Some Digressions on Intellectual Histories and Myths

Having examined in detail a piece of research which is the product of the complexities I am exploring here, I want to turn back to my narrative of cultural studies and pick up on some of the undeconstructed binaries that seem still to haunt us. Once Cultural Studies had constituted itself as separate from Literary Studies, it remained the subject of disciplinary disputes which have left their marks on its own cultural formation and activities. Despite its desire to distinguish itself from literary studies, many of its earliest proponents received their training in the literary field, and critical theory, also influential in literary studies, was dominant both in its formation and in its typical modes of analysis. I will characterise what I mean here by 'critical theory' as the poststructuralist/postmodernist work of Bakhtin, Barthes, Kristeva, Freud, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida to name just a few and associate it with a critique of structuralism, enlightenment values and empiricism among other things. However I want to be very clear that a critique or a deconstruction of these things does not involve the rejection of them. It often involves a complex understanding of the ways in which they are embedded in our modes of thinking and being and cannot be avoided.

As a consequence of that critique, cultural studies' modes of research and analysis remained textual and literary/philosophical in their derivation, and were largely humanities based. They involved various forms of critical reading practice, informed by the theories which drove them: e.g., psychoanalytic or deconstructive readings. Ideologically, this inheritance plus the critique of structuralism and empiricism produced research positions which were apparently opposed to the explicit articulation of methodology, as part of a resistance to disciplinary purity and to any easily identifiable disciplinary location. This is not to say however that there was no methodology, or that it is impossible to articulate it. Increasingly, in order to teach cultural studies in this mode, and to satisfy publishers who wanted to produce saleable textbooks, methodologies had to be produced. Axelrod/Cooper (1993) Reading Critically, Writing Well and Schirato/Yell (1996 and 2000) Communication and Cultural Literacy are cases in point produced in the USA and Australia respectively. The other context where reading strategies (of both literary and cultural studies kinds) were being made explicit was of course in education and literacy studies where both deconstruction of current practice for political purposes and explicitness for improved teaching practice (in the sense of taking apart in order to understand) were common and important interventions (Luke/Freebody/Gilbert 1993; Luke 1997). In more theoretical mode, Barbara Johnson in her introduction to Derrida's Dissemination (1981) demonstrates very effectively how it is possible in each of Derrida's texts, to outline his methodology and that these methods are in fact linguistically and rhetorically based, even when he is using linguistics and rhetoric to deconstruct the premises on which they themselves are based. And there are many accounts by those who are critical of cultural studies methods of just exactly how they work (e.g., Hunter 1992; Steedman 1992).

The question of empiricism versus textuality is connected to the issue of methodology and also needs some unpacking here. This binary opposition is an interesting one and one that I will gradually attempt to deconstruct in what follows. It surfaces in Barker/Galasinksi (2001) in the consistently positive values given to everyday life and talk over writing or text, despite the fact that everyday life is then reduced to text for purposes of analysis. It is very clear that the complex interactions between the discursive and the material, between language and the corporeal, between geographies, institutions, bodies and texts, are the stuff that cultural studies must investigate, and that not enough attention has been paid to the non-discursive aspects of these assemblages. What poststructuralist theory has argued is that the empiricism/textual binary must be deconstructed, that writing does not (mis-)represent speech as some pure and originary form, that both speech and writing are forms of writing in the complex sense Derrida gives that word above. To suddenly then privilege the empirical over the textual as part of a critique of the poststructural is an unworkable reversal, rather than a deconstruction, of the binary. McRobbie (1992: 730) is right that: 'The site of identity formation in cultural studies remains implicitly in and through cultural commodities and texts rather than in and through the cultural practices of everyday life' and Butler's work (1990, 1993) is a prime example of why work on cultural practices needs to be done but it needs to be done in ways which understand and theorise the complex networks of materiality and textuality within which cultural practices are performed and enacted, not simply by privileging speech again.

Why for example is collecting texts in communities (by way of interviews, focus groups etc.) more 'empirical' than collecting texts in libraries, on the internet, from newspapers? What is collected remains 'textual'. Once it becomes empirical 'evidence' rather than text, we see again the privileging of speech over writing. This is one of the ways texts enter into the 'relations of ruling', what Smith has called textually mediated social organisation (Smith 1990) to which, as she argues, 'sociology has been extraordinarily blind', rarely attending to the 'documentary or textual process as such'. (Smith 1990: 209). There are positive signs that this is no longer the case (Kitzinger 1998 ; Cameron 2001) but we should be wary, from a sociological perspective, of referring to the complexity of Derridean deconstruction, or Foucauldian derived 'discourse analysis', for example, as being merely 'textual', simply because they begin their work with (often written) texts.

