimodal analysis is that the technologies of mediation construe regimes of meaning, which represent the world in various degrees of connectivity to us, media publics. These regimes of meaning in mediation do not coincide with the specific image or language we encounter on screen. Because such regimes of meaning are patterns of co-appearance and combination rather than single pictures or sentences, they are best understood as analytical constructs that help us describe the systematic semiotic choices by which the world ‘out there’ becomes meaningful to us through specific technologies and genres of mediation. Three aspects of media texts are relevant in the multi-modal analysis of mediation: the mode of presentation through which the media text represents an aspect of the social world; the correspondence between verbal narrative and image in the text, which creates forms of connectivity and identification for media audiences or users; and the overall aesthetic quality or interactive potential of the text (Cottle and Rai, 2006, for similar proposals on the analysis of media texts in terms of their ‘communicative architecture’).

Critical discourse analysis Difference outside the semiotic lies in the asymmetries of power that traverse the social world and in the historical and political relations within or between social groups. The principle of difference outside the semiotic is the multi-functionality of semiotic

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practice. Multi-functionality assumes that every semiotic mode, language and image, creates meaning that fulfils more than one social function at once (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; Fairclough, 1992, 1995, 2003; Halliday, 1985/1995; Halliday and Hasan, 1989; Kress, 1989). Whereas the first social function of semiosis is the need to name and represent the world, the ‘ideational’ function, the second one is the need to engage in interaction and relate to other people, the ‘interpersonal’ function of semiosis. It is because these two functions concern themselves with the implications of semiosis in the social world – with the representation of reality and with the orientation to others – that they are conducive to the study of social relations of power and bring forth the dimension of mediation as difference outside the semiotic (Iedema, 2001: pp. 191–193). The analysis of mediation as difference outside the semiotic is critical discourse analysis (CDA).17 CDA is an approach to media texts that treats the linguistic and visual choices on screen as subtle indicators of the power of media technologies to represent the world to us and to orient us towards others in this world. Despite this general definition, CDA should not be regarded as one single method. As part of the broad hermeneutic tradition, CDA is a contextspecific and historically sensitive research approach that does not simply provide us with a tool-kit of categories for the analysis of power. Depending, rather, on the research question and the nature of technological texts under study, the critical analysis of mediation may require defining the power of mediation in different ways and combining different categories and techniques to examine the link between power and mediated discourse. It follows that the categories of representation and orientation may be variously operationalized in specific critical analyses of mediation. Following on Derrida’s ethical concern with the electronic mediation of the ‘arrivant’, CDA would here define the power of mediation as the power to classify the world

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into categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and to orient (or not) the viewers towards those others who are not like ‘us’.18 In the analysis of representations, CDA then would look into the construal of the scene of mediated action within a specific space and time that separates ‘us’ from ‘them’. The category of ‘spacetime’ refers to the place and the temporality of action. It tells us how close a specific media event appears to the viewer and how important engagement with or even action on the distant ‘other’ is. The analysis of ‘spacetime’, then, shows us how media technologies not only de-territorialize our experience of the world but also, simultaneously, how they re-territorialize such experience, by regulating the degrees of proximity/ distance or urgency/finality for each mediated event. In the analysis of orientations, CDA would look into the category of agency. Agency is about who acts upon whom in the scene of mediated action. There are two dimensions of orientation that are relevant in establishing the social relationships of de-territorialized connectivity. First, agency refers to who and how active the distant other appears on screen and, second, it refers to how other actors present in the scene of action appear to engage with one another. These two dimensions of agency come to shape how media publics are invited to relate to the mediated event, that is if they are supposed to simply watch, to feel for or to react practically to the other’s misfortune or struggle. The analysis of agency, then, shows us how the media as technologies of governmentality may re-territorialize the distant event not only in terms of proximity or urgency but, simultaneously, also in terms of the emotional engagement and moral commitment or, perhaps, practical action that they propose to media publics. This distinction between representation and orientation, let me repeat, is necessary for analytical purposes. In practice, representations and orientations are not separate parts of the media text and we must look at once into both dimensions in order to determine how they are brought together in each media story.19

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CONCLUSION In this chapter, I argue that the field of post-structuralist discourse analysis, a key approach in the study of culture today, is traversed by certain tensions as to what discourse itself is and how it figures in our culture today. I demonstrate this point by critically reviewing two prototypical theses of discourse analysis, discourse ethics (Habermas’s appropriation of the Frankfurt School’s critical social theory) and deconstruction (Derrida’s textualist appropriation of French post-structuralism). I claim that this ‘undecidability’ inherent in the field of discourse analysis is not a bad thing. On the contrary, it can become a creative resource for reflexively using discourse analysis as a methodology for the analysis of contemporary culture – a culture characterized by unprecedented processes of intense and pervasive mediation. I conclude that cultural analysis today could benefit from a reflexive discourse analysis approach, which (i) prioritizes questions of ethics, under conditions of cultural globalization and the de-territorialization of social relationships and moral commitments; (ii) grasps the question of ethics from the pragmatic perspective of practice and focuses on the instantiation of ethical values in the texts of mediation (phronesis); and (iii) effectively combines the interest in the production of hybrid media texts (multi-modal analysis) with the interest in power both as hegemony and as governmentality (Critical Discourse Analysis).

NOTES 1 Truth isn’t outside power … it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power, Foucault (1980: p. 131); see also Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982, ch. 4); Barrett (1991: pp. 126–137); Howarth (2000: pp. 67–85); Chouliaraki (2002: pp. 83–114). 2 See Hanssen (2000: p. 14) for the argument that ‘the between’ is not a position of inconclusive suspension or impasse but rather a position that both

exposes the fundamental differences between poststructuralism and critical theory and acknowledges the terms on which they may converge. 3 See Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) for speech act theory, the study of meaning-making and its effects on human action. The theory is based upon the idea that linguistic conventions do not only determine how the world is represented in language (the propositional content of utterances), but also how things get to be accomplished in speech (the ‘illocutionary force’ of our speech acts) – what Habermas (1971) calls the ‘performative-propositional dual structure’ of meaning. Habermas’s ‘universal pragmatics’, which, as we shall see, informs his discourse ethics, is based precisely on language as acts oriented towards pragmatic objectives. 4 Schultz’s sociological phenomenology does not aspire to explicate a priori rules that constitute the empirical world, as Husserl’s philosophical phenomenology does, but to describe the concrete ways in which social actors constitute common understandings of their social situations in the contexts of their everyday life (Giddens, 1993: p. 32; Eagleton, 1991: p. 56). 5 Even though Gadamer did not specify one concrete methodological route for hermeneutic inquiry, the concept of text interpretation is central in all contemporary qualitative research. Embedded in broader designs of anthropological fieldwork, including participant observation, interviews, diaries or archive search, the text is today at the centre of the hermeneutic analysis of culture (Eagleton, 1991). 6 Apart from Habermas’s argument, which I explore in detail below, the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ also came as a response to Gadamer’s idealism in that it perceived understanding not only as a positive move towards partial, yet illuminating truths, but as a violent move that seeks to expose deeper truths purposefully hidden (Ricoeur, 1970). Freudianism and Marxism are seen, in Ricoeur, as different forms of hermeneutics of suspicion, whereby the aim has been to understand reality in order to ‘demystify’ it, in order to disclose an order of things that the self-deluded social subject is unable to perceive. 7 Notably Raymond Williams (1981, 1982, 1989); also Hall (1987); Fairclough (1992). For criticisms see Laclau and Mouffe (1985); Barrett (1991: pp. 51–80); Bennett (1992: pp. 23–34). 8 See Habermas (1989) for the thesis on the ‘structural transformation of the public sphere’, but also Habermas (1998) on ‘facts and norms’; Barnett (2003: pp. 57–60); McLaughlin (2004: pp. 157–159) for critical discussions. 9 For Derrida’s conception of culture see Derrida (2002); for a critical discussion of Derrida’s deconstruction and post-modern culture see Harvey (1990: pp. 39–65); for Derrida’s approach to culture, public life and the ethics of the ‘other’ see particularly Barnett (2003: pp. 9–32 and 54–80).

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10 For the relative neglect of questions of ethics in cultural studies in favour of a politics of representation, see Kellner (1999). 11 More recently, Habermas’s reluctant openness towards the media is based on the recognition that they create interconnectedness among publics and contribute to articulating and evaluating public discourse: Habermas (2006b: pp. 9–10); see also Barnett (2003: pp. 71–75). 12 The most radical version of pessimism on the role of the media in our culture is Baudrillard’s thesis, where the media are considered to be responsible for the disappearance of the real into a simulacrum – a mirror image of reality that is nowadays the only authentic reality of the spectator. This position combines an extreme version of Derrida’s iterability (signs are here disconnected from any reference external to the medium itself) with the pessimism of Habermas vis-à-vis the corroding role of media in our culture, and, as a consequence, entails a disabling nihilism – a nihilism which leaves no space for the ethical content of mediation (for a criticism directly related to this, see Chouliaraki, 2006: pp. 50–53). 13 See Aristotle, Nichomahean Ethics, 1140a24– 1140b12 and 1144b33–1145a11. Also Flyvebjerg for the use of Aristotle in the social sciences (2001: pp. 110–128) and Ross (1923/1995: pp. 31–49) for Aristotle’s indictive methods and his analytics. 14 See Hall (1996: pp. 1–17; 1997: pp. 223–290) on the concept of difference and ‘other’; Calhoun (1995: pp. 231–82) on difference and national identity; Peters (1999), Silverstone (1999, 2006) and Butler (2004) in relation to media and the ‘other’. 15 See Couldry (2005) for an overview of discourse approaches to the question of social action and media texts; also for a persuasive argument for expanding the scope of discourse approaches beyond media texts towards, broadly, texts about the media by audiences and media users as part and parcel of the contexts of mediation today. 16 For the increasing interest in visual analysis in cultural studies, see Mirzoeff (1999); Evans and Hall (1999); Emmison and Smith (2000); Sturken and Cartwright (2001); van Leeuwen and Jewitt (2001); Iedema (2001) among others. 17 Inspired by the multi-functional theory of language (see below) and by the Russian school of linguistics and literary criticism, with figures such as Voloshinov and Bakhtin, CDA combines the close analysis of linguistic text with a Gramscian view of discourse as a key dimension of hegemonic struggles, showing how meaning and power articulate in a range of public discourses, such as political and media discourse (Fairclough, 1989, 1992, 1995, 2003). Moreover, mediated discourse analysis operates with a broad view of mediation and provides critical contributions on the ways in which, specifically, discourse and technology shape everyday actions and dispositions in our culture today (Scollon, 1998; Scollon and Scollon, 2003; Levine and Scollon, 2004).

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18 I discuss this categorization in detail in Chouliaraki (2006: pp. 84–93). 19 Other versions of critical discourse analysis, such as the historical approach towards political discourse (Wodak, 1999, 2003; Chilton, 2003) as well as the cognitive approach to discourse (e.g. van Dijk, 1997a,b), do not directly draw upon the multifunctionality principle of discourse but sustain the interest in language and power, contributing to an analysis of culture from the perspectives of domination and social inequalities.

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Habermas, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity. Habermas, J. (2006a) ‘On hermeneutics claim to universality,’ in Mueller-Vollmer, K. (ed.) The Hermeneutics Reader. Texts on the German Tradition. Continuum: New York. Habermas, J. (2006b) Time of Transitions. Cambridge: Polity. Hall, S. (1973/1980) ‘Encoding-decoding’, in S. Hall, D. Hobson and A. Lowe (eds), Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson. Hall, S. (1997) Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage and Open University Press. Halliday, M.A.K. (1985/1995) Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: E. Arnold. Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R. (1989) Language, Context and Text. Aspects of Language in a Social Semiotic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hallin, D. (1993). From Vietnam to El Salvador: Hegemony and Ideological Change in We Keep America on Top of the World. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 58–86. Han, B. (2002) Foucault’s Critical Project. Between the Transcendental and the Historical. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hannertz, U. (1996) Transnational Connections. Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. Hanssen, B. (2000) Critique of Violence: Between Post-structuralism and Critical Theory. New York: Routledge. Hasan, R. (2000) ‘The disempowerment game: a critique of Bourdieu’s view of language’, in Linguistics and Education, Vol. 10 Nr 4. New York: Elsevier Science. Harris, R. (1990) Language, Saussure, and Wittgenstein. London: Routledge. Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity. Blackwell: London. Heritage, J. (1984) Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge and New York: Polity Press. Hodge, B. and Kress, G. (1988) Social Semiotics. London: Routledge. Hoopes, J. (ed.) (1991) Pierce on Signs. Writing on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Pierce. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Howarth, D. (2000) Discourse. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Hoy, D. and McCarthy, T. (1995) Critical Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Iedema, R. (2001) ‘Analysing film and television: a social semiotic account of hospital: an unhealthy business’, in T. van Leeuwen and C. Jewitt (eds), Handbook of Visual Analysis. London: Sage, pp. 183–206.

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33 Cultural Activism Pepi Leistyna

In order to bring about social change, cultural activists have access to a rich theoretical and empirical history of different ways of thinking about the relations between intellectual and political practice. In fact, armed with an understanding of the synergy that exists among theory, research and activism – the multidirectional relationships within which each component influences and strengthens the other – people and organizations have long worked to secure human, economic and political rights. At its foundation, the dialectical relationship among theory, research and activism is relatively simple. As theory – through interpretation and explanation – begs empirical and practical questions and illuminates research findings and activist efforts, research not only puts theory to the test and provides the potential for its expansion, but it can also offer activists tangible models to critically appropriate from in order to address their current predicaments. Meanwhile, activism can simultaneously push theory forward into uncharted territory and expand the horizons of empirical analysis. This ongoing interaction helps us to better make sense of and to act upon the world in far more informed, efficient and effective ways.

Making use of this synergy is of particular importance in this age of globalization – driven largely by changes in global economics and interactive technologies – where social agency is taking on new forms. While many members of the global justice movement have been making effective use of existing theory and research to inform their strategic manoeuvres, their actions are simultaneously bringing into focus new questions for analysis and exploration. Before elaborating on these movements and their theoretical and empirical appropriations and implications, it is helpful to briefly point out some of the intellectual traditions that have come to inform most radical contemporary cultural activism.

THEORY AND CULTURAL ACTIVISM Theory embodies existing ways in which people have interpreted, analysed and made generalizations about why the world works the way that it does. It is the why and how of what has been happening around us and not simply a focus on what is occurring and how to respond effectively. While the following examples of critical social theory represent areas of thought that

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are internally diverse, frequently the result of different theoretical appropriations, and part and parcel of ongoing debates, there are nonetheless important analytic insights about the role of culture in political action woven through these various understandings that have informed social agency directed at the democratization of society. While providing a definitive list of such theoretical (and in the following section empirical) insights is obviously beyond the scope of this chapter, some key examples are useful in illustrating the importance and influence of theory, and pointing to its ever-evolving nature as it is confronted by new ideas, emerging research and real-world struggles. Since the early 1930s, activists have critically appropriated from the Frankfurt School and its many influential thinkers – including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, who conducted extensive ideological critique in order to understand the uses and abuses of power so as to be able to transform them (Buck-Morss, 1977; Jay, 1973). Such scholars pioneered the systematic analysis of mass-mediated culture and communications and worked to reveal how the ‘culture industry’ co-opts society and reinforces capitalist social relations – part of what became better known as critical theory. The word critical implied a break from the limits of positivism, pragmatism, phenomenology, historicism, existentialism and scientific socialism. It also drew on Karl Marx’s earlier call for philosophers to change the world rather than simply interpret it. Interdisciplinary in their approach to understanding domination and the interconnections among economics, politics, psychology, technology and culture, many intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School explored how the irrationalism and alienation embedded in capitalism and Western civilization work to defuse and disarm any possibility for revolution. Many of these analyses of authoritarianism and the irrational behaviour that permeated the industrialized society in which these intellectuals were living were largely influenced by the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant (especially his ideas on

reflection, how to explore the conditions that produce a particular phenomenon, and moral autonomy), G.W.F. Hegel’s dialectical method of negation and contradiction, Marx’s analysis of the role of ideology in reinforcing the capitalist system, Sigmund Freud’s work in psychoanalysis, and Max Weber’s critique of rationalism and bureaucratic domination in capitalist societies (Held, 1980). While relying on tools of the Enlightenment for empirical exploration, many of these critical theorists nonetheless fought the notion of a single, centred and essentialized route to human rights and emancipation, insisting that the search and imposition of ultimate rationality and order has historically perpetuated theoretical orthodoxies and relations of domination (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1944/2002). The study of culture, oppression and liberatory practices has also been greatly advanced by anti-colonial, anti-racist thinkers and activists of the 1950s and 1960s such as C.L.R. James, Franz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire and Albert Memmi. These revolutionaries, also influenced by Marxist, neo-Marxist and psychoanalytic theories, were fighting (and continue to fight through the work of such theorists as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha) against a long history of global colonialism and white supremacy (Ashcroft et al., 1995; McLeod, 2000; Mongia, 1996). They understood that economics and politics are important forces in maintaining unequal relations of power in society, but they also recognized the power of culture and the central role of ideology in working to control the psyche of people and public opinion, and consequently in maintaining systems of oppression. For these activists, all cultural terrain is worth fighting over.1 Since the 1960s, post-structuralists have also been interested in understanding the power/knowledge configuration (Best and Kellner, 1991; Sarup, 1993; Sturrock, 2003). By no means a monolithic group, many of these theorists, notably Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida,2 have argued that consciousness, identity, meaning and

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cognitive development are social constructions – the central idea being that systems of communication informed by particular values and beliefs play a significant role in shaping human faculties, sensibilities and subjectivities. Much more flexible than the Marxist interpreters of ideology and structuralist theorists in search of universal processes and mechanisms that could systematically explain meaning and human behaviour, poststructuralists have been engaged in an exploration of how knowledge is constructed within specific social conditions and relations of power. Of particular importance to Foucault (1972) was discourse, which refers to the way reality is perceived through and shaped by historically and socially constructed ways of making sense – that is, languages, systems of meaning, and practices that order and sustain particular forms of social existence. As oppressive discourses and discursive formations are understood as social constructions rather than inevitabilities, they can therefore be deconstructed through human action and reconstructed into more democratic and liberatory structures and practices. Post-structuralism, and its linguistic, cognitive and cultural turn towards language, affect, consciousness and systems of meaning, would theoretically pave the way for the emergence of postmodernism in the late 1970s (Cahoone, 2003; Hall et al., 1996; Lyotard, 1979). While by no means a monolithic entity, postmodernists, also influenced by phenomenology, structuralism and existentialism, and the work of Friedrich Nietzche, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, have great disdain for positivism, instrumental reason and any other paradigm that subsumes every aspect of social reality into one totalizing theory – that is to grand or master narratives. Universals in the form of absolute truth, certainty and objectivity are cast aside in the name of heterogeneity, contingency, intersubjectivity and indeterminacy. Because of their invaluable contributions to social theory, especially around issues of identity and difference, post-structuralism and postmodernism have been readily appropriated from, expanded

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upon and used to inform a wide range of political movements, including feminism, anti-racism/multiculturalism and queer rights. Primarily occupied with how meaning is produced, circulated, legitimated and consumed in society, and how relations of power affect this complex and multidirectional process, much of cultural studies has also had major political implications (During, 1999; Grossberg et al., 1991; Morley and Chen, 1996). In fact, its roots in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, founded in England in 1964 by Richard Hoggart, were directly connected to political projects. The primary figures in this movement (e.g. Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall) understood theory as being strategic, performative and directed towards solving pressing economic, social and political problems. Institutionally, cultural studies began to find its place in the world in the 1970s, and it is now widely used to theorize how culture and representation shape our lived experiences and sense of political agency. The work of Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s and early 1930s has had a major impact on the trajectory of cultural studies as it relates to political projects. Like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Gramsci worked to explain why the oppressed were not revolutionary. This resulted in the reinvention of the ancient Greek concept hegemony, which he used as a point of analysis to examine how the imposition of particular ideologies and forms of authority results in the reproduction of social and institutional practices through which dominant groups maintain not only their positions of privilege and control, but also the consensual support of other members of society, even those most exploited. Shifting away from Marx’s focus on economics, Gramsci looked instead at cultural relations and their effects on politics. He was interested in how, along with state coercion, the forces of civil society such as the family, houses of faith, educational institutions and so on often worked in the interests of the ruling classes. Far more open than the Marxist concept of false consciousness, the

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concept of hegemony as Gramsci understood it was full of contradictions, and he recognized people’s ability to resist domination in their everyday lives. Over the years, advocates of cultural studies have appropriated, battled over and expanded upon some of the theoretical ideas of humanism, formalism, Marxism, structuralism, postructuralism, semiotics, deconstructionism, new historicism, interpretivism, hermeneutics, constructivism, critical theory, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, ethnomethodology and feminism, among others (Alasuutari, 1995). This transdisciplinary practice has also influenced a vast range of fields, including ethnic, critical race and queer studies, globalization, communication and media studies, postcolonial, indigenous and diaspora studies, sociology, psychology and cultural anthropology (Frow and Morris, 2000). All these theoretical efforts to understand the role of culture in any struggle for social control have enhanced and been enhanced by empirical studies that are attuned to the need for radical social change.

