CULTURAL STUDIES:

ARCHAEOLOGIES,
GENEALOGIES, DISCONTENTS
Eduard Vlad teaches at Ovidius University, Constanta. In addition to a series of
scholarly articles in his fields of expertise (literary and cultural studies, American studies,
identity theories and literary texts, cultural globalization), he has written a number of
volumes dealing with issues in the same fields. These are: Larkin: The Glory and the
Gloom (1997), Romantic Myths, Alternative Stories (2004), American Literature:
Responses to the Po-Mo Void (2004), Ironic Apocalypses: The World According to
Vonnegut (2004), Authorship and Identity in Contemporary Fiction (2005), Journeys out
of the Self (2005), Perspective critice asupra globalizării culturale (2010), Dicţionar
polemic de cultură americană (2012). Literary Selves and Grand Narratives in the First
American Century (2016) and Early British Gothic and Its Travelling Companions
(Constanta: Ovidius University Press, 2017) are co-authored with Florian Andrei Vlad.
 EDUARD VLAD

CULTURAL STUDIES:
ARCHAEOLOGIES,
GENEALOGIES, DISCONTENTS

EDITURA UNIVERSITARĂ
Bucureşti, 2018
Colecţia FILOLOGIE

Referenţi ştiinţifici:Prof.univ.dr. Rodica Mihăilă, Universitatea din Bucureşti

director executiv, Comisia Fulbright, România
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Cultural studies : archaeologies, genealogies, discontents / Eduard Vlad. -
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ISBN 978-606-28-0753-5

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 PREFACE AND APOLOGIES

What follows is not what was initially planned. I plead guilty

from the very beginning. As a result of a course on what I
called ‘Archaeologies of Cultural Studies’ in the PhD program
run in the Graduate School for the Humanities at Ovidius
University, Constanta, I thought of mapping out a
comprehensive account of contemporary developments in
literary and cultural studies. The idea was to complete an
already sketched outline of significant cultural epistemes from
the past, containing important ideas, concepts, statements (the
combined work of archaeology and episteme acknowledging
an important reference to Michel Foucault) that is of use for a
better understanding of what is happening today in the groves
of Academe, an outline that was used in the above-mentioned
PhD school course. Completing it meant, obviously, focusing
on the present.
The undertaking was meant to start from the relatively
‘near past’ of the so-called American Culture Wars of the
1980s, from debates about the importance and relevance of
canonical culture and of the anti-canonical orientations of what
Harold Bloom called, two decades ago, the School of
Resentment, after a description of slightly earlier developments
in Britain in the late 1950s, the 1960s, and the early 1970s.
Initially, the ‘discontents’ of the title (the word here is
obviously indebted to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents)
was, in the account of the contemporary scene, meant to refer
to those who oppose some aspects of cultural populism, the

5
debate between the elitists (the discontents) and the mainstream
advocates of contemporary cultural studies positions. The
‘discontented’ positions of elitists, as briefly described in the
first section of this volume, deplore and oppose culture being
brought down to earth from the elevated shelves of canonical
excellence. However, in the book as a whole, the
discontentment is also associated with the critical attitude of a
considerable number of thinkers opposing established,
traditional views on what authority structures consider to be the
culture that serves their interests. In this particular sense,
almost anyone included in any of the three sections of the
volume is a ‘discontent,’ whose critical ideas become part and
parcel of the story of the rise and development of critical
cultural discourses, mainly from the dawn of Modernity, then
the heyday of the Enlightenment, culminating in the more or
less contemporary age.
Gradually, I came to realize that what was initially
designed to provide a short historical outline of what may be
called a long history of cultural studies (cultural studies in a
very loose, pre-institutional sense) was turning into a text of its
own, and that the main part of the initial project would require
a much vaster arena, even if the time slot it would concentrate
on consists of a couple of decades only. This would have meant
from what is now history (the impact of the so-called second
wave in British Cultural Studies, for which wave Stuart Hall
represents an emblematic figure) to the bewildering variety of
cultural, communication and media studies in the US, which
has brought new twists in these interdisciplinary fields, as well
as in Britain, the ‘mother’ of the first institutionalized form, the
Birmingham School of Contemporary Cultural Studies in the
mid 1960s.

6
 It so happened that the preliminary outline (the long
history of Cultural Studies or cultural studies) is inevitably
incomplete, relying on some basic sources (Surber’s, as well as
Browitt and Milner’s accounts featuring prominently in the
delineation of the general framework), giving less weight or
even leaving out equally important introductions and outlines.
It refers to some seminal theoretical sources by the prominent
figures of this long history, while omitting others. All this
exposes my mistakes and preferences, as well as a
determination to complete this preliminary work, the sketchy
historical outline, before focusing on the description of the
panoramic and dramatic contemporary culturescape1
Considering the vastness of this contemporary
intellectual picture, as well as the importance of the issues that
it deals with (not only canonical vs anti-canonical culture in a
clear-cut opposition, but more insidious and ambivalent aspects
of contemporary multiculturalism, representational politics,
gender and trans gender studies, ethnicity and migration as key
aspects of group and national identity, the current volume will
stop short of dealing with them at length, leaving the field to be
investigated in a following book. However, some of these
issues will be outlined and briefly discussed in the third section
of the volume, the first containing the preliminary discussion of
culture and cultural studies, as well as the debate between
cultural elitism and cultural populism, while the middle section
is focusing on a selection of significant voices and directions
which played a part in the gradual development of what would
be called, one day, cultural studies or Cultural Studies.
While attempting to make significant connections
between and among important figures, texts, and approaches
which have contributed to the development of cultural studies
in a broader or stricter sense, the current undertaking has
7
avoided hierarchies and taxonomies as much as possible, thus
observing the anti-hegemonic, anti-establishment approach of
more revolutionary forms of cultural studies, even if, in the
opinion of that particular person writing these lines, tree-like
hierarchies and classifications, structuralist dichotomies are
sometimes more useful than rhizomatic1, hidden, elusive roots
crawling underground, avoiding the light of day. Neither will
there be any attempt in what is to follow to prove that
everything, including gravity, is culturally constructed.

8
 CONTENTS

Preface and apologies ....................................................... 5

I. PRELIMINARIES ........................................................ 13

I.1. Culture: individual endeavor, collective survival ........ 13

I.2. Cultural Studies: what do we mean by it/them? ........... 15
I.3. Two opposite attitudes: cultural elitism and
cultural populism .......................................................... 22

II. OUTLINES OF HISTORIES OF CULTURAL

STUDIES ...................................................................... 33

II.1. From nature to culture to critical cultural discourse . 33

II.2. The metamorphoses of liberal humanism: an
overview of systematic skepticism’s cultural critique
within liberal humanism ............................................. 36
II.3. Bacon’s skepticism of ‘Idology’ ............................... 38
II.4. Descartes’s dualist rationalism .................................. 43
II.5. Reason and the natural law: Hobbes and Locke’s
contributions .............................................................. 46
II.6. Spinoza the double agent .......................................... 49
II.7. Hume and his ‘leaky weather-beaten vessel’ ............ 51
II.8. Liberal humanism and the strategy of moral critique 53
II.9. The liberal humanist debate between the essentialist
and the contractarian views on rights, freedom and
liberty ......................................................................... 54
II.10. From hesitation to assertiveness: historical critique
from the early Enlightenment to its heyday - Vico .. 58
9
II.11. Kant’s contribution to the foundations of critical
rationalism ................................................................. 61
II.12. From empiricism to the early ventures of ‘scientific’
materialism ................................................................ 66
II.13. Hegel as agent provocateur ....................................... 69
II.14. From Hegel toward Marx through Feuerbach .......... 72
II.15. Hermeneutics: an anti-Enlightenment project? ......... 73
II.16. Human understanding, interpretation and historical
contexts....................................................................... 74
II.17. Hermeneutics comes of age: Schleiermacher ........... 77
II.18. Hermeneutics as Lebensphilosophie: Dilthey ........... 81
II.19. Marx’s Marxism ........................................................ 82
II.20. Freud - from the dynamics of the individual psyche
to psychoanalytic cultural theory ............................... 88
II.21. Structure, form, semiosis and critical cultural
discourse: an overview .............................................. 111
II.22. Jakobson’s structuralist communication model:
factors, functions, the metaphoric – metonymic axis 114
II.23. Anthropological, formalist, structuralist cultural
connections: an overview .......................................... 118
II.24. Some of Marx’s marks in the 20th century .............. 123
II.25. Critical Theory and the beginning of Western
Cultural Marxism: Weber vs. Marx? ......................... 128
II.26. Walter Benjamin’s cultural revolution: from magic
to canonical art studies to mechanically-reproduced
popular culture studies .............................................. 132
II.27. Gramsci: whose hegemony? ..................................... 136
II.28. The Frankfurt School in search of a distinct identity:
an overview ................................................................ 144
II.29. Quo vadis, Enlightenment? Not the right way:
Dialectic of Enlightenment and mass culture as
culture industry ........................................................... 150
II.30. A Frankfurter with a difference: the critical, but
enlightened, Jurgen Habermas .................................. 157
10
II.31. Like a bridge over troubled waters: Marcuse’s
Frankfurt critical theory and the American
counterculture ............................................................ 164
II.32. 20th century hermeneutics figures and their
challenges to cultural discourse: Heidegger and
Gadamer ................................................................... 170
II.33. An inspirational figure playing hard to get: Michel
Foucault ..................................................................... 180
II.34. ‘Mixing memory with desire’: Lacan’s very special
return to Freud .......................................................... 187
II.35. The Birmingham School of Contemporary Cultural
Studies: historical context ........................................ 192
II.36. The first wave of CS: the culturalism of R. Hoggart,
R. Williams, E.P. Thomson ....................................... 195
II.37. New directions in the second wave: S. Hall .............. 207
II.38. How political can watching TV be?: John Fiske ...... 214
II.39. From class to subcultures and group identities in
multicultural communities: Hebdige, Chambers ...... 217

III. CULTURE, DIVERSITY, GENDER IDENTITY:

A BIRD’S EYE VIEW OF SOME
CONTEMPORARY ISSUES AND DEBATES ...... 221

III.1. A multiculturally brave new world ........................... 221

III.2. Is there a culture war going on? Multiculturalism
and political correctness ............................................ 223
III.3. Troubled Gender? Femininities and masculinities in
times of ‘identity subversion’ .................................... 233
III.4. Surfing feminism’s second wave .............................. 236
III.5. Postfeminism: key positions, cultural echoes ........... 241
III.6. The cultural construction of masculinity and its
(feminist and transgender) discontents ...................... 245

BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................. 261

11
12
 I. PRELIMINARIES

I.1. Culture: individual endeavor, collective survival

Science and technology have been making faster and faster
progress since the Industrial Revolution, but significantly
bringing about more and more dramatic changes since the
beginning of the post-industrial age, driven by information and
communication technology. This progress and these changes
are considerably affecting our ways of life, for better and/or
worse. Our way of life is one of the several definitions of our
culture, including, but not exclusively identical with, culture as
a record of intellectual and artistic excellence. Being cultured
or cultivated has usually defined an individual having acquired
sufficient knowledge in the humanities and/or the social
sciences, displaying good aesthetic taste and discrimination to
philosophize on key existential issues. Such a person is seen as
a member of the intellectual élite, usually valuing high culture
and looking down on popular culture. In the contemporary
world, culture keeps changing, encompassing more and more
in its realm and blurring the boundaries between the so-called
high culture and popular and mass culture.
It has become necessary for everyone, including those
aspiring to membership in a certain elite group, to understand
the mechanisms and the changing faces of contemporary
culture in order to adapt to a very challenging and puzzling
world. Understanding culture is no longer to be seen only as an
individual’s endeavor to rise in the social world, but also as a
collective effort to make the world function better, to become
aware of the challenges of the present as well as of the future,

13
while, at the same time, preserving the good heritage of the
past.
People all over the world have to learn to adapt to the
changes that affect their ways of life. The progress of science
and technology is inevitable, both causing problems for
humankind’s survival and, at the same time, making life easier
for more and more people. However, the main concern in what
follows is not the survival of humankind through science, but,
in a general sense, human survival in spite of science, extreme
rationality and rationalization. This has to do with the
explorations of culture, its mechanisms, its major players.
Before evoking some definitions of culture that will be
of use in what lies ahead, let us mention some of the general
features of humankind’s adaptation and survival that we are all
likely to take for granted. It is worth stressing that these three
general features of adaptation and survival work in all fields of
human knowledge, including the humanities in particular, the
social sciences in general:
1. inheriting the knowledge of previous generations
(traditional meaning of culture as cultural heritage);
2. dealing creatively and critically with this heritage,
rather than taking it for granted (the critique of received
knowledge);
3. dealing creatively and critically with the present and
its challenges (learning as adaptation to an ever changing
environment) in order to improve the prospects for the future.
What follows takes all these three features into account
to understand the cultural world as a whole, but also, more
specifically, dealing with the traditions, concepts, key issues
and dilemmas of what has come to be called the field and the
practice of Cultural Studies, closely linked to Cultural Theory
or Theory. Whether one is more interested in American Studies
or in Literary Studies, given their interdisciplinary character,
given the former’s official inclusion in Romania within a field
14
called Cultural Studies, it is useful for everyone to study the
relationships between and among these fields, the implications
of the core concepts (Culture, Ideology, Hegemony, Power,
Subjectivity), as well as the various traditions having
contributed to this relatively new area and mode of cultural
enquiry. This, it is worth stressing from the very beginning, is
not the apparently serene and peaceful Culture Studies, but has
witnessed, because of its involved, even militant, positions,
controversies and culture wars, especially in America, as it will
be seen.

I.2. Cultural Studies/ cultural studies: what do we mean by

it/ them?
Cultural Studies are or Cultural Studies is? This is obviously
the preliminary question which is the easiest to answer.
Although literary studies have long been seen as plural,
basically including history, theory and criticism under their
conceptual umbrella, the tendency is to see, both literary
studies and cultural studies as a whole. Even more than literary
studies (or Literary studies), Cultural Studies (or cultural
studies) is, having tried to define itself as a distinct field of
investigation or like a distinct way of dealing with culture, a
very elusive and protean object of study. This distinctiveness,
involving object of study and manner of investigation, is
illusory and will have to be addressed before long.
From the very beginning of their ‘Introduction: The
Questions of Method in Cultural Studies,’ Schwoch and White,
as their title show, raise the problem of method, the looseness
that the new avowedly interdisciplinary field has been charged
with:
At various points in time, different traditional fields and
disciplines have influenced cultural studies. For the most part,
this influence, while important, does not seem to have brought
about any obvious cohesion or unification to cultural studies.
15
 Many scholars celebrate and endorse the free-wheeling and
extremely open nature of this area of intellectual pursuit, while
others point to this openness as a sign of the relative
intellectual weakness of cultural studies (1).
The above-mentioned editors of Questions of Method in
Cultural Studies (and authors of the equally above-mentioned
‘Introduction: …’ to that 2006 volume) will go on to
distinguish between a scrutiny of the methodologies of the new
field and distinct theories of cultural studies. Their aim is to
examine methodologies conducive to a coherent and unitary
theory of cultural studies, an enterprise which, for many
practitioners, might look like an elusive pursuit. They will soon
admit that the field resorts in its empirical investigations to a
vast array of sometimes contradictory theories. What is special
about cultural studies, though, is identifying and highlighting
cultural objects that had been neglected in the past (such as the
popular or the cultural impact of ordinary, everyday life),
Cultural studies, from the outset, as it will be seen, avoided
settling into established frameworks, disciplinary boundaries,
final solutions.
Whether cultural studies or Cultural Studies is or are is
obviously easier to negotiate and then decide upon than the
problem of method or methodological framework, which can
be shared with the various fields the new kind of inquiry takes
issue with.
Legitimate questions like, what does Cultural Studies
mean? are more difficult to answer, though, thus indicating a
fundamental question about language in general, about what
language is and does. Many people take it for granted that
language, basically through its vocabulary, faithfully represents
the abstract and concrete worlds in which language users live.
To assume that language is transparent and that we can see the
real world through its faithful mediation is naȉve. Theorists
like Jacques Derrida (his différance or the permanent deferral
16
of meaning of a linguistic unit) have drawn attention to the
elusiveness of words, which escape our attempts at precise
definition like a fish slipping through the clumsy fingers of a
human’s groping hands. Derrida’s position is an extreme
approach that real people in real worlds do not need to adopt,
though.
What do culture, literature, literary studies, American
studies mean? are questions in which the basic concepts are
impossible to pinpoint with any precision without the
preliminary attempt at sketching a minimal and necessary
background or context. If this is true of words floating in a
world of texts, basically cut off from the concrete world in
which communicators live, then we need other questions to
consider, such as How to speak about culture and Cultural
Studies, under what circumstances, with whom, why, and with
what goals in mind? People in the real world do not use
floating signifiers, but engage in interaction to get things done.
In this interaction words and whole utterances are clarified in
the process of collaborative problem solving, in the process of
doing things together. The words’ meanings are no longer
elusive or ambiguous. The words’ meanings are those
meanings we … mean, in particular contexts, to achieve
particular goals.
One should bear in mind that such words as culture and
literature, like many others, have a long history, having
changed their meaning as people and societies have changed
across the ages. Cultural Studies has, in its specific, specialized
sense, a relatively short history (it was institutionalized in
1964), a centuries-old history in its broader sense (any critical
discussion of culture from Antiquity up to now). They are not
to be dealt with in terms of the simplistic question, ‘what does
it mean’? We will therefore have to clarify the contexts in
which preoccupations with what came to be called culture
appeared, developed in the real world of permanent social
17
change, making connections between and among important
individual voices, schools, approaches, movements.
In his Keywords (1976, 1983) Raymond Williams finds
the word culture one of the most difficult words to define,
largely because of its long history (87). Etymologically,
Williams traces the word to the Latin verb coleo - colere,
which had several distinct meanings, such as to inhabit (from
which we have now colonist (settler), to cultivate (agriculture),
to worship (a religious cult).
In a previous book, Culture and Society 1780–1950,
Williams had recorded four meanings of the word culture.
Three of them refer to attributes of a group or society: the state
of intellectual development of a whole society; the arts; the
whole way of life of a group or people (an anthropological
definition). The remaining one refers to an individual’s habit of
mind (Williams, 1963, p. 16).
What follows is written by someone interested in
American studies for people interested in … American studies.
It is also the product of someone who started in the fields of
literary studies ‘pure and simple’ (history of literature, theory
of literature, literary criticism) at a time when many people,
like the author himself, associated the broad concept of
Marxism with the terrible things that were happening in the so-
called Communist countries of the Eastern bloc.
An aversion to those who professed to follow in the
footsteps of the important 19th century philosopher and social
critic, theorists, militants and political leaders associated with
positions of power in what would prove to be a bankrupt
system of authoritarian government, amounted to something
that many non-Communists had to deal with. This aversion has
to be overcome by all intellectuals, irrespective of the area of
the political spectrum they are, deliberately or unwittingly,
associated with. This has to be undertaken in order to
understand present developments in the related, contiguous,
18
overlapping fields of the human sciences and social sciences, in
the first place. Such developments have to do with what came
to be called the important paradigm shift of the cultural turn in
the 1980s or with the institutionalization of Cultural Studies a
little earlier (the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies, 1964).
As already mentioned, American studies is an
interdisciplinary area seen as falling within the field of
investigation of Cultural Studies. The main concern in what is
to follow is to define Cultural Studies and its main concepts, as
well as other fields and disciplines in relation to which it
defines itself by being significantly different or with which its
preoccupations overlap. Thus, comparing and contrasting
Cultural Studies with cultural theory (Theory) and with literary
studies are among the first steps to be considered. The
contextual background and the various sites of definition and
contestation are meant to lead to a better understanding of the
position of American Studies in relation to Cultural Studies and
related fields of investigation, such as literary studies.
Like any piece of scholarly writing, in addition to a
survey of seminal theoretical sources in the examined fields,
this volume engages in a complex conversation. The attending
set of complex conversation situations has to do with the
inevitably Bakhtinian, dialogic nature of any form of human
communication. It has to do with authority figures in the
remote and immediate past, as well as with contemporary
experts and individuals interested in what the current text is
concerned with: the elusive realm of culture and its
mechanisms, attitudes to it, approaches to it. So, once again, it
is not what culture means but what it does, how it does it, how
it is used by various people to do things, issues that will shed
light on culture, power, and Cultural Studies.
Culture, like many other key concepts, such as those
referring to aspects of identity (race, ethnicity, gender), became
19
an important topic when what it is all about became
problematic, when people no longer took for granted what they
had considered a ‘natural’ part of their existence. Such critical
moments, and the accompanying paradigm shifts, may be
associated with sudden and dramatic cultural changes. Some
were occasioned by the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and
19th centuries, especially in the British Empire, in what would
become the culture and civilization debate. Others had to do
with the rise of a new and powerful nation defining its identity
in new terms: developments from the American War of
Independence at the end of the 18th century to the American
countercultural age of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the
ensuing Culture Wars in intellectual circles there. Thus, in the
last few decades of the 20th century, American exceptionalism
as a defining feature of American identity began to be
challenged by multiculturalist approaches to race, ethnicity,
gender.
What does Cultural Studies mean? In an age of
dramatic reassessments, of new ways of seeing things, of
cultural relativism, of a lack of a distinct authority center which
says what is true and what is false, the question should be
asked differently: what do you/ what does he/ what do they
mean by Cultural Studies now, here or there? What did they
mean by Cultural Studies then and there? Why did they engage
in doing that? Once again, let us forget simplistic questions like
what does this word mean? followed by the impatient gesture
of reaching for the dictionary with its infallible, final answers.
Let us see things in action and human interaction, all this set in
distinct contemporary or historical contexts, in which people
use words to get things done, in pragmatic or materialist
fashion.
For the time being, let us consider some brief
statements and attempts at simplifying the definition of culture
and of the special ways of engaging with it. Jeff Browitt and
20
Andrew Milner, in their 2002 survey of contemporary cultural
theory, define culture as referring to ‘that entire range of
institutions, artefacts and practices that make up our symbolic
universe. In one or another of its meanings, the term will thus
embrace: art and religion, science and sport, education and
leisure’ (5). They note, however, that Cultural Studies is not
usually perceived as a field encompassing political or
economic activities, although a strong political and ideological
dimension in the investigation of culture has always existed, as
it will be shown in what is to come in this volume. Its declared
critical and emancipatory objectives show a far from detached
position of its theorists and practitioners. Schwoch and White
draw attention to the importance of such concepts as ‘power’
and ‘resistance’ in cultural studies, as well as to its dynamic
approaches, its ‘oscillating interest in sometimes drawing
together, and other times pulling apart, approaches from the
social sciences and the humanities’(3).
Andrew Milner, in another 2002 book, authored by himself
only, Re-Imagining Cultural Studies: The Promise of Cultural
Materialism, from the vantage point of a perspective informed
by subsequent attempts at defining the field, comes up with a
brief and clear description of Cultural Studies as ‘the social
science of the study of the production, distribution, exchange
and reception of textualised meaning’ (5). This textualised
meaning is, within the context of Cultural Studies, both élite
and popular, both literary and non-literary. Chris Barker, in his
Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies, draws attention to the
difficulty of drawing boundaries between this special field of
critical inquiry and other discursive formations, drawing such
concepts as discourse, ideology, hegemony, identity, power,
representation from Marxism, structuralism, poststructuralism,
psychoanalysis (43). The concepts of discourse, ideology,
hegemony, power, as well as the complex relationships with
various Marxist and post-Marxist approaches, show that
21
culture, from a Cultural Studies perspective, is not an objective,
transcendent realm of pure knowledge, but a site of
confrontation and negotiation. However, this very argument
about culture being something superior, to which we aspire, or
something common, affecting our ordinary, down-to-earth
lives, has led to confrontation between two extreme positions,
cultural elitism and cultural populism.

