ABSTRACT
Nearly half a century ago, Raymond Williams (1961: 10) wrote that there was no academic subject that allowed him to ask the questions in which he was interestedquestions of how culture and society, democracy, and the individual voice interrelate. The early tradition of cultural studies emerged into this gap, drawing in part on the resources of sociology. Looking back, the historical parallel between Williams and the critical sociology of C. Wright Mills was not accidental, since that too privileged the role of power in culture and cultural analysis (Mills 1959: 33, quoted in Hall et al. 2003: 2). From the beginning, then, the robustness of cultural studies’ relationship with sociology was crucial to cultural studies’ possibilities of success. This relationship has been interrupted, but can, I suggest, still be revived under today’s very different circumstances. What are the two poles of this interrupted dialogue? On the side of sociology,
we must distinguish, first, between the field of sociology as a whole and domains of sociology more specifically interested in culture. Within the latter, I would distinguish between a formal sociology of culture (that places “culture” within a macro model of social organization) and a cultural sociology that takes a sociological approach to various aspects of cultural production and consumption. A dialogue between “sociology of culture” and cultural studies has never begun and perhaps was never feasible. In spite of some sympathetic calls for cultural studies to be “reintegrated” into sociology (Crane 1994; Long 1997), formal sociology of culture explicitly rejected a “power-based framework of analysis” (Smith 1998: 7), and so turned away from one of the key emphases common to all cultural studies. The position with cultural sociology is very different: the pluralism of cultural sociology as represented by the present volume derives from an attempt to mobilize the term “culture” across many domains of social analysis, foregrounding and certainly not suppressing issues of power. As a result, a dialogue between “cultural sociology” and cultural studies is without question feasible, even if for various reasons it has been interrupted. What then do I mean by “cultural studies”? An important reference point remains
the Birmingham school of cultural studies, with its origins in the earlier work of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and E.P. Thompson, even if it is important
to emphasize that from the beginning this vision of cultural studies had international parallels (see Couldry 2000: 26-28 for discussion). But other important developments were under way also: from the 1980s onwards, aspects of the Birmingham school of cultural studies-particularly the strands of semiotics and Gramscian hegemony theory as taken up by Stuart Hall-were adopted in broader literature and the humanities in the US and elsewhere (Turner 1990); in the longer term, aspects of cultural studies became internationalized (Chen 1998). Given this huge expansion, you might ask: does “cultural studies” still stand for anything specific beyond a particular trajectory for introducing cultural analysis into academic work? If that were all the term stood for, then resuming at this late stage a dialogue between “cultural studies” and sociology would be of limited interest. So let me distinguish three ways, stemming from the early history of the Birmingham school of cultural studies, in which “cultural studies” might resume a productive dialogue with sociology, particularly cultural sociology. The first substantive strand of cultural studies that we might identify for this
purpose focused on giving serious attention to the forms and dynamics of contemporary popular culture. To be sure, there are sociological problems with isolating the “popular” as the focus of cultural studies in this way. For one thing, this excludes many important areas of taste and cultural consumption-the cultural experience of the old (Tulloch 1991; Riggs 1998), “middlebrow” culture (Frith 1986), the cultural experience of elites (Lamont 1992), and indeed any cultural experience that is not “spectacular” or “resistant” (for further discussion, see Couldry 2000: 58-62). Another point is that old debates about popular versus elite culture have failed to keep up with the de-differentiation of cultural taste, and the possibility, indeed importance, of cultural omnivorousness today (compare Strinati 1996 with Peterson and Kern 1996). Finally, an exclusive emphasis on “the popular” ignores the need to deconstruct the relation between what is designated “popular” and everyday “experience” (Hall 1981). The second strand within early cultural studies that we might identify as a potential
contact-point with sociology is the strand that prioritized ways of reading culture, especially those derived from semiotics and versions of post-structuralism. This is the strand most frequently emphasized in histories of cultural studies (Turner 1990; Barker 2003; Tudor 1999). But here too there are difficulties. On the one hand it becomes, in some versions, an attempt to read all culture as, indeed only as, text, an approach which is resolutely non-sociological and so inadequate to understand the multilayered but structured complexity of culture (Hannerz 1992). On the other hand, the use of semiotics and post-structuralist approaches to reading culture has largely been absorbed across all cultural sociology and humanities work (Hall et al. 2003), so it no longer comprises a distinct strand of cultural studies per se. More promising for my purposes is a third strand within early cultural studies
that focused cultural analysis on the particular question, and problem, of democratic culture. It is this strand-which develops furthest the concern for hidden power relations within culture, both inclusions and exclusions-that characterized cultural studies from the start. The early work of Raymond Williams identified a culturally embedded democratic deficit at the heart of societies such as late 1950s Britain (Williams 1958, 1961). Because of its concern with the broader conditions for sustaining something like a democratic culture, this strand had from the start a particular affinity with sociology; so it was that early cultural-studies work developed a cultural
sociology within an intellectual legacy dominated by Marxism (Williams 1981). However, this strand of cultural studies has received less attention. The only recent scholarship engaging it (Hartley 2003) works exclusively through the analysis of texts, not employing a broader sociological approach to analyzing democratic culture. Can this third stream of cultural studies provide the starting point from which
we rebuild a dialogue between cultural studies and sociology? An affirmative answer will be my argument. In this chapter’s second section (pp. 80-82), I explain how early cultural studies suffered from a “holism” that we must move beyond if a productive dialogue beyond cultural sociology and cultural studies is to be renewed. In the chapter’s third section (pp. 82-84), I explore some recent developments that promise to reconnect cultural sociology and this third stream of cultural studies in ways that relate closely to today’s challenges for a democratic culture. Those challenges can be summed up in three words: neoliberalism, mediation, and globalization. It is not difficult to see how concern with the conditions of democratic culture might have renewed relevance to a time of profound economic crisis. In addition, democratization is today inseparably linked with the emerging opportunities of digital media culture, such that no account of the conditions of contemporary democratic culture is adequate unless it thinks beyond the scale of the national and takes account of the multiple pressures of globalization (Beck 2001; Garcia Canclini 1995). Before moving on, I should clarify one point. How is it that the potential
dialogue between cultural sociology and cultural studies, particularly its third stream, has been so seriously interrupted? One reason is methodological choice. Some work within cultural studies that foregrounded democratic culture seemed uninterested in any specific dialogue with sociology because of its conscious refusal of disciplinarity. Indeed an overwhelming commitment to exposing the contradictions of the current “conjuncture” can sometimes seem to leave any questions of disciplinary method entirely to one side:
Cultural studies always and only exists in contextually specific theoretical and institutional formations [which] are always a response to a particular political project based on the available theoretical and historical resources. In that sense, in every particular instance, cultural studies has to be made up as it goes along.