THE ROLE OF RESEARCH IN CULTURAL ACTIVISM The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable. (Roy, 2001: p. 7)

Research that is oriented towards the study of culture has always had theoretical and political implications, regardless of its ostensible goal. Progressive researchers who have concerned themselves with issues of power, social injustice and how people work to transform society have developed explicit political dimensions as part of their exploratory studies (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000; Gitlin, 1994; McGuigan, 1997; Rosaldo, 1989). These empirically guided projects of change exemplify what Raymond Williams referred to throughout his work as ‘knowable communities’ by showcasing groups actually

engaged in cultural and political reflection and struggle. However, it is important to note here that while the idea of ‘knowable communities’, as it pertains to political movements, is both appealing and useful, neither Williams nor this chapter aspire to essentialize geographies and identities by assuming that there are biologically determined or culturally fixed thoughts and practices at play that are easily identifiable, readily accessible and necessarily indicative of what other groups are experiencing and how they are responding. In fact, progressive researchers’ biggest milestone has been to break free from the clutches of positivism that have stifled the empirical world for centuries. Abstracted from concerns for history, ideology, relations of power and the political implications of research, the ultimate goal of the positivist tradition is to ‘discover’ the universal laws that reveal the essence of nature and human behaviour. Associated with Enlightenment thinkers and modernism – with Francis Bacon, John Locke, René Descartes, Isaac Newton and Auguste Comte – positivism is a defence of a scientific basis for the study of the world in its entirety in which knowledge and reason are seen as neutral and universal rather than as social constructions that reflect particular ideologies and interests. This research paradigm came under heavy criticism from such scholars as Willard Van Orman Quine, Karl Popper, Thomas Samuel Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Imre Lakatos and Jean-François Lyotard. Anti-positivists (who differentiate between the natural and the social sciences), post-positivists and postmodernists have helped guide and expand progressive and radical theory and research oriented towards the study of culture and the transformation of society, especially action-based research. Action-based research has always had a political and transformative agenda explicitly woven into its theoretical and empirical fabric. Fleeing Nazi Germany, social psychologist Kurt Lewin came to the USA and in 1946 coined the term action research (AR) to describe his new way of conducting research that attempts to use theory and the production of knowledge in action to address

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systemic social problems. Lewin, who is often recognized for his maxims ‘Nothing is as practical as a good theory’, and ‘The best way to understand something is to try to change it’, created a model of research that consists of three basic stages: breaking down existing structures – unfreezing, transforming them – changing, and subsequently putting them back together as a fixed functioning system – freezing (Greenwood and Levin, 1998). AR is thus substantively different from applied research in that praxis is not seen in terms of a distinction between theory and practice, given that knowledge is constructed and evaluated in the midst of action as the two dialectically feed off each other. The philosophical influences on the early development of the various strains of action research are many. Some camps have taken from John Dewey, who, influenced by William James’s radical empiricism and pragmatism, elaborated on the important links among experience, reflection, knowledge production and personal growth.3 Because interpretation, meaning-making, accessing the ‘Other’s’ experience, and understanding what shapes human consciousness have all played such an important role in action research, so have the influences of humanistic psychology, interpretivism, hermeneutics and phenomenology – and thus the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. While attempting to abide by the laws of objectivity, Lewin challenged the traditional researcher/subject binarism by making the researcher an active participant in the localized action rather than a passive observer. Advocates of this new model embraced the idea of doing research with others rather than on them, and thus speaking with rather than to what are now often referred to as ‘clients’, ‘stakeholders’ or ‘co-inquirers’. As a result, identifying pertinent issues and making decisions about how to proceed are done collaboratively, although the researcher and the clients in the early efforts maintained separate roles in the problem-solving process. In their exchange, the client was able to solve the

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problem, while the researcher, who provided the empirical tools, was able to expand on existing theoretical and empirical knowledge. Validity issues were called into question as researchers within this new paradigm were caught in the contradiction of remaining objective while joining in the action. In the 1960s, AR lost some of its momentum, in part because it was associated with the radical movements of the time; but mostly because it was eclipsed by traditional experimental, quantitative approaches that were faithful to the myths of positivism and thus institutionally supported and funded. Resurfacing in the 1980s, and moving away from the confines of the positivist grip of objectivity, validity and generalizability, advocates of action research were inspired by the work of Gramsci, critical theory, postcolonial theory, critical pedagogy, post-structuralism, cultural studies, systems thinking and structuration, and postmodern, constructivist and feminist theory (Reason and Bradbury, 2004). Making the linguistic, cognitive and cultural turn, many advocates of action research felt that traditional empirical constraints were not applicable to the social sciences. Recognizing research and knowledge production as inherently political acts, they understood that the goal of AR isn’t to be able to generalize about human experience (Pilotta et al., 2001). Instead, making use of any and all methodological approaches – even creating new ones to address the specific set of conditions, these researchers focused on how a particular group and its individual members come to know something within the actual struggle to transform it. Validity was now being based on the changes that were achieved as a result of the project. AR’s embrace of participation also matured as practitioners expanded the paradigm’s collaborative and dialogical dimensions. Rather than framing collaboration as a short-term intervention where the researcher is rewarded with new theoretical ideas and the clients get their change, AR now placed greater emphasis on co-generative learning and theorizing, and making sure that clients are strategically apprenticed into conducting research

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(Atweh, Kemmis and Weeks, 1998; Bray et al., 2000; Brown and Jones, 2001; Fals Borda, 2004; Jason et al., 2002). In this way, they are better equipped to bring about continuous change on their own, long after the departure of the initial support group. Action research has inspired many other empirical practices that are also concerned with personal and social change; among them: practitioner research, action inquiry, teacher-as-researcher, experimental learning, action science, community development, new paradigm research, appreciative inquiry, empowerment-based research, action learning, collaborative inquiry, community-based action research and participatory action research. While there is a great deal of ideological and practical variation within and among these action-based models, many of them have the same progressive intent: to create the self-empowering conditions within which people can conduct their own research, create democratic organizational structures and decision-making processes, and work towards generative learning and personal and social transformation through praxis. Action-based researchers have learned much from each other and have consequently expanded their theoretical and empirical horizons. They have also been influenced by what is referred to as new ethnography – research that is clearly directed towards social change. Lois Weis and Michelle Fine capture this radical spirit: Our commitment to revealing sites for possibility derives not only from a theoretical desire to review ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’, but also from an ethical belief that critical researchers have an obligation not simply to dislodge the dominant discourse, but to help readers and audiences imagine where the spaces for resistance, agency and possibility lie. (Weis and Fine, 2004: p. xxi)

Unlike the early examples of AR, more contemporary practices have placed even greater importance on reflexivity (deep self-analysis of all those involved in the project), and on people’s existential realities, lived experiences, discursive practices, emotions, and cultural sensibilities, and how these elements can contribute to community development

and on-going community action (Kemmis and Wilkinson, 1998; Stringer, 1999). Recognizing the existence of multiple realities, identities and voices, action-based researchers continue to work to create spaces within which subaltern voices can emerge under their own volition. But these researchers are often caught in the complex tension of trying to simultaneously be ‘truer to people’s lived experiences (new ethnography) and critically analyse problematic social discourses that seep into those experiences (poststructuralism)’(Saukko, 2003: p. 89). In fact, a recurring problem with identity politics of this sort is that experience is often left at the level of description; that is, narratives are welcomed at the expense of theoretical analysis (Scott, 1992). Such an atheoretical posture gives the erroneous perception that subject position – the place that a person occupies within a set of social relationships shaped by such factors as social class, gender, race, religion and sexual orientation – is inherently linked to critical consciousness. In other words, when a person shares the pains of social injustice, this narration, in and of itself, is thought to necessarily bring about the intra- and interpersonal political understanding of such oppressive acts. Peter McLaren warns of this pitfall: Either a person’s physical proximity to the oppressed or their own location as an oppressed person is supposed to offer a special authority from which to speak. . . . Here the political is often reduced only to the personal where theory is dismissed in favor of one’s own personal and cultural identity – abstracted from the ideological and discursive complexity of their formation. (McLaren, 1995: p. 125)

Countering this tendency to conflate location and consciousness, activists are encouraged to nurture the kinds of critical, inclusive dialogue that works to explain/theorize why everyone involved and affected thinks a particular experience has occurred so as to be able to act in solidarity to change unjust material, political and symbolic conditions. Within this new era of globalization, actionbased research also encourages participants to

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look beyond the micro-politics of the system under immediate examination, and when possible connect their efforts to larger struggles for social justice. In fact, all theoretical and empirical camps oriented towards democratic social change are being radically challenged by globalization and its discontents.4

GLOBALIZATION AND THE GLOBAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT Globalization falls outside the established academic disciplines, as a sign of the emergence of a new kind of social phenomenon . . . (Jameson, 1999: p. xi)

Without a doubt, we’ve entered a new era of global social and economic relations that are changing how we think not only about economics, but also about politics and culture and the complex inter-relationships among these forces. While this transformation should not be confused with one of those post trends where supposedly there’s a clearly definable gap between what was and what is, the global economy – a product of the last 500 years of invention and imperialist expansion (Chomsky, 1993) – has entered a new phase made possible by innovative technologies, transnational institutions and the logic of neoliberalism. As capitalism has been undergoing radical change, the new political order of globalization differs in many respects from previous forms of imperialism (Bauman, 1998; Castells, 1996; Hardt and Negri, 2000; Harvey, 2001; Lash and Urry, 1987). Obsessed with privatization, deregulation and restructuring, elite private powers have been successful in using the state to protect corporate interests and dismantle many of the rights and protections achieved internationally by grassroots activists, organized labour and social democracies. Since the birth of the nation-state, progressive and radical activists have challenged governments and private power in an effort to ensure that the interests of the people and different cultures are recognized and realized. However, what has dramatically changed over the years has

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been the power of the private sector. These days – with 51 of the planet’s 100 largest economies being corporations – new global justice movements are vehemently working against the hegemony of corporate rule (Danaher and Mark, 2003). Many contemporary activists are eyeing and responding to the undemocratic governing bodies that have achieved supranational power – institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (Hall and Biersteker, 2002; Wilkinson and Hughes, 2002): Globalization has been accompanied, some would say driven, by a thickening web of multilateral agreements, global and regional institutions and regimes, transgovernmental policy networks and summits. This evolving global governance complex regulates and intervenes in virtually all aspects of global affairs. It is far from being a nascent world government, but it is much more than a system of limited intergovernmental cooperation. (Held and McGrew, 2004: p. xi)

Needless to say, globalization is by no means a monolithic entity and there is a radical difference between the top-down economic versions whose proponents are looking to ensure access to cheap labour and raw materials in order to maximize their profits, and what is being referred to as ‘globalization from below’ – transnational networking to democratize global technologies, environmental resources and media, information and financial systems (Brecher, Costello and Smith, 2000). As a response to the injustices produced by neoliberal and neoconservative versions of globalization (Harvey, 2003; Kim, Millen, Irwin and Gershman, 2000), large multiinterest coalitions have sprung up that include human rights, environmental, faith, indigenous, student and consumer groups, along with trade unionists, feminists, antisweatshop activists, anarchists and anti-war protesters. These networks are demonstrating how a critical and inclusive public can effectively wage war against abusive states and international actors and institutions. Confronting oppression from economic, political, technological and cultural fronts, this

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transnational collective action is helping people understand and fight to transform how these forces currently organize societies. Contemporary cultural activists and social movements are compelled to adjust to shifting power relations that are the result of globalization, especially when it comes to their organizational frameworks, collective identities and actions (Porta and Tarrow, 2005). However, while these activists are crossing into uncharted territory, many of their theoretical orientations and organizational styles and strategies are by no means new.

Appropriating from the past Activists have inherited an immense legacy of radical thought, research and action (Alinsky, 1971; Bobo, Kendall and Max, 2001; Duncombe, 2002; Fox and Starn, 1997; Freeman and Johnson, 1999; Klandermans et al., 1988; Piven and Cloward, 1977; Tilly, 2004; Wieringa, 1997). An indispensable part of praxis is to make use of existing theory and research in order to study historically significant events and the actors and organizations therein that have worked towards economic and social justice; to name a few: the Abolitionists, the First and Second Internationals, the Cuban, Mexican and Russian revolutions, anarcho-syndicalism, experiments in social democracy, first and second-wave feminism, and anti-colonial, civil rights, indigenous and anti-war movements. There is also much to learn from the histories of trade union revivals, labour and environmental coalitions, antinuclear protests and the global networks that have developed in the fight against AIDS. The intent of exploring the history of activism is not to generate nostalgia in these conservative times, nor does it offer up a recipe book to be followed to the last grain of salt; rather, it is a way to inspire the critical appropriation and reinvention of revolution as these struggles offer theoretical, empirical and practical springboards for contemporary efforts. Take for example the sociohistorical underpinnings of the 1999 ‘Battle for Seattle’.

Coordinated largely by the Direct Action Network (DAN), this multi-interest decentralized manifestation was the product of years of political reinvention (Kauffman, 2002). Seattle protesters found strength in the history of the peace movement, the civil rights activism of the 1950s and 1960s, anti-nuclear and environmental movements beginning in the early 1970s, the actions against US intervention in Central America in the1980s, and decades of anti-colonial, feminist, queer and anti-racist theory, research and activism. Many of the techniques and strategies used in Seattle, such as affinity groups, spokescouncils, consensus-building and the use of non-violence, also have historical roots. Affinity groups – small protest units that choose targets and tactics – are derived from the IberianAnarchist Federation in Spain, who used this underground organizing structure in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War. It was later reinvented by chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other civil rights and anti-war activist groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Kauffman, 2002). Spokescouncil meetings have descended from the early Soviets of the Russian revolution. Internationally, the ‘No Nukes’ protesters of the 1970s critically appropriated this format so that representatives of affinity groups could meet, dialogue and develop action plans. The idea of consensus decision-making was handed down by the Quakers and enhanced by feminist movements that have also valued voice, inclusion and dialogue. Non-violent civil disobedience was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s struggle to liberate India from British colonial rule, and later by the civil rights movement in the USA under the guidance of Martin Luther King, Jr. The forces that made Seattle possible were also influenced by the anti-Vietnam war movement in the early 1970s that implemented small and decentralized operational strategies as opposed to many of the massive and unwieldy organizational structures of the 1960s. In addition, many protesters in Seattle benefited from the work of the organization ACT UP, a radical coalition of activists that

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got its start in the late 1980s in the fight against AIDS. Its members were tired of typical party politics, the divisiveness of identity politics, and the general ineffectiveness of endless lectures at fixed protest sites. ‘Through innovative use of civil-rights-era nonviolent civil disobedience, guerrilla theatre, sophisticated media work, and direct action,ACT UP helped transform the world of activism’ (Shepard and Hayduk, 2002: p. 1). Pushing the boundaries of protest, and borrowing aspects of the carnivalesque approach to politics that have been around since the Middle Ages (Bakhtin, 1984), contemporary activists have made effective use of technology, street theatre, puppets, block parties, art, music and dance.5 Many of the activists fighting for economic and social justice in Seattle also learned about coalition-building from the anti-IMF agitation of the mid-1970s, efforts to bring down the apartheid government in South Africa, battles against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Zapatista revolution, the WTO protests in 1995, the shutdown of the Multilateral Agreement on Investments of 1998, and the anti-World Economic Forum (WEF) demonstration in Davos that same year. While benefiting enormously from the invaluable lessons of history, contemporary global justice movements have also made important contributions to working for social change; contributions that are challenging existing theoretical and empirical models.

Carving a new path Now that the great utopias of the nineteenth century have revealed all their perversion, it is urgent to create the conditions for collective effort to reconstruct a universe of realist ideals, capable of mobilizing people’s will without mystifying their consciousness. (Bourdieu, 1998: p. 9)

Contemporary global justice movements have critically appropriated a great deal from the Left, reinventing its possibilities, while abandoning many of its dysfunctional qualities (Chong, 1991; Duncombe, 2002; Epstein, 2002; Fox and Starn, 1997; Freeman and Johnson, 1999; Tilly, 2004). Over the years,

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many activists have become disenchanted with the totalitarian structure of the old-guard articulation of communism, as well as its exploitation of labour within the new global economy. Progressive and radical activists have also been losing faith in organized labour because of the unequal relations of power maintained by the bureaucracies of these organizations, and their frequent capitulation to neoliberal policies. In addition, they have found little to no inspiration in the unpleasant realities of the majority of postcolonial governments. Fed up with the dogma, undemocratic structures and intolerance to difference of these leftist movements, and the slow death of social democracies at the hands of capital over the last 30 years, global justice activists have ushered in new kinds of organizing, protest, cooperation, consciousness raising and coalition-building – that is, a new kind of politics (Bennett, 2005; Danaher and Mark, 2003; Diani and McAdam, 2003; Guidry et al., 2000; Khagram et al., 2002; Leistyna, 2005; Mertes, 2004; Porta and Tarrow, 2005; Shepard and Hayduk, 2002; Welton and Wolf, 2001). Contemporary global justice movements have been effective in transcending the inhibiting walls that have been erected between what is referred to as ‘real’ as opposed to ‘cultural’ politics. Many activists are cognizant of the fact that neoliberal and neoconservative versions of globalization not only consist of a structural reality built on political and economic processes and relationships, they also rely on symbolic systems to shape the kinds of meaning, identity, desire and subjectivity that can work to ensure the maintenance of their imperial logic and practice.Influenced by many of the early critical and anti-colonial theorists/revolutionaries, as well as by the radical activists of the civil rights era, this new generation of activists knows that imperialists have always relied on the relationship between knowledge and power to control people. They recognize how material conditions, politics and culture are interlaced and how subordination, resistance and opposition take place in both the physical

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and symbolic realm. Consequently, these new activists not only take seriously the fact that culture is a pedagogical force that shapes our sense of political agency and mediates the relations between everyday struggles and structures of power, but this time around, as will be discussed later, they are harnessing its potential in far more sophisticated and productive ways. In other words, many activists in these new movements are not only thinking about culture politically, but they are also thinking about politics culturally, with an understanding that culture and politics coexist in a symbiotic relationship in which effective political mobilization can create new cultural spaces, and such transformative political movements emerge out of progressive cultural shifts. Regardless of their stance in the on-going debate over the power of the state – whether it has sovereignty or its power has been eclipsed by supranational organizations – virtually all factions of the global justice movement believe that national governments are often deeply implicated in perpetuating economic and social injustices, either because incumbent politicians are ideologically in line with neoliberalism, or because they have been strong-armed by supranational powers. Many progressive and radical activists believe that the institutions within existing states severely limit what civil societies are able to accomplish and have thus lost faith in representative democratic structures and leftwing parties that have not offered support for their most recent responses to social and economic injustice. Instead, when it comes to participation in public life, far beyond simply voting for candidates to represent them (who usually don’t come from the same social class and experience), or merely volunteering to join civil society organizations, they strive for active involvement and communicative autonomy. As Simone Chambers explains, Communicative autonomy refers to the freedom of actors in a society to shape, criticize, and reproduce essential norms, meanings, values, and identities through communicative (as opposed to coercive) interaction. (Chambers, 2000: p. 93)

He argues that voting-centric democratic theory is being replaced by talk-centric models of participation, and points to ways of moving beyond the idea of an all-inclusive vote, and away from the corrupting influences of economic and political party interests, to a democratized public sphere that creates the conditions within which all people, even those who have been historically excluded from the political process, can express themselves and work to shape the future. ‘Addressing public opinion directly, the activists seem to attempt (with some success) to create public spaces that are autonomous from the political parties, but also from the commercial logic of the mass media’ (Porta and Tarrow, 2005: p. 14). In addition, as Lance Bennett (2005) notes, instead of relying solely on existing governments, they strive to develop ‘new kinds of political relationships involving non-national mechanisms of political accountability and community, from standards monitoring and certification regimes, to demands for direct popular inclusion in supranational decision processes’ (p. 214). What makes the global justice movement different from the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and International NonGovernmental Organizations (INGOs) that have been at the forefront of global civil society for decades is that these more traditional organizations are often less radical in their theories and strategies and focus much of their energy on working with existing governments and institutions for policy reforms. Many members of the global justice movement, on the other hand, distrust established institutions and nationstates and prefer to transform, rather than merely reform, the system. And any neoliberal use of global civil society, which is generally understood by capitalists as a charity, non-profit, voluntary ‘third sector’ that is responsible for replacing the welfare state, is viewed with contempt. Many advocates of the global justice movement, who are trying to democratize globalization rather than pave the way for neoliberalism, often criticize NGO/INGOs for merely tinkering with the machine, or for actually reinforcing

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the institutions of oppression that they claim to be challenging. Recognizing that globalization is a crisis in representative democracy, global justice activists have been experimenting with novel approaches for bringing together multiple identities, issues and alliances – doing so, in part, to balance the demands of political unity and cultural diversity. The goal has been to search out new forms of democratic and revolutionary identification, to recognize differences and commonalities within struggles for economic and social justice, and to work through dialogue and action to sustain what has become a ‘movement of many movements’ (Klein, 2004: p. 220). Rather than solely focus on class issues and economics, or on the interests of the nation-state, many global justice activists have created multi-interest coalitions and their politics are concerned with any and all forms of exploitation and oppression, wherever they may occur. This democratizing project includes, but is not limited to, a battle against the social class structures and agendas of capital, racism, sexism, heterosexism, discrimination against persons with disabilities, and ethnocentrism. As such, they are working to move beyond the false binarism that has been constructed between ‘real’ and ‘identity’ politics. Their goal is to work towards group recognition and self-representation (allowing theoretical flexibility as such identities shift and have internal diversity), and movement interrelationships that can actually realize the redistribution of resources and the guarantee of public access and democratic rights. Benefiting from empirical studies focused on their work (while also providing data for researchers, and conducting ethnographies of their own), these activists are strategizing and building larger collective responses that have both local and global dimensions. At this historical juncture in which no society is entirely isolated, the global justice movement’s innovative efforts illustrate some of the ways that it is possible to work simultaneously through a politics of location (i.e. area-specific conditions, traditions and economic interests) and a politics of global unity. ‘If globalization

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is an amorphous phenomenon, “glocalism” – political activism based on the insight that every local action has a global component – has been a coherent response’ (Shepard and Hayduk, 2002: p. 5). Many of these coalitions are appropriating the best of what modern and postmodern theory have to offer, finding ways of creating unity without denying specificity, and becoming politically flexible without collapsing into a pluralism of indifference. Such solidarity, as opposed to isolated localized efforts, may present the only way of combating transnational corporations that no longer need to negotiate with local labour organizations for living wages and realistic environmental protections or with area-specific human rights groups – they just go elsewhere, leaving trade restrictions, unemployment, poverty and political chaos in their path. These more sophisticated attempts at coalition-building, developing cross-border solidarity and influencing the means of cultural production and distribution have been made possible, in large part, by the radical changes that have taken place in the world of technology.