I.3. Two opposite attitudes: cultural elitism and cultural

populism
For some time now, cultural critics have been broadly divided
between these two distinct attitudes: cultural elitism and
cultural populism. Traditional cultural elitism states that the
proper object to be investigated is high culture, the monuments
of artistic excellence preserved from the past and meant to
serve as exemplary for new artistic ventures. It is an attitude
that does not challenge existing power relations and encourages
the preservation of what it considers to be the best as far as the
cultural heritage goes, the main pillar in the maintenance of
various forms of national identity.
The word civilization had entered English usage
somewhat earlier than culture. Its urban associations (civitas,
civilis) made it the attribute of sophisticated, urban, refined
individuals as different from rural, rude, uneducated people.
The class connotations of the two words were obvious, clearly
showing that culture and civilization were associated with the
educated, higher classes of society. Rising from the individual
and class levels to what were becoming the international
relations in the post-Westphalian, also imperial, age, culture
and civilization were also the attributes of empire building,
consolidation and legitimation, especially since the 18th
century, which is Edward Said’s thesis in his Culture and
Imperialism.

22
 As capitalism developed, especially in connection with
the dramatic changes operated by the Industrial Revolution in
the 18th and 19th centuries, more salient processes affected what
we now call, in economic terms that cultural studies has
appropriated, cultural production and distribution. Artists,
especially writers, including novelists, playwrights and poets,
no longer depended on rich protectors and sponsors from the
aristocracy only, for whom they had been writing and to whom
they had been dedicating their work.
As printing was developing and printed matter was
becoming cheaper, the literary market appeared and involved
an ever larger paying readership, more closely associated with
the rise of the bourgeoisie than with the still important
influence of the aristocracy. New interests and values were
promoted by the new culture, with more and more agents being
involved in the dramatic transformations of the society of the
time. More and more people were becoming literate, therefore
able to become ‘consumers on the literary market.’ Literacy
was a sign of both culture and civilization, and the word
literature, from the Latin littera, expressed cultivated, written
culture, in opposition to oral, inferior culture, the latter being
the attribute of the lower, illiterate classes.
In the age of the Enlightenment, culture and civilization
came to represent the opposites of what was perceived as the
barbarism, ignorance, intolerance and savagery of the Middle
Ages. The meanings of culture and civilization, which initially
appeared to be quite similar, began to be used by some people
as denoting very distinct phenomena. We can define them very
easily by adding an adjective to each: spiritual culture vs.
material civilization. Some people saw civilization as bringing
material progress at the expense of society turning into a
machine-like mob, unable to behave in a creative manner.
Matthew Arnold, the British Victorian poet (1822 –
1888), is usually considered the cultural elitist who saw culture
23
as the best that has been said and thought, as a disinterested
pursuit of perfection. Taken out of context, the previous words
might support such a view. Culture is something approaching
perfection through excellence, and it is cut off from basic
human needs in a historical context. However, Arnold can be
seen as a cultural critic who realized that the society he lived in
was going through difficult developments, mainly due to
industrialization and secularization, and something had to be
done about it.
His collection of essays, published in book form in
1869, Culture and Anarchy, views culture as possible
resistance to anarchy, instrumental in maintaining stability in a
modern society where religion is fast losing its function as a
civilizing factor. In the political context of the Victorian 1860s,
with more and more people from the working classes acquiring
the right to vote, the above disinterested pursuit of perfection
was meant to ‘civilize’ those who would have otherwise felt
tempted to advocate their class interests more resolutely, and
thus provoke ‘anarchy.’ Culture as a pursuit of perfection
encompasses both the aesthetic and the moral realm, making
people better, more compassionate:
There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the
impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for
stopping human error, clearing human confusion, and
diminishing the sum of human misery, the noble aspiration to
leave the world better and happier than we found it,––motives
eminently such as are called social,––come in as part of the
grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture
is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity,
but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of
perfection (34).
Arnold refers to three distinct classes that make up
Victorian society. The aristocrats are called, quite
unexpectedly, the Barbarians. They are considered to have lost
24
touch with the lower classes. The Philistines, the rising middle
classes, of whom the author is even more critical, are seen as
equally selfish and self-centered. The poorest social section is
called the Populace. Arnold, who had been a school inspector
for some time, having subsequently been commissioned to
work on an Education Board to prepare the 1870 Education
Bill, thought that it was the responsibility of the state, given the
negligence of the Barbarians and the Philistines, to elevate the
Populace through the culture provided by the state-run system
of education.
At that time Marx’s and Darwin’s ideas were gaining
ground in Western Europe, while the power of the Church was
waning in an increasingly secular British society. To counteract
developments which might have led to what he calls anarchy
and the dissolution of the state, Arnold draws attention to the
working of two distinct selves that each individual has. The
ordinary self ties individuals to the class they belong to. The
best self, as the name shows, is preferable to the first, ordinary
self. The best self transcends the ... selfish interests of the
ordinary self. Through culture as promoted by the state, the
best self’s behavior leads to national harmony. In simple
words, even very poor persons will feel in harmony with richer
ones, since they all share a disinterested pursuit of perfection.
This mitigates or even eliminates class conflict or class
struggle, the motive power of Marx’s dialectical materialism,
which rises as the most influential conflictual theory of the
19th century.
Although largely conservative in outlook, Arnold is one
of the precursors of 20th century developments in British
Cultural Studies. He is claimed by some to have been among
the main initiators of what we might call today right-wing
culturalism, while others see him in the culture and civilization
tradition.

25
 In the 20th century F.R. Leavis will see culture being
endangered by the negative effects of modernization and
industrialization. He will distinguish between the mass
civilization of an ever growing popular culture and the minority
culture of an elite. Up to now, many artists and philosophers
alike have been apprehensive about mass production and
standardization gradually turning creative individuals into a
conformist mob, with the modernist writers of the first half of
the 20th century taking a very distinct stance to protect high
culture from the desecrations of the machine age and the
assembly line.
Leavis was one of the most prominent figures in the
line of cultural elitism illustrated by Arnold in the previous
century. F.R. Leavis was a formalist in terms of approach and
orientation, with an interest in literature’s moral and aesthetic
value. He is best known through his volume, The Great
Tradition, and his periodical, Scrutiny. Leavis was one of those
who advocated the importance of the study and teaching of
canonical literature. Like New Criticism in the US, what came
to be known as Leavisism viewed canonical literature as the
work of brilliant authors; this kind of literature was to be seen
as of all time and all places, going beyond the constraints and
limitations of ordinary life.
Cultural populism will soon define the attitudes
associated with the emergence of the Cultural Studies proper.
After the Second World War, British society was becoming
more democratic, with its strict class system becoming more
flexible. This largely affected the perception of culture as much
more than the refined taste and artistic sensibility usually
cultivated in elite universities by members of the upper classes.
Culture is ordinary, proclaimed Raymond Williams, one of the
first important representatives of cultural populism. Culture
was becoming more ordinary in more ways than one. For one
thing, as a result of a series of laws passed in what was
26
becoming the British welfare state (more money invested in
health and education in the first place), more and more young
people from the working classes came to pursue a university
education. The conversation, argument or heated debate about
the relationship between high culture and popular culture has
been one of the central cultural issues since the founding of the
Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
The Frankfurt School theorists (Adorno, Horkheimer),
as it will be seen in the second section of this volume,
dismissed, from an elitist perspective, the mass culture which
new technologies promoted by the emerging culture industry
used to control and manipulate larger and larger audiences,
largely for propaganda purposes (in Nazi Germany) and to
promote and exploit consumerism (postwar America). Mass
culture came to be associated with the US and constituted the
‘enemy’ of authentic popular culture in postwar Britain, as
obvious in the attitudes expressed by the first wave of British
cultural studies, although this ‘anti-American-mass-culture-
position’ did not join the ‘elitist’ camp, but the first important
form of cultural populism.
Apparently surprisingly for someone who would like to
see clear-cut distinctions between popular and mass culture,
between British and American positions, between elitism and
populism, the situation is always more complex than that of a
black and white picture with sharp contrasts. Thus, almost a
whole decade before 1960s British cultural studies defined
authentic British popular culture in opposition to American
mass culture, such prominent American voices as that
belonging to one of the co-editors of Mass Culture: The
Popular Arts in America, tried to dissociate American culture
and mass culture, the latter, arguably completely un-American.
First, Bernard Rosenberg, in ‘Mass Culture in America,’
deplores the little effort that the reception of mass cultural

27
products require, thus implying that culture is supposed to be
challenging, difficult, not easy to chew:
Shakespeare is dumped on the market along with Mickey
Spillane, and publishers are rightly confident that their
audience will not feel obliged to make any greater preparation
for the master of world literature than for its latest lickspittle
(5).
Contemporary Americans have a lot of free time on their
hands, but are feeling increasingly alienated from their
occupations, their community, their cultural heritage, even
from themselves, Rosenberg claims. To fill this void, they are
tempted by the cheap diversion of mass cultural entertainment.
He deplores the institutionalization of kitsch, which deprives
people of many of their attributes, including spontaneity and
creativity, of the serious substance of authentic culture.
Rosenberg is eager to dismiss the assumption that
capitalist America and its democratic system are responsible
for the success of mass culture, which is the product of an
authoritarian, dictatorial regime (unlike Adorno and
Horkheimer, he does not look back to Nazi Germany, but east
of the rising Iron Curtain to Soviet Russia). He blames
industrialization in both the communist and capitalist worlds as
‘the necessary and sufficient cause of mass culture’(12). A
remedy against this should be provided by the right kind of
education. It is, however, worth noting that the other co-editor
and most of the contributors to the anthology would show a
more receptive attitude toward mass culture as a distinct
American development.
As Cultural Studies and Cultural Theory are gaining
ground, fewer and fewer intellectual figures make a stand
against mass culture, popular culture, cultural populism.
Among the outstanding advocates of cultural elitism in the
academic world of the last few decades are … two Blooms,

28
Allan David Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind, 1987)
and Harold Bloom, especially through his 1994 volume, The
Western Canon. These highbrow literature professors are not
related by kith or kin, but by their cultural elitist concerns.
Allan David Bloom’s thesis is beginning to take shape
from the very beginning: the book’s subtitle reads, ‘how higher
education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of
today’s students.’ A.D. Bloom brings to late 20th century
American campuses an updated version of 19th century
Matthew Arnold’s better self as the expression of a disinterest
pursuit of excellence:
Men may live more truly and fully in reading Plato and
Shakespeare than at any other time, because then they are
participating in essential being and are forgetting their
accidental lives. The fact that this kind of humanity exists or
existed, and that we can somehow still touch it with the tips of
our outstretched fingers, makes our imperfect humanity, which
we can no longer bear, tolerable (380).
Bloom’s The Western Canon advocates the preservation
of the artistic excellence of the Western high culture traditions
in the context of what was associated with the debates
becoming very prominent in the 1980s in America as ‘the
culture wars.’ What he finds in American universities at the
time he is writing his book is what he calls ‘the Balkanization
of literary studies’ (517).
Bloom, a cultural elitist, considers that the study of
canonical art has always been accessible to a refined minority,
yet, very much like Matthew Arnold more than one century
before him, he believes that it performs a vital function in the
cultural fabric of a nation, such as America. In the great
masters of this canonical tradition he finds illustrations of
language power and creativity, essential attributes that can be
shared by those who can rise up to the challenges posed by
them. He finds culture in his country as being threatened by the
29
anti-canonical ‘School of Resentment.’ As members of this
‘school,’ he identifies the emerging New Historicism of
Stephen Greenblatt, and the even more populist and ‘resentful’
forms of gender and ethnic studies, as well as Marxism and
Deconstruction. Under the influence of this school, many
literature professors, he observes, have turned the field in
which they teach into one of ‘cultural criticism,’ a phenomenon
which, whether we side with Bloom or not, has to be reckoned
with both in America and in the rest of the world.
An interesting book describing the debate between the
elite canonical literature party and the populist cultural
criticism party is Anthony Easthope’s Literary into Cultural
Studies. In his 1991 book, Easthope described what, to use a
famous phrase from Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, had happened during the previous two
decades (i.e. from around 1970): a paradigm shift in literary
studies. This paradigm shift deconstructed the hierarchical
opposition between canonical literature and its ‘Other’ as
formulated by the ‘elitist’ British literary critic F.R. Leavis in
his Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture.
In Easthope’s opinion, the new field of inquiry of
cultural studies is the new framework in which both elite
canonical literature and popular texts have to be jointly
accommodated, thus ‘collapsing the literary studies paradigm,’
as ‘modern literary studies was invented, institutionalised in
the academy, fell into crisis, and is now being transformed into
something else, cultural studies (5).
In his opinion, new vitality will be infused in
contemporary cultural inquiries by competing approaches
associated with new historicism, cultural materialism, British
cultural studies. This goes on to show that there is no
consensus on the boundaries between these approaches: many
would argue that cultural materialism is a branch of British
cultural studies, while new historicism belongs to American
30
cultural studies, but boundaries are being challenged, and no
one wants to be circumscribed to a larger, more comprehensive
area, it seems. What is unquestionable, though, is that the
boundaries between canonical culture and popular culture have
been blurred, not only because of the populism of cultural
studies, but also under the critical attacks of postmodernist
theorists and practitioners.
Easthope ends his plea for the inclusion of literary
studies into cultural studies with what might be seen as
‘strange’ by many cultural populists. While acknowledging the
importance of the wide range of cultural phenomena that the
combined, and interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary field
accommodates, he appears to favor literary narratives as central
in these investigations:
As for the field of cultural studies I would expect it to continue
for some time to concentrate on ‘fictional’ rather than ‘factual’
discourse, narratives rather than non-narratives (though these
cannot be hard and fast distinctions). Since they are ready to
hand, political rhetoric and legal discourses are already getting
attention from radical criticism, and beyond these lie the
whole range of proliferating discourses of the culture—official
and unofficial, esoteric and banal, fantastic and scientific,
practical and pleasurable. Just as the old study of rhetoric
regarded no form of human signification as beyond its
concern, so, in principle, cultural studies will address every
form of signifying practice (178).
While now ready to address any form of signifying
practice with the tools provided by the combined discourses of
politics and ideology, the form of cultural studies which ‘old-
fashioned’ people like the ‘scriptor’ of the current volume
favors would be one closer to the one the ‘founding fathers’ of
British Cultural Studies started from – literary studies,
associated with the fictional discourse Anthony Easthope

31
claims to concentrate on, ‘narratives rather than non-
narratives.’
As for American studies as part of Cultural Studies in
European curricula in the academy, a discussion is worth
having: do the education systems in most European countries
encourage a critical, revolutionary attitude to contemporary
societies and power structures or do they lump populist,
revolutionary Cultural Studies and more elitist Culture Studies
and more traditional forms of cultural history together in a
wider, competitive, cultural conversation?

32
 II. OUTLINES OF HISTORIES OF
CULTURAL STUDIES

II.1.From nature to culture to critical cultural discourse

If culture includes, apart from cultural artefacts, both
institutions and practices, the next thing to do involves tracing
the historic development of institutions and practices, as well
as ways of speaking about them. It involves both what one
means by culture now and the history of this preoccupation
with culture since the beginnings of human civilizations. One
can call these preoccupations with culture, especially if they
contain a critical dimension, critical studies in a broad sense.
Has Cultural Studies been mainly or only descriptive or has it
displayed forms of political action? is an either – or question in
relation to which theorists have been invited to clarify their
positions in any historic account of the development of various
forms of cultural critique. A brief answer to such a question
would be both... and..., the example of Matthew Arnold
speaking about a so-called disinterested pursuit of perfection,
but a pursuit obviously accompanied by the determination of
solving a certain social problem is a good illustration of that.
In order to understand what some specialists today
mean by Cultural Studies, one has to trace its history as part of
a longer debate about culture and what it amounts to, which
may go back in time to Ancient Greece. This is what Jere Paul
Surber does in his book, Culture and Critique: An Introduction
to the Critical Discourses of Cultural Studies. Surber sees the
first critical interrogations about the mechanisms of culture
starting with such thinkers as Socrates, but such critique having
preceded him, in its essence, from time immemorial:
33
 It is difficult to imagine a time at which human beings were
entirely satisfied with the conditions of their lives. It is equally
hard, if not impossible, to conceive of a state of affairs either
natural or cultural to which every person or group would give
its unqualified assent. In fact, the most archaic narratives we
have, from mythologies to founding religious texts, to the
earliest histories of world civilizations, are full of conflict,
opposition, and revolt against established order (1).
Most people do not revolt against established order
(revolutions do not occur on a very frequent basis) because,
influenced by the prevailing ideology of their society, they take
many unjust situations for granted, as something natural, God-
given. The Ancient Greeks made the distinction that would
lead to what later would be defined in terms of the opposition
nature – culture. For them, it was physis vs. nomos. Physis
defined the entities in the world which were perceived as
immutable: the sun and the stars, the seasons, the flora and
fauna, as well as some abstract principles, as well as their
prevailing ideology seen by them as a grand and truthful
narrative: the creation of the world by the gods, as well as their
demands and their stories. What we now see as a mythology, as
part of the Greeks’ culture, was taken for granted by most
Greeks as physis, a set of intangible narratives. Once taken as
physis, a certain situation, however imperfect we might see it
now in retrospect, was not to be challenged. By contrast,
whatever was made by human minds or hands and perceived to
be so was open to discussion and possible change. If the belief
in gods, for example, was not seen as created by humans, less
theological matters, such as what is good and evil in a human
community, were nomoi, Greek plural for nomos.
Socrates as the first important Cultural Studies
practitioner, so to speak, invited interlocutors to argue with him
through his famous maieutics. The Socratian debate or
maieutics was a dialectical approach of conducting a
34
conversation in such a way that the philosopher’s interlocutor
was led to discover that certain things that he had taken for
granted as immutable truth (as part of the world of physis) were
culturally constructed (as part of the world of nomos – nomoi).
What is more, some of these culturally constructed things were
also wrong, unjust or unfair. The important thing was not only
to become aware of this, but also to be able to change some of
the things that were initially considered to be unquestionable
and immutable.
In his introductory book, Surber equates a succession of
critical discourses about culture and their dialectical
relationships of successive challenges with the story of Cultural
Studies itself:
In its broad and more theoretical sense, it indicates the range
of modern discourses that go beyond disciplines and their
particular theories, employing the notion of culture in a
distinctive way and specifying certain critical practices as
appropriate for analyzing given cultural activities, products,
and institutions (7).
Although Surber starts from the interrogations of Socrates
about the arbitrary distinctions people used to make between
what we now call nature and culture, his survey skips the
centuries until the age of the Enlightenment (roughly, from the
late 16th century to the French Revolution). The critical
discourses about culture will each contribute to the features of
what would become, in a more technical sense, Cultural
Studies in the 20th century, in their dialectical dialog with
previous discourses and with aspects of their contemporary
culture.
Another useful introductory volume to cultural studies
in terms of the cultural theory informing it is Jeff Browitt and
Andrew Milner’s Contemporary Cultural Theory. The book
covers a shorter temporal range, while making a distinction
between utilitarian and anti-utilitarian theorizing about culture,
35
with emphasis on anti-utilitarian perspectives as representative
of Cultural Studies proper, in their special relationship of
inclusion or ‘coexistence’ with forms of Critical Theory. It
should be noted from the very beginning that each of the
subsequent sections of this historical outline is not to be seen as
a temporal link in the long chain of critical cultural discourse
as cultural studies leading to … institutionalized Cultural
Studies.

