A whole way of life

Cultural studies involves a hybridisation and a crossing-over between previously discrete disciplines, to unearth the links between the production of meaning and privileged structures of power. But instead of talking to itself in a professionalised language, it needs to relate to the world of everyday life, says SHELLEYWALIA, reviewing two books on the discipline.

WITH increasingly interdisciplinary approaches being employed in scholarship, is it possible to speak of discrete fields of study? When one teaches "Dr. Faustus," is it possible to ignore the relevance of the age of the Renaissance and the history of the attainment of self-consciousness freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races? Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God is an anthropological study of the Ibo tribe in one of the villages in southern Nigeria and not merely a work of fiction to be handled in the traditional ways of literary criticism. Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea or Saadat Hasan Manto's "Toba Tek Singh" cannot be approached without a Foucauldian consideration of the politics of madness with the entire cultural history that goes into the construction of the discourse of insanity.

This inclusion of "cultural studies" in various disciplines suggests a collapsing of difference as well as the hybridisation and crossing over between disciplines such as linguistics, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, history, social theory, anthropology and philosophy. Recently we have seen incompatible figures like Saussure and Freud, or Marx and Heidegger come together - a theoretical linkage which is challenging and wide in scope. Violations of rigid compartmentalisation are certainly positive and must be viewed as liberating insofar as they produce theoretical advances that would become fundamental for generations to come.

Combining critical theory and cultural studies is to clearly consider the cross-section of the current "dissensus" on the shape of the postdisiciplinary university, including the positive aspects of cultural studies as the new organising principle of academic work. This method offers a new understanding of the way literary studies shape and define culture as well as popular culture, and the way that teaching and research institutions are changing in response to international movements, social forces, and the increasing importance of the historical specificity and the character of popular culture and everyday life. Investigating how "high" culture (literature, liberal education) and popular culture (fashion, film, advertisement, and discourse analysis) are dealt within the classroom, shows that the culture wars of the 1980s and the 1990s are by no means over; they have simply warped into new visible struggles of educational funding, curricula, academic standards, and pedagogical authority.

Toby Miller and Alec McHoul have clearly rethought the study of popular culture in their recent book Popular Culture and Everyday Life, while also explaining key ideas on an everyday practice, such as "eating" or "talking" or sports and discourses that construct these practices; the way we dress or talk, what we eat and how we socialise, communicate things about ourselves, and thus can be studied as signs. Ideologies, for instance, are all related to class positions and therefore to the primacy of material living conditions rather than ideas or beliefs in the life of human beings. History is the struggle for control of the material conditions upon which life rests.

Therefore, when we look at a game like golf, is it possible to see beyond the accepted or conventional attitudes and beliefs which go with the game? A determining and defining established authority is created through the social discourse of this game. It is performed most effectively by making the system seem natural, god-given or ideal so that other classes accept it without asking any questions. The golfer becomes a part of something larger than himself and surrenders to the power of the game, its hysteria and, to use Walter Benjamin's negative term, its aura. The cultural imperialism of the game is akin to baseball or cricket, which links these games to a modernist sensibility of western exceptionalism. In the world of golf the ludicrous enthusiasts experience a sense of transcendence, a removal into a realm of the timeless and universal.

The phallocentrism of the game where males dominate the different committees that run the show, is an indicator of the cultural construction of a patriarchal power which underwrites the domination of one gender by the other. The links between beliefs, the pro-golf lobby's self-image, the production of meaning and the process of constituting so-called lovers of the game, even if they have never played another game in their lives, are not immediately apparent.

The ideology that goes with the game is essentially a contested concept, a discourse that renders it almost invulnerable and much appreciated in many circles, but there is a fundamental rejection of it by people who realise its worth and its elitist aura that suffers from inherent complexes, though there are exceptions of those who are genuinely in love with the game and play it without making a show of it. Its popularity is based on the production and dissemination of erroneous beliefs whose inadequacies are socially engineered. The ideas that rule this game are the ideas of the ruling material force of society. Therefore, the institution of golf is as much ideological as any other state institution.