A revolution in technology In every revolution there is the paradoxical presence of circulation. (Virilio, 1977: p. 3)

Within the current stage of global technocapitalism, corporate media are some of the most influential and powerful forces shaping not only what and how we see, but also who gets access to information. However, this corporate-driven, neoliberal revolution is being challenged by an uprising whose diverse members also clearly understand that the circulation of information is pivotal in generating collective identity and mobilizing people to act against the tyranny of market forces and other oppressive institutions, policies and practices. In this postmodern phase of human interaction, the circulation of information has reached unprecedented levels, made possible by advanced global communication

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technologies that contribute greatly, on the one hand, to the corporate model of globalization. As Mark Poster (1990) reminds us, ‘Cheap, reliable, durable communication is a necessity of empire’ (Poster, 1990: p. 7). But, on the other hand, cyber-democracy has also been realized through more progressive and radical uses of these innovative media and the relatively autonomous zones for political activity that they offer. This cultural force has given rise to new forms of civic engagement and social capital, relations and movements. As Manuel Castells (1996) notes about this network society, ‘Interactive computer networks are growing exponentially, creating new forms and channels of communication, shaping life and being shaped by life at the same time’ (Castells, 1996: p. 2). While media have always played a pivotal role in activist efforts, with the advent of printing, newspapers, telephones, radio, TV, film and so on, the power of cultural production and circulation has taken on new life with digital, multimedia and wireless technologies, and especially with the Internet (Anderson, 2002; Bell and Kennedy, 2000; Davis, 1999; Hill, 1998; Kamark and Nye, 1999; Rash, 1997; Wilhelm, 2000). The ideas that inspire social protest now have vast geographical reach, with far greater efficiency in diffusion and influence than ever before. As Martha McCaughey and Michael Ayers (2003) observe about the Internet: ‘It is more immediate than a newspaper, more interactive than TV. . . . It is not only instant and transspatial but multilateral, including many participants and connecting many different activist groups’ (McCaughey and Ayers, 2003: p. 5). Combining traditional methods of cultural activism with new interactive modes and technopolitics has not only helped individuals and organizations mobilize, but the art of organizing is undergoing radical changes as a result. This new wireless, multimedia palette includes notebook computers, PDA (personal digital assistant) devices, cell phones (with digital cameras built in), text messaging, pagers, global positioning systems (GPS) and digital camcorders. Along with these tools, and often in connection with them, the

Internet has ushered in a revolution in cultural activism. Unlike the activists of yesteryear who accomplished so much with so little, the new hybrid ‘smart mobs’ (Rheingold, 2003) have access to email, podcasts, computerfaxes, listservs, hyperlinks, chat rooms and downloadable street instructions. These and other cyber-tools are all used for educating the public on pertinent issues, building and mobilizing communities, coordinating events locally, nationally and internationally, and influencing policy initiatives both locally and globally. They can also be used to transcend the language divide with software that instantly translates messages. It is widely recognized that activists can now be the media. New affordable technologies and the Internet have made possible independent media sites such as Alternet, Indymedia, Truthout and Common Dreams. Making effective use of web casting, such news outlets offer access to Internet radio and video feeds, information and photo archives, and frequently updated news reports. There is an abundance of hyper-organization websites that keep the public up to date on current events, that support real-life mobilization, and that connect activists to other like-minded organizations through hyper-links. And an endless stream of electronic information is readily available through e-journals, blogs, online zines and info-pages. These innovative technologies have also made possible the reinvention of many traditional methods of activism into electronic civil disobedience in the form of online petitions, boycotts, blockades, sit-ins, hacktivism and other kinds of cyberprotest (Jordan and Taylor, 2004).6 What’s particularly powerful about virtual agency is that people can participate from anywhere. Perhaps the most revolutionary contribution that these technologies have made is that they’ve radically advanced social networking. The Internet allows people, with relative facility, to cross geographical, political and professional boundaries (Harcourt, 1999).As cyberculture helps groups transcend traditional borders, develop cross-interest coalitions and forge collaborative knowledge,

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it simultaneously opens the door to more inclusive and effective political struggle. As Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner note: Thus, while new mobile technology provides yet another impetus towards experimental identity construction and identity politics, such networking also links diverse communities like labor, feminist, ecological, peace and various anti-capitalist groups, providing the basis for a new politics of alliance and solidarity to overcome the limitations of postmodern identity politics. (Kahn and Kellner, 2005: p. 224)

In the early 1990s, the Zapatistas in Chiapas Mexico provided an invaluable model of using media in this postmodern age in order to connect to a global audience and to cross traditional borders and forge an online transnational movement. Playing a critical role in contemporary acts of mass mobilization, the Internet has also made possible the largest coordinated international demonstration in history – the recent anti-war protest.

NEW QUESTIONS AND DIRECTIONS FOR THEORY, RESEARCH AND ACTIVISM Given its appropriations from the past, and its ever-increasing push forward, the global justice movement presents a number of challenges that demand reflection, research and innovative practical responses. As progressive and radical transnational movements have learned much from the Left’s successes and failures, there is a real effort to avoid the dangers of sectarianism, as dogma of any type inevitably leads to an extremely limited sense of community, solidarity and agency. Instead, global justice activists are searching out new forms of democratic and revolutionary identification where a plurality of perspectives based on difference, antagonisms and dissent are experienced as productive rather than disruptive and unacceptable. While this tactic is virtuous in any participatory democracy, it raises some red flags when it comes to social agency. Given its embrace of diversity and open

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exchange, the global justice movement will need to reconcile at some point the disparity that exists among its constituents in order to continue to maintain cooperative relationships among groups that have a contentious past. As Michael Hardt recalls: This is one of the characteristics of the Seattle events that we have had the most trouble understanding: groups which we thought in objective contradiction to one another – environmentalists and trade unions, church groups and anarchists – were suddenly able to work together, in the context of the network of the multitude. (Hardt, 2004: p. 236)

While this short-term resistance movement represents a healthy democratic sphere, and challenges our understanding of how political antagonists operate, it nonetheless points to the problem of when push comes to shove in realizing specific demands, far beyond the ambiguities of mass protest, long-term co-existence is surely far more difficult to maintain. The idea of practical politics compels the individuals and groups of the global justice movement to define their action plan and terms. Identifying adversaries, articulating a clear collective agenda, teasing out contradictions in political thought and practice, and drawing new political frontiers presupposes defining the concepts of political ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, progressive thought and social agency, as well as hegemonic and anti-hegemonic sociocultural practices. The global justice movement is forced to risk fragmentation by carving out a more specific set of ideological parameters through which it operates, beyond the World Social Forum’s Charter. The goal of achieving unity in diversity while also maintaining an activist stance requires that we work through what need not be a contradiction between a Gramscian (1975) vision of civil society and war of position intended to use cultural and political practices on multiple fronts to lead to revolutionary change rather than mere representation, while creating and protecting a Habermasian public sphere (Calhoun, 1993; Habermas, 1991) that can burgeon within a liberal democracy to serve as a venue for the

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free exchange of ideas – an exchange through which mobilization can germinate. The diverse groups that make up the global justice movement are usually geographically separated and often rely solely on technologies in order to communicate and network. They are also working within the realities of flexible citizenship – a product of the cultural logics of transnationality (Ong, 1999). While this phenomenon of cross-border coalitionbuilding leads to a more globalized framing of issues and identity, the struggle to maintain a coherent political front and action plan is made that much more difficult as ‘different parts of advocacy networks need to appeal to belief systems, life worlds, and stories, myths, and folk tales in many different countries and cultures. This is even more problematic when networks link activists from highly industrialized and less developed countries’(Meyer and Tarrow, 1998: p. 224). Global justice activists will need to continuously overcome cultural, linguistic, material and ideological differences – differences in political orientation7 – and continue to achieve substantive change of the likes of environmental treaties, the World Commission on Dams, protection of indigenous rights, international agreements on standards, and the defeat of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. This issue of inclusion and opt-in membership also points to the problem of political capacity and direction. Creating the selfempowering conditions within which the subaltern can speak – a critical feature of any participatory democracy – does not mean that their participation comes with ideological guarantees. Empowered communities could in fact result in the rule of an oppressive majority. There is an extensive history of cases where feminist movements, working-class struggles, gay and lesbian groups, anti-racist efforts and anti-globalization movements have experienced discriminatory and conservative tendencies; and where some struggles for national sovereignty have turned fascist, mass revolutions have become totalitarian, or social democracies have capitulated to capitalist demands. Within the complex set of social relations that make up global

governance, global justice networks need to pay close attention to the very real risks of the emergence of reactionary movements and the risks of general co-optation. If ‘equality’ is really one of the ultimate goals of a participatory democracy, and this call is not limited to the liberal notion of ‘equal opportunity’ within existing economic relations, then social class has to be eliminated altogether, and with it capitalism, as class is a structural inevitability of its logic. Ellen Meiksins Wood (1995) reminds us that unlike a world that can strive to provide social justice for and harmony among racial, ethnic, religious, sexual and gender differences, it’s impossible to imagine ‘class differences without exploitation and domination’ (Wood, 1995: p. 258). Is the global justice movement working to define and implement a new socialist agenda, and if so, what shapes will it take? Different social, economic and political commitments will also require different tactics in how anti-capitalist, anti-statist groups strategically work with the NGO/INGOs who are aligned with national governments and working towards a ‘more humane’ form of capitalism (Gautney, 2005). In fact, while interacting with existing political parties, structures and institutions, progressives and radicals will have to reconcile the contradiction of building a new world order with some old-world tools. Activists are also confronted with three contradicting options that have serious implications for the future of social agency: working towards a democratized world government that bypasses the oppressive nature of nationstates; looking to maintain national borders and develop the kinds of sovereignty that ensure protection from the colonizing forces of capital; or searching for alternative, nonnational, horizontal networks with a local focus and global voice.8 Commitments to different governing structures will certainly change the movement and thus need to be theorized through and observed in great detail.9 While cyberactivism is theoretically, empirically and practically interdisciplinary, there is a great deal of theoretical and empirical work that also needs to be done in

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this area in order to combine these forces and make possible greater economic, political and cultural change. One way to maximize its effectiveness would be to establish a network of scholars and activists that could combine forces in producing more effective online activism (McCaughey and Ayers, 2003). In addition, using quantitative and qualitative methodologies, researchers need to look into the pros and cons of working relationships that exist between offline and online activists. And, while collective identity development has been explored by social movement research, it would be enormously beneficial to study the kinds of community commitment that actually emerge from cyberspace. Theorists, researchers and activists concerned with cyberdemocracy also need to continue to focus on the vast post-structural work that addresses the role of language and framing in shaping consciousness and collective identity (Lakoff, 2004; Melucci, 1996). They need to explore in far greater depth the dialogical and dialectical relationship between changes in communication patterns and changes in activists. If Poster is correct in arguing that: Changes in the configuration or wrapping of language alter the way the subject processes signs into meanings, that sensitive point of cultural production. The shift from oral and print wrapped language to electronically wrapped language thus reconfigures the subject’s relation to the world . . . (Poster, 1990: p. 1)

then we desperately need to examine the effects of electronically mediated communication on activists. Technological advances have already given rise to new kinds of research, such as interface analysis, which studies the interface as a medium of cultural production that generates particular kinds of interaction (McCaughey and Ayers, 2003). Within the Internet’s realm of symbolic exchange, it is important to look at what ideological and tactical effects the organizers of these cyber-bases have had on real-life activists. Theorists, researchers and activists also need to pay more attention to online movements of the political Right, and how they

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(of course recognizing this category as diverse and complex) have used cyberspace to promote their causes and build their constituencies. We should also pay close attention to how the race to commercialize the Net is impacting politics – both real and virtual. As part of this effort, a great deal more investigation is necessary into the corporate and government bodies currently trying to colonize cyberspace. This is a particularly urgent mission in a post9/11 world where the threat of ‘terrorism’ is being used as the pretext for curbing online rights, privacy and access to information. There is much to learn from the victories that have been won by groups who are fighting against this repression – groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. While some theorists see the Internet as working within a Habermasian public sphere – as a communication medium that is decentred and nonhierarchical (Salter, 2003) – a key issue that needs to be confronted pertains to the realities of the digital divide. We need to work to link all groups both locally and globally, as computer technologies, software and technological literacy are so unequally distributed, especially in poor communities and between the North and the South.

CONCLUSION: ACTIVE UNDERSTANDING, FLEXIBILITY AND PARTICIPATION For those of us who wish to visualize and realize change in a world that is rapidly spinning out of control, it’s critical that we continue to make effective use of the synergy that exists among theory, research and activism. In order to assist people and organizations in securing human, economic and political rights in this age of globalization, we need to continue to critically appropriate from the past, actively theorize the present, and forge new frameworks of analysis, new

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research methods and creative and courageous actions that, when realized and mobilized with others around us, whether that be with our neighbours next door or the ones 6000 miles away, allow us to work together towards shortand long-term strategies directed at radical but achievable democratic change. A crucial part of this democratizing project is to realize, as the global justice movement has, that theory needs to be flexible. While understanding that the ways in which existing theories explain social reality is enormously important, theorizing is the ability to actively engage bodies of knowledge and human practices for the logics and sociohistorical conditions that inform them so that they can be reworked. It encourages individuals to evaluate, based on their own experiences, expertise and insight, the strengths and weaknesses of any conceptual and practical movement and recontextualize and reinvent its possibilities for one’s own predicaments; while extending, when possible, its geographical reach (Leistyna, 2005). It is important to re-emphasize that while engaged in the exploratory and creative process that theorizing offers, one’s own subject position should always be held in a critical light, not only for the purposes of continued self-actualization, but also, as action-based research has long pointed out, so that the ethical stances that are taken on an issue allow a person to speak to particular problems and in solidarity with others rather than for people from different backgrounds. In this way, theory does not have a monopoly on understanding, rather it reveals much about how we relate to the world and the assumptions that guide our political actions. As Cornelius Castoriadis argues: More than in any other area, here the idea of pure theory is an incoherent fiction. There exists no place, no point of view outside of history and society, or ‘logically prior’ to them, where one could be placed in order to construct the theory of them . . . (Castoriadis, 1987: p. 3)

As an integral part of any political project, theorizing presents a constant challenge to imagine and materialize alternative political

spaces and identities and more just and equitable economic, social and cultural relations. It makes possible consciousness raising, coalition-building, resistance, activism and structural change. Likewise, research has to maintain methodological flexibility in order for it to provide a life line to theory and ‘knowable communities’ engaged in cultural and political reflection and struggle. Whether it’s action research, applied research, social movement research, or any other paradigm dedicated to political insight and social change, advocates of such exploratory processes need to learn from action research’s model of doing research with others rather than on them, and thus speaking with rather than to people engaged in eradicating injustice. Making use of any and all methodological approaches – even creating new ones to address a specific set of conditions – researchers can help create the self-empowering conditions within which people can conduct their own studies, forge democratic organizational structures and decision-making processes, and work towards generative learning, social networking and personal and social transformation through praxis.

NOTES 1 As the educational arm of critical social theory, critical pedagogy, which emerged in the early stages of decolonization, has been used to help understand and respond to oppressive social practices, especially those that manifest in educational institutions. Arguing that education is an inherently political act where values and beliefs are transmitted, or at best struggled over, critical pedagogy encourages, as a fundamental part of the learning process, examination of the exploitation of labour and the concomitant class divisions and conflicts that reveal different economic, political and cultural interests in society. In its more mature form it also addresses how oppression affects people of all walks of life who fall outside mainstream norms of identity and ‘acceptable’ behaviour. In order to be active ‘subjects’ of history rather than passive ‘objects’ to be acted upon, manipulated and controlled, critical pedagogues argue that literacy needs to work in a way that helps people read the economic, social and political realities that shape their lives in order to develop the necessary critical

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consciousness to name, understand and transform them. 2 It is important to note that virtually all of these intellectuals have roots in structuralism, and that none of them have identified themselves as being post-structuralist. 3 They have also been influenced by classical theories of participation and cooperation; e.g. the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Owen and John Stuart Mill. 4 It is also important, but beyond the scope of this chapter, to explore social movement research, which has enormous political potential. Concerned with the power of movements and their impact on people, public discourse, policy, institutions and governments, social movement research has looked at the ways in which activists understand and make use of the cracks of agency made possible by shifting economic, political and cultural relations, and how organizations and networks develop, mobilize and change (Diani and McAdam, 2003; Freeman and Johnson, 1999; Guidry, Kennedy and Zald, 2000; Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Khagram, Riker and Sikkink, 2002; Klandermans and Staggenborg, 2002; McAdam, McCarthy and Zald, 1996; Melucci, 1996; Smith et al., 1997; Tarrow, 1998; Tilly, 2004). However, much of this theoretical and empirical work, even the comparative studies, has been limited by its preoccupation with examples of movements within nation-states. Like all analytical frameworks, it too is now being radically challenged by globalization and transnational global justice movements. 5 Instead of continuing the binarism between artistic expression and social responsibility, radical street activists have learned much from the Brazilian theatre of the oppressed of Augusto Boal, as well as from the Butoh dancers of Japan, Bread and Puppet Theatre, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe (Starr, 2001). 6 In addition to informing and mobilizing groups, the Internet has also expanded the terrain of culture jamming with laser-projected messaging, the creation of subversive websites (such as those generated by the Yes Men), and Google bombs that expose and ridicule abusive individuals and corporations. The group the Electronic Disturbance Theatre embodies this new electronic ethos. Its members, who have combined theory and politics with performance art, and computerized resistance with mass decentred electronic direct action, have for example developed a webjamming tool called FloodNet to flood and block corporate and supranational organization websites. It’s important to note here that there’s a long history of electronic hacking that has been critically appropriated by this new generation of hacktivists (Jordan and Taylor, 2004). Hacktivism – a combination of grassroots political protest and computer hacking – has assumed the earlier waves’ electronic populist and anti-corporate values, and has become a powerful force in the globalization debate.