II.2.The metamorphoses of liberal humanism: an overview

of systematic skepticism’s cultural critique within liberal
humanism
The critical discourse associated with the rise of Modernity as a
whole, with the Enlightenment more precisely, in opposition to
the medieval system, thought and practices, is called liberal
humanism, which will undergo significant changes in its
development until the present day. At all times until it became
a prevailing ideology itself, it promoted a critical view on the
ruling cultural institutions and prevailing practices of the day, a
feature that cultural studies in the 20th and 21st centuries
inherited. Its first and foremost type of cultural critique was a
systematic skepticism, which reminds one of Lyotard’s famous
definition of the postmodern condition. Lyotard defines it as
‘incredulity toward grand narratives,’ and skepticism is there
all right with liberal humanism centuries before the formulation
of the postmodern condition. It is worth noting that all the
subsequent critical discourses were naturally … critical of
some of the liberal humanist ideas, the more so in the 20th and
21st centuries. Nevertheless, liberal humanism’s declared
agenda, of never taking anything for granted, promoting a
critical attitude of anything whose only claim to truth was
authority and revered tradition, served as a good starting point
for further critical investigations of cultural processes and
phenomena. It promoted secularization, the advances of
36
modern science and the scientific method, the firm belief in
progress, democratic principles having as their object the
individual as the center of all cultural pursuits.
Like Socrates on an individual basis, the liberal
humanists as a group in a loose sense, still a minority but
influential in the realm of ideas, subjected all forms of received
beliefs, religious and otherwise, to a systematic critique. They
pitted their reasoned approach against the superstitions of the
previous medieval age, whose worst episodes were linked to
the barbarous Dark Ages (from the 5th to the 15th centuries).
The barbarous traditions and their superstitions were mainly
linked to the main centers of authority of the Middle Ages: the
absolutist monarchy, based on its aristocracy and the intolerant
Roman Catholic Church.
Liberal humanism was not necessarily dismissive of
medieval culture as artifacts (Gothic architecture, poetry,
music). It condemned the opposition that medieval institutions
and practices exerted against the free exercise of reason and
scientific thought and experiment. Once again, it was reason
against tradition as superstition, culture and civilization against
barbarism. Liberal humanism favored the exploration,
description, and explanation of the phenomena in the real
world.
The liberal dimension of this critical cultural discourse
advocated freedom against the constraints that the prevailing
institutions were imposing on the individual. This humanist
dimension proclaimed that the highest ideal of the progress of
history was the individuals’ realization of their human
potential. Will that dream come true or will it turn into
Enlightenment’s failed project?
Generations of cultural critics will have to address this
crucial issue, while 20th century social psychologists will
define this permanent drama of identity through the opposition
between an individual’s or a group’s agency (ability and power
37
to make choices) and the formidable impact of structure (the
combined effect of institutions and various other constraints
that limit the subject’s power as agent).

II.3. Bacon’s skepticism of ‘Idology’

Francis Bacon was among the first skeptical thinkers (in such
select company as René Descartes) to question the authority of
both the ancients and of more immediate predecessors. His
largely empirical approach, more than the more theoretical,
rational approach promoted by Descartes, paved the ground for
the empiricism of the Cultural Studies today, while also being
instrumental in developing the scientific method. The method
involves moving from making empirical observations to
identifying interesting questions to formulating working
hypotheses to working out predictions and testing them to
emerging general theories. This arduous path is problematic,
though, made difficult, among other things, by the
imperfections of the behavior of individuals and groups, as any
skeptic thinker is well aware of.
Peter Urbach warns the reader of Bacon’s work as a
whole to adopt a provisional, conjectural attitude, given the
scope and diversity of his investigations, his critical attitude to
the imperfections of other people’s thinking as well as to those
of his own:
One should not be surprised if a philosopher like Francis
Bacon, with a prodigious output over many years, produces
inconsistent or changing doctrines. Clearly, if we are to credit
this philosopher with a consistent theory, some of his ideas
will have to be adopted as central and others reinterpreted, or
perhaps set aside as based on errors which we suppose would
have been corrected by the author had he had them pointed
out. Any reading of the philosopher’s work is therefore bound
to be conjectural (113).

38
 Bacon’s skepticism was obviously not nihilistic and his
critique of learning and of human behavior, including the
imperfect workings of the mind, set him on the right path to the
discovery of ‘of a new logic of discovery in the investigation of
nature’, as Perez Zagorin claims in his investigation of what he
calls ‘Bacon’s objectivity’ in his Novum Organum:
Bacon's foremost goal as a philosopher was the attainment of a
new logic of discovery in the investigation of nature that
would greatly enhance human cognitive power and assure the
continual progress of the sciences and the growth of
knowledge. edge. His conception of objectivity is entirely
bound up with this end. This conception is formulated most
completely in his Novum Organum (384).
The road is open for those who investigate Bacon’s major work
to call his approach objective, in terms of the attempt to
transcend the imperfections of any subjective individual or
simply skeptical, as the general critical attitude of the
Enlightenment thinkers.
The Theory of the Idols, developed in his 1620 work,
Novum Organum Scientiarum (The New Instrument of
Science), was among the earliest systematic intellectual
exercises of skepticism inaugurating the critical discourse of
liberal humanism. This was a skeptical undertaking critically
addressing prevailing prejudices of his age, but, at another
level, it amounted to an important illustration of modern
cultural critique, aimed at assessing and exposing the ‘idols’:
different types of human delusion and the institutionalized
forms they assume in culture. In his opinion, these idols were
linked to four main sources of human delusion: the idols of the
tribe, the idols of the cave, the idols of the marketplace, and the
idols of the theater. Their critical examination may be seen as
what later would be called ideological critique, what Bacon
would have called, to exploit the pun once again, ‘idological
critique’.
39
 The idols of the tribe are caused by the manner
employed by human understanding. In order to make sense of
the world around, one depends on sensations. Such
information, though, is fallible. One then organizes and turns
the information provided by these sensations into knowledge
based on abstract concepts. This takes the human mind to
distance itself even further from the real material causes which
were the object apprehended by the original sensations. Thus
people take for reality what has already become an abstract and
very selective representation of the empirical world of
experience.
The name of the second type of ‘idological’ or
‘ideological’ delusion, the idols of the cave, is reminiscent of
Plato’s allegory of the cave in the Republic. As a consequence
of the effects caused by the first idol, each individual will
select one particular abstract picture of the world around on the
basis of their own subjective choices, abilities and prejudices.
People will choose one way of looking at the world, and will
tend to take the view filtered and refracted through their
subjective lenses for the accurate view of the world or even for
the world itself.
‘The idols of the marketplace’ have to do with the
power of language at social level, where individuals share
language to get to know the world and to interact on its basis.
This type of deception is caused by the links made between
what he calls words and names. Bacon thus becomes aware of
the special status that language assumes, both useful and
deceptive tool, in this way inaugurating a form of cultural
critique that foregrounds the workings of language in shaping
human experience. Although language is vital in human
interaction and communication, it may also give rise to the
greatest deceptions. The impression that language faithfully
‘reflects’ the world is wrong. The mere existence of a word
might lead people to think that it faithfully refers to something
40
‘out there.’ Francis Bacon considers language the main
instrument used to create what one might call ‘idological’
effects at the social level. By means of this ‘idol,’ socially
shared beliefs and prejudices are taken for granted as true.
‘Idology’ becomes ideology, and people do not question it,
seeing it as the right view on things.
The fourth type of delusion completes the effect of the
third. It is described through the phrase ‘idols of the theater,’
which are systematic ways of thinking, philosophical systems
in a general sense. This form of deception is systematically
disseminated as ‘grand narratives’ of learning in different
intellectual fields. Bacon is concerned with, and concerned
about, the impact that a specific conception or method can
exercise, from a position of authority, over an entire area of
learning. Like cultural critics today, he advocates the adoption
of a critical attitude toward any self-proclaimed, or authority-
based, exclusive or privileged kind of methodology.
In addition to his careful skepticism in relation to the
limitations of the human mind to view reality accurately,
Bacon’s liberal humanism is also to be seen in his realistic, but
far from skeptical attitude to Nature, expressing confidence in
humankind’s powers to relate to it.
Francis Bacon’s cultural project stresses the need for
something similar to what we call critical thinking today.
People, he claims, should identify the idols (of the prevailing
ideology, one feels tempted to add), they should be aware of
what causes them and how they have an impact on individuals
and groups as a whole. Although he may be seen as a
forerunner of cultural studies through his skepticism, he was
also a man of his time to a certain extent. He recommended a
skeptical, empirical attitude against the supremacy of the idols,
while also accepting the authority of the Classics and of a
certain form of enlightened Christian doctrine.

41
 Brian Vickers aptly captures these two coordinates, the
scientific and the religious, which are suggested from the very
beginning of the Novum Organum by the engraving of the
sailing ship of learning overcoming difficulties and by a
quotation from the Bible, ‘the book of books’:
One of the most famous images in English Renaissance
literature is the engraved title page to Bacon’s Instauratio
Magna, showing the ship of learning sailing back through the
“pillars of Hercules” - the straits of Gibraltar which
traditionally marked the limits of human knowledge of the
world - returning from the open seas, bringing with it new
ideas and discoveries. Underneath the engraving is a quotation
from the Book of Daniel (12:4) in the Latin Vulgate: Multi
pertransibunt et augebitur scientia. Bacon adopted this
quotation as his own, giving it a rather personal interpretation,
as he explained when using it for the first time in chapter 1 of
Valerius Terminus, entitled “of the limits and end of
knowledge.” Here he writes that although the highest “law of
nature” is reserved for God, the inferior levels of knowledge
are still “many and noble”(495).

Title page of the original edition.

42
 These inferior, but noble levels of knowledge, in order
to be reliable, have to be protected, like the ship in the
engraving above, from the pillars of Hercules or the Scylla and
Charybdis that obstruct the plain sailing of human knowledge.
These pillars may be seen as another representation of the idols
that Bacon warns his reader about. These idols preventing
people to see things as they really are will be later described by
two terms that will become central in Cultural studies, like the
pillars of Hercules in the Strait of Gibraltar: ideology,
especially as prevailing ideology, as well as its subtle, all-
pervasive form, hegemony (see Antonio Gramsci).

II.4. Descartes’s dualist rationalism

Marxist approaches to culture and society, having a strong
material basis (economic determinism is the term that
‘consecrates’ the primacy of the economic base over the
cultural superstructure) obviously start with … Marx and his
sponsor and fellow ideologue, Engels in the shortest historical
narrative, but a leap backward to the beginning of previous
developments linked to materialist cultural discourses may start
with an idealist’s philosophical doctrine. Almost two millennia
ago, Lucretius had written his remarkable poem, De rerum
natura (On the Nature of Things).
Descartes disliked poetry and the humanities in general,
preferring the rigor of mathematics as the inspiration for a
rationalist approach to … res naturae. Descartes’s dualist
philosophical system divided, in true avant-la-lettre
structuralist fashion, the nature of things between res extensa
(material things that extend in space) and res cogitans
(‘thinking things’ a nice way to call Descartes himself and
other thinking organisms, humankind as a whole). The thinking
things were the human beings, in whom the material body is
distinct in nature and separate from the spiritual mind.

43
 David L. Smith acknowledges the importance of this
Cartesian distinction as the prevailing view that would define
not necessarily the dualism mind – matter, but also the special
relationship between the more immaterial mind and the more
material brain, well into the 20th century:
Descartes held that mind and body were made from two
distinct “substances”. He believed that the body is made out of
physical substance and exists in space, whereas the mind is
made of immaterial substance and exists only in time. In
contrast to the spiritual nature of mind, the body is nothing but
a complicated machine. Over the next few centuries, other
philosophers proposed novel forms of dualism. In one form or
another, dualism remained the prevailing view of the
relationship between mind and brain until the twentieth
century (12).
Descartes’s famous statement, Cogito ergo sum (I
think, therefore I am) establishes him as the first acknowledged
rationalist, but also as a rationalist in an idealist tradition (the
mind defines the subject, so the mind is primary, matter is
secondary, a statement that will stir Marx and some of his
forerunners to disagree). To simplify, one can see his
rationalism defining the individual as a mind whose
embodiment is completely neglected. This disembodied mind
is also endowed with some a priori ideas, innate knowledge,
with some sort of thinking acquisition device that appears to
foreshadow Professor Noam Chomsky’s Language Acquisition
Device in his versions of Generative Transformational
Grammars more than three centuries later.
In another way, Descartes also belongs to the tradition
of careful, systematic skepticism associated with the
beginnings of liberal humanism, since his above-mentioned
statement also contains a preliminary element of doubt, a more
comprehensive quote being, ‘dubito ergo cogito, ergo sum.’
Arguably, that also makes him one of the predecessors of the
44
postmodern condition, with its Lyotardian incredulity toward
grand narratives.
Obviously, in his time, Descartes could not declare
doubts concerning the most important grand narrative of his
age for very obvious reasons. Again arguably, for the sake of
argument, Descartes also outlines a mechanistic account of the
world and of human beings in particular.
In addition to the ‘mechanical side,’ the human beings’
rational souls elevate them above both machines and animals.
Humans have consciousness, have rational minds and souls,
while animals, although living creatures, are more like
machines, unable to feel pain and suffer. Such rationalist
statements dividing living matter between creatures endowed
with reason, therefore sensitive, on the one hand, and those
deprived of reason, therefore deprived of intelligence
whatsoever and consequently unable to feel, like automata, are
unlikely to make Descartes very popular among 21st century
militants of animal rights, of animal lovers in general.
An idealist in the philosophical context is therefore not
necessarily very humane. Neither is Descartes a lover of the
humanities (he prefers math to humanistic nonsense), but his
critical, questioning, doubting attitude links him to both the
first steps of the liberal humanist cultural march and to
subsequent idealist, rationalist, materialist developments in true
dialectical fashion. Descartes thought (thought for him is more
important than belief) that the laws of material nature should be
derived, not from empirical observation, but from mathematics.
One may say that his kind of idealism is
anthropocentric and ‘cogitocentric’: for Descartes, the material
world, res extensa, was an extension over which the sovereign
human thinking subjects can exert their control through the
command of scientific, mathematical, calculable knowledge.
Using one’s deductive powers, then, one can safely say that
Descartes’ kicking his ‘mechanical dog’ out of his study (no
45
pain) and eating meat did not pose any serious ethical problems
for him.
Descartes’s version of rationalism is idealist in the
sense in which the discourses of liberal humanism and of
hermeneutics can be seen as idealist. Descartes, heralding
subsequent liberal humanist and hermeneutical thinkers,
considers the human subject and the accompanying cultural
manifestations as the point of departure in any critical approach
to the world. His idealist rational discourse will soon be
reconfigured in a materialist critical discourse that will move
the materialist cultural critique closer to that of the prophet of
the proletarian revolution in the 19th century.

II.5.Reason and the natural law: Hobbes and Locke’s

contributions
Thomas Hobbes paved the way toward a more modern
understanding of reason and the natural law, completely at
variance with that of the ancient and medieval traditions. In his
1651 treatise on political science, Leviathan, Hobbes put forth
a purely instrumental conception of reason, a critical view of it
as a source of moral judgment.

46
 Leviathan starts from marking the boundaries between
the religious realm and the ‘body politick,’ the latter
foreshadowed on the cover of the book. Hobbes makes a
distinction between the empirical world and our imperfect
perceptions of it. The imperfection and subjectivity of what
Hobbes calls ‘Ideas, Idols, Phantasmes, Conceits’ lead to
distortion and to fetishism in the form of idolatry, which is no
longer used in a religious sphere only, but, as David Hawkes
notes, moves ‘into the secular notion of ideology’ (43), while
also being reminiscent of Bacon’s already mentioned theory
about the imperfection of the human mind and the accidents of
what has been called here ‘idology.’
In a move that foreshadows 19th century materialist
cultural discourses, Hobbes claimed that politics must deal,
first of all, with basic material forces, like any other science. In
politics, which deals with relations among human beings, these
material forces consisted in the basic passions of attraction and
repulsion. Rather than seeing that reason was a divine gift
which straightforwardly linked people to a natural law, he
insisted that reason amounted to no more than a tool that the
passions used. Our basic motive force, our passions, decreed
the goals to be attained by people’s deeds.
Reason only worked in order to enable people to find
the best ways of reaching those goals. In Hobbes’s treatise,
reason displayed no natural ends in itself. It so followed that no
moral law was to be derived or expected from a natural
tendency that was entirely dependent on the passions.
John Locke (1632- 1704), like Bacon and Hobbes,
starts from an awareness of the limitations of the human mind.
J.D. Mabbott starts his examination of Locke’s An Essay on
Human Understanding by drawing attention to this aspect in
the philosopher’s work in relation to the concept of the ‘idea’
and how it is engendered in a person’s mind:

47
 Locke begins his enquiry into human understanding by
apologising for the frequent use throughout the Essay of the
word ‘idea’ ... that term which, I think, serves best to stand for
whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man
thinks.’ He adds ‘I presume it will easily be granted me that
there are such ideas in men’s minds; every one is conscious of
them in himself, and men’s words and actions will satisfy him
that they are in others. Our first enquiry then shall be how they
come into the mind’ (15).
Locke was quick to note that the view on natural law was
complicated in practice by various difficulties. The fact that the
laws governing human affairs were not as easy to discern in the
nature of things as those rules presiding over material nature
was easy to establish. The law of gravitation, for instance,
would be much easier for us today to ascertain than that of the
divine right of kings or of the justification and legitimation of
all forms of government relying on the consent of those
governed, moving away from authoritarian regimes toward
more democratic systems.
John Locke went on to vindicate the instrumental
function of reason. Locke looked for a way to preserve a moral
dimension for reason without referring to a social order
established by divine providence. In his “Second Treatise on
Government” (1690), Locke claims that human reason is not to
be seen as wholly dependent on the passions. He thinks that
reason is able to manage a balance between satisfaction in the
short run and possible effects to be contemplated in the long
run. Which means that what he calls the natural light of human
reason tells people that if in satisfying their desires they wrong
other people or damage their property, the latter will feel
justified in responding in the same unjust manner. As a
consequence of this commonsensical realization mediated by
human reason, people are ‘enlightened’ on the advantage of
exerting fair play and self-restraint in their interactions with
48
other people, on the basis of the so-called enlightened self-
interest.
Michael Pusey compares the two parallel traditions, the
first starting from Hume and Locke, the second including
Hegel and Marx, which would feature in the development of
modern social thought, stressing the importance of individual
enterprise under the protective shelter of the State in the former
(Lockean and Hobbesian) tradition:
[…] from Locke and Hobbes to the classical liberalism and
utilitarianism of J.S.Mill and Jeremy Bentham, the individual
has a clear primacy. The natural relation between one
individual and the next is of difference and competition.
Consequently individuals mutually contract to assign some of
their natural rights to the State—so that they may more
happily pursue their own individual ends. Only the private
enterprise of the individual is creative (16).
In the Hegel and Marx tradition, the individual is seen as an
instance of an abstract and transcendental history-making
entity. Interestingly enough, it was the individualism of the
first tradition that led to tangible democratic achievements in
the near future through the discussion of the contractarian
theory rather than the Hegel -Marx line.

II.6.Spinoza the double agent

A younger traveler on the intellectual road from idealist to
materialist critical cultural discourse was Baruch Spinoza
(1632-1677). Spinoza undertook to demonstrate that
phenomena can be approached and explained either from a
materialist or from an idealist perspective, which might show a
somewhat strenuous effort to accommodate contrary or
contradictory positions, or to explore, in dialectical fashion,
various perspectives. This explains his renewed relevance
today, but also the mixed bundle of rejection and praise that

49
Idit Dobbs-Weinstein notes in her study on Spinoza’s influence
on subsequent materialist thinkers (Marx, Benjamin, Adorno):
To my knowledge, no philosopher has been simultaneously
embraced and rejected for as many reasons as has Spinoza. At the
same time as Spinoza was read as a rationalist, he was also read as
a mystic; the same elements that have led to his description as a
“God intoxicated man” gave rise to the accusations of pantheism
and, most frequently, heresy; and the same “heresies” for which he
has been denounced by some philosophers and theologians are the
ones celebrated by others (21).
The natural order and the realm of the spirit appear to
engage in a sort of peaceful coexistence in his philosophical
system, the choice of a materialist or of an idealist approach
being a matter of opportunity, depending on the specific issue
to be dealt with and explained by the idealist materialist
thinker. A quote from the Preface to his Ethics clarifies this
non-dualist position regarding ‘the nature of anything’: ‘the
way of understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind,
must … be the same, viz. through the universal laws and rules
of nature’(qtd. Allison 125).
In Ethics, his magnum opus, Spinoza challenges some
of Descartes’s main philosophical views (the clear-cut dualism
mind-body, the idea that the senses can be wholly trusted, that
there is free will, that God is transcendent, rather than Nature
itself). The view that God was non-transcendent made Spinoza
the promoter of Pantheism in Western Europe, thus bringing
Providence closer to the world as apprehended by the humans.
Discussing Spinoza’s veiled challenge to his times as well as to
modernity, Brayton Polka notes the philosopher’s bold
demarcation made in his Theologico-Political Treatise:
[…] his central purpose in the Theologico-Political Treatise is
to separate philosophy from theology such that neither is the
hand-maiden of the other—in sharp contrast to Thomas
Aquinas who, typical of high medieval scholastics, held that
50
 philosophy was ancillary to (the ancilla or handmaiden of)
theology (3).
In addition to separating the ontological fields
investigated by philosophy and theology, Spinoza also travels
into epistemologically problematic realms. Although he calls
sensory perception ‘knowledge of the first kind,’ he finds it
untrustworthy, since it has more to do with the resources of
people’s bodies than with the purity of a disembodied
individual reason. He values ‘knowledge of the second kind’ or
‘reason’ more, which includes knowledge about the
characteristics of all things, incorporating scientific knowledge
from geometry and physics. The third kind is intuitive
knowledge or ‘knowledge of the third kind.’ Intuition is more
elusive, more difficult to encompass, having to do with attempt
at making understanding divine nature and other ineffable ideas
of a higher order than that of the other two kinds of knowledge,
which are hampered by the affects or the passions of embodied,
not wholly rational, subjects.
Developments in the sciences in the late 17th and early
th
18 century, the Newtonian revolution in physics, as well as
the favorable conditions facilitated by the Protestant
Reformation in Western Europe, which, in its ideological
rivalry with the Catholic Church, encouraged scientific
discoveries challenging established religious dogma, led to
increased intellectual effervescence, all this in the wake of such
philosophical ‘double agents’ as Spinoza.