The book thus offers a broad-ranging survey of social and cultural theory, while issuing a challenge to the emphasis on speculation rather than observation which is inherent in contemporary cultural studies. The authors try to show that everyday popular culture is too important a social phenomenon to be dealt with speculatively as the spectacular, and always as a representation of something else. Instead, they want to show how (first, using a historical or geneological approach) everyday cultural objects arise out of local conditions - conditions which are highly specific and far from spectacular. And then (secondly, using some variations on conversation analysis) they demonstrate what these objects actually look like in their everyday situated places.

In the last few years, as is the practice observed in the humanities, many departments have introduced courses in both dominant and sub-cultural practices backed by a study of literary criticism and theory which takes into consideration the diversity and range of cultural studies and providing perspectives on the everyday through ethnography, textual reading, discourse analysis and political economy. For 50 years the model or paradigm of university studies has relied on an opposition between the established canon and its "other" i.e. popular culture. The theory wars of the 1980s changed that. The canon has been overwhelmed by world literature and popular culture. As Aijaz Ahmed argues, "there is no exclusionary pleasures of dominant taste" but only an inclusive sense of heterogenity that counters the "cultural myopia" of the Western Humanities curriculum. No unitary idea of world literature is possible.

With the advent of post-structuralism and the death of literature, the opposition between high and popular became untenable, transforming the concentration of inquiry from only canonical into cultural studies. This shows us how we might think about the humanities - and how we might act as humanists - as the world changes around, about, and under us. We have to realise that the role that theory and cultural studies has played and will play in the various conceptual mutations in contemporary times is not slight. Such developments suggest changes in teaching and the pursuit of interdisciplinary areas such as anthropology, film studies, literature, American or African or Asian studies and history, which range widely over a diverse terrain.

The discipline of cultural studies must have a new paradigm for the common analysis of canonical as well as non-canonical texts. Ziauddin Sardar and Borin Van Loon in their recent book Introducing Cultural Studies have tried to show the presence of this exciting field of study in academic work within the arts, the humanities, the social sciences and even science and technology. They take a fleeting, though rather interesting, view of the contribution of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and E.P. Thompson to the whole enterprise of cultural studies. Interestingly, all these pioneers came from a working- class background and tried to understand the role of culture at a critical point in a deeply class-ridden English society. Culture to them was more of a commodity that is constucted with the sole purpose of class struggle for cultural domination, a war for legitimacy and social status waged by the elites.

Many departments have already undertaken to radically change the methodology and approach to popular culture. Through a detailed criticism of competing theories, including Cultural Studies, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, social and literary critics like Miller and McHoul in the last few years have demonstrated how this new study should - and should not - be done. We are at a juncture where it is important to alter the specialised intellectual work in the academy because, as Edward Said has also argued, it speaks increasingly to itself rather than the world of everyday life and ordinary need. Such specialisation and methodology has a tendency towards a doctrinaire set of assumptions and a language of professionalisation allied with cultural dogma and a "surprisingly insistent quietism". Our consistently advocated preference is for a form of criticism and a teaching methodology that dispenses with all this obscurity and instead contests at every point the confined and limited specialisation of much academic discourse. For a teacher the text must be a vast web of affiliations with the world, not simply located in a canonical line of books called "English Literature" but something that has its roots and connections with many other aspects of the world - political, social, cultural, - all of which go to make up its relevance to our day to day life.

It is well known that there is a complacency in the obsession with the status quo. Academics who have devious and short-sighted agendas are not prepared to consider one of the central battlefields of the culture wars in the universities where liberals and conservaties have fought over questions of diversity, tradition, and current innovations in pedagogy. The battles have been fierce in many universities around the world, complicated by the university's unsettled, ever-changing nature, whereas here in many of our so-called forward-looking universities senior faculty members feel threatened to hear or afraid to put across radical views exploring the university's engagement with "culture" and its vast number of different as well as competing representations.

Popular Culture and Everyday Life, Toby Miller and Alec McHoul, Sage, p.224, £ 14.99.

Introducing Cultural Studies, Ziauddin Sardar and Borin Van Loon, Icon, p.176, £ 8.99.

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