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7 The West is already guilty of ‘premature formulation of universal civic values before there had been sufficient intercultural discourse to establish an authentic consensus about such values, particularly in relation to individual rights versus group rights’ (Boulding, 1997: p. ix). 8 For example, ‘Indigenous forms of organization continue to provide a radical challenge to modern political organization – in particular the nation-state – and offer possibilities that need to be considered seriously in any speculation over place-based democratic alternatives to the abstractions of both national and transnational political identities’ (Prazniak and Dirlik, 2001: p. 9). The current experiments with democracy in Argentina, with neighbourhood and city-wide delegate assemblies, are not relying on the maintenance of the nation-state. 9 As the idea of civil society has always presupposed a politically defined territory, many theorists are concerned about how global civil society can function without such a geopolitical focus – that is, without a global State (Colás, 2002). Some activists have simply retheorized civil society as a freestanding entity that does not need a fixed governing apparatus to grieve and work for change, relying instead on autonomous social movements and the mass mobilization of people. Another response to this dilemma is that there are indeed international governing bodies and doctrines in existence, and others that are emerging on a regular basis that can support activist efforts or be challenged, e.g. the United Nations, the European Union, the establishment of laws protecting international human rights, the development of an international criminal court, and global treaties (Kaldor, 2003). At the same time, as mentioned earlier, there are forces of the likes of the G-8, the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO that do resemble independent global governance – albeit mostly through private authority – that is often beyond the power and influence of the State.

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Index Abbate, J. 590 Abbott, A. 479 Abelove, H. 533 Abrams, P. 211 Abu-Lughod, I. 113 action research 700–3 action theories 677, 679 activism see cultural activism actor-network theory (ANT) 101–2, 293–4, 581 Adkins, Lisa 545, 548 Adlam, D. 77, 78 Adorno, Theodor 7, 21, 114, 138, 211, 212–13, 235, 314, 400, 470, 518, 521–3, 524, 570–2, 573, 587, 596–7, 610, 698 congealed history 150 critique of the culture industry 552–3 immanent critique 149 Philosophy of Modern Music 156 socio-music studies 145, 148–51 advertising, visual analysis 168, 178 aesthetics 8 affinity groups 704 Afonso, Ana Isabel 639 Agassiz, Louis 53, 55–6 agency, culture as 48–9 Agrawal, A. 407, 408 Ahearne, J. 99 Al-Ali, N. 368 Alasuutari, P. 700 Albury, Kath 546 Aldridge, D. 158 Alexander, Jeffrey 12, 94, 145 Alfred, Taiaike. 424 Alinsky, S. 704 Allanbrook, W.J. 152 Alloula, M. 387 Alphen, Ernst Van 171 Alter, J. 392 Althusser, Louis 19, 67, 78, 79, 89, 92, 134, 229, 236, 274, 275, 503–4 Altman, Dennis 532 Altman, Rick 187 analysis cultural see cultural analysis principles underlying 177–9 visual see visual analysis analytical philosophy 676–7 Andersen, K.E. 214 Anderson 393 Anderson, D.M. 708 Anderson, Benedict 13, 108, 111, 237, 321–2, 327, 331–2, 450, 510, 587 Anderson, J. 443 Anderson, K. 375 Anderson, Kay 17, 18–19, 24, 46–62 Anderson, Perry 89, 470 Anderson, W. 55

Andolina, R. 373 Andrews, M 72 Ang, Ien 17, 22, 227–45, 588 Anheier, H. 369, 370 Ansdell, G. 155, 158 Antal, Frederick 108 Anthias, F. 520 anthropology 1–2, 5–6, 8, 18, 25–42, 113, 275, 531, 609, 619–20 archaeology 26, 273–4 Boasian 25–34, 36–40 cognitive 69–70 cultural 26–7, 237, 619, 632 cultural critique 27 and cultural history 116, 120 cultural translation 116 cultural turn 138, 344–6 ‘culture makers’ 409 ‘culture theory’ 37–8 ethnography see ethnography ethnology 26 fieldwork 31–6, 41 interpretive 37 kinship studies 39 linguistic 26, 27, 29–30 Marxist approach 275, 276 material culture see material culture studies modernity and culture 344–6 monogenesis and polygenesis 342 the other 346 participant observation 32–3, 41–2 physical 26 politics, as form of 40–2 postmodern (neo-Boasian) 42 postmodern crisis 613–14 psychological 69–70 and race 27, 28–31, 42 reflexive turn 346 social 26–7, 37–8, 116, 273–4, 276, 278, 344, 632, 633 society as set of rules 95 socio-music studies 145 structuralism 35–6, 37, 259–61, 277, 609 symbolic 36–40 text-centered 623 visual 166, 610, 632–50 and visual analysis 173 as ‘writing culture’ 40, 620 Appadurai, Arjun 10, 34, 169, 237, 276, 366, 370, 384 Appiah, K.A. 9, 10 Appleby, Jo 447 Apteker, Bettina 251 Apter, E. 276 Araeen, Rasheed 398, 399 archaeology 26, 273–4, 276, 281 architecture, study of 281, 282 Arendt, H. 81 Aristotle 128, 134, 151, 687 Armistead, N. 67, 73

Armstrong, J. 151 Armstrong, N. 88 Arnason, Johann 346–7 Arnheim, Rudolph 188, 208, 209 Arnold, Matthew 4, 7, 20, 28–31 Aronowitz, S. 590 art global art market 362 indigenous culture 420–1 intellectual property rights 436–43, 554, 559 material culture studies 276 and visual anthropology 646–7 visual arts and colonialism 394–9 see also visual analysis art history 163, 164, 166, 167, 170, 175–6 feminism 108 iconography 120 artist, romantic conception of 147–8, 150 Asad, T. 505 Ashcroft, B. 698 Asplen, Lisa 303 Assézat, J. 535–6 Atkinson, C. 220 Atkinson, D. 47 Attfield, J. 281 Attwood, B. 52 Atweh, B. 702 Australian Aboriginals 417 art 395–6, 420–1, 439–41 collective ownership 439–40 Western response to 51, 53–6, 58–9, 60 Ayers, Michael 708, 711 Aylesworth, Merlin 211 Bach, J.S. Wachet auf 152–4 Back, L. 285, 520 Bacon, Francis 700 Badmington, N. 50 Bagnall, Gaynor 482, 484 Bailey, F.G. 27 Bailey, P. 109 Baker, G. 370 Baker, K. 115 Bakhtin Circle 136 Bakhtin, Mikhail 70, 73, 88, 109–10, 118, 121, 705 Bal, Mieke 17, 21, 163–82 Baldick, Chris 127, 129–30 Balibar, E. 52 Ballard, J.G. 301 Ballaster, Ros 385–6, 387 Baltes, P.N. 1 Baltzell, Digby 326 Balzer, M.M. 416 Bandy, J. 372 Bandyopadhyay 384 Banerjee, M. 283

718

Banerji, S. 155 Banks, Joseph 54, 57 Banks, Marcus 632, 633, 636, 638, 642 Banton, Michael 326, 518 Baran, Paul 471, 599 Barber, B. 365 Barbéro, Jesus Martin 237 Barcham, M. 418, 419 Barcinski, M. 73 Bardini, T. 590 Barker, Martin 520, 655–6 Barkley Brown, Elsa 251 Barnett, C. 46, 61, 689 Baroja, J.C. 109 Barry, A. 448, 456, 461, 516, 582 Barsh, Russell 422 Barth, Frederik 34, 328–30 Barthes, Roland 7, 134, 193, 228, 229, 274, 533, 698–9 Bartmann, Sartje 397 Bashkow, I. 42 Bateson, Gregory 26, 633, 636, 644 Batt-Rawden, K. 158 Baudelaire, Charles 347, 348 Baudrillard, J. 51, 274, 579, 595 Baudry, J.-L. 573 Bauman, R. 114 Bauman, Zygmunt 314, 511, 526–7, 703 Baxandall, Michael 109, 110, 114 Bayly, C.A. 389, 390 Baym, N.K. 624 Bazin, André 188, 192 Beaglehole, J.C. 54 Bean, S.S. 392 Beattie, John 26 Beck, U. 360, 364, 545 Beckenham, A. 218 Becker, A. 220 Becker, Howard 644 Becker, H.S. 152 Bedford, R. 418 Beer, Stafford 301 Beethoven, Ludwig van 147–8, 150 Behar, R. 40 Belfiore, E. 556 Bell, D. 708 Bell, Daniel 335, 597 Bell, M. 417 Bell, Philip 211 Bellah, R.N. 214 Beltrán, L.R. 215 Ben-Atar, D. 434 Bender, B. 276 Bender, John 89 Benedict, Ruth 30–1, 33, 34 Benfer, R.A. 407 Benhabib, Seyla 9, 207 Benjamin, Roger 388 Benjamin, Walter 7, 88, 136, 189, 235, 571–2, 573 Bennett, Andy 155 Bennett, Gordon 395–6 Bennett, Jill 172 Bennett, Lance 705, 706 Bennett, T. 685 Bennett, Tony 17, 19, 86–103, 231, 236, 241, 243, 387, 396, 448, 450, 476, 477, 655, 662, 663, 665, 671 Bentham’s Panopticon 515–16 Berelson, B. 659 Berg, Alban 150 Berger, D. 154 Berger, P. 513

INDEX

Bergh, A. 155 Berkeley School 47 Berndt, C.H. 415 Berndt, R.M. 415 Berry, C. 273 Berry, M. 668 Besançon, Alain 114 Best, S. 698 Beteille, A. 415 Beunza, D. 455 Bhabha, Homi 177, 178, 179, 237, 243, 312, 325, 334, 335, 367, 389–91, 392, 396, 399, 520, 698 Bhagwati, Jagdish 220 Biagioli, Mario 111, 112 Bianchini, F. 555, 557 Bibliothèque Bleue 110 Biernacki, Richard 13 Biersteker, T.J. 703 Billig, Michael 73 Bindman, D. 90 bio-politics 262 Birdwell-Pheasant, D. 282 Birmingham School 22, 97, 229–31, 699 Bison, I. 372 Blackburn, R. 448 Blackburn, S. 676 Blacking, J. 158 Blackman, Lisa 19, 66–82 Bland, L. 263, 540 Bloch, Marc 108 Block, F. 451 ‘blockbuster syndrome’ 554 Bloor, David 581 Blunt, A. 47 Boas, Franz 5–6, 12, 18, 25–34, 36, 37, 38, 344, 346, 634, 635 Bobo, K. 704 Boczowski, P.J. 591 Boddy, W. 210 Boli, J. 373–4 Bollas, Christopher 168 Boltanski, L. 689 Bolter, J.D. 574 Bonnell, V.E. 94, 119 Bonwick, James 60 book as artifact 117 Booth, Charles 481 Booth, J. 211 Bordwell, David 21, 193, 196 Born, G. 98, 151, 154 Borovsky, A. 398 Bosma, J. 591 Bott, Elizabeth 472, 480–1 Bourdieu, Pierre 5, 6, 7, 20, 24, 27, 34, 109, 212, 236, 273, 276, 287, 657, 661–3, 678, 698–9 class and classification 468, 472, 475–8, 482 cultural capital 99, 476–8, 485 and cultural history 112, 116 cultural turns 95, 98–101 Distinction 99, 471, 484, 663 ‘field’ model 478 habitus, concept of 100–1, 112, 116, 455, 477–8, 662 hierarchy of musical taste 146, 148 Outline of a Theory of Practice 100, 277, 279 Pascalian Meditations 478 Practical Reason 100 social space, conception of 99 and sociology 89–90, 91, 95

symbolic violence, power of 478, 489 The Weight of the World 99, 476 Bourgeois, Louise Spider 175–6; fig.8.2 Bourke, J. 108 Bourriaud, Nicolas 163 Bové, P. 536 Bowen, J. 415 Bowler, P. 52, 56, 59 Bowles, Samuel 471 Boyd-Barrett, O. 362 Boyle, J. 437 Boyle, Robert 305 Bradley, B. 71 Bradley, S. 60 Brague, R. 505 Braidotti, R. 593, 594 Braithwaite, J. 433–4 Brakhage, Stan 189 Bratich, J.Z. 98 Braudel, F. 492 Braun, B. 49, 50 Brautlinger, P. 60 Bray, J.N. 702 Brecher, J. 703 Breitz, Candice 397 Bremmer, J. 110, 111 Brennan, T. 110 Brewer, John 116 Briggs, A. 207 broadcasting 22, 206–23, 362 audiences 209, 212–17 cultural analysis within 217–19 domestic effects modal (DEM) 22, 214–17 global effects modal (GEM) 22, 215–16 government regulation 207–8 government subsidy 554–5 and Marxism 209, 212 political economy 209 study, disciplines of 209–10 textuality 209 weather broadcasts 221–2 Brody, Samuel 208, 209 Brokensha, D.W. 408 Brookes, R. 668 Brooks, Cleanth 129 Brouwer, J. 408 Brown, M.F. 432, 433, 437, 442 Brown, Richard 474 Brown, R.S. 152 Brown, T. 702 Brown, V. 447 Brown, W. 461 Browne, J. 52 Brubaker, Rogers 330–1 Brudnoy, D. 218 Bruegger, U. 455 Bruner, Jerome 71–3, 74 Brush, Stephen 441 Bryson, A. 111 Bryson, B. 477 Bryson, N. 173 Buchan, D. 109 Bucher, B. 57 Buchli, V. 275, 276, 282 Bucholtz, M. 622 Buck-Morss, Susan 400, 447, 572, 698 Buckingham, D. 216, 656 Buffon, Comte de 52 Buisseret, D. 117 Bukatman, S. 589 Bull, Michael 155–6, 285, 582

INDEX

Bulmer, M. 474 Bunnell, Tim 354, 368 Bunzl, M. 6, 26, 28, 29 Burawoy, M. 451 Burchell, G. 79, 516 Burckhardt, Jacob 107 Burke, Peter 17, 19–20, 107–21, 207 Burnham, S. 148 Burns, Tom 513, 514 Burr, V. 513 Burston, J. 590 Burton, Richard 387 Butler, Judith 10, 23, 32, 100, 112–13, 237, 251, 253, 255, 265, 284, 314, 517, 531, 540–2, 548, 594, 681, 685 Cabral, Amilcar 698 Cadigan, P. 593 Calhoun, C. 98, 494, 682, 709 Caliskan, K. 455 Callon, Michel 157, 291, 294, 300, 315, 454, 455, 457, 458, 459, 581 Caluya, Gilbert 314, 530–49 Camic, C. 93 Campbell, W.J. 213 Camus, A. 526 Canclini, N. 117 Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge 400 Cannadine, David 111, 116, 389, 390, 392 capital, social 94 capitalism 11, 311, 469–70 disorganized 238–9 global justice movement 703–9 material culture studies 273 Caputo, J. 685 Carnes, M. 113 Carraher, D.W. 70 Carrier, J.G. 451, 460–1 Carroll, W.K. 368, 370 Carson, C. 368, 370 Carter, Paul 396 Cashmore Ellis, E. 519 Cassidy, J. 285, 592 caste, colonial construction of 393, 469, 479 Castells, Manuel 237, 285, 312, 366, 375, 377, 574, 582, 587, 595, 601, 602, 703, 708 Castoriadis, Cornelius 347, 712 Castree, N. 49, 50 Cate, F.H. 217 Cavallaro, D. 593 Caves, R.E. 435 Cawelti, J. 89 Caygill, H. 4, 90 Centers, Richard 471 Cerf, Vinton 599 Certeau, Michel de 34, 110, 114, 179–80, 236 Cerulo, K.A. 154 Césaire, Aimé 383, 393–4, 698 Chabal, Patrick 114 Chagnon, Napoleon 33 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 49, 231, 398, 400 Chalfen, Richard 632, 641 Chambers, I. 48 Chandhoke, N. 372 Chandler, A.C. 448 Chandler, D. 370 Chaplin, Elizabeth 644 Chaplin, S. 171 Chapman, T. 282 Charcot, Jean-Martin 536

Charity, R. 397 Charle, C. 116, 469, 476 Charlesworth, S. 478 Chartier, Roger 110, 113, 222, 432 Chateaubriand, François-René de 321 Chatterjee, Partha 319, 394 Chen, K.-H. 699 Chicago School 93, 134 Childers, Mary 252 Chomsky, Noam 553, 596, 703 Chong, D. 705 Chouliaraki, Lilie 610–11, 674–92 Christensen, Jeannette 176 Christiansen, P.O. 107, 108 Chytry-J. 4 Cicourel, A. 677 Cieraad, I. 282 cine-club movement 195 cinema see film; film studies civil rights movement 704 civilization, use of term 28–31 Clark, A. 120 Clark, J. 94 Clark, T.J. 89 Clarke, A. 281, 282 Clarke, E. 154 Clarke, John 240 Clarke, Simon 314, 510–28 class, culture and classification 467–85, 557 academic disciplines, jurisdiction 471–3, 479 Bourdieu 468, 472, 475–8 citizenship rights 469 and colonialism 469, 479 ‘depth’ models 468, 473–5, 484 liberal classifications 468–9, 471, 473 Marxism 469–72, 473, 475 neoliberal classifications 480 political agency 469–71, 473, 479 reflexivity and 479–84 ‘spatial’ models 476 ‘surface’ models 468 class, unity and cultural consumption 661–3 Clifford, J. 8, 42, 237, 240, 618, 621, 637 Clifford, R. 218 Clinton, Bill 218 Clinton, Hillary 214 close reading 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135 clothing, study of 282–4 Cloward, R.A. 704 Clunas, Craig 116 Clynes, Manfred E. 593 Coe, N.M. 368 Coen, J. 531 Cohen, Anthony 327, 329 Cohen, G. 470 Cohen, P. 520 Cohen, R. 494 Cohn, Bernard 312, 384, 386–7, 390, 393 Colás, A. 370 Colchester, M. 415 Cole, D. 31 Cole, Michael 19, 68, 69–70, 73, 75, 81 Coleman, James 171 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 4 Colley, Linda 390 Collier, John 633, 636–7, 643, 644 Collingham, E.M. 392

719

Collins, Harry 291 Collins, J. 90 colonialism 382–402 art-ethical processing and 394–5 caste, colonial construction of 393, 469, 479 Census 384, 479 Christian missionaries 411–12 civilizational discourse and The Enlightenment 54–5 colonial archive 634 creolization 117 cultural technologies 383, 384–6 difference in colonial contexts 392–3 fatal impact thesis 383 and globalization 382 historiography 383, 388 and identity 520, 523–5 and modernity 382 museum displays 168, 179, 383, 387 Négritude 383, 387–8, 393–4 Orientalism 384–5, 386, 388, 398 postcolonial studies 117, 130, 388, 390, 393, 394–5 provincializing Europe 390–2 and race 55–6, 393 somaticizing empire 392–4 and visibilities 384, 386–8 visual arts 394–9 xeno-epistemology 393, 395–7, 399 Comaroff, Jean 34 Comaroff, John 34 commodity theories of culture 235 Comolli, J.-L. 573 computer 579–83, 589–604 Comstock, G. 214 Comte, Auguste 92, 700 connoisseurship 173 Connor, W. 321 Conrad, Joseph 38 consociationalism 499 constructivism 10, 700, 701 content analysis 209, 666–9 conversational analysis 677 Cook, G. 622 Cook, I. 47, 281 Cook, N. 154 Cook, S. 649 Coombe, Rosemary 437, 438–9, 442 Cooper, C.A. 214 Cooper, F. 391, 392–3, 540 Cooper, R. 576 Coover, Rod 637, 646, 647, 649 Copeland, J. 590 Coppin, Dawn 302–3 copyright law 431–6, 441, 554 Corbin, Alain 113 Corner, John 666 Cosgrove, D. 46 Costello, T. 703 Cottle, S. 690 Couldry, Nick 231, 234, 243, 244 counter-culture 66–7, 68, 591 Cousin, B. 109 Crafton, D. 187 Crane, Diana 312, 359–78 Crane, R.S. 134 Crang, M. 46, 47 Crang, P. 281 craniology 56, 60 Crary, Jonathan 315, 577–8, 579 Crawford, R. 127