II.7. Hume and his ‘leaky weather-beaten vessel’

Although David Hume, the 18th century historian and
philosopher, is rightly considered one of the giants of
philosophy, he did not fail to note the relativity and limitations
of human knowledge, following an emerging tradition of
skepticism in which Descartes’s dubitative rationalism and
Bacon’s ‘anti-idological’ stance have already taken their
51
important place. Hume broadened the scope of intellectual
skepticism to encompass the field of the sciences as well. This
is an attitude that cultural theorists of the 1970s and 1980s also
used to challenge the findings of the natural sciences, whether
rightly or wrongly.
Hume believed that the main aim of science is to
identify necessary and unchanging cause – effect connections
holding between various natural events under investigation. He
was aware that if one wishes to get the real meaning of an idea,
one will follow it backward to the original impression, but the
idea of causality is fraught with considerable difficulties. It is
basically formed on the knowledge acquired, and the habit
formed, by the past observation of one kind of impression
being immediately accompanied by another one. It is usually
confirmed by the tendency to expect the same sequence of
impressions repeated in the future as cause followed by effect.
Nevertheless, Hume came to realize that this kind of
expectation is not guaranteed, that future impressions might be
displayed in patterns of sequencing which are different from
the previous ones. This skeptical realization led to a critical
attitude toward the firm belief in scientific reason as well as in
other forms of less scientific knowledge. His skeptical attitude
makes him follow different philosophical paths, which
inevitably shows flexibility of mind that some might consider
inconsistency.
Although Hume valued the qualities of scientific
knowledge based on precision, explanation, and prediction, his
critique was conducted with the awareness that the apparently
truthful account of the world by the scientific forms of
knowledge did not reach any apprehension of the world as it
really is. Hume found these apparently infallible forms of
knowledge equally open to a critical approach, in ways similar
to those having to do with any of the less ‘scientific’ forms of
cultural discourse, an attitude that 20th and 21st century cultural
52
critics have come to adopt. His forms of relativism and
pluralism are preferable to self-righteous dogma and
fundamentalism in a world torn apart by inimical ideologies
within the increasingly united and disunited world of
globalization today.
The previously mentioned engraving of the ship of
learning at the beginning of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum
evokes both a mighty, bold ship sailing the seas of knowledge
and the pillars of Hercules symbolizing the difficulties awaiting
it. Rather than sailing on board an indestructible battleship, in
David Hume’s opinion, any virtuous citizen ‘pursues the good
of his or her country in a “leaky weather-beaten vessel,”’ as
Marc Hanvelt quotes the philosopher in his essay on Hume’s
‘fortitude of the uncertain’(201).

II.8.Liberal humanism and the strategy of moral critique

In addition to systematic skepticism, another strategy that
liberal humanism employed was moral critique. It featured
consistent endeavors to set up a foundation for the individual’s
moral judgment concerning prevailing institutions and
practices. In Ancient Greece, thinkers like Aristotle were
inclined to see an individual’s morality deriving from political
practice. Later, during the Middle Ages, the theological
doctrine would also subordinate individual moral judgment to
its requirements.
The Enlightenment thinkers were critical of both
approaches. They tended to consider the individual as the only
source out of which might come a critical attitude toward
prevailing cultural practices. They depended on the natural
propensity of the individuals to notice the imperfections of
institutions and to challenge them. Skeptical strategies tended
to consider issues concerning the status that human knowledge
assumed, in the belief that it could be best approached by the
sciences. In its turn, moral critique endorsed the capacity for
53
moral judgment which exists in human nature itself. The
critical discourse of liberal humanism issued critical
pronouncements on those existing cultural practices that were
found unacceptable, expressing the argumentations that would
substantiate such condemnations.
One of the expressions of these critical pronouncements
was the response to the notion of natural law, a critical position
which emerged in the seventeenth century as a secularized,
improved version of earlier medieval and ancient thought on
the same issue. Earlier versions to which these expressions
responded claimed that natural law was some sort of gift from
a god that had endowed humankind with reason. This divine
gift, reason, was, in the tradition of natural law, the innate
capacity to elucidate the unchanging natural laws and to
discover and establish additional laws that could be important
for humankind.

II.9.The liberal humanist debate between the essentialist

and the contractarian views on rights, freedom and liberty
The concepts and attending values of freedom, liberty, human
rights, which occupy center stage in the contemporary
discourse of cultural studies, were also an important
component of the critical discourse of liberal humanism. There
were two distinct, but often interwoven, contexts in which the
problematics of these concepts and values were dealt with: the
naturalist/ essentialist view and the contractarian view.
In the naturalist/ essentialist view, the nature, the
essence of the human beings, consists in these individuals
being able to exert agency, to make decisions based on their
own will, free from external constraints, thus expressing
themselves through the exercise of liberty. Human rights are
therefore natural and essential. The essentialist or naturalist
view will have to establish which human actions can be
constrained by whom under which legitimating circumstances.
54
 In the contractarian theory, which was the prevailing
one in the heyday of the Enlightenment, rights originate in a
social contract by means of which each party promises to
respect the rights of others if the others reciprocate. Since
liberty and rights are not natural or essential in this view, it
follows that if one party violates the rights of the other party/
parties, even if the violator might be an authoritarian ruler, the
previous agreement can be declared null and void.
The preference that the liberal humanists expressed for
the contractarian view is easy to understand, given their dislike
for unjust, abusive, oppressive institutions, viewed as relics of
a barbarous past. Jere Paul Surber invokes the example of
Locke in the developments which will eventually enforce
something that had been unheard of in the age consecrating the
divine rule of kings and queens: ‘such thinkers as Locke
wished to claim a “right of rebellion,” whereby the governed
could legitimately absolve themselves of their duties toward
the state in cases where the state violated the original terms of
the contract that had called it into being’ (32).
The liberal humanist opposite views on rights and
liberties held by the two theories of essentialism and
contractarianism have lingered at the core of this critical
cultural discourse up to the present day. The heated arguments
and the dilemmas which divided the two camps drew attention
to weaknesses and inconsistencies, a situation which led to the
emergence of other critical discourses. Three of these
dilemmas acquired particular prominence.
The first dilemma involving the essentialist and the
contractarian approaches to rights and liberty comes from their
logically opposed positions. Liberal humanism cannot favor
either position at the expense of the other. The vast majority of
the Enlightenment scholars were in favor of a universalist
vision of rights and liberties extending to all human beings as
sensible and rational creatures. This attitude logically led to the
55
assignment of such attributes to the essence of what it means to
be human. Consequently, exercising freedom and enjoying
human rights implied no previous contract. On the other hand,
as thinkers expressing critical views on their contemporary
culture, they were also intent on working out lines of argument
by means of which the aura of God-given legitimacy could be
removed from the oppressive institutions which affected them.
This led to the creation of the critical discourse dependent on
the idea of the social contract. When disregarded by one party,
there was justification for the other party to call it null and void
as well.
One serious problem here was that there were some
human creatures that were currently excluded from the
contract: the slaves. Their condition in relation to the
unalienable rights promoted by the US Constitutions would
remain the central issue of this dilemma in the New World for
a long time. In the 20th century, a solution to this problem was
sought within the framework of distinct human and civil rights.
The second dilemma was linked to the concept of
liberty becoming even thornier if one considered the
contractarian theory. The essentialist theory declared freedom
as a natural attribute of people without the need of any
argument. On the other hand, the contractarian view considered
a marked distinction between a ‘natural’ freedom sufficient to
allow becoming a party of a contract and an ‘artificial’ liberty
(agreed upon) which ensued from that contract.
Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the author of The Social
Contract (1762), whose contractarian views would inspire the
leaders of the French Revolution, realized the consequences of
having to choose artificial liberty at the expense of natural
freedom. Although he worked to legitimize the liberty of
citizens in a democratic society where laws are democratically
arrived at, he remained undecided about which of the two – the

56
natural freedom of the individual or the political, contractual
liberty of the citizen – is to be given priority.
This dilemma has continued to confront people up to
the present time. The situation of a conscientious objector who
refuses to fight and kill people, as well as other cases of civil
disobedience, not to mention violent revolutions, draws
attention to the fact that not all citizens always accept generally
agreed upon liberties to individual, rather than the natural
freedoms that they consider more valuable.
The third dilemma has to do with the status of the
concept of rights. Since rights, like liberty, are part of the social
contract, are they to be enforced for everyone or are they
merely to be proclaimed as a potentiality? If one has the right
to work, does that mean that the community in which he or she
lives has to provide work for everyone? In communist
countries, for example, not only did people have the right to
employment, they were, more often than not, forced to work,
unemployment being seen as unnacceptable. The terms had
been changed: the state guaranteed this right, the citizen was
forced to accept it, willy-nilly.
The most memorable paragraph of the United States
Declaration of Independence provided some interesting issues
for discussion, first in the combination of the meanings of
natural freedom and artificial liberty (formally, at that moment
America was no longer a colony, not yet a sovereign state to
provide such ‘artificial’ liberties):
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed.
At the beginning of this impressive statement, the natural
freedoms of the people are seen as unalienable rights (it is true,
57
they are not seen as granted by the British Empire, but by
God). Then, there follow Rousseau’s (as the best-known
advocate of the civil contract) ideas about the legitimacy of the
governments, implying the consent of the governed, and the
governments’ obligations to secure the rights. The statement
also illustrates the bone of contention that two liberal humanist
parties had to address: will governments be held accountable
for securing these rights, to what extent, and who would be the
beneficiaries? Is ‘all men are created equal’ deliberately
ambiguous or is it only how language used ‘men’ for generic
use (all humankind). Would all men include all white, yellow
and black men and exclude women? Would it include white
men and women and exclude the others, irrespective of sex?
The tendency to narrow the application of the term rights in the
political area was the main reason for the emergence of the
suffragette movement at the beginning of the 20th century and
of the civil rights movement after the Second World War.

II.10. From hesitation to assertiveness: historical critique

from the early Enlightenment to its heyday - Vico
Historical critique reached its climactic moments in the 19 th
century. Until then, since the beginning of the Enlightenment,
it had somehow kept a low profile, being less conspicuous than
the previously discussed forms of liberal humanist cultural
discourse (systematic skepticism, moral critique, or rights-and-
liberty-based critique). Since the Church had imposed the
theological as teleological interpretation of history as the effect
of the workings of divine Providence, there was considerable
hesitation to engage in cultural criticism: all was as it should be
in the world’s historical narrative from the initial Genesis days
to the Last Judgment of the Apocalypse. In spite of that, there
was considerable progress in historiography, with the
specification that it became prominent in the late 18 th century,
especially in such non-Catholic countries as Britain.
58
 Although David Hume’s History of England and
Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
were the most remarkable achievements in the Anglo-Saxon
world, it was the Italian Giambattista Vico who had come up
before them with a modern historiographic method. His
foundational historical critique would then be employed by the
idealist Hegel and then by materialist Marx to develop what
would become the materialist form of modern critical historical
materialist discourse, itself the prevailing influence on the
emergence of 20th century forms of Cultural Studies in the
contemporary sense. All these can be considered from the
perspective of an increasing historicist position, informing all
the versions of current Cultural Studies.

Third, final edition of Scienza Nuova

The title of Scienza Nuova (1st edition, 1725, 3rd and
final edition, 1744), Vico’s historical magnum opus, alluded
polemically to the earlier forms of natural science developed
by René Descartes and Galileo Galilei. In his new scientific
approach, Vico paved the ground for the creation of a
historically-based science of human affairs that would compete
in terms of scholarly rigor with the natural sciences. His
modernity as a lucid historiographer (the new historicists of the
59
late 20th century will undoubtedly have appreciated that) can be
seen from such statements as this one, from the 1744 edition,
on the bias that prevents historians from interpreting the past
more accurately:
122 It is another property of the human mind that whenever
men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they
judge them by what is familiar and at hand. 123 This axiom
points to the inexhaustible source of all the errors aboutthe
beginnings of humanity that have been adopted by entire
nations and by all the scholars. For when the former began to
take notice of them and the latter to investigate them, it was on
the basis of their own enlightened, cultivated and magnificent
times that they judged the origins of humanity, which must
nevertheless by the nature of things have been small, crude
and quite obscure (54).
Verum ipsum factum (what is true equals what is created) is
Vico’s creed. For the natural sciences, this principle implied
that scientists were not, as they mistakenly believed, actually
unraveling the unchanging mysteries of the natural laws. They
were actually developing provisional models or constructs by
means of which nature could be apprehended in its complexity
by far from omniscient minds. What ordinary people and
scientists alike may hope to learn about the natural and the
cultural worlds amounts to what they have created or
constructed for themselves. Vico’s ‘constructionist’ view of
what natural science can do contributed to the natural scientists
adopting more realistic claims. His findings supported the idea
that, since the human constructs of nature were not final but
provisional, the activity of the natural scientists was amenable
to historical critique.
In contemporary cultural studies discourse, as well as in
the related fields of sociology and communication theory,
Vico’s idea, according to which human beings rationalize their
experience by constructing models of the world is a very
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important principle, the principle of social constructionism,
while the whole undertaking has to do with what has become
one of the pillars of critical cultural discourse over the last few
centuries under the broad concept of historicism.

II.11. Kant’s contribution to the foundations of critical

rationalism
Kant’s essay ‘Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan
Intent’ (1784) clearly shows the paramount importance that he
conferred upon culture. Very much like other prominent
figures in what is sometimes called the culture and civilization
tradition in the development of the liberal humanist cultural
discourse, Kant equated culture with civilization, seeing it, or
either of them, as the highest expression of the human spirit, as
the victory over the barbarism that all Enlightenment thinkers
opposed.
Kant considered culture as fundamental for the
development of individual taste and of individual abilities and
for the promotion of individual talent or genius, a view that
prevailed in cultural discourse well into the 20th century, before
being challenged by Cultural Studies. However, what cannot be
challenged by the Birmingham School and other trends and
perspectives in Cultural Studies is Kant’s contribution to the
foundations of critical rationalism, the realization that any
theoretical approach to knowledge, to the social and natural
world, should be able to lucidly examine both other approaches
and its own validity, foundations and limitations in processes
of reflection and self-reflection, critique and self-critique, of
pure and theoretical reason alike.
Like Vico before him, Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804)
was aware that humans themselves create the models that they
apply in order to make sense of their experience of the world.
Well before the 20th century philosopher Karl Popper, who

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formally founded the epistemological construct called critical
rationalism, Kant contributed to the laying of its foundations.
Kant’s Critical Philosophy went on to become a
historical reference point for later forms of liberal humanist
discourse, in addition to those of most other later critical
cultural approaches. Kant undertook to radicalize the various,
often diverging, critical trends of the Enlightenment into an all-
encompassing critique of pure reason, in the eponymous work
that came to be his first major achievement.
In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant examines the
basis and limitations of knowledge, acknowledging the
accomplishments of both empiricist (Hume and Locke) and
rationalist philosophers (Leibniz) before him. He believed that
if reason were to be vindicated against skeptical attacks such as
those launched by Hume, there was no alternative but to look
to reason itself to provide the response.
Thus, as he explained, the critique of pure reason was
not only a critique directed at reason, but one carried out by
reason. In other words, for Kant the root of all critique was
ultimately self-critique. The undertaking of being critical of
other views, practices, or institutions can be made convincing
if one first demonstrates the ability of self-critique. That was
what prompted him to write his Critique of Pure Reason.
He first undertakes to discriminate among three
meanings that the concept of reason displayed in
Enlightenment philosophical thinking. The general meaning,
encompassing the other two, was the capacity to … reason in
systematic and coherent ways. Its principles, which were
familiar to Aristotle, were the main laws of logic. If
disregarded, the road to fallacy, confusion, and absurdity is
wide open. This intellectual capacity is called pure reason
because it is entirely formal, devoid of content, while also
generally applicable to all other contents. The second meaning
that reason had referred to, misleadingly called, if taken out of
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context, theoretical reason, is the capacity conducive to the
processing of information and the creation of knowledge. The
empirical dimension of this so-called theoretical reason allows
it (it allows theoretical reason) to reach its highest level in the
development of the natural sciences. Therefore, in addition to
having to obey all logical laws governing all the other types of
pure reason, theoretical reason also needed a certain content,
which comes from empirical observations. Last but not least,
the third sense of reason, practical reason, circulated and
disseminated in Enlightenment thought, has to do with the
moral principles and the human actions that they regulate.
Practical reason, very much like theoretical reason, was
controlled by logic and its laws, also needing a certain content.
While the content of theoretical reason was provided by the
sensations working on the natural world, practical reason
derived its content from some morally relevant characteristics
of human nature. The three meanings and what they referred to,
supplied the theoretical framework within which Kant’s
philosophical project was perfected.
Kant thinks that, while pure reason can produce any
kind of ideas, provided that in so doing the basic laws of logic
are not violated, theoretical reason, and human knowledge as a
whole, are confined to the spatial and temporal parameters
which can be observed and linked by cause and effect by
means of the pure laws of the sciences. He also thinks that
mathematics is that human construct which allows a faithful
account of the phenomenal world.
Previous thinkers in the liberal humanist tradition were
right to be suspicious of ideas of pure reason, such as
superstitions and religious doctrines, devoid of convincing
evidence to substantiate their claims. The natural sciences, on
the other hand, while anchored in the productive capabilities of
the mind, can be trusted to produce convincing and systematic
knowledge of the natural world if they confine their work
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within the boundaries of the empirical observations of spatially
and temporally-bound phenomena.
Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788) would be
instrumental in the theoretical support of the moral critique and
of the rights, freedoms, and liberties that the Enlightenment
valued. Kant firmly believed that the moral critique and the
rights-based strategy clearly implied that individuals have
agency, being free to choose what they think the best option for
action is. To be critical of a human institution also implies that
individuals are aware of their potential and that it is possible
for their critique to exert an impact, one of the uses that
practical reason can be put to. Individuals can go beyond
acquiescence, obedience, contemplation and observation
toward decisive cultural and social action, while at the same
time developing their ability to test the foundations and limits
of their own values, beliefs, and theories, a prerequisite that
20th century critical rationalism will consecrate.
In his perceptive survey of critical cultural discourses
preceding the emergence of Cultural Studies proper in the 20th
century, Surber notes the significant changes that strands of
liberal humanism underwent, from oppositional to prevailing
cultural orientations:
[…] by the beginning of the nineteenth century, if liberal
humanism had not entirely triumphed, it had certainly begun
the process of transformation from an oppositional discourse
critical of the status quo to the basis for a set of newly
emergent practices and institutions. As time went on, liberal
humanism itself became the dominant ideology of the most
powerful countries of Europe and the Americas, as it remains,
for the most part, today (43).
As Western societies were changing throughout the 19th
century and capitalism was gaining ground in Europe and
America, liberal humanism was gradually softening its critical
edge, displaying several distinct forms. One of the most
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prominent ones, Matthew Arnold’s, in his Culture and
Anarchy, has already been mentioned in the section on cultural
elitism, inaugurating what some people call the culture and
civilization approach, leading into the late 20th century and
provoking the critical reaction of Cultural Studies and Cultural
Theory. The elitism of such Modernist literary critics and poets
as T.S. Eliot, as well as F.R. Leavis’s advocation of canonical
literature as a sign of culture in opposition to the lower forms
of ‘majority civilization’ were among the most direct targets
and critical landmarks that would lead to the reconsideration of
the concept of culture and of the scope of the field that it has
come to refer to.
One of the most influential forms, if not so much in
academic circles, is included in what Milner and Browitt call
the most important form of cultural discourse today, supported
by big business and government authorities, utilitarianism,
known under its 20th and 21st century form as neoliberalism,
extending from the field of the ideological and of the economic
well into the cultural. Quite understandably, utilitarianism is
less studied in critical theories of culture. Cultural studies
developments have featured only critical attitudes toward what
have been considered the negative aspects of the capitalist
system in a broad sense, of its culture, which, in cultural
studies today, includes a strong political and ideological
component. As for Kant and his appeal to liberal humanists of
all denominations, as well as to followers of a Marxist
denomination, it is largely attributed to what Leszek
Kolakovski acknowledges as the philosopher’s view on
humankind’s main goal:
Kant opens a new chapter in the history of philosophy’s
attempt to overcome the contingency of human existence,
setting up freedom as man’s realization and establishing the
independence of the autonomous reason and will as the

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 ultimate goal of man’s undending pilgrimage towards himself,
a self that will then be divine (50).
Human emancipation will be the central goal of Cultural
Studies, a goal heralded by Marx in his advocation of a more
militant form of philosophy in his Communist Manifesto,
associated, paradoxically, with what one might call the
‘beneficent’ specter that Marx claimed was haunting Europe
then. The militant dimension of social theory associated with
cultural studies will then be dealt with by Max Horkheimer in
his essay about critical theory being different from traditional
theory in this particular respect (for more, see Horkheimer in
the section on the Frankfurt School).