If we return then to the constitution of cultural studies, it was precisely this empiricism/text binarism that marked the arrival of Sociology and Anthropology, disciplines which had hitherto seen 'culture' and the 'social' as their territory, in this newly formed interdisciplinary space. It was here that the problems to do with the practical effects in cultural studies of the so-called 'linguistic turn' of critical theory, the supposed claim that 'everything is discourse', were first raised as an issue: and while, as I have suggested above, I do not believe that this is the only way for that 'linguistic turn' to be read, it is certainly the case that in the popularisation and enactment of its theoretical positions in textbooks and classrooms, and in summarising histories like that in Barker/Galasinski (2001), the complexity of the original theory (see Threadgold 1997, 2000) was lost in favour of a litany of concepts which had lost their original power and complexity and produced research remarkably lacking in history and context (Steedman 1992; McRobbie 1992). Thus terms like: signs, codes, representation, narrative, genre, intertextuality, myth, metanarrative, deconstruction, trace, supplement, subjectivity, habitus, identity, race, gender, class, sexuality and so on proliferate as metalanguage but with very little sense of the histories which produced them or of prior historical moments in which similar concepts and research have circulated. My criticism here can be compared to Curran's (Curran/Morley/Walkerdine 1996) account of the institutionalised 'forgetting', 'revisionism', involved in narratives of media audience research.

Nor has there been any attempt in the teaching of recent cultural studies to provide knowledge of the contexts, and of methodologies for researching them, which would make sense of all the textual work the metalanguage gives rise to. I am thinking here of the contextualising work that could be done in courses on critical theory, political science, history, economics, geography, sociology and so on. It is in the 'interdisciplinary' absence of this disciplinary context that criticisms of the anti-method stance have to be taken seriously. Cultural Studies has rejected on these grounds quantitative studies (e.g., content analysis), survey methods and questionnaires in favour of what Lewis called 'microscopic, semiotic or literary deconstruction of specific media texts' or qualitative (but not textual) analysis of audience reception of media and other texts (Williams 1999). McRobbie (1992) points to the absence of sociology in the Grossberg et. al. (1992) anthology of cultural studies, in many ways a defining text, and the failure to think, post-Marxism, which like the disciplines had come in for both poststructuralist and postcolonial and feminist critique, about a transformative social politics. In 2003, ten years later, it seems to me that that task is even more urgent as multicultural societies and globalisation force us to ask a lot of very hard questions about the meaning of 'critical' and for whom, about who gets to speak for whom and about how we re-theorise the constantly changing networks of textual and material relations in which we work.

The very binary alternative to the metalanguage of cultural studies is to insist on the reality of the material world and the need to research it, empirically, providing recognisable kinds of evidence, using widely accepted 'research methods for the social sciences' which can be codified and replicated. Media Studies, situated as it is both within and outside Cultural Studies, like Linguistics, in its institutional UK forms at postgraduate level, has largely adopted the social science rather than the humanities trajectory. This may well have not a little to do with current ESRC funding arrangements and support for research methods courses of particular kinds in graduate contexts in UK universities. But it also has quite a lot to do with producing the current lack of any convincing body of media theory in the field. The fragmentation of research methodology produced in research methods courses, again without contexts, this time any detailed knowledge of the disciplines from which the methods come, is exacerbated at undergraduate level where as Williams pointed out some time ago, the influence of the cultural studies textual/deconstructive paradigm and its parallel focus on subjectivity left students without any 'research tools that might help build a picture of the world that is verifiable and representative' (Williams 1999: 277). The work of the Glasgow Media Group provides a notable exception to the claim that we lack a convincing media theory (Eldridge (ed.) 1993; Miller et. al. 1998; Philo (ed.) 1999), bringing together both kinds of approach - the social science methods and sophisticated understandings of language, text and discourse -in interesting and productive ways. However the kind of complexity involved in books like The Circuit of Mass Communication (1998) is not readily accessible to students when research methods are taught separately from disciplines, without critical theory to explain or challenge their connections and implications, and without some basic understandings of the role of textuality in the use of the methods themselves.

The work of the Glasgow media group deconstructs the binary distinction between the social and human sciences that I have constructed above as indeed does work in a number of other areas in cultural studies and as we shall see in critical discourse analysis itself. Production studies in television and theatre (performance studies, like media studies and communication studies, overlaps with cultural studies), and audience studies within cultural studies and media studies seem always to have drawn to some extent on both traditions (Tulloch/Moran 1986; Ang 1996; Threadgold 1997; Tulloch 2000; Tulloch 1999): but there is an uneasy truce here which continues to surface in relation to Critical Discourse Analysis and to some extent explains why it has not been taken up in dominant forms of Cultural Studies. It remains, for the critical theorist, a slightly suspect form of empirical social science methodology in a field which encompasses feminisms, queer theory, postcolonial theory and is still strongly influenced by an interdisciplinary anti-social science method stance, and it is often, for the social scientist, too closely connected to the problems of the 'linguistic turn' in cultural studies to be a viable option.

I have rehearsed these histories, and challenged some of the myths which they narratively produce, albeit in a somewhat cursory and broad-brush fashion, in order to situate the question of where, and whether, Critical Discourse Analysis might be useful to cultural studies and to locate the difficulties inherent in arguing that it could or should be useful in that space. But however we may, in the end, argue for the value of CDA, there are many other lacunae in cultural studies current armoury.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 741