720

creative industries see cultural and creative industries Creed, B. 267 creole states and modern nationalism 327 creolization 117 Crewe, L. 276, 281 Cringely, R. 591 Critical Art Ensemble 594–5 critical pedagogy 701 critical theory 679–80, 692, 698, 700, 701 Cronon, W. 448 Crossley, N. 98 Crow, Thomas 111, 115 Culler, Jonathan 533 cultural activism 697–712 globalization 697, 703–9 research, role of 700–3 theory and 697–700 cultural capital 99, 476–8, 485 cultural and creative industries 552–67 ambivalence of markets 556 ‘blockbuster syndrome’ 554 class issues 557 creative cities 557–8 creative clusters 557–8 creative labour, critique based on 563, 564–7 government policy 55–74, 559–60 intellectual property rights 554, 559 political economy of culture 553 ‘public goods’ 554 theory 560–2 use of terms 552, 559–60 cultural critique 27 Cultural labour 563, 564–7 cultural mapping 299, 301 cultural studies 113, 117, 227–45 academic status 227–8 commodity theories 235 common culture 244 contextuality 239 culture and society 231–4 discipline theories 236 dispersal of culture 234–8 and globalization 237–8, 239 hegemony theory 236–7, 699–700 and journalism 242 and literary studies 242 nature/culture divide 5–6, 8–9 origins and trajectories 228–31 and politics 234, 241–2 popular culture 236 as postmodern discipline 240–5 recognition theories 237 situatedness 238–40, 243 universalist tradition 3–4 and visual analysis 166–7 cultural survival 414, 415–17, 421–3 cultural technology see technology cultural translation 116 cultural turn 2, 3, 7, 19, 94–103, 227, 242–3 anthropology 138 Bourdieu 95, 98–101 cultural history 113 economy 89 Foucault 95, 96–8 geography 46 historical geography 113 linguistic 610–11, 617–19, 675–8, 699 literary studies 133, 138–41 modernism 340

INDEX

sex and sexuality 531 structuralism 95 use of term 94–5 culture, concepts of 108–13 culture industry 570–1 culture shock 2 ‘culture theory’ 37–8 Culturology 118 Cunningham, H. 370 Cunningham, Stuart 561 Curran, J. 363 Curt, B.C. 77 Cushion, S. 657, 658 Cussins, Charis 298 cyberactivism 708–11 cyberculture 587–604 cybernetics 301, 580, 582–3, 589, 592–4 cyberpunk 589, 593, 594–5 cyberspace 593, 595–6 cyborg 23, 258–9, 294–5, 297, 298, 304, 582–3, 589, 593–5 Dahlgren 689 Dalal, F. 524 Daloz, Jean-Pascal 114 Dalrymple, William 387, 390 Damisch, Hubert 172 Danaher, K. 703, 705 Danaher, W.F. 155 Daniels, I. 281–2 Dant, Tim 583 Darnton, Robert 107 Darwin, Charles 56, 393, 424 Darwinism, social 57, 341, 342, 343, 344–5, 518–19 data, use in cultural analysis 654–71 Davey, N. 170 Davidson, A. 152 Davidson, J. 154 Davies, Donald 599 Davies, Ioan 232 Davies, T. 51 Davis, J. 591 Davis, R. 708 de Beauvoir, Simone 23, 253–5, 258, 260 de Lauretis, Teresa 23, 249–50, 252, 263–4, 574 de Man, Paul 135 de Pedro, J.P. 207 de Rooij, Vincent 609–10, 613–25 De Silva, J.P. 219 Dean, B. 408, 415 Dean, Bartholomew 423 Dean, Jodi 242 Dean, M. 97 deconstructionism 135, 675, 683–8, 700 Delacroix, Eugène 398 Delaney, C. 327 Delanty, G. 363–4 Deleuze, Gilles 7, 51, 81, 82, 192, 292, 295, 298, 306, 598 DeLillo, Don 211 Delmar, Rosalind 249, 261 Delphy, Christine 250 D’Emilio, J. 532 democracy, global 373–4 Denning, Michael 234–5, 236, 237 Dennis, N. 472 DeNora, Tia 17, 20–1, 145–58 Denzin, N.K. 700 Derné, S. 363

Derrida, Jacques 7, 38, 49, 135, 165, 533, 611, 675–6, 677, 680, 683–9, 691, 692, 698–9 ‘And say the animal responded?’ 50 language 95 Dery, M. 589 Desai, M. 371 Descartes, René 700 Desrosières, A. 448 Detel, W. 675 development populism 409 Deveraux, George 114 Devine, F. 475, 477, 478, 482, 483 Dewey, John 701 Diamond, I. 539 Diani, M. 372, 705 Dias, N. 5 Dibben, N. 157 Dick, Philip K. 301 Dicks, B. 623, 645 Diderot, Denis 386, 411, 535–6 difference, notion of 256, 510 see also identity; Other, the Dilthey, Wilhelm 68 DiMaggio, Paul 4, 12, 145, 146, 148, 443 Dirks, Nicholas 112, 117, 384, 389, 393, 469, 478 Dirlik, A. 340 discipline theories of culture 236 discourse analysis 140, 578–9, 674–92 contemporary culture and 686–91 critical 690–1 critical theory 679–80 deconstructionism 683–8 discourse ethics 675, 681–3, 686 ethics of mediation 686 governmentality and discourse 688–9 hermeneutics 676, 678–9 linguistic turn 675, 676–8 mediation 686, 691 multi-modal 690 normative values 686–7 orientations 691 phenomenology 676, 677–8 phronetic 686–8 post-structuralism 675, 676, 677–8, 679–80, 681, 684 representations 691 social constructionism 679–80 discourse ethics 675, 681–3, 686 discourses 538–9 dispositif 455 Dixon, Thomas 198 Doan, L. 540 Doane, M.A. 574 Dodd, Tricia 658 Dodge, M. 595 Dolgin, J. 37 Dorfman, A. 215 Douglas, Mary 32, 35, 36, 37, 276, 519 Douglas, Susan 210 Drahos, P. 433–4 Drexler, E. 595 Dreyfus, H. 514, 515, 516, 517 Driver, F. 113 Du Gay, Paul 239, 582 Dubcan, J. 47 Duby, Georges 108 Duckworth, W. 60 Dulac, Germaine 189 Dumont, L. 26, 27 Duncan, J. 61, 110, 113

INDEX

Duncombe, S. 704, 705 Dunlop, I. 636 Dupré, J. 293 Durham, Jimmy 395 During, Simon 235, 240, 699 Durkheim, Emile 8, 19, 26, 27, 34, 37, 92–3, 95, 100, 110, 278, 279, 286, 291, 292, 343, 347, 495 Dussart, F. 638 Duvignaud, Jean 88 Dyer, G. 665 Dyer-Witheford, N. 601 Dylan, Bob 215 Dyson, E. 597 Eagleton, Terry 49, 89, 128, 137, 241, 431 Earls, M. 218 Easthope, Antony 139, 241 Eco, Umberto 89, 210 economy 313 colonizing corporations 448 cultural turn 89 culture and 447–63 discipline and biopower 447–8 embeddedness 451–3 feminism 460 globalization 360, 364–5, 370–1, 500 as government 447–50 growth 450 historical economics 343 Marx 448 nation-states 450 neoliberal 453, 461 networks 453–4, 456–60 political 447–50, 596 political economy of culture 553 postmodernism 460 ‘public goods’ 554 science and technology studies (STS) 454–6 as social tool 461–2 socio-technical arrangements 454–6 as socio-technical project 456–60 use of term 10–12, 450–1 virtualism 460–2 Edelman, Bernard 428 Edelman, M. 321, 655 Edelson, John 194 Edison, Thomas 187, 456–9 Edney, M. 113 education as set of specific practices 70 Edwards 75 Edwards, Elizabeth 276, 633, 634, 637, 638, 641, 643, 647 Egan, T. 218 Eikhenbaum, Boris 128 Eisenberg, R.S. 436 Eisenman, Stephen 391, 392 Eisenstadt, S.N. 345 Eisenstein, Sergei 189 Eisner, R. 460 El Sawaadawi, N. 253 Eley, G. 321 Elias, Norbet 114, 115, 147, 392 Elichirigoity, Fernando 300 Eliot, T.S. 128, 136, 137 elitism and visual analysis 179 Ellen, R. 408 Elliott, Anthony 82, 513–14 Ellis 686 Ellis, John 134 Elman, B.A. 108

Elmer, G. 582 Elsen, A. 432 Elsner, J. 110 Elvin, M. 121 Elyachar, J. 461 Emel, J. 49 Emmison, M. 642 Empson, William 135 Eng, D.L. 540 Engelbart, Douglas 601 Engelke, M. 272 Engels, Friedrich 304, 469–70 English, James F. 17, 20, 21, 126–42 Enlightenment 4, 38, 51, 53–6, 115, 386, 523, 698, 708 areal classification and 52–3 civilizational discourse and 53–5 European universalism, critics of 410–12 modernity, notion of 343, 344 and race 51, 53–6, 58–9, 60 and sexuality 537–8 Eno, Brian 157, 301 environmental studies 301–4 Enwezor, Okwui 394, 397–8 epistemology cultural analysis 676–7 ethnography and 620–1 Epstein, B. 705 Epstein, Jean 189, 192 Eriksen, T.H. 625 Eriksen, Thomas 325, 326, 329 Erikson, Erik 114 Eschbach, K. 418 Eschle, C. 371–2 Escobar, A. 447, 451 ethics discourse ethics 675, 681–3, 686 ethnography 624–5, 642–3 and sex 544–6 ethnicity 239 cultural classification 469 ethnic hatred and cultural identity 518, 525–6 and nationalism 318–19, 322, 324–6, 328–30 ‘new ethnicities’ 95, 96, 519–20 ‘ethnie’ 324–5 ethnography 27, 40, 209, 212, 609–10, 613–25 and alterity 620 autobiography in 621 currency of 613–14 data production and analysis 621–3 dialogical nature of research 621 epistemology 620–1 ethics 624–5, 642–3 ethnographic writing 615 ethnography of communication 618 ethnography of speaking 617–18 experimental 623–4 film 634–8 forms 614–15 historicity 621 history of 615–19 linguistic turn 617–19 memory, role of 621 multi-sited 615 new ethnography 615, 617–18, 701 presence of researcher 620–1 present-day 619–20 technology 623–4 use of term 615–16 visual 166, 632–50 ethnology 6, 26, 276

721

ethnomethodology 677, 700 ethnomusicology 145, 151–2 ethnosience 617–18 Ettinge, B. 268 Evans, J. 645–6 Evans, T. 374 Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 33 everyday culture, concept of 110 evolutionism 56–61 social 29, 57, 341, 342, 343–5, 518–19 exchange, culture as 259–61 existentialism 523, 698, 699 Eyerman, R. 155, 156, 157 Fabian, Johannes 5, 109, 177, 398, 400, 609–10, 613–25 Fairclough, N. 691 Falcon, F. 108 Falk, R. 360, 370–1, 373 Fals Borda, O. 702 false consciousness, theory of 699–700 Fanon, Franz 228, 314, 394, 511, 518, 520, 523–4, 525–6, 698 fatal impact thesis 383 Fauquet, J.M. 154 Featherstone, M. 237 Fechner, Gustav 577–8 Feenberg, A. 582 Feld, S. 156 Felman, Shoshana 252–3 Felski, Rita 242 feminism 23, 237, 249–68, 531, 699, 700, 701, 704 academic study 251–3 art history 108 economy 460 feminist materialism 256–9 Foucauldian 539–40 gender politics 255, 541–2 gender and visuality 174 and globalization 256–9, 369 human and post-human 50–1 and idealism 258 post-structuralism 23, 539–40 postmodern 594 and psychoanalysis 265–8, 531 sex/gender system 256–7, 259–60 and sexuality 261–5, 531, 534 and structural anthropology 259–61 woman in feminist thought 253–6 see also gender Ferguson, Adam 53 Fergusson, Niall 388–9, 390 Fernandez-Armesto, F. 50 Ferro, M. 383, 400 Feyerabend, Paul 293, 700 Fichte 322 ‘field’ model 478 Fielder, Leslie 228 film 571, 587 apparatus theory 573–4 cannibalization and absorption of other media 187 cine-club movement 195 cinema distinguished 192 ethnographic 634–8, 647–8 feminist criticism 174 ‘global vernacular’ 201 government subsidy 554–5 national identity, expression of 198–9, 200 off-screen space 263–4

722

film (continued ) political use 197 universal language, as 199–202 visual analysis 171 Film and Photo League 198 Film Practices 190, 194 dynamics 195–9 history 189–92 film studies 21–2, 185–202 aesthetic analysis 193–5 amateur filmmaking 197–8 applied film theory 189 cinema architecture and design 194 Classical Film Theory 21, 188–9, 192–3, 195 Classical Hollywood Cinema 195–6 film studies experimental film 198 fan culture 196 genre 191 literary studies, and 194 neglected forms 193–4 non-fictional filmmaking 198 political positions, and 195, 197 programming, effect 195 soundtracks 152 visual analysis distinguished 167, 170 see also film; Film Practices film theory 189 Findlen, P. 111 Fine, B. 94 Fine, G.A. 624 Fine, M. 702 Finnegan, R. 153 Fish, Stanley 136 Fisher, M.M.J. 344 Fiske, J. 216, 236, 588 Flaherty, Robert 636, 637 Flew, Terry 561–2 Florida, Richard 561, 563 Flyvebjerg, B. 687 Foerstel, L. 532 Foote, K. 47 Forbes, E. 146 Ford, C. 152 Forde, Daryll 275 formalism 20, 99, 128–30, 131, 134, 136, 151, 700 Fornas, Johan 228 Forster, J.R. 53 Foster, Vincent 218 Fotopoulos, T. 371 Foucault, Michel 7, 19, 23, 27, 34, 66, 67, 71, 77, 78–90, 140, 172–3, 236, 287, 297, 314, 392, 397, 453, 514, 524, 526, 528, 533, 535, 541–4, 548, 588, 611, 655, 689, 698–9 The Archaeology of Knowledge 96–7 class-based accounts, critique of 476 and cultural history 89, 113, 115–16 cultural turns 95, 96–8 discipline and biopolitics 303, 447–9 Discipline and Punish 510, 515–16 discourse analysis 578–9, 674–5, 678, 699 discourse and language 97, 98 dispositif 455 on dividing practices 52 Feminism and 539–40

INDEX

governmentality, account of 97 Herculine Barbin 537 The History of Sexuality 261–3, 516–17, 536–7, 538–40, 542–4 Madness and Civilization 514–15 The Order of Things 96–7, 274 power/knowledge relationship 390, 517, 538–9, 680, 687, 688 technologies of the self 577–8 The Use of Pleasure 544 visibility and power 384, 387–8 Fowler, Mark 217 Fox, E. 215 Fox, R. 384, 704, 705 Frampton, Hollis 189 Francois, E. 111 Frank, A. 42 Frank, Reuven 221 Frankfurt School 7, 470, 511, 571, 576, 597, 679, 680, 681, 692, 698 Franklin, Adrian 302 Fraser, Nancy 499, 539, 682 Frazer, James 341, 342 Frederickson, G. 54 Freeman, J. 704, 705 Freud, Sigmund 19, 32, 66, 111, 254, 258, 265–7, 483, 514, 518, 536, 698 Civilization and its Discontents 115 and cultural history 114, 115 Marxist critique of 70 theory of repression 73 Three Essays on a Theory of Sexuality 266 ‘The Uncanny’ 521–2 Freyre, G. 113 Friedman, J. 275, 492 Frith, S. 155, 435, 557 Frosh, S. 72, 81 Frow, John 87, 89, 90, 97, 228, 230, 232, 233, 240, 241, 243, 245, 312–13, 427–43, 475, 478–9, 700 Frye, Northop 134 Fryer, P. 518, 519 Fudge, E. 51 Fuente, E. de la 91 Fujitani, T. 111, 112 Fukuyama, Francis 349–50 functionalism 619 functionalism-structuralism 619 Furbee, L. 407 Furnival, F.S. 495, 497 Fuss, Diana 533 Gable, Eric 17, 18, 25–42, 231 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 7, 136, 678–9, 701 Gale, F. 47 Galison, Peter 296, 299 Gallagher, C. 537 Galtung, J. 374 Gamson, W. 659 Gandhi, Mohandas K. 384, 392, 394, 704 Garavaglia, J.C. 415 García Canclini, Néstor 215, 237, 244, 367 Garcia-Downing, C. 410 Gardener, Robert 637 Gardiner 682 Garfinkel, Harold 214, 216, 513 Garnham, Nicholas 213, 314, 553, 555, 559, 561, 566 Garton, S. 532, 536 Garvey, P. 282 Gascoine, J. 55

Gaudet, H. 659 Gaudréault, André 187 Gauguin, Paul 391, 392 Gauntlett, David 655, 659, 660 Gautney, H. 710 Gay, John 69 Geertz, Clifford 7, 12, 18, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38–40, 48, 62, 109, 111, 114, 116, 118, 119, 618 The Interpretation of Cultures 107–8 ‘The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man’ 38 ‘thick description’ 94, 120, 609 Gelder, K. 89, 90 Gell, Alfred 23, 276, 278–9 Gellman, E.F. 211 Gellner, Ernest 311, 317, 319, 322, 323, 326 gender 286, 314, 540–1 cultural hierarchies 90, 469 gender politics 255, 541–2 historiography 112–13 indigenous cultures 423 ‘intelligible’ 540–2 music, representation in 152–4 nationalism, women’s relationship to 327 sex/gender system 256–7, 259–60, 531 sexual identity, social construction of 510–11, 516–18 and sexuality 530–1, 534 as a technology 263–5 use of term 250–1, 256, 531, 539 and visuality 174 see also feminism; sex and sexuality genetic engineering 427 Geneva School 135 genre theory 130 geography 2, 6, 18–19 areal classification 52–3, 55–7 Beyond Geography 48 civilizational discourse and the Enlightenment 53–5 cultural 9, 46–62, 237, 644, 645 cultural turn 46 and evolutionism 56–61 historical 113–14 human 46, 531; see also race humanist ontology 48–9, 53 Marxist 48 nation, and 330 nature and culture 49–51 non-representational 46 post-humanism 49–51, 61–2 post-structuralism 46–7, 48 race and areal classification 55–7 socio-music studies 145 and The Enlightenment 51, 52–5 Gerbner, G. 669 Gergen, Ken 70–1, 74, 76, 513 Gergen, Mary 70–1 Gerome, François 398 Gershman, J. 703 Giarelli, G. 408 Gibberd, K. 413 Gibson, William 593, 594 Gibson-Graham, J.K. 462 Giddens, Anthony 93, 314, 364, 474, 528, 544–6, 677, 679, 687 Giere, R.N. 294 Gikandi, Simon 127, 133 Gillam, L. 624

INDEX

Gillen, Frank 634 Gillespie, M. 661 Gilliam, A. 532 Gills 374 Gilroy, Paul 52, 237, 326, 393, 520 Gingrich, A. 29 Ginsburg, F. 242, 421 Gintis, Herbert 471 Ginzburg, Carlo 89, 109, 120, 388, 400 girl culture 546–7 Gitlin, A. 700 Gittoes, George 157 Glaser, B.G. 623 Glasser, T. 655, 656 Glassie, H. 281 Glendinning, S. 50, 53 Glick, J. 69 Gliddon 518 global justice movement 371, 703–9 globalization 239, 300, 312 advocacy networks 369, 370 anti-globalization movement 371–2 and colonialism 382 cultural 360–1 cultural activism 697, 703–9 cultural flows/networks 359–78 cultural imperialism/hegemony 361–4, 377 democracy and world polity thesis 373–4 economic 360 ethnomusicology 151–2 feminism and 256–9 from above and from below 360 global cities 364–5 global communities 368 global governance and government, conditions for 370–5 global versus local analysis 364–5 global village concept 366–7 globalization theories of culture 237–8 ‘grand’ theory 375–7 hydridization 367–8, 377 indigenous labour power 417 information flows 360 intellectual property 433–6 inter-organizational networks 369 interpersonal networks 368–9 and multiculturism 499–503 multinational companies 359–60 nation states, relationships between 361–6 and nationalism 324, 335 neoliberalism 360, 370 and television 220 transnational communities 368 value systems 372–3 glocalization 364, 377 Gluck, C. 112 Gluckman, Max 27, 34 Gobineau, Arthur de 518 Godard, Jean-Luc 189, 192, 200, 201 Godelier, M. 41, 275 Goehr, L. 146 Goffman, Erving 115, 168, 277, 285, 314, 510, 511–14 Golding, P. 596 Goldmann, Lucien 88, 117, 137 Goldthorpe, J.H. 472, 474, 477 Goldwater, R. 399 Golvan, C. 440 Gomart, Emilie 155, 298 Gombrich, Ernst 277, 388 Gopnik, A. 218