II.12. From empiricism to the early ventures of ‘scientific’

materialism
Empiricism rose to prominence in the study of human
knowledge in its competition with the other epistemological
modes of the time, skepticism and rationalism, which had been
dominating Enlightenment thought. Descartes and rationalism
had started from the thinking subject engaged in a detached
process of deduction, relying on mathematical models to
project mathematical ideas on nature. Empiricism stated that
nature had its own laws and humans had to find them by
carefully observing the world, accumulating evidence and
acting by induction, rather than by deduction. Some of these
thinkers went so far as to openly challenge the importance of
divine intervention in human affairs, coloring their materialist
perspectives with more than Spinoza’s Deism.
La Mettrie (1709-1751) had received the degree of
Doctor in Medicine at the age of 24, his first published work,
two years later, being a translation of a work on … VD
(venereal disease). From the vantage point of this medical
background, he dismissed the idealism that had prolonged
Descartes’s special form of rationalism into the Enlightenment
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age, and which aimed at offering the natural sciences a
metaphysical basis.
He rejected both rationalist Cartesianism and the
superstitions and prejudices mainly perpetuated by the all-
powerful Catholic Church, in a more straightforward way than
previous Enlightenment freethinkers. He, like other materialist
thinkers, firmly believed that people were material entities at
the core of material nature, subjected to the same material
physical laws as the rest of the universe.
La Mettrie went so far as to write and publish an
outrageous work (in the opinion of many, including fans of
Descartes), called Man the Machine. Contradicting Descartes’s
low opinion of the animal machines, La Mettrie gives evidence
to prove that animals are endowed with intelligence, and that
animals and humans are, to a larger or lesser extent …
machines, whose ‘mechanisms’ are essentially material. He
describes what he considers the mechanism of sensations in
humans, going on to demonstrate that the sensitive human soul
is also material. He links the materiality of the soul to the
sensations: humans, no matter what they social condition may
be, have equal rights as far as the gratification of the senses is
concerned. La Mettrie’s discourse strengthens the materialist
position, while also advocating, whether more or less
straightforwardly, the rights or humans of all classes and of
animals to enjoy the material life of the senses.
This is how Ann Thomson assesses La Mettrie’s
polemical response to the author of Discourse on the Method
and his contribution to a materialist approach to the workings
of the mind:
The work is not devoid of a polemical aim, in particular in its
rejection of the Cartesian conception of the soul and of animal
machines, and it also contains a number of satirical elements.
But it mainly attempts to provide detailed explanations of how

67
 matter can explain all natural phenomena, including
intellectual activity (xii).
In the late 18th century, a number of cultural critics
came to reject the general Cartesian theory and its idealist
implications seen as incapable of explaining an ever more
complex modern world in which the scientific method and the
laws of economics were requiring more materialist approaches.
Promoting the economic sciences as the right approach to the
realm of human affairs, these materialist thinkers opened new
avenues of research that would inaugurate the materialist
critical discourse that Marx would bring to maturity in the 19th
century in an increasingly definite capitalist environment.
Like liberal humanism and hermeneutics in the specific
cultural contexts in which they had appeared and had made
their mark, this new kind of discourse was critical, but it
appeared to be so in a more assertive and more thoroughgoing
manner. Critical material discourse claims that philosophical
achievements and artistic and cultural expressions as a whole
are dependent on more substantial, material forces which
enable them.
The early materialists, while not dismissing the
importance of human thought and its impact (after all, they
themselves were thinkers that wanted to have an important
influence), wanted to investigate the ways in which the
material world works to enable the generation of mental and
cultural formations, while these latter function as ideology, an
important concept in these approaches and a central concept in
cultural studies proper, to distort the nature of their material
source. Materialist discourse has been advancing on several
paths and dealing with and engaging with the human and social
sciences, even if it rose with the claim that would become a
Marxist orthodoxy for a long time, that the economic base
determines the cultural superstructure.

68
 Materialism wanted to emulate the achievements of the
natural sciences in its attempt to understand, explain and gain
mastery over human affairs, an undertaking in which it was
designed to borrow and use the methods of the scientists that
materialist thinkers wanted to compete with. Speculation and
metaphysical meditation, as well as artistic expressions, were
thought to be less respectable than the management of more
‘scientific’ instruments, a materialist approach which has been
adopted up to the present day even by those who dismiss or are
critical of Marxism. The rivalry of the two cultures was
convincingly represented by a ‘double agent,’ straddling the
divide between the two, the novelist and scientist C.P. Snow in
a famous 1959 lecture, later published in book form.
The emphasis of the forms of the materialist critical
discourse dealing with the realm of the human is laid on
processes of a material nature by means of which large groups
of people (seen as the masses rather than as individuals) create
the resources that satisfy their basic needs and manage their
social configurations in order to keep their material existence
going and to keep populations under reasonable control
(usually at a certain growth rate that material conditions
ensure). Materialist critical approaches deal less with
remarkable historical figures, with important texts and their
interpretation, less with the rights and liberties of the
individual, bourgeois constructs becoming old fashioned, at
least in the later version of materialist discourse, Marxism.

II.13. Hegel as agent provocateur

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) is without
question the great philosopher who stimulated idealist, anti-
materialist systems, strong responses from the opposing
materialistic camp, and, in true dialectical fashion, synthetic
approaches accommodating elements from both orientations.
He is also held in high esteem in both the continental and the
69
analytic philosophical traditions. Pusey acknowledges Hegel’s
contribution to the development of sociological thought, which
was one of the main sources contributing to the problematics of
cultural studies (see the beginnings of British Cultural Studies
in the 1950s, for example):
[…] it is natural to think of the individual as an instance of a
collective and even of a transcendental history-making subject.
Indeed, German sociology grew out of historicism and it was
first conceived (Völkerpsychologie) as the (collective)
psychology of the people (Volk), understood as a collective
subject, and in the stronger Hegelian version, as a spiritual and
cultural entity that transcends the individual (16).
‘ In Hegel’s system, human knowledge comes out of
experience, the process through which the particular is
incorporated within the universal. However, sensations need
general concepts in order to classify and characterize empirical
experience and turn it into knowledge. For the idealist Hegel,
reality consists of the action of the abstract, universal concepts
by means of which individual, unordered, disjointed, chaotic
perceptions turn into the rational. Thus, human experience
moves from the individual, the particular, and the unique,
toward a more general level of abstraction on a progressive and
cumulative journey.
On this journey, each higher level of abstraction allows
a better understanding of the previous ones. The thinking
subject produces these ever higher levels of abstraction and
comprehension and understands more and more fully the
reality around, a gradual process which is also a self-expansion
of the subject.
The process of engendering higher and higher levels of
abstraction, higher levels of ‘reality’ is what is commonly seen
as the Hegelian dialectics, usually in terms of the three-stage
‘episodes’ in the narrative of the Absolute Spirit: thesis –
antithesis – synthesis. Hegel sees universal history as the
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progress of this transcendental spirit, of its becoming alienated
from itself at a certain stage and striving higher toward a
superior stage of consciousness.
A consequence of the understanding of the meaning
that Hegel ascribes to his dialectics is that all the entities
constitutive of what humans regard as reality: themselves as
living organism, as well as culture and nature as a whole,
everything is flowing and changing, unlike the patterns of
diachronic structures that structuralist thinkers would be
interested in.
For Hegel, this dialectical upward journey of the
Universal Spirit as reflected in the adventure of the subject
seeking ever higher knowledge has a final point of destination,
in a teleological vision that is in keeping with teleological,
theological perspectives. It so happens that Hegel’s dialectics
involved in his system of absolute knowledge of the universal
spirit develops, in philosophical terms, the central idea of
progress to the ‘final countdown’ in religious discourse. Marx
will take Hegel’s idealist reasoning in terms of the dialectical
mechanism, but his destination point will not be heavenly
Heaven, but equally heavenly Communism or, to twist
Fukuyama’s famous phrase, the ‘end of history and of the last
Adam (and Eve).’
Hegel's view of history as a teleological development
leading to the final, supreme form of realization implied that
everything in this world was going smoothly in the right way,
which has been perceived as a very conservative view,
discouraging critique and controversy. This came about, in
spite of the fact that the concept of dialectics had introduced
the idea of the fight of the contrary stages (thesis – antithesis –
synthesis) in the process of alienation of the Absolute Spirit,
the latter being in charge of everything in the less absolute and
changing empirical world.

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II.14. From Hegel toward Marx through Feuerbach
Hegel’s dialectical, but idealist view of the progress of the
Universal Spirit both inspired and provoked a wave of
materialist critics. These thinkers are called the New Hegelians.
Some of them, like Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), can be
seen as secular forerunners announcing the advent of Karl
Marx. Feuerbach and the other New Hegelians realized the
conservative thrust of their predecessor and mentor and their
turning away from his idealism toward more materialist
critiques of the existing society also earned them the name of
the Left Hegelians.
Feuerbach, more than the other neo-Hegelians, was
fully aware of how influential the dialectical system was. He
realized that subsequent philosophical interpretations could not
ignore Hegel and a critique of his system, with all its
implications of contemporary political and cultural discourse.
Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel focused on three key issues: his
linking religious teleology and the progress of the Universal
Spirit, his preference for abstract general concepts at the
expense of empirical, concrete sensuous experience, and
human discourse being ultimately accounted for in terms of an
idealist vision.
For Feuerbach, the primary reality is the one conveyed
by the experience of the senses, the concrete manifestations by
means of which the biological dimension of life is preserved.
Unlike Descartes and other idealists, who first think in order to
prove their identity, for Feuerbach human beings first make
sure they stay alive, find a shelter, find means of subsistence,
etc., while in so doing developing ever more abstract ways of
dealing with the environment.
Feuerbach is the one who went beyond the high level of
abstraction promoted by idealist approaches to human
experience, translating aspects of Hegel’s idealism into the
realm of the finite, of the concrete, of down-to-earth
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experience. He went on to develop the theory linked to his
concept of religious alienation, according to which individuals
ought to recover what they had originally projected (through
alienation) into the divine. Feuerbach invited people to look for
the absolute in themselves. His critical way of thinking,
especially his theory on religious alienation, is seen by Peter C.
Caldwell to have been one of the main motive forces fueled by
radical political thought before the 1848 revolutions:
Feuerbach’s psychological theory of religion pervaded radical
political thought in Germany in the 1840s. Radicals found in it
a way of thinking that questioned the legitimacy of established
institutions and authorities. The critique was radical: not just
of the established church, but of religion in general; not just of
the existing, undemocratic state, but of the state and its
institutional forms (especially army and bureaucracy) in
general; and not just of the existing patriarchal family, but of
legalized forms of interpersonal relationships in general (1).
Therefore, Feuerbach’s ideas stimulated the radical
political thought that would soon oppose idealist and
materialist theories in a much more dramatic fashion in an age
heralded by a series of revolutions. All in all, though, at least
through their dialectical relationship of dialog and
confrontation, the often diverging, often converging
orientations, idealist and materialist, empirical and rationalist,
unwittingly conspired together, leading to the rise of Marxism.
Philosophers had philosophized, imagining ways in which
human affairs and cultural configurations could be understood.
A certain individual then would make up his mind to stir the
oppressed masses to mutiny and rage. Would the proletarians
of the world unite, to make Marx’s world come true?

II.15. Hermeneutics: an anti-Enlightenment project?

An important critical discourse, which can be seen as a critical
response to some of the aspects of the Enlightenment and its
73
accompanying liberal humanism, is hermeneutics, a theory of
understanding and interpretation. Hermeneutics also marks a
step toward what would be 20th century forms of Cultural
Studies through its pronounced historicist dimension.
If liberal humanism promotes progress in terms of
universal laws and principles, as well as secular human nature,
hermeneutics defines its goals in relation to definite historical
contexts. Historicism as a general attitude in Cultural Studies
claims that meaning and its interpretation depend on temporal,
spatial, cultural coordinates within which an act of
communication is produced and received, with an awareness
that detached, atemporal knowledge is neither possible nor
desirable, as mainstream liberal humanism believed.

II.16.Human understanding, interpretation and historical

contexts
Interpretation is based on understanding, which has been seen
by hermeneutics as the basic human attitude. Knowledge,
meaning and interpretation are historical, depending on the
here and now, the there and then, and on relationships to
filiations and traditions.
In religious hermeneutics, historicism has a special
meaning, which is less relevant to Cultural Studies today: the
idea that the interpretation of the holy texts provides a
prophetic account of the history of humankind up to the Day of
Reckoning, having thus an apocalyptic dimension (apocalypse
with its original meaning of revelation, not all-encompassing
disaster, although the two meanings are related). It is worth
noting that both ‘Godless’ Marxism and theology have in
common the religious dimension of historicism, its teleology:
both Marxism and Christianity are grand narratives that define
human history from its beginning to the prophesied end:
Communism or the Day of Reckoning, followed by the end of
history and the beginning of the Afterlife (Heaven).
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 In their introduction to a volume on Gadamer and
Ricoeur as the outstanding representatives of 20th century
hermeneutics, while defining the general characteristics of their
work, George H. Taylor and Francis J. Mootz III also identify
the issues that hermeneutics has been concerned with
throughout its historical development, under the aegis of the
Enlightenment and beyond:
The primary task hermeneutics takes for itself is to think
through the nature of human understanding. Gadamer and
Ricoeur also share a basic perspective that understanding is
always interpretive. Understanding is always inextricably
informed by the perspective we bring to bear in the act of
understanding. Understanding is a product of our language,
our history, our traditions. These “prejudices”—these
prejudgments—offer us our lens on the world. We do not have
available the eagle eye, the Enlightenment’s dream of
detached reason that is independent in perspective.
Understanding is always located within the situated and partial
perspective of our prejudices. Our understanding is shaped by
the way we belong to the world. Our belonging to the world
speaks to the way in which, through our languages, traditions,
and cultures, we inhabit something beyond ourselves (1).
Hermeneutics as the theory of interpretation initially
developed in a religious context. The preoccupations of its
forerunners, in the 17th and 18th centuries, basically amounted
to finding the best methods for the interpretation of the Holy
Scripture, i.e., the Bible, while reconstructing the appropriate
social and historical contexts in which the texts were produced.
It tried to deal with the challenges posed to the European
reader understanding texts produced at a considerable distance
in time and in a very different culture. Religious hermeneutic
studies were soon to be assisted by developments in philology
(comparative historical linguistics, rather than the study of

75
literary texts, their original meaning, the authenticity of their
written sources) and historiography.
While liberal humanism had dismissed tradition as
medieval oppressive superstition, early hermeneutics tried to
retrieve the past and its traditions. It considered the individual
as part of a more comprehensive cultural structure.
Hermeneutics valued interpretation and communication, rather
than observation, description and explanation. Culture for its
scholars consisted in the multitude of texts, mainly about the
past, seen as the sum total of human endeavor, texts to be read
closely and interpreted. Reading was not seen as a passive,
receptive skill, but as a creative and imaginative act, not in the
sense promoted by reader response theory today.
Hermeneutics first focused on the interpretation of the
holy texts in theological seminaries at the end of the 18th
century. The main idea was that, in order to reconstruct the
texts of the more remote past, one had to reconstruct the
cultural context by means of other texts tracing discernible
traditions, a procedure that would be taken advantage of by
different strands of Cultural Studies in the 20th century.
The sense of belonging to a tradition was more
important to the proponents of hermeneutics than a critical
attitude toward the past, which had been the case with liberal
humanism. The transition from a preoccupation with reason
and a critical attitude toward the falsehoods and iniquities of
the past in order to promote the cause of individual freedom
was not that clear-cut, though. The values of liberal humanism
were gradually being taken over by the winners of the
Industrial Revolution, the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, an
important critical attitude was espoused by the hermeneutics
scholars in their more or less secular interpretations of the holy
texts, as Surber notes, thus taking forward the torch of critical
thought in the realm of culture:

76
 Certainly there was an important critical strain in hermeneutic
discourse, especially with regard to texts that were held to be
divinely inspired. Indeed, modern hermeneutic discourse
originated, to a great extent, among Biblical scholars who
sought to apply to sacred texts the same historical and critical
methods of reading and interpretation that other scholars had
been applying to secular texts. To the extent that hermeneutic
discourse undermined any presumed authoritativeness of
certain types of texts and subjected them to principles and
procedures of interpretation rooted in the imagination of the
reader, it fostered a generally critical attitude (9).
Found in a dialectical relationship with the rationalism
of the Enlightenment, hermeneutics adopted more scientific
ways of corroborating internal and external evidence in the
texts under study, such contextual elements as archaeological
and historical knowledge, as well as the comparison and
contrast of sources to reach the most valid interpretation. This
showed a significant change in the attitude toward the holy
texts, which were to be approached with lucid, critical eyes
with a view to reaching their original meaning. The modern
critical cultural discourse of hermeneutics did not acquire its
modern configuration until the Romantic Age. There were
some important transition figures, featuring prominently in the
narratives of both the rational Enlightenment and of the
creative, imaginative hermeneutics (such as Kant), with the
Romantics (such as Coleridge) clearly taking sides with
hermeneutics in their appreciation of certain forms of tradition
as well as of the expressive, creative imagination as the source
of cultural production.

II.17. Hermeneutics comes of age: Schleiermacher

Clearly marking a shift from the Enlightenment to ‘mature’
hermeneutics was the German philologist Friedrich
Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Unlike many Enlightenment

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thinkers, for whom culture was incorporated into inquiries of
civil or political society, Schleiermacher used the concept of
culture to refer to a distinctive sphere of investigation all its
own, and positioned it at the intersection in space and time
where human practical reason is instrumental in producing
history.
Schleiermacher displayed an organic perspective on
culture, while stressing individuality as a prerequisite. For him
individuals were unique, distinguishing themselves each from
the others, contributing their cultural idiosyncracies to the
common human undertaking.
However, he thought that individuality could only be
affirmed and preserved within such groups or communities as
the family, the nation, the church. This affirmation was
achieved in the interaction between and among unique
individuals within the frameworks offered by the communities
in which they found themselves or where they chose to live.
Organic culture is thus seen as the result of the unfolding in
time of this interaction, individuals and communities
expressing themselves in and through each other and one
another. This view of organic culture will persist in a long
tradition of cultural thinkers well into the 20th century,
affecting the beginnings of British Cultural Studies.
Although following an idiosyncratic route that
expressed his own individuality, Schleiermacher also pursued a
broad theory of the operation of human understanding
extending to its most basic manifestations, finding its way well
into the hermeneutic thought of the twentieth century,
informing the philosophical hermeneutics of both Heidegger
and Gadamer. Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic theory shows its
humanist perspective through the belief that the process of
understanding and communication will facilitate the recovery
of the link between the original authors and the eventual
readers or interpreters, something that later stages of
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hermeneutics, under the influence of poststructuralism, will
endeavor to challenge, giving up the search for the author and
for the author’s intentions.
For Schleiermacher, thorough human understanding
facilitates valid interpretation. Interpretation, in his view, was
the best illustration of the fundamental functioning of
understanding as typical of the human mind. Through this
understanding, the interpreters, who are familiar with the
language that the authors of the texts used, secure access to the
latter’s inner worlds, by attempting to reassemble, or
reconstruct, in their own minds the thought processes that the
authors experienced. The hermeneutic understanding goes
beyond what a text might mean all by itself to various
interpreters the way that forms of Practical Criticism will
encourage in the early 20th century. It involves the process of
reconstructive, not deconstructive interpretation, ‘hermeneutic
interpretation’ in its early, liberal humanist stages, aiming at
recovering and re-living the working of the mental mechanisms
of another as it is displayed in the text. Its linguistic expression
is the medium through which this mental and experiential
communion is facilitated. This strategy was conducive to
Schleiermacher’s recourse to dialog as the proper way to
conduct interpretation. By the recourse to dialog he implied
that interpretation’s main goal was to achieve a reciprocal
relationship between the author and the interpreter by means of
the text.
Schleiermacher maintained that language played a dual
role in this process, thus giving rise to two different aspects or
dimensions of the enterprise of general hermeneutics:
grammatical and psychological interpretation. The former has
to do with the interpreters dealing with the meanings of the
language material of the text, relying on their knowledge of the
language. The latter (i.e. psychological or technical
interpretation), works at an even higher level, dealing with the
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distinct ways that a given author employs to reveal his or her
own personal experience, feelings, thoughts. This second
dimension of interpretation stimulates the reader to have
recourse to relevant contextual coordinates (historical,
biographical, cultural) going beyond the merely linguistic
expressions of the text
All interpretations display both the grammatical and the
psychological (technical) dimensions, with either featuring
more prominently in specific texts and circumstances. Readers
have to attend to both content and form, both what is being
conveyed and how that is being done to express the author’s
individual meaning or intention. The combined operations of
these two distinct dimensions of interpretation will allow the
reader to achieve the aim of interpretation, in Schleiermacher’s
opinion: the mental reconstruction of the meaning or the
intention of the author of the text.
Actual interpretation situations reveal an important
difficulty to be overcome, and Schleiermacher is considered to
be the first to identify it. In order to understand a part of a text,
one has to understand the text as a whole and the other way
round. This may be seen as a vicious circle, Schleiermacher
called it, more specifically, the hermeneutic circle.
Theoretically, this problem is insoluble. In practice, interpreters
gradually get to comprehend, in their permanent interaction,
the part and the whole, as they and the authors interact with
each other within the interpretive framework (the larger and the
more nuanced, the better) that competent readers and
successful authors share. In this way, individual expressions
are not allowed to float free, to engage in a permanent deferral
of meaning leading nowhere, as effective communication goes.
While the Enlightenment critically dealt with
reactionary institutions and practices, exposing them,
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics focused on texts as the building
blocks of culture. Gradually the meaning of ‘text’ broadened,
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to encompass all products of cultural activity acquiring
significance in a historical context. Again, in opposition to the
Enlightenment thinkers, who dealt with the negative facts of
the practices and institutions they associated with an antiquated
past with a view to changing them, the practitioners of
hermeneutics had a more reverential attitude to the past,
including the most remote past. The text was not a piece of
evidence testifying to an unjust past or obsolescent institution
or practice. It was a sort of revelation of a comprehensive
combination of views and thoughts in relation to which the
reader engaged in a sort of sympathetic complicity with the
original author of the message as text in a process of
communication. In this process, the description and
explanation that the Enlightenment thinkers were mainly
interested in gave way to understanding as the ultimate aim of
interpretation.

II.18. Hermeneutics as Lebensphilosophie: Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833 – 1911) shared his illustrious precursor
Schleiermacher’s typically Romantic preoccupation with
individual experience as rich and unique, in contrast to
attempts to reduce it to either abstract categories in the realm of
reason or empirical data provided by sense experience in
important philosophical projects. Dilthey conceived the task of
his project, which he called his hermeneutic philosophy of life
(Lebensphilosophie) in terms of the formula highlighting his
central concepts of experience, expression, and understanding.
The first term stresses the fact that all human meaning is
derived from the individual’s lived experience, firmly
positioned within the framework of the interactions manifested
in a specific cultural and historical world.
Dilthey’s broadening of Schleiermacher's general
hermeneutics would provide the foundation of the
philosophical hermeneutics of the twentieth century.
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Hermeneutics came to deal with more than written texts. Its
object came to encompass the whole range of human culture.
He expanded the meaning of the concept text to include all
cultural products. Thus, hermeneutics came to be viewed as a
comprehensive critical discourse dealing with culture in a
broad sense. This comprehensive account of human
understanding as basically hermeneutic enabled Dilthey to
examine methodological problems in the human sciences in
ways which differed from the more restrictive interpretive
approaches of his time, notably in historiography.
Since the understanding of the meaning of a text was
what hermeneutics focused on (at first in the strict sense of
written record, then in Dilthey’s more comprehensive
acception), language acquired an increasingly important
position in this undertaking. It was texts, basically consisting of
language structures, that hermeneutics deals with, not facts,
facts, facts in the ‘real’ world, what Gradgrind in Dickens’s
Hard Times was obsessed with. The position of the
hermeneutics scholar, therefore, is more creative, like that of a
hybrid creature combining the features of the reader and
author, rather than that of a detached or even critical observer,
judging pieces of evidence.
Hermeneutics valued imaginative and creative
interpretation at the expense of reason, which accounted for the
British and German Romantics favoring it. There followed, in
the dialectics of the development of critical cultural discourse,
a materialist backlash, which was intent on debunking the
mythology of Romantic inspiration, creation and interpretation.
Culture will soon be seen as basically material or as the
product of essentially materialist forces.