Gordon, D. 40 Goswami, M. 449 Gouk, P. 112 Gould, S. 56, 60 Gouldner, Alvin 471 Govil, N. 564 Graber, D.A. 221 Graff, G. 127 Grafton, Anthony 386 Gramsci, Antonio 96, 117, 236, 470, 680, 699–700, 701, 709 Granovetter, Mark 11, 451, 453–4 Gray, Jonathan 668 Grayson, D. 274 Greaves, Tom 441 Green, Joseph 197 Green, L. 154 Greenblatt, Stephen 89, 109, 110, 111, 116, 386 Greenfeld, L. 327 Greenwood, D.J. 701 Greer, G. 108 Gregg, M. 228 Gregory, C. 41 Gregory, D. 9, 47, 110, 113 Gregson, N. 276, 281 Griesemer, J.R. 296 Griffen, C. 113 Griffith, D.W. 197, 198, 200 Griffiths, A. 6, 635 Griffiths, T. 57 Griliches, Z. 460 Grimshaw, Anna 635, 638–9 Groebner, V. 111 Gross, L. 669 Gross, P.R. 297 Grossberg, Lawrence 229, 235, 238, 239, 241, 699 Grosz, E. 540 Grotius, Hugo 10 Grusin, R. 574 Gruzinski, S. 113, 117, 395 Guala, F. 458, 461, 462 Guattari, F. 81, 82, 292, 306 Guha, Ranajit 117, 119 Guibernau, M. 324, 360 Guidey, J.A. 705 Guillemin, M. 624 Guillory, J. 90 Gunew, Sneja 488 Gunning, Tom 17, 21–2, 185–202 Gurevitch, M. 275 Gutmann, A. 10 Guyer, P. 4 Habermas, Jürgen 7, 115, 201, 330, 347, 348, 600, 611, 618, 675–6, 678, 679, 680–7, 689, 692, 709 habitus, concept of 100–1, 112, 116, 455, 477–8, 662 Hacking, Ian 448, 655 Haddon, Alfred Cort 634–5 Hage, G. 313–14, 327, 488–508, 502, 503 Halberstam, J. 251 Hall, Catherine 112, 117, 390, 392 Hall, R.B. 703 Hall, Stuart 10, 19, 47, 93, 95, 96, 138, 228, 229–30, 232, 235, 236, 238–9, 275, 334, 474, 475, 519–20, 527, 531, 538, 596, 645–6, 656, 659, 662, 665, 699 Halle, D. 477 Halliday, M.A.K. 691 Hallowell, Irving 36 Halperin, D. 544

723

Hamelink, C.J. 360 Hampton, K.N. 367 Han, B. 678 Hanawalt, B.A. 114 Handler, Richard 17, 18, 25–42, 231, 614 Hann, C.M. 429, 442 Hannerz, U. 237, 244, 494 Hanrahan, N.W. 158 Hansen, K. 283 Hansen, Mark 171 Hansen, Miriam 200–1 Hanssen, B. 681 Haraway, Donna 23, 24, 51, 250, 252, 258–9, 261, 294–5, 297, 298, 303–4, 580, 582–3, 589, 593, 594 Harcourt, W. 708 Hardt, Michael 238, 565, 703, 709 Hargreaves, I 670 Hargreaves, D. 155, 157 Harper, Douglas 644 Harré, R. 73, 74, 75, 76 Harris, R. 676 Harrison, S. 49 Harsnett, Samuel 109 Hart, G. 451–2 Hartley, John 227, 561, 655, 667, 671 Hartley, L.P. 334 Hartman, Geoffrey 135 Harvey, D. 280, 460, 556, 703 Hasan, R. 691 Hashagen, U. 590 Hassard, J. 81, 598 Hastings, Adrian 319–20 Hauser, Arnold 108 Haverkort, B. 408 Hayduk, R. 704, 705, 707 Hayes, C. 321 Hayles, Katherine 50, 301 Hayles, N.K. 592, 594 Head, L. 54 Healy, Kieran 563 Heath, Stephen 574 Hebdige, Dick 93, 235, 273, 275 Hecht, A. 281 Hefner, R.W. 497 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 24, 186, 279–80, 347, 348, 698 hegemony, theory of 96, 236–7, 680, 699–700 Heidegger, Martin 7, 51, 100, 136, 387, 397, 579, 699, 701 Heider, K. 637, 638 Hekman, S.J. 539 Held, B. 359 Held, D. 374, 698, 703, 710 Heller, A. 489 Helliwell, C. 406 Henare, A. 283 Henderson, G. 46 Henderson, H. 460 Hendry, J. 638 Henley, Paul 640, 649 Hennion, Antoine 154, 155, 298 Henriques 78, 82 Herbst, S. 656 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 6, 27, 29, 322, 333, 393, 411 Heritage, J. 677 Herman, Edward 553, 596, 661 hermeneutics 618, 619, 676, 678–9, 681, 700, 701 Herzfeld, Michael 330, 335 Hesmondhalgh, David 151, 314, 315, 552–67 Hesse, Barnor 488

724

‘heteroglossia’ 121 Hetherington, K. 102 Heyd, T. 407, 408 Hiemstra, W. 408 hierarchies, cultural 90, 145, 146–8, 150 Higashibaba, I. 113 Higgins, C.S. 211 high culture, concept of 90, 110–11, 118 Hiles 68, 72 Hill, K.A. 708 Hills, H. 112 Hills, M. 659 Hilton, Rodney 471 Hindless, B. 275, 406, 447 Hinsley, C.M. 6 Hirschkind, Charles 388 Hirsh, P. 666 Hirst, P. 275, 359, 360 history art history 163, 164, 166, 167, 170, 175–6 of the body 115–16, 117 book as artifact 117 chronology 174 collective memory 111–12, 119–20 congealed 150 cultural 19–20, 107–21 cultural translation 116 Culturology 118 economics, historical 343 of the emotions 112 everyday history, concept of 110 geography, historical 113–14 ‘heteroglossia’ 121 historiography of colonialism 383, 388 historiography of gender 112–13 iconography 120 ‘invention of tradition’ 112 and literary theory 117–18, 140 Marxist concepts 114, 117, 118 methods of cultural historians 119–21 microhistory 120 narrative 120–1 nation, and 334–5 new cultural history 110–11 new historicism 8, 89, 118, 130, 139–40, 700 oral 119–20 political 112 postmodernism 121 postmodernity 121 psychohistory 114 related disciplines 113–18 of the senses 113 spatial 396 visual analysis 120, 175–7 ‘History Wars’ 120 History Workshop movement 117 Ho, K.C. 592 Hobbes, Thomas 5, 114, 305 Hobsbawm, Eric 108, 112, 319, 471 Hobson, J.A. 411, 412 Hochschild, Adam 156, 383 Hockey, J. 282 Hodder, I. 120, 281 Hodge, B. 659 Hodges, William 400 Hoebel, E.A. 428, 430 Hoffenberg, Peter 387 Hoggart, Richard 138, 139, 229, 232, 233, 234, 235, 237, 472, 662, 699 Hohfeld, W.N. 428

INDEX

Holden, B. 370, 373 Holland, Norman 136 Hollway, Wendy 78, 81 Holm, P. 455 Hom, A. 540 homosexuality 260, 263, 264, 534–5, 543–4 lesbian and gay culture 532–3, 543, 545 post-structuralism 533–4 queer theory 130, 237, 243, 532, 540–2 Honoré, A M. 428, 430 hooks, b. 251–2 Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean 168–9, 172–3, 174, 175, 178 Hopkins, T.K. 452 Horkheimer, Max 7, 114, 138, 211, 212–13, 235, 314, 470, 518, 521–3, 524, 570–1, 596–7, 698 critique of the culture industry 552–3 Horne, Donald 233, 234, 240 Horowitz, D. 273 Hosokawa, S. 582 Hovland, Carl 659, 665 Howarth, D. 684 Howes, D. 113 Howkins, John 560–1, 563 Hoy, D. 681 Hroch, Miroslav 327–8 Hubbell, Richard Whittaker 208 Hubinger, V. 62 Hudson, D. 591 Hudson, N. 54 Hughes, S. 703 Hughes, Thomas 456–9 Hughes-Freeland, F. 638 Hughson, J. 94 Hui, Desmond 560 Huizinga, Johan 107 human genome, ownership 427, 429, 435–6 humanism 700 fundamental 49 humanist ontology 48–9, 53 post-humanism and separateness from nature 49–51, 53–4, 61–2 science and technology studies 291–5 Humboldt brothers 29 Humphrey, K. 429 Humphrey, Laud 532 Hundt, Reed 218 Hunt, L. 94, 110, 119, 227 Hunter, Ian 5, 131 Huntington, Samuel 114, 365 Husserl, Edmund 135, 136, 701 Hutchins, E. 455 Huxley, T.H. 57, 60 hybridization 367–8, 377 Hymes, Dell 27, 617 idealism 258 identity ambiguity and 526–7 biologism 518–19 and colonialization 520, 523–5 control of 510 culture and 510–28 difference, notion of 510 dramatic self 511–14 ego 512, 513 and ethnic hatred 518, 525–6 and ethnicity 518

Foucault 514–17 Freudian model of difference 518 the gaze and I 515–16 Goffman 510, 511–14 identity politics 237 the Other 511, 514–15, 518–26 personal 512, 513 power/knowledge relationship 517 projective identification 522–3, 524 and psychoanalysis 514, 517, 521–3 and race 518–27 self and Other 514–15 sexual, social construction of 510–11, 516–18 social 512–13 stigma 512–13 the stranger, concept of 511, 526–7 ideological community 87, 92 ideology and consciousness 77–8 Iedema, R. 691 Ikegami, Eiko 91, 100, 115 imagined community, the 91–4 immanent critique 149 immaterial labour 601–2 imperialism 5 cultural 361–4 see also colonialism Inden, Ronald 384, 398 indigenous culture 406–24 anthropology see anthropology art, relevant meanings 420–1 cultural property 438–43 cultural survival 414, 415–17, 421–3 Enlightenment critics of European universalism 410–12 folk music 435 and globalization 417 immanent temporality 406–7 indigenous knowledge 407–9, 427 intellectual property 435 labour power 417–20 League of Nations and 412–15 vulnerability 406–7, 423 women 423 World Bank and 409–10, 415 Ingarden, Roman 136 Inglehart, R. 365–6 Inglis, D. 94 Ingold, T. 57, 650 Instone, L. 51 intelligibilty, cultural 541–2 inter-coder reliability 667, 668–9 interdisciplinary collaboration 163 International Labour Organization (ILO) 412–15 Internet 208, 219, 237, 284–6, 315, 367, 494, 562, 582, 589, 592, 598–9, 600–1, 602 cultural activism 708–9 domain names, ownership 427 ethics of 624 ethnography of 623–4 visual analysis 171–2 interpretivism 700 Irigaray, Luce 254, 264, 265 Irwin, A. 703 Iser, Wolfgang 136 Isherwood, B. 276 Isnenghi, M. 112 Iwabuchi, K. 237, 364 Iyengar, S. 659, 669, 670 Jacknis, I. 634, 635 Jackson, P. 47, 540

INDEX

Jacques 238 Jahoda, G. 52 Jakobson, Roman 128, 129 James, C.L.R. 228, 698 James, William 295, 701 Jameson, Fredric 9, 137, 139, 140, 235, 340, 351–2, 443, 595–6, 703 Jamieson, A. 155, 156, 157 Jardine, N. 109 Jason, L.A. 702 Jaszi, Peter 432 Jauss, Hans Robert 7, 136 Jaworski, A. 690 Jay, Martin 523, 698 Jayne, Mark 557 Jefferson, T. 81, 93, 229, 238 Jefferson, Thomas 40 Jenks, C. 176, 177 Jewitt, C. 690 Jhally, S. 661, 664 Johns, A. 117 Johnson, G. 412 Johnson, J.H. 146 Johnson, Lesley 210 Johnson, N. 47 Johnson, Richard 231, 241, 243 Johnson, V. 704, 705 Johnston, B.R. 410 Johnston, J. 578, 579 Jones, A. 327 Jones, Gareth Stedman 108, 112, 475 Jones, L. 702 Jones, P. 276 Joppke, C. 489 Jordan, T. 708 Jordan, W. 54 Jouhaud, C. 114 journalism and cultural studies 242 Joyce, James 132 Joyce, Patrick 98, 111, 116, 469, 475 Judt, T. 470 Juffer, J. 98 Jütte, Robert 113 Kafka, Franz 57 Kahn, Joel S. 311–12, 338–54 Kahn, Richard 709 Kahn, Robert 599 Kaldor, M. 370 Kalia, V. 73 Kalpagam, U. 447 Kamark, E. 708 Kant, Immanuel 4–5, 90, 91, 347, 348, 411, 523, 545, 698 Kasfir, S.L. 396 Kassabian, A. 152 Kasson, J.S. 90 Katz, H. 369, 370 Katzew, I. 393 Katznelson, I. 474 Kauffman, L.A. 704 Kay, S. 116 Kaye, H. 471, 474 Keane, Webb 274, 279, 284, 320 Keck, M.E. 369 Keesong, R. 62 Keith, M. 494 Kekulé 298 Kellner, Douglas 362, 698, 709 Kelly, Bill 483 Kemmis, S. 702 Kemmler, William 457 Kemnizer, D. 37 Kendall, J. 704 Kennedy, B.M. 589, 708

Kenney, M. 590 Kenrick, J. 415 Keogh, R. 213 Kern, R. 477 Kerns, V. 36 Kersenboom, S. 623 Khagram, S. 705 Khazanchi, Deepak 155 Khondker, H.H. 364, 366 Kim, Jongyoung 299, 703 Kimball, R. 140 Kimmel, M.S. 547 Kinder, D. 669 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 704 King-Smith, Leah 397 Kingsbury, B. 415 Kingston, W. 434 Kinsey, Alfred 532 Kirtunç, A.L. 231 Kitchin, R. 595 Kittler, Friedrich 315, 577–81 Kitzinger, J. 429, 659, 670 Klandermans, B. 704 Klein, L.E. 111 Klein, Melanie 266, 523 Klein, N. 707 Klein, Ursula 297 Kline, Nathan S. 593 Kluckhohn, Clyde 25, 28, 29, 37 Knorr Cetina, Karin 24, 101, 296, 300, 455–6 knowledge cultural property 427, 432 indigenous 407–9, 435 Knox, Robert 55, 518 Kobialka, M. 114 Koester, D. 41 Kogut, B. 367 Köhler, Rollefson, I.U. 407, 408 Kohn, Hans 318–19 Konstanz circle 7 Kopytoff, I. 276 Koremenos, B. 373 Koselleck, Reinhardt 4, 7 Koser, K. 368 Kracauer, Siegfried 194, 571 Kramer, L. 152 Krätke, S. 364–5, 369 Kress, G. 690, 691 Kripke, S. 676 Krippner, G.R. 451, 454 Kristeva, Julia 23, 254, 255, 267 Kritzer, H. 656 Kroeber, Alfred 18, 25, 28, 37, 61, 231 Kuan Hsing Chen 237 Kubelka, Peter 189, 193, 194 Küchler, S. 283, 284 Kuhn, Annette 531 Kuhn, Thomas Samuel 292–3, 296, 700 Kuisl, R. 363 Kuleshov, Lev 189, 192 Kull, Stephen 664, 666, 670 Kuper, A. 3, 12, 26, 27, 31, 34, 54, 277, 344, 415 Kvale, S. 76 Kymlicka, W. 495 Lacan, Jacques 19, 67, 71–2, 77, 78, 80, 81, 114, 229, 254, 266, 493, 573, 698–9 Laclau, E. 96, 236, 238, 475 Lahire, Bernard 98, 100, 477 Laitin, David 320 Lakatos, Imre 700

725

Lakoff, G. 710 Lal, V. 394 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 28 Lamont, M. 477 Landes, J. 115 Landry, C. 557 Lane, C. 525 Lane, Edward 387 Lang, Jack 555 Langer, John 221 language Bourdieu 98–101 critical psychology 74–7 and cultural identity 27, 29–30 deconstructionism 135, 675, 683–8 Derrida 95, 683–8 discourse analysis see discourse analysis ethnography 617–19 Foucault 97, 98 and nation 321 de Saussure 95 Wittgenstein 676–7, 678, 679 see also linguistics Laplanche, J. 522 Laqueur, Thomas 108, 537–8 Larkin, Brian 400 Larson, Heidi 633 Larson, Stephanie 656 Lash, S. 238, 545, 582, 703 Latour, Bruno 5, 10, 18, 23, 24, 50, 98, 101, 102, 291, 294, 297, 301–2, 315, 458, 473–4, 475–6, 581 modernity and culture 339–40 objects and agency, theory of 278, 279 Politics of Nature 302, 305–6 science and technology studies (STS) 454 We Have Never Been Modern 304–5 Laughren, P. 634, 635 Lave, Jean 70 Law, John 81, 101–2, 244, 294, 598 Lawler, S. 478 Lawrence, D.H. 132 Lawrence, E. 520 Lawrence-ZúNiga, D. 282 Layton, L. 82 Lazarsfeld, P. 659 Lazzarato, Maurizio 565, 601 Le Goff, Jacques 108, 111 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel 114, 120 Leach, Edmund 34, 35, 37–8 Leacock, Eleanor 36 Leadbeater, Charles 556 League of Nations 211, 412–15 Leavis, F.R. 20, 131–3, 136, 137, 140, 662–3 Lee, Benjamin 340, 345 Lefebvre, Henri 113 Leistyna, Pepi 611, 697–712 Leitch, Vincent 243 Lemke, T. 461 Lenin, Vladimir 470, 473, 699 Leong, R. 540 Lépinay, V.-A. 455 Leppert, Richard 148, 154, 173 Lessig, L. 435, 602 Levebre, Henri 228 Levi, J.M. 408, 415 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 8–9, 18, 23, 27, 34, 35–6, 37, 38, 95, 119, 259, 274, 609 Levin, N. 701

726

Levine, Lawrence 90, 91, 118, 147 Levinson, P. 575, 582 Levitas, Ruth 93–4, 556 Levitt, N. 297 Levy, Pierre 601 Levy, S. 591, 599 Lewin, E. 39 Lewin, Kurt 700–1 Lewis, Dave 397 Lewis, J. 415 Lewis, Justin 214, 221, 610, 654–71 Lewis, P.M. 211 Lewis, T. 218 Ley, D. 47 Leyshon, A. 455 Li, Tania 409 Liddicoat, A. 211 Lieberman, V. 353 Lijphart, A. 499 Limbaugh, R. 218 Lin, N. 94 Lincoln, Y.S. 700 Lindqvist, Sven 383 Lindsay, Vachel 200 Lines, W. 50 linguistic turn 610–11, 699 discourse analysis 675, 676–8 ethnography 617–19 linguistics 113, 114 anthropology 26, 27, 29–30 ethnography 617–19 reflexive analysis 544–6, 676 social analysis, as model for 95 structural 229, 617 see also language Linnaeus, Carl von 52 Lipset, Martin Seymour 471 List, Friedrich 449 Lister, Martin 588, 589, 593, 598, 633, 645, 646 literary studies 20, 126–42 close reading 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135 communitarianism 132–3 and cultural studies 242 cultural turn 133, 138–41 deconstructionism 135 discourse analysis 140 diversity and stratification 141–2 formalism 99, 128–30, 131, 134, 136 genre theory 130 history, dialogue with 117–18, 140 history of 127–42 legitimation 127–31 literary form and institutional form 127 literary genres 89 Marxism 134, 136–8, 140 Marxist social history 117 narratology 130 New Criticism 20, 128–9, 130, 131, 134, 135, 137, 139 New Historicism 118, 139–40 new poetics 130, 131 phenomenology 134, 135–6 postmodernism 139 Practical Criticism 20, 128–9, 132, 135 rationale 131–3 reader-response criticism 136 reception aesthetics 134, 135 Russian Formalism 20, 128–30, 131, 136–7 sociological debates 88–9

INDEX

structuralism 130, 134 theory revolution 133–8 Little, A. 328, 331 Livingstone, D. 47 Livingstone, Sonia 656, 659 Locke, John 53–4, 382, 410, 700 Lockwood, D. 470, 474 Loesberg, J. 131 logocentrism 684 Loizos, P. 638 Long, C. 634, 635 Long, Elizabeth 227 Longhurst, Brian 482, 484 Looseley, D.J. 99, 554, 555 Lorenzer, Alfred 228 Lotman, Juri 118, 119 low culture, concept of 90, 111, 118 Low, M. 400 Lowie, Robert 431–2 Lsh, S. 155 Lubbock, John 57, 59 Lucey, H. 81 Luckmann, T. 513 Luhmann, Niklas 6, 90–1 Lukács, George 11, 87–8, 89, 117, 136, 137, 470, 473 Lukes, S. 489 Lumby, Catharine 546 Lumière brothers 187 Luria, Alexander 68, 69 Luria, Zella 531, 547, 548 Lurie, S. 539 Lury, Celia 98, 103, 315, 433, 570–83 Lykke, N. 593, 594 Lynch, Michael 291–2 Lyon, D. 582 Lyotard, Jean François 171, 236, 460, 577, 677, 700 Ma, Eric Kit-wai 231 McAdam, D. 705 McCabe, J. 59 MacCaffery, L. 593 McCarthy, T. 681 McCaughey, Martha 708, 710 McChesney, Robert 363, 553, 666, 669 McClary, Susan 152–4 McCombs, M. 659 McConnochie, K. 57 McCormick, L. 154 McCrone, David 311, 317–36 McCurry, Steve Afghan girl 180 McDonald, I. 440 McDonald, M. 324 Macdonald, R. 155 Macdonald, S. 276, 281 MacDougall, David 637, 638–9, 640, 649 MacDougall, H. 333 McElrea, H. 157 McEvilley, Thomas 399 Macey, D. 524 McGregor, R. 57 McGrew, A. 335, 703 McGuigan, J. 211, 236, 688, 700 McGuire, P. 454 Macherey, Pierre 89, 137 McIntosh, Ian 415 McIntosh, Mary 532, 536 MacIntyre, S. 120 McKendrick, J. 157 MacKenzie, A. 580, 581, 582 McKenzie, Don 117 MacKenzie, Donald 300, 455, 456

MacKenzie, John 117, 386, 388 McKeon, Michael 88 McKinnie, M. 94 McKlintock, A. 469 McLaren, Peter 702 McLean, Ian 396 McLennan, Gregor 242 McLeod, J. 698 McLeod, K. 427 McLuhan, Marshall 211, 216, 315, 367, 574–8, 580–2, 597–8 McMurria, J. 564 McNay, Louis 539 McPhee, J. 302 McQuail, D. 587, 596 McRae, Tommy 395 McRobbie, Angela 235, 567 McSwain, R. 300 McWhorter, L. 540 Magubane, Z. 54 Maharaj, Sarat 393, 394 Maine, Henry 412, 413, 430 Maisonneuve, S. 155 Malaysia, modernization 338–9, 349–53 Malik, K. 50 Malinowski, Bronislaw 18, 31–2, 34, 616, 635 Mallarmé, Stéphane 579 Maltby, Richard 196 Mamdani, Mahmood 384 Manet, Edouard 180 Mann, M. 335, 475 Mannheim, K. 291 Manning, P. 511, 512, 513 Manovich, Lev 171–2, 582, 588 Marcoux, J.-S. 282 Marcus, G.E. 8, 43, 227, 240, 344, 618, 621, 637 Marcus, Steven 536 Marcuse, Herbert 698 Mariampolski, H. 614 Marín, Cristóbal 345 Marin, Louis 173 Mark, J. 703, 705 Marks, E. 253 Marshall, Alfred 558 Marshall, G. 477 Marshall, L. 435 Marshall, P.J. 53 Marshall, T.H. 471–2 Martin, Biddy 263 Martin, Jean-Hubert 399 Martin, John 98, 99, 478 Martin, P. 150 Martin, R. 558 Martín-Barbero, J. 213 Martinez, D.P. 638 Martinsons, R.B. 590 Marvin, Carol 189 Marx, Karl 6, 34, 35, 36, 235, 298, 343, 347, 448, 449, 483, 556, 698, 699 class, approach to 468, 469–72, 473 Communist Manifesto 304, 469–70, 473 Critique of Political Economy 136 The Eighteenth Brumaire 334, 473 Marxism 23, 228, 229, 276, 469, 521, 700 Althusserian 89, 275 anthropology 275, 276, 277 autonomist 564–6 and broadcasting 209, 212

INDEX

class, approach to 469–70, 471, 473, 475 false consciousness, theory of 699–700 Freudianism 70 immaterial labour 601–2 literary studies 134, 136–8, 140 Marxist geography 48 material culture studies 275, 276, 277 New International Division of Labour 564 and psychology 68, 77, 78 social history of literature 117 sociology of culture 89, 91–2, 114, 118 Western 89, 90 Mason, B. 623, 645 Mason, D. 519 mass culture 114 Mass Observation 481–4 Massey, D. 48 material culture studies 2, 23–4, 117, 120, 271–87 agency, concept of 278–9 architecture 281 capitalism 273 contemporary 280–6 history 271–2 ideology 271–2 Marxist approach 275, 276, 277 materiality, attitudes towards 272–6 postmodernism 275 post-structuralism 274, 275 structuralism 281–2 theory of things 276–80 Mattelart, Armand 215 Maturana, H.R. 594 Maurer, B. 461 Mauss, Marcel 27, 40–1, 100, 259, 279, 291, 430, 547, 635 Max, S. 704 Maxwell, Richard 220, 564 Maybury-Lewis, David 414, 416 Mayo, Chris 534–5 Mbeki, Thabo 393 Mead, G.H. 618 Mead, Margaret 18, 31, 32, 33, 34, 513, 532, 633, 636, 638, 642, 644 Meadows, D.H. 460 media cultural technologies 570–83 and globalization 362–5 imperialism 362 influence 657–60, 663–6 media studies 167 new media 284–6, 587–604 see also broadcasting; Internet; radio; television Medvedev, P.N. 136 Meek, J. 436 Meek, R. 53 Méliès, Georges 187 Melody, J. 81 Melton, J. 115 Melucci, A. 710 Memmi, Albert 698 memory history of 111–12, 119–20 role in ethnography 621 Mendonça, L.F.M. 368 Menger, P.-M. 563 Mennand, L. 6 Mennell, S. 49 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 100, 277, 701

Merryman, I.J. 432 Mertes, T. 705 Meskell, L. 281 Metz, Christian 191–2, 573–4 Meurat, D. 447 Meyer, D.S. 710 Meyer, J.W. 368, 373 Michaux, Oscar 197 Mickey of Ulladulla 395 Middleton, R. 150, 152 Miège, Bernard 314, 553, 554, 566 Miell, D. 155 Miles, Robert 518 Millar, John 53 Millen, J.V. 703 Miller 687 Miller, Daniel 17–18, 23–4, 271–87, 451, 459, 460–1 Miller, Henry 530 Miller, J. Hillis 135 Miller, P. 97, 98, 448 Miller, Toby 17, 22, 206–23, 564 Mills, C. Wright 211, 471 Milner, A. 350, 353 Minihan, J. 7 Minow, Newton 217 Minsky, M. 595 Mintz, Sidney W. 36, 391 Mirowski, P. 449, 458, 461–2 Mishler, E.G. 622 Mitchell, D. 47 Mitchell, Juliet 265 Mitchell, Timothy 10, 97, 313, 317, 387, 388, 395, 447–63 Mitchell, Tony 479 Mitchell, W.J. 589 Mitter, P 399 Modell, J. 39 modernity 305–6, 410–11 as differentiation 343 nations and 322–6 as rationalization 343 reflexivity 544–6 modernity and culture 338–54 classical social theory 340–4 and colonialism 382 critical theory 346–7 cultural turn 340 Enlightenment view 343, 344 exemplary modernism 347–8 Latour 339–40 Malaysian modernization 338–9, 349–53 and meaning 346–9 modernization theory 341–2 popular modernism 348–9 social and cultural anthropology 344–6 social Darwinism 341, 342, 343, 344–5 Modood, Tariq 243, 326, 504 Mohanty, Chandra 250, 253 Mol, Annemarie 244 Moller, H. 88 Mommaas, Hans 558 Mongia, P. 698 Monod, Jacques 592 monogenism 58, 342 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de 40, 342 Moore, J.Y. 147 Moorhead, A. 383 Moos, Michel 574–5, 576 Moran, A. 327, 527 Moravec, H. 595 Moretti, Franco 88, 89, 130, 656

727

Morgan, Lewis Henry 59, 60, 341, 342 Morgan, M. 664, 666, 669 Morley, David 235, 237, 659, 665, 699 Morphy, Howard 439–40, 632, 633, 634, 636, 638 Morris, Meaghan 228, 232, 233, 234, 236, 237, 240, 241, 243, 245, 700 Morrison, Toni 133 Morrow, M.S. 147 Morss 74 Mort, Frank 116 Morton, D. 542 Mosco, Vincent 220, 553 Moss, P.D. 211 Mouffe, C. 96, 236, 238, 475 Mowlana, H. 207, 218 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 147–8, 152 Muafangejo, John Ndevasia 396–7 Muchembled, R. 109 Muecke, S. 62 Muehlebach, Anna 408–9, 415, 416, 424 Muir, E. 111 Mukerji, Chandra 98, 117 Mulhern, F. 5 multiculturism 2, 6, 313–14, 488–508, 555, 699 anti-Eurocentrism 496–7 assimilation and 491, 506–8 conditions of emergence 491–5 cosmopolitanism 494 crisis of 491, 500, 502, 506–8 cultural diversity and cultural pluralism 496 democratic pluralism 496–7 diversity, as form of 495–9 European self-reaffirmation 499–503 and generational change 503–4 and globalization 499–503 group relations 499 multicultural studies 237 and the Muslim other 504–6 and racism 503–4 relaxed nationalism 493–4 and religious belief 504–6 rise of cultural diversity 491–3 rise of multicultural disposition 491–3 social literacy 495 sociological modes of thinking 494–5 Mulvey, Laura 189, 268, 395, 574 Mundy, J. 152 Muniesa, F. 455 Munson, W. 211, 218 Murdoch, G. 596 Murdoch, J. 62 Murphy, Craig 409 Murphy, Robert 36 Murphy, T. 442 Murray, J.B. 462 Murrow, Edward R. 217 museum displays 6 colonialism 168, 179, 383, 387 visual analysis 168–9, 178–9 museums 7 cultural history 117 material culture studies 276 sociology 98 music 20–1, 145–58 Adorno 145, 148–51, 156 bodily phenomena, influence on 157

728

music (continued ) cognitive functions 149 ethnomusicology 145, 151–2 film soundtracks 152 formalism 151 gender representation in 152–4 hierarchy 145, 146–8, 150 hybridization 367–8 intellectual property rights 434–5, 554, 559 intressment 157 music education 145 music therapy 145, 158 new (cultural) musicology 151, 152, 154 as political action 149 romantic conception of artist 147–8, 150 as social practice 158 social representations, interpretation as 145–6, 149 structuralism 150, 151 as technology of action 154–8 Muthu, Sankar 5, 393, 411 Myers, Fred 276, 420–1, 440 Myerscough, John 556 Nandy, Ashis 393–4 Nardi, P.M. 532, 540 narrative psychology 68, 71–3, 74 narratology 130 Nash, C. 50 nation civic aspects 318–19, 322, 330 constitutional patriotism 330 creole states 327 cultural property 438, 442 and culture 317–36 culture and structure, relationship between 323–4 defining 318–22 economy 450 essentialist view 322 ethnic aspects 318–19, 322, 324–6, 328–30 ‘ethnie’ 324–5 film, expression through 198–9, 200 geographic aspects 330–4 German Romantics 322, 333, 393 and globalization 324, 335 historical aspects 334–5 instrumentalist view 322 and language 321 modernist view 322–6 national economy 449 nationalism see nationalism primordialist view 322, 324 and race 321, 326 stateless 326 transactionalism 329 and the Volk 27 Western and Eastern forms 318–19 national minorities 330–1 nationalism 319 homeland 330–2 nationalism studies 317 nationalizing 330–1 relaxed, and multiculturism 493–4 women’s relationship to 327 see also nation natural law theorists 410 nature/culture divide 5–6, 8–9 Needham, Rodney 35, 37 Negri, Antonio 238, 565, 703 Négritude 383, 387–8, 393–4

INDEX

Negt, Oskar 7, 228 Neilson, Brett 565–6 Nelson, S. 622 neo-Marxism 680, 698 neoliberal movement 7, 300, 556, 558 classifications 480 economics 453, 461 and globalization 360, 370 Neveu, E. 98 New Criticism 20, 128–9, 130, 131, 134, 135, 137, 139 ‘new ethnicities’ 95, 96 new ethnography 701 new historicism 8, 89, 118, 130, 139–40, 700 new media 587–604 new (cultural) musicology 151, 152, 154 new poetics 130, 131 Newby 474 Newman, J. 94 Newton, Isaac 700 Newton, N.J. 438 Ngugi wa Thiong’o 228, 229 Nielsen, F.S. 625 Nietzsche, Friedrich 51, 384, 398, 535, 541, 699 Niezen, R. 414, 419, 422 Nik-Khah, E. 458, 461–2 Nochlin, Linda 388 Nora, Pierre 111, 112 normative values and cultural theory 686–7 Norris, Christopher 533 Norris, L. 283 Norris, M.J. 418–19 Norris, P. 365–6 North, D.C. 453 North, A. 157 Nott 518 Nunes, T. 70 Nye, J. 708 Nye, P. 218 Nye, R.A. 113 Oakley, Kate 556 O’Bryan, C.J. 594 Ochs, E. 622 O’Connor, Justin 558–9 Oedipal complex 32, 257, 265–7 Ogborn, M. 114, 115 Ogundipe-Leslie, M. 253 O’Keefe, P.J. 437 Oksala, J. 678 O’Leary, T. 448 Olesen, T. 371 Oliveiro, M.B. 372 O’Neill, S. 155 Ong, Aihwa 338–9, 341, 349, 364, 366, 368, 710 Oomen, T.K. 342–3 Oraschakoff, Haralampi 400 Orientalism 384–5, 386, 388, 398 Orlan 594 Orobitg, Gemma 639 Ortner, S. 61 Ory, P. 108 Ossowski, S. 471 Other, the 9, 118 identity, culture and 511, 514–15, 518–26 multiculturism and 504–6 in psychology 66 reflexive turn in anthropology 346 woman as 253–6, 260

Outhwaite, W. 679, 681 ownership see property Page, B.I. 218 Palgrave, R. 449–50 Pandey, Gyanendra 393 Papadopoulos, D. 82 Parisi, L. 594 Park, M.-J. 363 Parker, Ian 73, 77 Parker, R. 90 Parkin, F. 475 Parkinson, N. 555 Parnet, C. 298 Parry, R. 665 Parsons, Talcott 37, 93, 231 Pashukanis, E.B. 428–9 Pask, A. 443 Pask, Gordon 301 Pasler, J. 155 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 189 Pateman, Trevor 66 patents, intellectual property 431–2, 433, 434, 436 Patteman, R. 81 Patton, C. 540 Pauw, de 53 Pavlicevic, M. 155, 158 Peach, C. 46 Pêcheux, Michel 97 Peeson, R.A. 477 Peirce, Charles 274 Peltonen, U.-M. 120 Penny, H.G. 6, 29, 111, 117 Perlmutter, D. 690 person, legal 429 persona, concept of 428 Peters, J. 686 Peterson, N. 420 Peterson, R.A. 148, 154, 477 Petley, Julian 655 Pew Research Center 220 phenomenology 134, 135–6, 276, 277, 279, 676, 677–8, 698, 699, 701 Phillips, Caryl 326 Phillips, T. 482 Philo, G. 668 philology 128 Phoenix, A. 81, 503 phronesis 687 Piaget 69 Picasso, Pablo 391 Pickering, Andrew 18, 24, 101, 291–306 Pieterse, Nederveen 367 Pietz, W. 276 Pike, K. 617 Pile, S. 49, 494 Pilotta, J.J. 701 Pinch, Trevor 301 Pinder, K.N. 90 Pink, Sarah 610, 623, 632–50 Pinney, Christopher 276, 312, 382–402, 641 Pitt-Rivers, Lt.-Gen. 59 Pitts, S. 154 Piven, F.F. 704 Plamenatz, J. 319 Plant, R.F. 547 Plato 51, 151 Plummer, Ken 536 poetics of culture 112 poetics of the everyday 118 Poirrier, P. 108 Polanyi, Karl 11, 451–3, 457, 462

INDEX

politics 113 and anthropology 40–2 bio-politics 262 class and 469–71, 479 cultural 234, 241–2 gender 255, 541–2 identity 237 new media, cultural politics of 600–2 political ecology 302, 305–6 political economy of culture 553 science and technology studies 304–6 Pollock, Griselda 17, 23, 90, 249–68 polygenesis 60, 342 Poma, Guaman 400 Pomian, K. 110 Pons, A. 108 Pontalis, J.-B. 522 Pool, I. 416, 418 Poovey, M. 90, 447, 449 Popper, Karl 700 popular culture 109–10, 118, 126, 138, 145, 147, 236, 276 Porta, D.D. 704, 705, 706 Porter, Bernard 388, 390, 391–2, 412 Porter, Michael 558 Porter, Roy 116 positivism 698, 700 post-human 579–83 postcolonial studies 117, 130, 237, 388, 390, 393, 394–5 class and classification 469 postcolonial theory 701 Poster, Mark 574, 600–1, 708, 710 post-humanism 49–51, 53–4, 293 cultural mapping 299, 301 science and technology studies 291–5, 301, 304, 306 separateness from nature 49–51, 53–4, 61–2 postmodernism 284–5, 700, 701 anthropology 42, 613–14 and cultural history 121, 240–5 cultural studies 240–5 cyberculture 589, 594–5 economy 460 feminism 594 literary studies 139 material culture studies 275 post-structuralism 48, 95–6, 98, 135, 140, 229, 274, 275, 692, 700, 701 cultural geography 46–7, 48 cultural turn 699 discourse analysis 675, 676, 677–8, 679–80, 681, 684 feminism 23, 539–40 power/knowledge configuration 698–9 and psychology 67, 77, 78, 79–81 sex and sexuality 533–4, 539–40 Pottage, A. 429 Potter, Jonathan 74–6, 77 Poulantza, N 96 Poulet, Georges 135 Poulot, D. 117 Powell, E. 520 Powell, J. 54 power/knowledge relationship 390, 517, 538–9, 680, 687, 688, 698–9 Powers, Richard 301 Practical Criticism 20, 128–9, 132, 135 pragmatism 698 Prague Circle 129 Prakash, Gyan 387, 479

Pratt, M.L. 110, 387 Preda, A. 456 Prentoulis, M. 591 Preziosi, D. 98 Price, Richard 121 Price, S. 111, 116 Prins, B. 583 Prins, G. 113 Probyn, Elspeth 314, 530–49 Procter, J. 238 Proctor, R. 29 projective identification 522–3, 524 property 2, 312–13 collective ownership 439–40 copyright 431–6, 441 cultural 427–43 differential distribution of rights 429 folk arts 435, 441 genetic research 427, 429, 435–6 globalization of intellectual 433–6 inalienable and alienable rights 430 indigenous cultures, cultural property 438–43 intellectual 430, 431–6, 559 limitation of rights in 428 the music industry 434–5 national heritage 438, 442 and non-property 430–1 patents 431–2, 433, 434, 436 res mancipi and res nec mancipi 430 res and persona 428–9 trade-related aspects of intellectual property (TRIPS) 433–4 trademarks 433 what constitutes 427–9 Prott, L.V. 437 Prunier, G. 327, 328 psychoanalysis 19, 32, 66, 67, 80–1, 113, 114, 134, 229, 514, 517, 521–3, 573, 698, 700 and feminism 265–8, 531 Oedipal complex 32, 257, 265–7 sexual difference 257 psychohistory 114 psychology 2, 19 beyond psychic/social dualism 81–2 Bruner 71–3, 74 ‘central processor models’ 70, 81 cognitive 68, 69 cognitive universalism 66, 67 communication 71–3 constructionist 76–7 counter-culture and 66–7, 68 crisis in social psychology 67, 73–4 critical 67, 74–7 cross-cultural 68 cultural 68–71 and cultural analysis 66–82 and education 70 folk 66 humanist 701 ideology and consciousness 77–8 language-based approach 74–7 Marxism 68, 77, 78 narrative 68, 71–3, 74 the Other 66 and post-structuralism 67, 77, 78, 79–81 psychological anthropology 69–70 psychosocial methods 81 social 8 Symbolic Order 78 visual 166 ‘public goods’ 554