II.19.Marx’s Marxism
Starting from the beginning statement of Marx and Engels’s
1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, ‘A specter is haunting
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Europe – the specter of Communism’(8), one can say today
that Marx’s specter is still haunting Cultural Studies and
Cultural Theory. Karl Marx’s impact on Cultural Theory and
Cultural Studies represents only a fraction of his influence on
the world of thought, with philosophy, economics, sociology
completing a very comprehensive picture. The far from
exemplary history of all the Marxist-oriented political regimes
has cast a shadow on his theory, with many people having
suffered because of the left-wing dictatorships in Eastern
Europe, Asia, Africa and Central and South America, blaming
Marx and his ideas for the sad story of the Communist bloc and
of its allies.
One should bear in mind that Marx’s … Marxism was
developed at a particular time, in a certain socio-political and
cultural context, following specific traditions of critical
thought, and, like any other critical cultural theory, it should
mainly be assessed in terms of those contexts, whether one
loves the likes of Stalin or not. The social context was grim:
19th century capitalism was different from what we witness
today. Children, women, men were working long, exhausting
hours to earn enough to avoid starvation, and any trade union
initiative was met with violent means. Therefore, the socialist
movement … moved away from the idyllic utopian socialist
ideas of previous social reformers and thinkers such as Robert
Owen toward more revolutionary and desperate means of
action.
Marx was one of those who felt the spirit of the age, not
in terms of the Protestant ethic as propelling capitalism, the
way Weber would soon do, but from the perspective of those
who represented for him the hope of a more equitable system:
Communism, a kind of secular heaven in which the lion and
the lamb would sleep next to each other (obviously, after the
elimination of the bourgeoisie).

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 The phrase ‘Marx's Marxism’ here is largely designed
to provoke through its obvious imprecision. One can only
assess its impact on other thinkers and on the world (more
specifically, on the development of Cultural Studies), while
trying to reconstruct Marx’s vision from only a fraction of what
he wrote (about 1,000 pages of published work out of 30,000
unpublished and unedited ones during his lifetime).
Continuing the simplification of the development of
critical cultural discourses in terms of filiations and critical
responses in a dialectical narrative, one can see Karl Marx
thinking that hermeneutics was following a dangerous path, as
its imaginative reconstructions of the past ran counter to some
of the positive contributions of rational, critical liberal
humanism. Liberal humanism, focusing on individual rights
and values, was also seen as counterproductive for the aims
and goals of the new doctrine.
In addition to the critique of hermeneutics and liberal
humanism, a third critical response was to the idealist, although
dialectical, Hegel. Priding himself on being a materialist
philosopher, promoting a materialist critique of culture, Karl
Marx ‘stole’ the dialectical method from his illustrious, idealist
philosopher, Hegel, in order to critically deal with, partially
accept, partially reject, the valuable findings of liberal
humanism. Hegel's dialectics in the realm of ideas involved the
process of alienation, through which an idea gradually turns
into something different (alien?), moving from thesis to
antithesis to synthesis.
In dialectical fashion, Marx took the Enlightenment
thesis, submitted it to a critical, antithetical assessment, leading
to a higher stage, synthesis. Stepping over the subjective
imagination of hermeneutics, Marx also moved from the
previous critical discourse of the Enlightenment to his own
materialist theory, alternatively called dialectical or historical
materialism, or scientific socialism. This new kind of approach
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defied previous discourses based on the scientific method
which had required detachment and objectivity in its operation.
For Marx, scientific materialism or socialism had to deal not
only with objective characteristics and elements of human
social life, but with the subjective impact that these had on the
people associated with them.
If for Hegel history consisted in a movement of the
Absolute Spirit in the right direction, enabling the individual
greater and greater freedom with each new stage, as society’s
laws get more and more rational, Marx saw distinct classes
‘usurping’ the role of the Absolute Spirit in the march for
social progress. The classes which achieve prominence are
those that combine material and intellectual force in a certain
age, a statement he clearly makes in his ‘The Ruling Class and
the Ruling Ideas’:
The class which has the means of material production at its
disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental
production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of
mental production are on the whole subject to it. The ruling
ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the
dominant material relations, the dominant material relations
grasped as ideas; hence of the relations which make the one
class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance (9).
In his time, it was the bourgeoisie that Marx saw as the
ruling class and the motive force of this forward movement, as
its class interests coincided with the political and economic
journey in the right direction: capitalist rationalization, freer
markets, promotion of individual rights and initiative. The
economic engine came first, what occurred in the mind of the
engine driver was of lesser importance for the time being,
since, in broad lines, material life determines consciousness,
not the other way round. What occurred in the mind of the
bourgeois engine driver, although representing progress, was

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false consciousness or ideology. Marx specifically used the
word ideology to refer to the ‘false’ beliefs of the bourgeoisie.
For Marx the idea of taking culture too seriously as a
set of fundamental set of texts defining culture in the
hermeneutic tradition or as a fundamental set of values
supported by reason and a critical attitude toward superstition
as tantamount to modern civilization was too much. Culture for
him is part of the superstructure as ideology, and as such it has
the attributes of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat is excluded
from culture, its domain being, in capitalism, work.
The capitalist economic base determines and produces
the capitalist superstructure. If Marxist Raymond Williams will
call culture ordinary, Marx himself will find it secondary, not
fundamental (since it is ‘false consciousness). Culture as part
of ideology, in his opinion, has a strong material dimension,
representing important historical developments, being, as
already said, conditioned, not completely determined, by the
economic base. The economically-based reflections and
responses that ideology (including culture) produces are bound
to be understood and explained not in ideal, spiritual terms, but
in material, economic terms. Understanding the workings and
effects of culture as ideology involves the study of the
economic production system and its underlying material
processes, which engendered it, as a secondary, but materialist
phenomenon. Culture is then material, one can add to culture
being secondary, the economic base determining the cultural or
ideological coordinates of the superstructure. In Marx’s
opinion, as stated in ‘The German Ideology’, everything is
material, in opposition to what his idealist German
philosophers thought:
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from
heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is
to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine,
conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined,
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 conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out
from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-
process we demonstrate the development of the ideological
reflexes and echoes of this life-process (656).
What will be seen in very categorical terms as Marx’s
economic determinism, his claim that culture is fundamentally
conditioned by the economic base, should be considered within
the framework in which it was formulated. It will become a
major bone of contention for those theorists walking in his
footsteps, some of them straying from the so-called orthodox
Marxist views.
Thus, starting from the Frankfurt School of Critical
Theory, from Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, partially from
Althusser’s theory of the Ideological State Apparatuses and
further on into contemporary Cultural Studies, the idea of a
relative autonomy of the superstructure (which had been
present in Marx from the beginning) has been gaining ground.
That will mean, in relation to a more careful interpretation of
Marx's famous pronouncement in its context, that some
Marxist thinkers realized that the cultural creations of artists
are not the products of the economic base in a very
straightforward way. The artists themselves, not entirely
inspired by the economic base, may have some degree of
cultural contribution to their own work, so to speak, and may
become active social agents through their cultural impact on
their audiences, their artistic worth, even in Marx’s expressed
opinion, shown in the subtle indirectness of their orientation (to
be later contradicted by the strict requirements of Soviet
socialist realism).
Even more than the Enlightenment’s liberal humanist
discourse, Marxism as the materialist critique of capitalism was
both critical in theory and militant in practice. It was from the
very beginning, as revealed in Marx and Engels’s Communist

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Manifesto, a theory of social conflict, viewing history in terms
of the class struggle:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian,
lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word,
oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one
another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open
fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the
contending classes (9).
In the same above mentioned text about a certain
German ideology, Marx decrees that the time has come to
change the world, not to contemplate it, the way philosophers
had done before him. This revolutionary, or at least militant
stance, has informed a whole series of Marxist-based
approaches all the way to Stuart Hall, the second director of the
Birmingham School of Contemporary Cultural Studies, and
beyond, while other strands of critical cultural discourse have
remained more peaceful, much in the tradition of what Marx
dismisses with the phrase ‘German ideology.’ These different
orientations, in true Marxist fashion, should not be discussed in
terms of the theorists’ ideas and personalities, but in terms of
the concrete material conditions which prompted them. It so
happens that the idea of the individual as a mere subjected
subject (subjected through ‘false consciousness’) gains ground,
to be further explored by such subjected authors as Louis
Althusser and his theory of interpellation through the ISAs.

II.20. Freud - from the dynamics of the individual psyche to

psychoanalytic cultural theory
If Marx wanted to revolutionize society, while making culture
reflect the apparently inexorable historical forces that propel
the world beyond capitalism, it was Sigmund Freud (1856 –
1939) that succeeded in doing the same thing in the realm of
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the psyche, first as therapy for vulnerable individuals, then as a
comprehensive cultural critical discourse, both projects known
under the name of psychoanalysis.
Paul Ricoeur is one of the prominent voices
acknowledging Freud’s contribution to the emergence of
psychoanalysis and his engagement with cultural analysis and
interpretation from the vantage point offered by his
investigation of the psyche and its cultural expressions:
A meditation on Freud’s work has the advantage of revealing
that work’s broadest aim: not only the renovation of
psychiatry, but a reinterpretation of all psychical productions
pertaining to culture, from dreams, through art and morality, to
religion. This is how psychoanalysis belongs to modern
culture. By interpreting culture it modifies it; by giving it an
instrument of reflection it stamps it with a lasting mark (4).
Although Freud would strongly reject Marxism as a
valuable cultural discourse, the intersections of Marxist and
psychoanalytic thought (especially through Lacan, rather than
directly from Freud) would considerably influence the
development of cultural studies and cultural theory.
Sigmund Schlomo Freud’s formative years show him as
traveling between the strict, traditional culture of the Jewish
shtetl and the more cosmopolitan environment of Vienna’s fin
de siecle, as David L. Smith is quick to note before outlining
the intellectual journey of the founder of psychoanalysis, again
defining itself throughout at the intersection of these cultural
coordinates:
The liberal policies of the Emperor Franz Josef encouraged the
assimilation of Jews into the mainstream of European cultural
life. Vienna was perhaps the pinnacle of European cultural
achievement and innovation in both the arts and the sciences.
Those Jews seeking integration into this world therefore
moved from a deeply traditional culture to the cutting edge of

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 modernity. Freud was, as it were, midway between the shtetl
and high European culture (10).
Freud gradually developed the socio-cultural dimension
of his psychoanalytic project starting from the versions of his
psychodynamics of the individual (the conscious vs the
unconscious, then the ego, the id, and the superego). In Freud’s
opinion, very much like in the case of individuals, culture is
not to be assessed, described, understood by rational, liberal
humanist coordinates, the ‘collective unconscious’ being
particularly powerful (although the phrase as such was later
coined by Carl Jung and used in such works as The Archetypes
and the Collective Unconscious).
Freud’s general theory of interpretation stipulated that
explanation and cultural critique should not move from society
toward the individual, but the other way round, unlike what
Marx and his followers claimed. Like Marx, though, Freud
would ground his theory in the material, not in the ideal realm,
starting from the determining coordinates imposed by biology
and physiology. Freud went on to see psychoanalysis as a
science able to deal not only with the individual’s major
existential problems, a form of therapy that he had assumed
initially, but also capable of providing a suitable critical
cultural discourse to address the far ranging socio-cultural
problems that Marx and Marxism had decided to engage with.
As Paul Ricoeur has been quoted as describing Marx,
Freud and Nietzsche as the founders of a certain type of
interpretation theory, of the so-called school of suspicion, the
assumption which makes psychoanalytic discourse different
from liberal humanism or hermeneutics, and close to Marx’s
materialist discourse, is the one stating that faith in the
certainties of consciousness is an illusion. Humans do not
comprehend their aims and motivation, neither can they rely on
such techniques as lucid self-examination and self-reflection,
being victims of what Marx had identified as false

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consciousness (one of his definitions of the prevailing
ideology).
Initially, Freud promotes psychoanalysis in the form of
a talking cure, featuring the use of the free association
technique by means of which this false consciousness, the
inability to clearly see oneself in relation to the Other, can
undergo some therapeutic treatment at the individual level.
Psychoanalysis will gradually move from individual
pathological cases to more comprehensive realms of study,
considering that meaning stems from desires and anxieties, not
from texts or the minds of authors and interpreters.
Psychoanalysis assumes a position between the mental and the
material realms, between the psychological and the biological
levels of existence, between desire, instincts and meaning,
between individual treatment and cultural commentary.
Although Freudian psychoanalysis, considering its
founder’s long career, underwent some significant changes,
involving both revision and dismissal of previous
interpretations, it preserved a definite mainstream of concepts
and basic general statements that would have a considerable
impact on various cultural discourses, creating inter-
disciplinary areas of thought and practice (psychoanalysis and
the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis and feminism - most
often, feminism against Freudian psychoanalysis -
psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and
postcolonial studies, etc.), either by inclusion or rejection of its
pronouncements.
From the very beginning, Freudian psychoanalysis (the
terms psychoanalysis was first used by Freud as early as 1896),
assumed a material (biological) basis, human sexuality. Its
better understanding was meant to elucidate how conscious
meanings are derived from unconscious desires, early on in the
development of the individual, the distinction between the
unconscious and the conscious providing the first major
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distinction in what would become the first Freudian topography
of the human psyche.
In this first psychodynamic topography, the
unconscious appears as a consequence of the dynamic process
of repression. It consists of the psychic materials that have
been ‘buried’ deep, out of the reach of consciousness. A further
distinction is made by Freud between any consciously available
psychic materials that the mind is aware of (images, sensations,
perceptions) – the conscious – and those images, ideas,
perceptions that can easily be recovered – the preconscious.
Nevertheless, the fundamental distinction in this first version of
the map of the human mind remains the one between the
unconscious and the conscious, the latter also containing the
easily recoverable material of the preconscious. By the process
of repression, the unconscious is clearly separated from its
minor component, the preconscious, as well as from its
opposite, the conscious.
The repressed psychic material (basic drives like food
intake, elimination of the body’s waste materials, or physical
contact with other humans are all seen as elements of the
libido) does not disappear from the psyche. Attempts to satisfy
those drives stay in the unconscious, continuing to put pressure
on the preconscious and the conscious. The action of the
preconscious insulates the repressed drives from any deliberate
and unmediated entry into the conscious. To get at least partial
satisfaction or to gain access into the conscious, the energy of
the drives must undergo repression and then be linked to
particular images and words (a process called cathexis) in the
preconscious. It follows that any conscious and deliberate
access to them can be achieved through a bypass: the
preconscious. There is no direct route into the unconscious, no
path which bypasses the cathected images and words of the
preconscious.

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 One of Freud’s first discoveries in this until then
uncharted mental realm was that these unconscious drives are
sufficiently disruptive as to suggest some sort of access to
them. The action of these disruptive unconscious drives is
described in terms of parapraxes: the so-called Freudian slips,
some ‘dubious’ jokes, strange dreams, strange behavior shown
by mental patients. These parapraxes allow its unconscious
drives a direct entry into the conscious. These parapraxes are
the stuff of what Freud names in the title of his famous 1901
work and then describes in the body of its text proper. This
text, soon to reach such a wide non-specialist audience as to
become a best-seller, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
goes on to prove that both the so-called normal mental
behavior and the less normal forms of psychosis can be
described in terms of the same unconscious and preconscious
mechanisms. It so happens that Freud had started from the
investigation of individual patients and their cases of hysteria,
moving on to the interpretation of mechanisms operating in
ordinary life with people considered to be … ordinary. To twist
Raymond Williams’s famous definition of culture (‘culture is
ordinary’), the starting point of post-war British cultural
studies, ‘psychopathology is ordinary,’ thus becoming part of
the wider realm of everyday cultural behavior.
In his 1899 work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud
had attempted to prove how a special theory of interpretation
can be worked out in order to allow access into the dynamics of
the unconscious, which would otherwise remain an
unreachable domain. The two above-mentioned texts would be
instrumental in shaping that theory of interpretation of the
workings of the hidden recesses of the mind.
The theory aimed at connecting the level of the
conscious account of a dream by the patient (the manifest
content of the dream) through a complex process of repression
and refashioning from the unconscious through the
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preconscious back to its latent content, hiding in the
unconscious. Freud believed that the analyst could reach the
latent content by means of the mechanism of the dream-work,
connecting the latent and the manifest levels, reconstructing the
original ‘text’ of the unconscious dream. He wanted to
discover the ways through which the dream-work gradually
turned the latent content into the manifest content. As his
clinical work offered him more and more ‘raw material,’ more
accounts of his patients’ dreams, he identified certain types of
processes that recurred in the dream-work, condensation and
displacement featuring prominently among them. Anna Freud
would call such processes defense mechanisms, by means of
which repressed material tries to keep a low profile, so to
speak, instead of straightforwardly revealing itself.
Condensation, as the name suggests, amounts to a
number of unconscious wishes being ‘condensed’ through the
mediation of the dream-work into one image, which emerges
into the patient’s narrative of the manifest content.
Displacement, instead of concentrating and condensing the
unconscious material into an image, downgrades in the
manifest text one aspect of the unconscious material. It is
displaced in the sense that it is isolated from a more important
combination of repressed material, thus becoming less
shocking, more ‘acceptable’ in the manifest content. This
downgrading is a kind of displacement in the sense that one
unconscious form of mental energy is transferred to another
‘symbolic carrier,’ the relation between the two levels being
achieved by processes similar to those associated with
synecdoche and metonymy (part for whole, whole for part) and
metaphor (X standing for Y).
Having arrived at some of the processes involved in the
dream-work, Freud was convinced that he could recover the
dream’s latent content in order to explain it to the patient in
question as a conflict in the unconscious, thus mitigating the
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effect of the conflict that had caused the patient’s mental
condition.
Freud soon came to realize how important such a theory
of interpretation might be for the examination of phenomena
linked to such important cultural issues as political ideology,
religious discourse, mechanisms of artistic creation, among
many others. As the theory went beyond the mere treatment of
individual forms of hysteria into these realms of cultural
human interaction, psychoanalysis developed into the cultural
theory that would also influence other major cultural
approaches that would become part of contemporary cultural
studies and adjoining forms of cultural investigation. However,
from the very beginning, through the promotion of the free
association technique, the probing of the unconscious and the
interpretation of dreams, Freud influenced experiment in such
creative realms as literature (the Dada movement,
developments in Modernism under the sign of Virginia Woolf
and the Bloomsbury Group, etc.) and painting (Salvador Dali
and the surrealists).
Freud’s views on the impact that aspects of the
workings of the individual psyche may have on surrounding
social and cultural phenomena (Jung would then posit the
existence of the collective unconscious) would promote the
problematics of a critical agenda that would influence cultural
definitions and negotiations, Civilization and Its Discontents
being one of the most significant works written from that wider
cultural perspective, which would later be called a
hermeneutics of suspicion. For the time being, for a better
contextualization of Freud’s subsequent, more comprehensive
critical cultural discourse, some basic information about his
study of early sexual development, narcissism, the Oedipal
Complex and its psychic adjustments, and about his second
topography of the psyche, is worth considering.

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 Freud’s interpretation of dreams was followed by a
closer examination of the link between the early development
of human sexuality and relevant psychic processes, which was
the wrong thing to do in the puritanical Vienna of that time. In
the Vienna of his early psychoanalytic practice and research
Freud’s increasing interest in infantile sexuality was considered
by many outrageous (this was what the British called the
Victorian age, an age of gentility and downright prudery as far
as explicit discussions of sexuality were concerned).
Freud considered that the study of sexual development
should go back in human development as far as … birth. For
him, sexuality had a very broad meaning, including anything
having to do with the experience of pleasure, and its story
began with four distinct episodes associated with this
experience of pleasure, the first three belonging to the
pregenital period.
The pregenital period extended over the infant’s first
five years of life. The first of the three is the oral stage, the
young baby experiencing pleasure through breastfeeding
(breast sucking). As the baby in the oral stage solely depends
on sucking for obtaining pleasure even when not being
breastfed, what in American English is called a pacifier is
supplied in order to fool the young creature (to pacify it or to
please it). If there is too much frustration at this stage, the
development of the young person is affected, thus showing
signs of fixation at the oral stage. Thus, the adult will look for
compensation by comfort eating, by smoking or drinking, even
nail-biting, all associated with the mouth.
At about the respectable age when a toddler has turned
into a walker, the she or he reaches the anal stage. Her or his
major accomplishment is the disposal of body waste, a pleasure
soon accompanied and disciplined through the first major
civilizational process: potty or toilet training. If toilet training
involves too strict an attitude on the part of the ‘educators,’ the
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child may turn into a rigid and obsessive person, displaying an
anal-retentive personality.
By the age of three the young child reaches the phallic
stage, with the discovery that the touching of the sexual parts
may lead to pleasure, as well as the discovery of difference
between the sexes. It is also the time when the Oedipus
Complex appears.
The fourth stage is the genital stage, beginning in early
adolescence, which is considered to occur after a period of
relative latency. In the genital age, the pleasure to be sought for
becomes interpersonal, the desire being channeled toward
contact with the opposite sex. For Freud male heterosexuality
was the norm, with female sexuality and homosexuality as
secondary or deviant.
Freud’s concept of narcissism refers to an important
component of his theory of sexual development, whose story
starts in the three stages of the pregenital period. During the
oral, anal, and phallic stages, the focus of pleasure remains the
child’s body, including such external objects as the mother’s
breast, since these objects are perceived as inextricably linked
to the child’s body. All these areas and objects linked to
pleasure remain within the sphere of the pleasure principle.
The external objects are seen by the young child as
pleasurable extensions of his own body. This self-contained
condition of the child changes when the pleasurable object
comes to be seen as external to his body. Then, the original
ego-love turns into an external object-love. By transcending
primary narcissism a sense of a distinct self in relation to an
external reality is enabled. Thus, the original pleasure principle
driving the self-contained individual is challenged by the
reality principle. This leads to special arrangements and
adjustments which are instrumental in the formation of a self
with a distinct character. This significant change marks the
transition from the pregenital, narcissistic phallic stage to the
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latency and then to the genital stage, in which primary
narcissism is overcome, allowing libidinal drives toward
external objects.
The main bundle of problems experienced by the child
during the phallic stage of sexual development is called by
Freud the Oedipus Complex. These problems are linked to the
mother-child-father triad, the way the child deals with them
determining his subsequent psychic make-up and sexual,
social, cultural behavior. This complex starts from the
perception by the child of the disappearance of what has been
his main source of pleasure, his mother, caused by the
appearance of the father figure. Consequently, a complex set of
adaptations of the psyche will emerge, which will continue
well into the next stage, the genital phase, and then into adult
life. This set of psychic adjustments that the child will
experience is discussed by Freud in terms of three basic terms:
ambivalence, identification, and introjection.
Freud hesitates about clearly distinguishing between
and among these three terms, considering that what they refer
to, as well as other psychic drives, are doubly-inflected, being
dealt with and experienced in terms of a kind of love-hate
relationship. He finds that, on the one hand, children growing
into adults are attracted to pleasurable objects that satisfy
various drives and try to become united with them (possessing
them, eating them, etc.). On the other hand, because of the
reality principle (the opposite of the pleasure principle) the
desired unity is only temporary or partial, leading to frustration
and acts of aggression toward the desired objects, especially
when they are unavailable or hard to get. This strange
relationship with the desired objects will lead Freud to the
scenario of the two instincts, aggression and libido, being
interwoven in most of the individual’s relationship with the
objects of desire. This love-hate relationship with the object of
desire will be called ambivalence. Early on in his life, the child,
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unable to distinguish between the inner and the outer realms,
between his psyche and external reality, self and world, is
likely to see the object of desire as internal. He operates,
through a process of identification, a union with the desired
object, which appears as a part of himself. The third type of
psychic adjustment, introjection, consists in a partial
identification with certain traits of the object of desire, which
turn into permanent characteristics of the child’s and the future
adult’s psyche, a distinct part of his character.
The activity of the psyche is managed by the pleasure
principle and the reality principle. The former is not so much
directed at experiencing pleasure as at avoiding pain and
relieving instinctual tension by imaginary (hallucinatory) wish-
fulfillment. The latter offers gratification by adjustments in
relation to objects and facts from the external world. However,
the theoretical apparatus of the psychic … apparatus was still
incomplete.
Freud had become convinced that for a better
understanding of such phenomena as anxiety and guilt, certain
dreams and sexual dysfunctions, the more or less simple
operation of the preconscious as mediator between the
unconscious and the conscious was not enough in what he
thought was too static a … psychodynamic model. He
hypothesized that every area of the psyche had specific forms
of repressive ‘defense mechanisms’ (again, the phrase defense
mechanisms belongs to Anna Freud) by means of which the
individuals defended themselves against major contradictions
and threats to their integrity. His first topography had said very
little about how the components of the psyche developed in
their interaction
As the tension and the confrontation between the
pleasure principle and the reality principle, between the drives
coming from inside and the outer pressures exerted by
individuals, groups, and the whole of society acquired more
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importance in his psychoanalytic vision, Freud thought of
reconsidering and updating his first topography of the psyche.
He found it necessary to come up with a new scheme, which
would enable him to better account for the rise and
development of a specific ego or self. This new topography,
consisting of the triad id – ego – superego, replaces the
previous one, featuring the unconscious – preconscious –
conscious system, with a reconfiguration of the psychic energy
and its dynamics.
The Id, in German das Es (literally, ‘the it), refers to the
most primitive component of the psyche, preexisting the rise of
a distinct self, its presence thought to become noticeable in the
pregenital, pre-Oedipal stage of development. It is linked to
the natural drives of the organism. It (that is, ‘the it’) consists
of both repressed psychic material and the drives naturally
originating in the organism, part of the instinctual system. In
the previous topographical model of the psyche, the
unconscious only contained repressed material. Therefore what
the unconscious described in the first model is only a part of
what the Id stands for in the second one. This psychic energy
complex is ruled by the pleasure principle, its behavior
disregarding any possible consequences. It is a mysterious
mental field devoid of any logic and lacking any articulate
resources able to convey meaning through language or any
signifying system.
The Ego, (Latin for ‘the I’) appears when the
functioning of the emerging reality principle leads to the
relative supervision and control of the drives, resulting in the
production of repression. Repression, as already mentioned,
occurs when the natural component of the Id, its drives, are
prevented from immediate and thorough gratification by the
constraints exerted by the external world by means of the
reality principle. In the tension and interaction with the reality
principle, the Id will develop its own, already mentioned
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psychic adjustments, notably ambivalence, identification, and
introjection.
Freud does not see the Ego (containing the conscious
and preconscious sections of the previous topography), which
is a component developing from the Id, as completely marked
off and separated from its origin, the Ego and the Id being
considered to exist and interact in a permanent state of dynamic
tension. The Ego gradually tries to ‘break free’ from the initial
chaos of the all-powerful Id. The only distinct boundary
between the two ‘inimical brothers’ is considered to be the area
of repressed psychic energy. In principle, the Ego is what is
commonly defined as the self, but the two terms encompass
more than just the instant activity of the conscious and of the
preconscious and their memory archive. In addition, the Ego or
the self is even more than what the individuals claim to be
through their memory, also containing character features and
specific dispositions, even some unconscious wishes (since the
boundary with the Id is uncertain). Considering the fuzziness of
the boundary between the Id and the Ego, it is worth noting
that the latter also takes over some of the work of repression of
certain drives, in its process of adaptation under the guidance
of the reality principle. The Ego also assumes a certain degree
of control over the Id by language learning, by acquiring a
sense of causality and a sense of time, by the gradual mastery
of the ways through which it can cope with reality for the
reasonable gratification of some of the Id’s instinctual drives.
The Ego is a systematic component of the psychic
apparatus, basically defined by its reason and common sense,
its willingness to adapt to the environment. It emerges slightly
before and during the establishment of the Oedipus Complex
crisis, at the time when primary narcissism weakens and the
young child realizes the rift between his imagined all-
encompassing world and the external world that refuses to
gratify all his wishes. Its framework is gradually permeated by
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introjection: a number of objects and features are included in
the psychic component of the developing human organism.
The Superego is essentially reflective, capable of self-
observation and self-criticism. It has two parts, the ego-ideal
and the conscience. The ego-ideal subsystem is the
introjection of various objects or traits learned from the parents
as proper, while the conscience, in Freud’s view, is the result of
the work of a number of threats and prohibitions, including the
Oedipal threat. Even when external threats and prohibitions are
absent, the internalization of these prohibitions, initially
imposed from outside, leads to the control of the behavior and
thoughts of the individual. The phrase ‘guilty conscience’
arguably reflects this threatening and prohibitive nature of this
component of the Superego.
To a certain extent, the Superego is able to engage in
interchange with the Ego, while the latter cannot do the same
with the repressed part of the Id. More particularly, areas of the
Superego get in touch with the preconscious-conscious system,
enabling the Ego to become … conscious of some of the
Superego’s values and ideals and to modify them in order to
channel their energy in non-destructive, creative directions.
The Ego is trying to please three masters in Freud’s
second topography. The first is the Id, which insists on the
immediate gratification of its drives under the influence of the
pleasure principle. The second is the external world, which
constantly runs counter to the claims of the Id. The Superego is
the third, the prohibitions and ideals that the Ego introjected
during its development and which now seem to constitute a
distinct entity opposed to the Ego. The self or the Ego is thus
trying to satisfy and to placate various, often conflicting
demands, coming from its own instinctual drives, from its
introjected prohibitions and ideals, as well as from the external
world.

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 Undoubtedly under the influence of the shock and terror
that the First World War created, and in parallel with
developments that would soon lead to the rise of aggressive
Nazi ideology, Freud felt like reconsidering what later he
would cover under the title of his Civilization and Its
Discontents. That work would describe some sort of peacetime
solution, what he had contemplated, from the center of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, what he saw turning into an evil,
authoritarian father-figure Führer. That gave him new material
for a reexamination of the ‘heart of darkness’ located in the
individual as well as in human society.
Thus, it so happened that toward the end of his
prodigious psychoanalytic research and practice, starting with
his ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ Freud began to give shape
to his final theory of the instincts. The sheer irrationality of the
havoc wreaked by civilized nations during WW I urged Freud
to try to account for the forces driving those states that, against
any commonsensical judgment, appeared bent on self-
destruction. He thought that his investigation of the embattled
areas of the individual psyche could provide him with clues
about the strange behavior of nations as well.
In Freud’s theory, the motive force of the psychic
apparatus is provided by the interplay of Eros and Thanatos,
two fundamental instinctual forces. Eros epitomizes the
attempts made by the psychic apparatus to encourage unity or
union with parts of the external world. Such diverse processes
as identification with the mother and then with other important
figures, the tendency to associate with smaller or larger groups,
or even the mere intake of food are some of its characteristic
manifestations. Eros shows the willingness of the organism to
consolidate itself, to expand its vital energy into larger
environments. Thanatos is the opposite instinct, representing
disharmony, dissolution, the dismantling of parts, the ending of
vital activities. In keeping with his very comprehensive
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definition of the libido and of sexuality, Freud came to bring
together Eros and the libido. On the other hand, his theory of
sexual development also included the force of repression,
which increased the drive on the part of the unconscious to
regress toward an earlier state, all the way to the end of the
road, the death of the organism.
This very special theory of the dual nature of
conflicting and conjunctive instincts has a couple of features
worth noting. The first has to do with the fact that although
these instincts originate in the Id, in the physical constitution of
the body, they permeate the framework of all psychic
manifestations. The Id remains the primary location of
Thanatos, of dissolution, but it also transmits its energy to more
conscious processes. Although the Ego was considered the
main device through which Eros was confirmed and Thanatos
repressed, Freud thought that the death instinct sometimes also
manifested itself in the Ego’s activity. Last but not least, Freud
did not think that the death instinct was totally evil or
something to be annihilated. In the psychodynamic economy, if
properly checked by the countervailing Eros, Thanatos
prevents the individual from total absorption into the objects he
identifies with, especially with higher cultural constructs. What
is more, the aggressive force of Thanatos may facilitate the
further expression of its apparent opposite, Eros, although the
power coming from its roots, firmly planted into the primitive
forces of the id, tends to be greater. At a higher level, this was
clearly and painfully demonstrated by the power of Thanatos
over Eros in the first global military conflagration.
Although Freud was not as interested as the other great
modernist thinker, Marx, in creating an all-encompassing grand
narrative that would serve as a theory of culture as well as of
everything else, as previously mentioned, he extended his
investigations of the individual psyche toward a lucid
interpretation of wide-ranging cultural phenomena. His 1907
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essay, ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming,’ continuing a
preoccupation previously expressed in The Interpretation of
Dreams, claimed that literature and creative work as a whole
can be seen as similar to the fantasies encountered in the young
child’s narcissism driven by the pleasure principle in the
pregenital phase. The act of creation relies on daydreaming,
thus inviting approaches to it which were discussed in The
Interpretation of Dreams. Jerry Aline Flieger, in an essay
discussing ‘the art of forgetting,’ also links Freud’s
daydreaming to Proust’s moments bienheureux, with the
famous madeleine image:
In Freud’s view, the artist, like the dreamer, gives free play to
forgotten infantile material and mobilizes unconscious
processes ‘instead of suppressing them with conscious
criticism’ (Standard Edition 9:14). Indeed, when Freud
repeatedly characterizes the moment of poetic inspiration as a
dreamlike experience, a moment when repressed material
surges into an altered consciousness, he seems to be describing
a phenomenon very like Proust’s moments bienheureux (those
moments of sudden artistic revelation provoked by a fecund
image - object such as the madeleine) (67).
The literary work, like the dream as accounted for in
the patient’s manifest content version, does not display the
author’s narcissistic vision in its original form. It is refashioned
into the aesthetic form, which places it in the cultural field of
structured imagination and fantasy, making it enjoyable and
acceptable to the author and the reader alike. In this
interpretation, cultural work is seen as the medium through
which repressed materials from the unconscious emerge and
are found enjoyable as a result of the action of the sublimation
processes.
It so happens that Freud’s very materialist view of the
individual and of society leads to what is, arguably, a sort of
escapist, narcissistic view of culture and its motivations. Thus,
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in Freud’s opinion, the cultural economy of production and
consumption of literary works, of artistic works as a whole,
unfolds under the sign of the pleasure principle of the
unconscious, in opposition to the reality principle. Culture is
thus a form of comforting human activity reminiscent of the
narcissistic gratification that the young child strives to
experience, a sublimated return of the repressed.
Freud’s relative detachment from both the traditional
society of his Jewish background and from his non-Jewish,
rather liberal Christian Viennese environment facilitated the
broadening of his cultural investigations in such works as
Totem and Taboo (1913), The Future of an Illusion (1927), and
Moses and Monotheism (1939). He thus moved from the study
of the narcissistic mechanisms of artistic creation to religion, a
much more sensitive and problematic cultural field.
Since art’s effects rely on the sublimation of the
working of the unconscious, on primary narcissism and the
pleasure principle, its materials, however outrageous, violent or
shocking, were seen as remote from reality, more acceptable as
the ‘mere’ play of fantasy. With religion, things stand
completely differently. The shock and the outrage are not
sublimated, since its prohibitions, taboos, fears have to do with
the much closer and more tangible processes of repression.
Thus, while a baby’s primary narcissism is the source of
artistic expressions, religion stems from the more disturbing
Oedipus Complex and its reaction to narcissism. As such,
religion, in Freud’s opinion, is a collective symbolic
representation of the Oedipal complex and of the way it is dealt
with by a community of people.
In Totem and Taboo, on the basis of evidence derived
from anthropology, Freud concluded that a large number of
primitive religious practices focused on the incest taboo. This
consists in a prohibition against sex with individuals within a
more or less large kinship group. This is accounted for by
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Freud through the Oedipal fear that the father himself feels,
aware of the child’s desire for the mother.
The symbolic attribution of the ambivalence toward the
father-figure to a mystical animal figure, which was both
worshiped due to its attributes of omnipotence and debased to
the status of food through its slaughtering and consumption, led
to the identification of various tribes with various totem
animals. The same ambivalent combination of omnipotence
and ritually victimized object was found by Freud to
characterize Christianity, with the forbidding figure of God the
Father, especially as revealed in the Old Testament, and the
suffering God the Son. The holy communion symbolically
reenacts the Son’s sacrifice, with whom the believer identifies
through incorporation and consumption of what the holy bread
and wine symbolize (the body and the blood of God the Son as
part of the Holy Trinity).
Freud admitted that religion plays an important role in
the preservation of psychic balance and integrity, while at the
same time claiming that it preserved in new forms prerational
experience. He suggested that the lucid truths supplied by the
scientific worldview would finally substitute for it, in people’s
mature confrontation with the harsh realities of life.
Undoubtedly reflecting on what was already happening
in neighboring Germany in the aftermath of WWI, Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) continued
Freud’s theoretical project of linking his research and findings
on the development of the individual psychic apparatus to
broader social and cultural frameworks. Freud thought that the
narcissistic behavior of young children, driven by the need for
immediate gratification of basic desires was not radically
different from that of individuals identifying with such larger
entities as crowds, mobs, masses. Both individual infants and
large groups of people acted on the impulses of fantasy, the

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latter’s behavior having a much more serious impact on what
was taking shape as a troubled European and world history.
The irrational symbols and slogans that animated
people at that time and in the subsequent years were providing
both reasons for anxiety and food for thought concerning the
characteristics and operation of ideology, especially in the
more obvious form of propaganda. Under more than specific
circumstances, the primary energies of the unconscious of the
individuals, when large groups are formed, are channeled
toward the focus of the collective ego-ideal: the supreme,
omniscient and omnipotent ruler, assuming the father-figure
role. This collective ego-ideal as part of the Superego – Ego
relationship, through its access to primitive urges and drives,
may turn the Superego, otherwise geared to the
accomplishment of constructive, civilizational projects, to
violence and destruction through the activation of ingroup –
outgroup antagonisms based on differences in ideology, one
might say today, looking around and in retrospect. Freud was
aware that the collective adoption of the Ego-ideal led to both
solidarity with one another (typical of Eros) within the group,
and to the exclusion of the … outsiders, who did not share the
same Ego-ideal (‘superior’ Germans vs. ‘inferior’ Jews being a
good illustration in Hitler’s Germany).
Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, originally
published in German in 1929, is his best-known, influential and
controversial work in the field of cultural theory. The Eros and
Thanatos structural theory, highlighting the ambivalent and
powerful role of aggression as Eros’s inimical brother, revealed
Freud’s ideas about the conflict-ridden human condition,
balanced between the individual desire for lack of constraints
and the conformity that social organization as civilization
requires. What appears to be good for civilization gives cause
for discontent to the individual, whose natural condition makes
him prone to aggression and selfishness. The clash between the
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individual and culture, which inhibits primary, primitive drives,
leads to the individual’s persistent guilt and discontent. Freud
does not make any distinction between culture and civilization,
they represent the social forces that are meant to ‘tame’ the
instincts of individuals living in a community. As Francis
Mulhern briefly summarizes Freud’s view, ‘learned social
behavior [i.e. culture and civilization] formed a single complex
shaped by the necessities of the human constitution’(25).
The very general question Freud is trying to address is
the reason why a large number of people living in advanced,
rather affluent communities in the West, experience alienation,
going so far as to show destructive and self-destructive
behavior, a question which undoubtedly still puzzles many
people in Europe in the 21st century as well. Freud’s answer
affirms that it is the troubled, antagonistic relationship between
the death instinct and the sexual instinct in its broad (Freudian)
sense.
Members of primitive pre-civilized communities had
led lives almost devoid of repression, under the apparently
happy-go-lucky pleasure principle. They had experienced more
freedom, fewer social (civilizational) pressures. They found it
easier to satisfy their aggressive drives quickly. On the other
hand, they had led harsher, shorter, more insecure lives, with
little material comfort.
Gradually, living in communities involved each
individual renouncing part of the freedom linked to the
pleasure principle (the right to kill, rape, torture, or rob
someone, for example). Part of the sexual energy, under the
influence of the reality principle, came to be directed toward
socially beneficial work or toward cultural creation, thus
delaying gratification and sublimating the energy of the
primitive drives.
Communal work is seen by Freud as a sublimating
activity of the Eros, at the same time postponing and repressing
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erotic activity. All this gradually led to a considerable increase
in the level of aggression against other individuals, more or
less indiscriminately (much in the way serial killers act). Also,
largely because cultural work involved cooperation, the death
instinct was reoriented, through the Superego, to the Ego,
leading to feelings of guilt. This sense of guilt, in its turn, came
from fantasies or hallucinations of aggression against other
people redirected inward onto the self through the mediation of
the Superego. All this resulted in large amounts of repressed
sexual drives seldom successfully rechanneled into social
activity and the attending increased aggression redirected
inward that caused guilt-based forms of neurosis. The more
advanced a civilization became, the higher the proportion of
individuals feeling anxiety, anger, outbreaks of aggression, a
realization that prompted Freud to conclude that as civilization
advances, people tend to become increasingly neurotic (or at
least a larger and larger number of them).
Freud had no far reaching and general cure for these
alarming civilizational symptoms (a grimly ironical, black
humor remark would be: this explains why WW II started
before long). An understanding of these symptoms might
produce some slight improvement in the condition of some,
might elucidate the causes, might produce more tolerance
(which, as it has been seen, may be a mixed blessing,
sometimes making some civilizational conflicts worse).
Unlike G.B. Shaw, Freud was not an enlightened,
compassionate socialist, nor was he a devout believer in
Marx’s Communist Manifesto. He thought that Marxism was
no solution to the capitalist society’s ills. In his opinion, as
Civilization and Its Discontents attempts to prove, the social
trouble and conflicts are not caused by the imperfection of one
particular economic system, but by the conflicting essence of
civilization itself. What is more, Freud (rightly) thought that
the socialist system may be even more repressive of the drives
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than capitalism, the latter offering a welcome release of
instinctual energy through the possibility of acquiring private
property.
Those who analyze Freud’s reasoning on the …
unreason provoked by too much civilization should also
consider the historical context of that moment: Stalinism, the
rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, the beginning of the Great
Depression, the greatest economic crisis of the capitalist
system until then, none of these civilizational symptoms likely
to provoke an exaggerated amount of optimism. No wonder
that Freud was made painfully aware of the destructiveness of
some central aspects of 20th century civilization and was able to
see all that from the perspective of some of civilization’s
discontents.

II.21. Structure, form, semiosis and critical cultural

discourse: an overview
Assessments of culture based on structure or form rather than
on content may be traced back to ancient times, although such
historical incursions may lead to very different interpretations,
depending on the meaning attributed to such broad concepts as
form or structure.
Structuralist critical cultural discourses became
prominent in the 1950s and the 1960s, influencing and being
influenced by other theoretical tributaries and currents of the
Cultural Studies river, so to speak. The cultural phenomena
under study are meaningful only to the extent that they belong,
as units, to a systematic structure within which all units are
defined in relational terms, while individuals are seen as being
affected by these structures, rather than contributing to their
creation (see the extreme position of the Marxist structuralist
Althusser and what will be called here ‘the story of the ISAs
and the subjected subject’).