729

Pudovkin, Vsevolod 189 Pultar, G. 231 Putman, Robert 94 queer theory 130, 237, 243, 532, 540–2, 644, 699 Quemin, A. 362 Quinby, L. 539 Quine, Willard Van Orman 700 Rabinow, P. 37, 514, 515, 516, 517, 544, 618 race and anthropology 27, 28–31, 42 and areal classification 55–7 and colonialism 393 cultural classification 469 cultural studies 237, 239 high and low culture, concept of 90 and identity 518–27 and nation 321, 326 see also human geography racism The Birth of a Nation 197, 198 and identity 519–21 and multiculturism 503–4, 699 new racism 518, 519 visual analysis 179 Radcliffe Brown, A.R. 635 Radin, Margaret 430 radio 206–23, 285, 587 see also broadcasting Radway, J.A. 89, 235 Raheja, G. 41 Rai, A.K. 436 Rai, M. 690 Raine, Michael 200 Rajagopal, Arvind 220 Rajan, T. 678 Ramazanoglu, S. 539 Ramos, Manuel João 639, 640 Rancière, Jacques 90, 452 Randel, Donald 148 Ranger, Terence 108, 112 Rash, W. 708 Ravilious, K. 427 Rawski, E.S. 109 Ray, L. 11, 227 reader-response criticism 136 Reason, P. 74 reception aesthetics 134, 135 recognition theories of culture 237 Reddy, W.M. 112 reflexivity 544–6, 676 Regev, M. 151, 367–8 Reich, Wilhelm 82 Reinhardt, S.G. 117 Reith, John 211 religion, ‘primitive’ 28 Rembrandt van Rijn Judith Beheading Holophernes 21, 163–5, 166; fig.8.1 Renan, Ernest 320–1, 325, 335 Rendell, J. 49 res, concept of 428 research theory and practice 609–11 Rey, G. 213 Reynolds, H. 54 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg 296 Rheingold, H. 591, 708 Ricardo 449 Rich, Adrienne 251, 252, 263, 265, 541 Rich, P.B. 393 Richards, I.A. 129, 130–1, 135, 136 Ricoeur, Paul 701 Rieff, D. 375

730

Rifkin, J. 13, 433 Riles, A. 455 Riley, D. 250, 263 Ringer, F. 116 Risley, Herbert Hope 393 Ritvo, H. 54 Ritzer, G. 364 Robally, T.A.C. 157 Robbins, Lionel 450 Robertson, R. 359, 364, 366 Roche, Daniel 110 Rodowick, David 171–2 Romanticism 4, 27, 322, 333 Ronell, A. 457 Roodenburg, H. 110, 111 Rooney, E. 50 Rorty, R. 620 Rosaldo, R. 700 Rosario, V.A. 531, 540 Roscigno, V.J. 155 Rose, Carol 427 Rose, Gillian 633, 645, 646 Rose, Jacqueline 81, 265–6 Rose, M. 432 Rose, N. 79, 80, 97, 447, 448, 685 Rosenau, J. 244 Rosenlund 477 Ross, Andrew 567, 590, 601 Rossiter, Ned 565–6 Rouanet, H. 99 Rouch, Jean 637 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 40, 53, 151, 449 Routh, G. 449 Rowan, J. 74 Rowlands, M. 275 Rowntree, B.S. 481 Rowse, Tim 312, 406–24 Roy, A. 700 Roy, W. 155 Roy, W.G. 448 Royas, R. 590 Rubies, J.-P. 110 Rubin, Gayle 256, 259–60 Rubin, M. 116 Rubin, William 399 Ruby, Jay 632, 639–40, 649 Ruiz, Raul 189 Rushdie, Salman 505–6 Russian Formalism 20, 99, 128–30, 131, 136–7 Ruud, E. 155, 158 Ryan, Bill 554, 566–7 Rycroft, Daniel 387 Sachsenmaier, D. 345 Sahlins, Marshall 34–5, 36, 116, 118 Culture and Practical Reason 35 How “Natives” Think 35 Said, Edward W. 312, 382, 386–7, 388, 389, 390, 398, 698 Culture and Imperialism 52, 385 Humanism and Democratic Criticism 48–9, 52 Orientalism 97, 117, 119, 237, 384, 385, 386, 685 Said, Y. 371 Saignes, T. 415 Saint-Simon 92, 151 Salmon, C. 655, 656 Salter, L. 710 Salwen, M.B. 362 Samad, Y. 495, 496 Sampson, E. 76 Samuel, Raphael 112, 117, 119, 471 Sanchez, Cristina 643

INDEX

Sánchez-Eppler, B. 540 Sandby, Paul 333 Sapir, Edward 30 Sartre, Jean-Paul 135, 280, 512, 523–4 Sarup, M. 698 Sassen, S. 364, 369, 375 Sauer, Carl Ortwin 47, 48, 61 Saukko, P. 243, 702 Saussure, Ferdinand de 8, 95, 128–9, 229, 274, 674, 676, 683 Savage, Mike 313, 467–85 Saville, Jenny 179 Sawicki, J. 539 Sawyer, Keith 96–7, 102 Sayer, A. 11, 46, 227 Sayers, A. 395 Schama, Simon 321, 332–3 Scharrer, E. 214 Schatzki, T.R. 13 Scheid, Volker 299 Schein, R. 47 Schiebinger, L. 5, 108, 538 Schiller, Herbert 215, 553 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 298, 391 Schliemann, A.D. 70 Schnapp, A. 274 Schnapper, Dominique 330 Schneider, A. 276 Schneider, B.E. 532, 540 Schneider, David 18, 37, 38, 39, 40 Scholte, J.A. 367 Schönberg, Arnold 150, 156 Schönfeld, Johann 146 Schor, N. 50, 540 Schramm, W. 214 Schrift, A. 41 Schudson, M. 217 Schultz 677 Schulze, H. 112 Schumacher, E.F. 460 Schumpeter, Joseph 392 Schutz, A. 526 Schwab, Raymond 385 science fiction, trans-human 50 science and technology studies (STS) 2, 24, 291–306 animals, attitudes towards 301–4 and the constitution of culture 299–301 discipline and ontology 294–6 economics 454–6 environmental studies 301–4 humanism and posthumanism 291–5, 301, 304, 306 material culture 292 multiplicity, concept of 292–3 performance and agency 292, 298 politics of 304–6 Science Wars 297 social roles and relations 292 time and change 293 units of analysis 293 Scott, A.J. 365 Scott, D. 152 Scott, Joan 314, 539–40, 702 Scott, Walter 333 Scribner, R.W. 110 Scribner, Sylvia 19, 69–70 Searle, J. 681 Sebeok, T.A. 89 Secord, James 109, 111, 117 Secord, P.F. 73 Sedgwick, E.K. 534–6, 542, 548–9 Seidman, S. 517, 540 Seligman, Adam 330

Semali, L.D. 407, 408 semiotics 700 Senghor, Léopold 387–8, 393, 397 senses, history of 113 seriating 177 Serna, J. 108 Seroussi, E. 151 Serra, S. 375 Serrano, R.C. 408 Service, E.R. 36 Seshadri-Crooks, K. 525 Sewell, William 116 sex and sexuality 2, 23, 530–49 anthropological research 532–3 discourses and/of 538–40 the Enlightenment 537–8 epistemology 534–6 and ethics 544–6 and feminism 261–5, 531, 534 Foucault 261–3, 516–17, 536–7, 538–40, 542–4 and gender 530–1, 534, 540–1 girl culture 546–7 historical research 532–3, 536–8 homosexuality 260, 263, 264, 533–5, 540–1, 543–4 lesbian and gay culture 532–3, 543, 545 post-structuralism 533–4 see also gender sex/gender system 256–7, 259–60, 531 sexual difference 257 sexual identity, social construction of 510–11, 516–18 Seymour, M. 326 Shakespeare, William 89, 109, 118, 147, 332, 333 Shalins, M. 113 Shannon, Claude 580 Shapin, S. 109, 111 Sharp, D. 69 Shaviro, S. 580–1 Sheehan, J. 56 Sheehan, P. 50 Shepard, B. 704, 705, 707 Shepherd, J. 158 Sherman, B. 441 Shils, E. 37 Shively, D.H. 109 Shklovsky, Victor 128, 129, 132, 136, 137 Shohat, E. 171 Shonibare, Yinka 396 Shotter, J. 74, 76 Shulman, N. 233 Shurmer-Smith, P. 47 Siegrist, H. 469 Signorielli, N. 666, 669 Sikkink, K. 369 Silber, L. 328, 331 Sills, D.L. 1 Silva, Olivia da 646–7 Silverman, Kaja 171 Silverstone, R. 686 Simkus, A. 148, 154 Simmel, Georges 87, 92, 276, 280, 282, 343, 526 Simmons, A. 372 Simondon, Gilbert 315, 580, 581, 582 Sinclair, J. 362 Singer, Dorothy G. 215 Singer, Jerome L. 215 Singer, Milton 1 Sinha, M. 113 Siopsis, Penny 397

INDEX

Skeggs, B. 469, 478 Slade, C. 218 Slater, D. 285, 456 Sloboda, J. 155 Small, Albion 644 Small, C. 152, 154 Smart, B. 347–8 Smelser, N.J. 1 Smith, Adam 343 Smith, Anthony 311, 324, 335 Smith, B. 703 Smith, Bernard 55, 400 Smith, J. 372 Smith, M. 594 Smith, P. 145, 642 Smith, T. 396 Snipp, C.M. 418 Sobchack, V. 591 Soboul, Albert 471 social anthropology 25–7 social capital 94 social constructionism 679–80 social contract theorists 53 social Darwinism 29, 57, 341, 342, 343, 344–5, 518–19 social literacy 495 social movements, transnational 371–3 social nature 49 social space, conception of 99 sociology 34, 86–103, 113, 114–15 classical tradition 87, 92–3, 94 cultural 237 cultural turns 94–103 of culture 87–91 ideological community, engagement with 87, 92 the imagined community 91–4 linguistics 95 literature, studies of 88–9 Marxism 89, 91–2, 114, 118 and multiculturism 494–5 New Historicism 89, 118 socio-music studies 145 visual 166, 644–5 Solomos, J. 520 Sombart, Werner 343 Somers, M.R. 451 Somerville, S.B. 540 Sorokin, P. 151 Spary, E. 109 Spears 77 Speers, T. 670 Spencer, Baldwin 634, 635, 636 Spencer, Herbert 151, 343, 518 Spezzano, C. 82 Spigel, L. 219 Spingarn, Joel 128 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti 117, 119, 253, 260–1, 264, 698 Springer, C. 594 Spurr, D. 52 Spyer, P. 276 Sreberny, A. 369 Stagl, Justin 615 Staiger, Janet 196 Stallman, R.M. 591, 599 Stallybrass, P. 276 Stam, Robert 171, 228 Stamatov, P. 155 Stammers, N. 371–2 Standing, L. 157 Stanley, Lord 55 Star, S.L. 296, 298 Starabinski, Jean 135 Stark, D. 455

Starn, O. 704, 705 statistical analysis 654–71 content analysis 666–9 methodological critiques 655–6 political critiques 654–5 proof, notion of 663–6 surveys 669–71 Stavitsky, A. 210 Steadman, P. 273 Steedman, C. 252–3, 282 Stelarc 594 Stengers, I. 579 Stenner, Paul 76–7 Stenton, G. 434 Stepan, N. 51, 52, 56, 58, 60 Stephenson, N. 82 Sterling, Bruce 593 Steward, Julian 36 Steyn, M. 427 Stichweh, R. 526 Stiegler, B. 577 Stige, B. 158 Stiglitz, Joseph 423 Stinchcombe, A.L. 448 Stockfelt, O. 157 Stocking, George 5, 25–31, 36, 51–2, 273, 344, 616 Stoler, A.L. 540 Stoler, L. 391, 392–3, 399–400 Stone, D. 368, 369, 370 Stone, R.A. 582, 594, 596 stranger, concept of 511, 526–7 Strathern, Marilyn 23, 37, 38, 41, 279, 437, 443, 479 Stratton, J. 228 Strauss, A.L. 623 Stravinsky, Igor 435 Stringer, E.T. 702 structuralism 6, 35–6, 95, 99, 609, 619, 699, 700 anthropology 36, 37, 259–61, 277 and feminism 259–61 literary studies 130, 134 material culture studies 281–2 music, study of 150, 151 structuration 701 Stryk, R.J. 369 Studdert, D. 81 Sturrock, J. 698 sub-cultures 93, 118 Sullivan, G. 540 Sullivan, W.M. 37, 618 Sunley, P. 558 Suny, R.G. 321 superorganic entity, culture as 47 superstition 28 Suzuki, D. 50 Suzuki, L.A. 614 Sweezy, Paul 471 Swidler, Ann 13, 145, 158 Swieten, Baron Gottfried van 146, 148 Sydow, E. von 399 Symbolic Order 78 systems thinking 701 Szreter, Simon 479 Tacchi, J. 285 tacit knowledge 178 Tagg, P. 152 Tagore, Rabindranath 393–4 Tannenbaum, J. 218 Tanner, A. 416 Tarkovsky, Andrei 189 Tarrow, S. 372, 704, 705, 706, 710 Taylor, B. 91

731

Taylor, Charles 237, 338–9, 340–1, 345, 347, 348, 410, 423–4 Taylor, J. 417 Taylor, Lucien 633 Taylor, P.A. 708 Taylor, Peter 331 technology ‘concretization’ 581 cultural technologies 570–83 and ethnography 623–4 gender as 263–5 media and culture industry 570–6 post-human 579–83 post-medium 579–83 and society 596–9 technique distinguished 571 technological determinism 572 technologies of the self 577–9 technoscience see science and technology studies Tedlock, D. 619, 622 television 206–23, 362, 574–6, 587 visual analysis 171 see also broadcasting Tennenhouse, L. 89 Terranova, Tiziana 315, 582, 587–604 Terry, J. 540 Tester, K. 686, 687 textual analysis 8, 667, 668–9 Thatcherism 238, 475, 520 Thayer, W.A. 146 Therborn, Göran 87, 91–2, 94 ‘third way’ 93 Thomas, G. 373–4 Thomas, J. 281, 657, 658 Thomas, Keith 116 Thomas, Nicholas 10, 52–3, 113, 119, 276, 383, 459, 638 Thomas, W. 61 Thompson, E.P. 7, 11, 109, 112, 114, 117, 298, 469, 471, 472, 475 Thompson, G. 359, 360 Thompson, J. 676, 677, 681, 682, 683, 687 Thompson, Kristen 196 Thompson, P. 119 Thorne, Barrie 531, 547, 548 Thornton, R. 415, 416, 419 Thrift, Nigel 46, 49, 281, 455, 459, 480, 484 Tifft, S.E. 217 Tilly, C. 276, 704, 705 Tjakamarra, Michael Nelson 420 Todorov, Tzvetan 395 Toffler, A. 597 Tolman, Deborah 547 Tomlinson, J. 362, 366, 494, 687 Tönnies, Ferdinand 92 Tovey, Donald Francis 148 Towse, Ruth 435, 563 trade-related aspects of intellectual property (TRIPS) 433–4 trademarks, intellectual property 433 trans-human 50–1 transactionalism 329 Trevarthen, C. 71 Tribe, K. 447, 449 Tripp, D. 659 Trocco, Frank 301 Trotsky, Leon 136, 137, 470 Trouillot, M.-R. 32 Troyna, B. 519 truth regimes 539 Tully, J. 114 Tumbler, H. 591 Turkle, Sherry 284–5, 582, 594

732

Turner, G. 51 Turner, T. 421 Turner, Victor 36, 37, 39 Tylor, Edward Burnett 5, 25, 28, 47, 48, 57, 59–60, 61, 341, 637 Ubuntu 393 Ulmer, Edgar G. 197 Urla, J. 540 Urry, J. 9, 81, 155, 238, 240, 244, 375–7, 378, 703 Urwin, Cathy 78 Vaidhyanathan, S. 602 Valentine, J 98 van Brakel, J. 488 Van Crowder, L. 407 van Dijk, Teun 667–8 van Leeuwen, Theo 211, 690 van’t Hooft, K. 407 Varela, G.F. 594 Venn, Couze 78 Venn, Henry 411 Verdery, K. 429 Veresov, N. 68 Vertovec, S. 494 Vester, M. 477 Vilar, Pierre 88 Virilio, Paul 590, 595, 707 virtualism 460–2 visibility 169, 170–3 and colonialism 384, 386–8 visual analysis 21, 163–82 affect 172, 173–4 and anthropology 173 and art history 163, 164, 166, 167, 170, 175–6 of behaviour 168 chronological history 174 cultural history 120, 175–7 and cultural studies 166–7 elitism 179 events of seeing 169–70 film 171 and gender 174 iconography 120 images thinking history 175–7 interdisciplinary collaboration 163, 177 Internet 171–2 museum displays 168–9, 178–9 object domain 167–70, 179 origins 166–8 power-embedded cognition or knowledge 173–4, 175 principles underlying 177–9 situating vision 173–5 synaesthesia 171, 173–4 television 171 use of term 167 visual anthropology see anthropology visual culture 163, 167 visual literacy 175 Viswanathan, G. 127 Voloshinov, V.N. 70, 73, 136 vom Bruck, G. 281 Vygotsky, Lev 68–9, 70, 73, 81 Wagner, G. 690 Wagner, Peter 339, 346, 347 Wagner, Roy 33, 40 Wahrman, D. 469 Walby, S. 327

INDEX

Walker, J.A. 171 Walkerdine, Valerie 17, 19, 66–82 Wallace, Alfred 56, 57–9, 60 Wallerstein, Immanuel 207, 362, 400 Wallin, N. 158 Walser, R. 152 Walsh, T. 218 Walters, S.D. 531, 542 Wang, H.-I. 370 Wang, Jing 560 Wang, T. 564 Warde, A. 477 Warhol, Andy 219 Wark, M. 597 Warner, Lloyd 471 Warren, Austin 129 Warren, Kay 409 Warren, Michael 407 Warren, Robert Penn 129 Watt, Ian 88 Weber, Max 7, 11, 37, 38, 86, 92, 93, 115, 321, 457, 469, 474, 521, 698 modernization as rationalization 343, 347, 348 The Rational and Social Foundations of Music 151 Weber, William 146 Webster, F. 231 Weed, E. 50, 540 Weedon, C. 539 Weeks, Jeffrey 536, 539, 545 Weeks, P. 702 Weinbaum, A.E. 540 Weiner, A. 430 Weininger 478 Weinreich, Max 320 Weis, Lois 702 Weisenfeld, G. 400 Welch, Reed 656 Wellek, René 129 Wells, Liz 633, 645, 646 Welton, N. 705 Wendl, T. 646 Wenger, E. 70 Werbner, P. 243 Wertsch, J.V. 73 Western, M. 482 Weston, K. 39 Wetherell, Margie 74–6, 77, 81 Whatmore, S. 49, 54 Wheelock, G. 152 White, Hayden 7 White, J. 54 White, Leslie 36, 275 White, M. 596 Whitehead, Alfred North 295 Whitehead, N.L. 415 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 30 Whyte, W.F. 93 Wick, P. 158 Wiener, Norbert 580, 590, 592 Wieringa, S. 704 Wigley, Mark 165 Wilhelm, A. 708 Wilk, R. 282 Wilkinson, M. 702 Wilkinson, R. 703 Williams, Alistair 151 Williams, C.P. 411 Williams, G. 53 Williams, Raymond 4–5, 7, 47, 49, 53, 88, 89, 114, 117, 138, 207, 230, 234, 237, 240, 315, 450,

472, 572–3, 574, 575–6, 580, 583, 597–8, 662, 699, 700 Culture and Society 138, 139, 232 The Long Revolution 232–3 Marxism and Literature 474 Williams, Spencer 197 Williamson, C. 397 Williamson, E. 321 Williamson, O.E. 453 Willis, Paul 154, 155, 157, 236, 275, 475 Wilmer, F. 414 Wilton, T. 517 Winch, P. 676 Winnicott, Donald 78 Winocur, Rosalía 220 Wise, J.M. 82 Witkin, R.W. 150 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 611, 674, 676–7, 678, 699 Wittig, Monique 23, 254, 255–6, 264 Wolch, J. 49 Wolf, L. 705 Wolfe, Bernard 301 Wolfe, C. 48 Wolff, J. 90 women see feminism; gender; sex and sexuality Wong, L.L. 368 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 710 Wood, N. 262 Woodmansee, M. 432 Woodward, S. 283 Woolgar, S. 102 World Bank 370, 409–10, 415 Worth, Sol 632, 633 Wortman, R. 116 Wotherspoon, G. 532 Wright, C. 276 Wright, Erik Olin 92, 471, 474 Wright, Handel Kashope 228, 229 Wright, Terence 641 Wundt, Wilhelm 66, 67, 68, 69, 70 Xaloom, C. 455 xeno-epistemology 393, 395–7, 399 Xenos, N. 273 Yanacopulos, H. 710 Yang, Mayfair 345 Yearley, Steve 291 Yoshino, K. 349 Young, M.W. 635 Young, N. 76 Young, R. 52 young, R.J.C. 389, 393, 394 Yudice, George 4, 6–7, 228, 408 Yuval-Davis, N. 327, 520 Zaret, D. 115 Zeigeist, concept of 108 Zelinsky, Wilbur 417 Zelizer, Barbie 242 Zelizer, V. 454 Zhang, L. 117 Ziehe, Thomas 228 Zimmerman, A. 6 Zizek, Slavoj 77, 314, 502, 511, 518, 524–6 Zolberg, A. 474 Zuboff, S. 582 Zukin, S. 282