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 The structuralist critical cultural discourse may be said
to consist of three related approaches, out of which is
structuralism in its strict sense, the other two being the
formalist and the semiotic approaches. Ferdinand de Saussure,
usually seen as the founding father of structuralism as a whole
by his Cours de linguistique générale, is also considered, along
with Charles S. Pierce, as one of the two major initiators of
semiology or semiotics. Although Saussure’s main interest was
linguistics, Saussure was thinking of fashioning a new science,
semiology, applying to all social aspects of human experience.
Others will expand his ideas beyond the scope of linguistics:
Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Russian Formalists,
even Marxists such as Louis Althusser.
Saussure broke with strong 19th century trends which
had neglected the diachronic dimension of language and the
mechanisms associated with it. Scholars had concentrated on
histories of the development of various languages, on
comparative approaches, on the phonological systems and how
they developed. Paradoxically, these trends would be more in
line with the historicist dimension in critical approaches to
culture and the chief component, language. However, it was
Saussure’s diachronic approach that became particularly
relevant to the emerging cultural studies of the 20th century.
Saussure sees the ‘frozen’ language system of the diachronic
approach as a cultural phenomenon which creates meaning by
the functioning of a system of similarities and differences.
Language is not a transparent lens through which people see
the world as it ‘really’ is. It is a cultural construct that
‘controls’ people, offering them the parameters and coordinates
that select what is seen as important in the amorphous reality
surrounding us. Language is thus what others will try to define
through the concept of ‘ideology,’ a simplified and selective
construction that invites us to take it as ‘the real McCoy,’

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‘truth,’ ‘reality’ in the inner world of subjective experience, in
the outer world of action.
This cultural construct is defined in terms of a number
of distinctions or dichotomies, the most important one being
langue vs. parole. The former designates the vast array of rules
and structures that are shared by those engaged in an act of
linguistic communication. The latter shows the actual
performance of a speaker having internalized some of the rules
and structures of langue to a satisfactory extent, so that
unproblematic communication can take place.
Langue and parole as a signifying system in which the
sign as the arbitrary link between the signifier (the physical
form, written or uttered) and the signified (the mental
association) provided the model for many other signifying
systems which will become the province of semiotics or
semiology, studying performance and competence in the social
spheres, linguistic or otherwise.
Starting from Saussure’s theory, one arrives at the three
basic sorts of rules involved in any semiotic system. The first
type of rule determines the inventory of elementary units that
make up the system. Therefore, a field of investigation,
kinship, for example, is divided in its component parts. Second,
since the field is limited, there is also a limited number of items
in this inventory that may meaningfully be substituted for any
given unit, word, item. Uncle, for example, may be substituted
for niece, father for son. These units are in a paradigmatic
relationship, one item substituting for another in the
paradigmatic series. Last but not least, there are also
syntagmatic rules that regulate the order in which units occur.
In language, it is word order, which is looser in Latin, stricter
in English, for example.
What emerges is a view of any signifying system
imagined as a sort of comprehensive pattern, featuring all
possible syntagmatic and paradigmatic possibilities. This
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pattern should be able to encompass the whole range of
possibilities for producing meaning. The meaning of each unit
of the signifying pattern depends on its position within the
framework of the system. In principle, the inventory of
possible meanings within any semiotic system should be
limited, and therefore determinable, considering the
relationships within the closed pattern.
To understand a cultural text, then, two questions are of
paramount importance in a structuralist, semiotic cultural
approach. The first one, of a paradigmatic nature, has to do
with the reasons why certain elements and not other ones were
chosen. From a syntagmatic perspective, the question is linked
to what the structural rules that regulate the sequencing of the
component elements are.

II.22. Jakobson’s structuralist communication model:

factors, functions, the metaphoric – metonymic axis
Roman Jakobson (1896 - 1982) went on to broaden Saussure’s
linguistic theory to a more comprehensive cultural scope, his
main contribution to literary, communication, and cultural
studies arguably being his description of the structural
constituents and their functions in any act of communication,
his theory about the metaphoric and metonymic poles in
literature, as well as his views on the binary nature of the
functioning of the human mind.
In his Cours de linguistique générale (one has to
remember that it was later recovered and reconstructed, from
incomplete forms, from the lecture notes of his students,
probably part of a larger project that Saussure had intended on
semiology, the general science of signs) Saussure had
concentrated on the nature of the sign and on the distinction
between langue and parole in a diachronic approach to
language. For the sake of a more accurate analysis he paid less
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attention to the more comprehensive contexts of
communication, while focusing on the linguistic, synchronic
dimension. Jakobson went on to fill in this apparent gap,
providing a structural description of the communication system
and its factors in terms of addresser, addressee, context,
message, code, and contact, as shown in the following
diagram:

It is worth adding that, in Jakobson’s model above, such details

as the relative status of the addresser and of the addressee, as
well as their attitudes, might make all the difference in specific
communication situations.
In addition to addresser (speaker/ narrator/author/
encoder) and addressee (listener/reader/decoder), whose
functions are easy to understand, as well as the message as
content, the last three Cs - context (referent), contact, and code
- provide the finishing touches to the complex communication
system.
In cultural studies, context and even code would
become more important than the message, especially when
subjects of cultural situations are thought to be interpellated,
even created as such by external forces (structure, ideology,
language, cultural background, etc.). The contact is also
important, having to do with the medium, media studies going
then on to become an important area of cultural investigation in
a contemporary, largely mass-mediated world. The code refers
to both the language as the overarching code, as well as to

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various other cultural codes (dress code, etc.), again heralding
directions in contemporary cultural analysis.
Depending on which factor the communication act (the
literary text as communication, etc.) focuses on, the six
functions of language Jakobson identifies are: referential
(context), poetic (the text focused on itself as unique use of
language), emotive/affective/expressive (focus on the
addresser’s emotions, feelings, inner state), conative (on the
addressee), phatic (maintaining or dismissing the channel/
contact), metalingual or reflexive (language describes itself).
Jakobson not only theorized the factors and functions,
but also provided brilliant demonstrations, as Edward J.
Brown, one of his former students, remembers about the
mentor’s remarkable analysis and interpretation of the poetic
function:
His most striking demonstrations of the principle were an
analysis of Baudelaire’s ‘Les chats’ in collaboration with
Levi-Strauss, and of Shakespeare’s verbal art in Sonnet 129,
done in collaboration with L. G. Jones. Both are masterful
dissections of poetic structure in terms of linguistic
oppositions and correspondences, symmetries and anti-
symmetries, equivalent forms and salient contrasts (97).
Jakobson’s metonymic – metaphoric axis is linked to an
important contribution to structuralist theory: the concept and
use of binarism. Starting from Saussure’s views on the
differential nature of language as a sign system, Jakobson
noted that any differential system can be analyzed in sets of
dichotomies, oppositions involving only two contrary aspects
of a whole or two distinct elements. Jakobson thought that the
mind works in a binary fashion, that is, on the basis of the
operation of binary principles. Basically, thinking relies on
sets of oppositions.
What is important for cultural discourse is that the
realization of the binary nature of the working of the human
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mind linked to the idea of associative or paradigmatic
substitution, which Saussure had already worked out, led to the
conclusion that individuals have a tendency to think in terms of
parallel but opposed sequences of items. Each of the cultural
terms of a system will be linked to the other ones in one
particular sequence – and possibly replaced by any of them –
and additionally opposed to another item in an opposing
sequence.
Figures of speech, their classification and their use, had
featured prominently in the critical assessment of literary texts,
with many attempts being made to establish a comprehensive
taxonomy of them. Jakobson started from Saussure’s
identification of the basic operations of paradigmatic
substitution and syntagmatic sequencing, claiming that two of
the main figures of speech, metaphor and metonymy, provide
defining frameworks for meaningful linguistic structures, such
as literary texts. Metaphor is seen as the literary or rhetorical
counterpart of the operation of associative substitution,
consisting in a substitution of meaning within the paradigmatic
axis of language, while metonymy regulates language on the
syntagmatic axis.
From this distinction Jakobson concludes that the two
above-mentioned tropes represent the two extremes of a
continuum within which specific literary works and whole
literary genres can be located, closer to either the metonymic or
the metaphoric pole.
Fiction, dependent on syntagmatic sequencing, is closer
to the metonymic pole, while lyric poetry, less narrative,
largely emotive, focusing on the feelings of the sender (poet) in
Jakobson’s communication model, is close to the metaphoric
pole. One application of this generalization can be literally
seen today in one component of cultural studies, film studies.
Syntagmatic segments show narrative as action, while short,
paradigmatic close-ups are likely to express emotion, feeling,
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subjective perception. A combination of syntagmatic and
paradigmatic elements will give both depth and dynamism to
long extended sequences.

II.23. Anthropological, formalist, structuralist cultural

connections: an overview
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work in anthropology is the model of the
structuralist discourse. Basically, Levy-Strauss considers that
culture is the system of the expressions of the deep structures
of the human mind, and that the savage mind has the same
makeup as the civilized mind. Cultural studies will preserve the
concept of culture as structure, but will develop the idea of
culture in social, political, ideological, linguistic contexts, with
many strands of it giving more importance to agency, the
ability of individuals to be creative and make choices, rather
than to abstract structure as the set of constraining and defining
institutions that create and manage culture and identity.
Formalism is associated with the Russian formalists of
two distinct schools, the OPOJAZ (The Society for the Study
of Poetic Language) from St. Petersburg and the Moscow
Linguistic Circle. Like most cultural movements, Formalism
appeared as a response to the orthodoxies of the day, as Victor
Erlich claims:
Like most new schools of thought, Formalism was in large
part a reaction against the dominant intellectual trends. Like
most new Russian schools of thought, it was a vehement
reaction. The young Formalist theoreticians repudiated with
equal fervor academic eclecticism which weighed heavily
upon Russian literary history, the message-mindedness of the
‘social’ critics, and the metaphysical bias of the Symbolists. It
is worth noting that the ‘formalist’ label was pinned on the
Opoyaz by its opponents rather than chosen by its adherents
(627).

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As the term formalism had strong derogatory connotations in
the Soviet Union, among its opponents featuring prominently
‘the powers that be,’ the movement was banned under Stalin’s
dictatorship in the early 1930s, with its members either leaving
Soviet Russia or keeping a very low profile.
Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928) is
an illustration of the principles of the Russian formalist
approach to popular culture (folklore studies and cultural
studies competing in the intellectual cultural arena, the former
less visible, though). Its structural examination of plot and
other component parts of the folklore narrative will lead to the
emergence of the systematic analysis of narrative patterns,
narratology, which, in its structuralist form, enjoyed
prominence in literary studies for several decades, until more
context-based approaches became more influential.
As late as the early 1980s, largely because of the broad
interdisciplinary scope that the structuralist discourse occupied,
it was seen with reservation by some who, like the American
Robert Grafstein, from a social science perspective, reproached
it for its amorphousness:
Structuralism has not been a well-structured movement. As it
diffused from linguistics and psychology into the various
social sciences (as well as other disciplines), its reputation
grew, and its unifying message became harder to discern […]
Structuralism's apparent assimilation into social science is the
result of equating social structures with the structural
descriptions that emerge in ecological and aggregate data
(617).
Structuralism in its broadest sense led to the assessment
of culture as a signification network making up a complete
system, in which signs do not refer outside culture, but acquire
meaning in opposition to other signs, usually within
significantly different subsystems. Compare, as one
illustration, the most conservative dress code in tennis
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tournaments observed at Wimbledon, with more casual, highly
multicolored dress attire allowed in newer tournaments. It
appears to stress tradition, as Wimbledon makes a statement: it
is the oldest and most prestigious Grand Slam tennis event,
unwilling to accept eccentricity. Wimbledon’s dress code says
white only, no change admitted.
While the previous cultural discourses of hermeneutics
and psychoanalysis dealt with subjective interpretations, the
sign system defines itself and its components by means of the
system’s relatively stable structural features. On the other hand,
since it postulates the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign,
structuralism draws attention to the social and arbitrary
construction of culture, not to be taken in immanent terms.
Cultural events, processes and various entities are therefore not
seen as intrinsic and inalterable, being entirely dependent on
the various abstract configurations of the cultural system. J. K.
Merquior critically views the extreme structuralist,
poststructuralist cultural thought advocating the power of
ideology to distort and the apparent disconnection between the
system of culture and reality adopted by such theorists as
Gerald Graff, quoting from Graff’s Literature Against Itself, to
support the point of his criticism of that text:
It is true that the idea of a ‘natural correspondence’ between
language and reality has often been used to justify the view of
reality held by those wielding political power […] one can
argue that the established ideology fails to correspond to
reality, and go on to present an alternative view which
corresponds more closely (244-245).
Structuralism, as it has been said, came in several
dimensions (structuralism proper, formalism, semiotics). Some
make a distinction between an earlier, more empirical
structuralism (before 1968) and a more theoretical, anti-
humanist version. John G. Blair, writing in 1978, discussing
structuralism in terms of its reception in the United States,
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distinguishes between a structuralism in the old sense, which
was easily accepted in the US, and the later version which will
influence British Cultural Studies in the 1970s:
Piaget’s own work is typical of the positivist orientation of
earlier study of structures; that is, he isolated through
repeatable experiments the presence of certain stages of
development of children's minds which shape their
possibilities of conceptualization and cognition. His
widespread influence on American educational theory makes
it clear that his sort of structural study is easily accepted in the
United States (262).
Piaget’s genetic structuralism is contrasted with the non-
genetic type as developed by Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes,
the difference between the two orientations being perceived by
Blair in ontological terms, as to where the structure is to be
traced, in the human brain or outside it, in the external medium
of language:
Piaget and his fellow students of structure affirmed that the
patterns they studied are verifiably there, in the human brain, the
atom, the physical universe. The structuralists proper, on the other
hand, focus their attention on the structuring vision of human
beings, most particularly on the necessities of human thought
imposed by its in- escapable medium-language (262).
The non-genetic structuralism in the cultural studies, unlike
culturalism and Piaget’s earlier version, is an anti-humanist
approach, removing individuals as agents from the core of their
critical inquiry. It examines those signifying practices that
produce meaning as an effect of the action of structural,
predictable regularities that do not originate in people, but
govern them, thus determining their identity as subjectivity.
Human agency in the liberal humanist tradition, also present in
British culturalism, is replaced by what Althusser calls the
interpellation of the subject by the ISAs (Ideological State

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Apparatuses), the distinct and specialized institutions, not to be
confused with the RSA (Repressive State Apparatuses). The
ISAs that he mentions are:
– the religious ISA (the system of the different Churches),
– the educational ISA (the system of the different public and
private “Schools”),
– the family ISA,
– the legal ISA,
– the political ISA (the political system, including the different
Parties),
– the trade-union ISA,
– the communications ISA (press, radio and television, etc.),
– the cultural ISA (Literature, the Arts, sports, etc.)(80).
The work of these institutions is obviously more powerful, as
they are less visibly constraining; what’s more, they even
assume a beneficent, positive appearance. What they do is
subtle manipulation in ‘manufacturing consent,’ to use Herman
and Chomsky’s phrase from the title of their 1988 book on
what American media does.
The structuralist strand in cultural studies sees culture
having to do with the ‘systems of relations’ of the deep
structures of language, with the meaning produced not by
human interaction, but by an abstract grammar. These deep
structures and this grammar, though, impose themselves on
specific people in specific situations, under specific cultural
circumstances, creating meaning through patterns of systematic
difference in language, unconstrained by the intentions of the
people who do not take advantage of them, but are subjected to
them (the poststructuralist view of the individual as subjected
subject).
In structuralism, culture is seen as a language, whose
system is regulated by the same linguistic dichotomies. Culture
is thus seen as a manifestation of the deep structures of
language. It is to be noted that, although the term structuralism
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is here used to include poststructuralism, the latter term adds a
complication to the structuralist project. Whereas structuralism
assumes the existence of a synchronic system with stable
meaning relations, poststructuralism, in its deconstructive
version, dismisses and challenges any illusion of stability and
regularity, its excesses advocating relativism and
indeterminacy as central issues in the interpretation of cultural
texts.

II.24. Some of Marx’s marks in the 20th century

Judging by what little attention Marx paid to editing his work,
one might think that he did not envisage turning his views on
history and society into a rigid theoretical doctrine. That
actually happened after his death in 1883, first under the
supervision of his closest friend and collaborator, Engels.
Marxism as taken over from a selection of Marx’s writings,
initially by Engels, was turned into a political ideology
following different directions.
The first aimed at developing dialectical materialism as
a theory of theories, a universal doctrine that would encompass
and inform the natural sciences as well. It is Engels who gave
the final triadic form (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) to Hegel’s
and Marx’s more flexible versions of the dialectic movement
the categorical status of a universal law. In the second, starting
from Darwin’s theory about natural history and evolution,
Engels fused the natural and the historical into an inexorable
universal materialist dialectic process.
This is the specific move that led to the exaggeration of
Marx’s ideas about the dependence of the superstructure on the
economic base as far as culture, part of the superstructure, was
concerned. In Engels’s revised version, superstructural aspects
(including cultural phenomena) came to be seen as
straightforward reflections of developments in the economic
sphere, being thus confirmed in their secondary roles. This
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economic toughening of the Marxist doctrine, quite
unexpectedly, became extremely widespread outside Western
Europe, with Soviet Russia and Communist China developing
the kind of materialist cultural and political discourse that
would become bankrupt by the end of the 20th century (with
China’s current hybrid model being an interesting
development).
Among the first devout believers in the view that the
superstructure faithfully reflects the economic base was Georgi
Phekhanov (1856 – 1918) who did not live long enough to help
in the implementation of socialist realism. According to
Plekhanov, the examination of the kind of art created at a
specific historical time is bound to give accurate information
about the ideological make-up of that age. Art for art’s sake,
which was thriving in his time, for example, was not seen as
disinterested, apolitical, but as bourgeois art. By not getting
politically involved, it helped preserve the capitalist status quo.
Similar positions had been conspicuous in the writing of
radical critics well before the Bolshevik Revolution, as Sarah
Ruth Lorenz notes:
The ‘radical’ criticism of mid-nineteenth-century Russia is
marked by a tension between its realist and its revolutionary
impulses. The work of N. G. Chernyshevsky and N. A.
Dobroliubov, the leading voices at the progressive journal The
Contemporary [Sovremennik], is remarkable on the one hand
for its implacable commitment to a literal understanding of
artistic imitation. Chernyshevsky's 1855 dissertation The
Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality [Esteticheskie otnosheniia
iskusstva к deistvitel'nosti] notoriously proclaims that the role
of art is to be a second-rate surrogate for reality, and
Dobroliubov, although not as aggressively iconoclastic in his
work as Chernyshevsky, consistently asserts in his articles of
the late 1850s that art must follow life (67).

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 Therefore, it was more than Engels’s more dogmatic
version of Marx’s views that was taken as a point of departure
by the founder of the Soviet version of Communism, Lenin,
considering the Russian contribution to this reflectionist thesis.
In practice, Marx’s economic determinism thesis did not work
in Russia. According to Marx, Russia first had to move from
feudalism to capitalism, the mujiks had to turn into the
proletariat, the proletariat and capitalism had to grow fast, then
the proletariat had to become politicized in order to start the
revolution, moving Russia into Communism. That needed a lot
of time.
Marx had stated that bourgeois society was the most
advanced form of social organization, to which Lenin added
the term ‘imperialism,’ to describe the highest stage of
capitalism. The concept of imperialism explained why the
Western working classes did not revolt against the oppressors.
The shrewd bourgeoisie shifted the burden from the shoulders
of the Western working classes onto those of workers in the
colonies and in the less developed countries. Lenin and a
succession of Communist leaders had to find another recipe
then. Communism would be arrived at not by the contribution
of the most advanced class, the proletariat, but through the
control of a certain Communist ‘aristocracy,’ the
nomenklatura, which took over the revolutionary role initially
assigned to the soviets (councils) of workers as the leading
force of society.
Apart from that, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution
was less interested in further developing the theory as in using
it for specific tactical moves in the implementation of his
political agenda. Kolakowski supports such a view of Lenin’s
revolutionary reductionism in his Main Currents of Marxism:
To Lenin […] all theoretical questions were merely
instruments of a single aim, the revolution; and the meaning of
all human affairs, ideas, institutions, and values resided
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 exclusively in their bearing on the class struggle. It is not hard
to find support for this attitude in the writings of Marx and
Engels, who in many theoretical passages emphasized the
transience and class-relatedness of all aspects of life in a class
society (383).
One of his major contributions to the Marxist theory,
which, like Hegel’s, was based on higher and higher levels of
emancipation and freedom for humankind in each new
historical formation was … the implementation of the idea of
the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ which became the official
doctrine of Communist states. Under Lenin’s successor, Stalin,
this dictatorship of the proletariat would become Stalin’s
personal dictatorship, largely supported by the bureaucratic
apparatus of domination and control established and managed
through the use of the nomenklatura.
Apart from his most important personal cultural
contribution, his own personality cult, Stalin’s main personal
contribution to the culture of revolutionary terror was the show
trial, in which innocent people (at least of the charges brought
against them), in front of large audiences of indignant ordinary
people, confessed to everything, after being questioned and
tortured by secret police ‘specialists.’
An exaggeration of Engels’s reflectionist thesis (the
superstructure as reflection of the economic base) was
institutionalized in the Soviet Union within the artistic realm
under the name of Socialist Realism, then updated as
Zhdanovism under the supervision of Stalin’s cultural
commissar, Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov. The artists had to
work under the watchful eye of the Party, had to choose the
right subjects and themes, had to show the world in clear-cut
ideological distinctions: those who were very good (the Soviet
working class) and those who were evil (the Western
bourgeoisie). While depicting the realities of Soviet Russia,
artists were free to choose between good and very good
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depictions of them. C. Vaughan James gives a more detached
view of the above-mentioned movement:
Far from being a new system foisted on the cowed and
unwilling artist (though uncomprehending, he may most
certainly have been), it was in fact an interpretation, within the
context of Marxist-Leninist ideology, of artistic developments
throughout the proletarian period of the revolutionary
movement. It was an attempt to codify those developments
and project them into the future, transforming the artist’s
‘tendency’ into a conscious programme (84).
Mao Zedong was the Lenin and Stalin rolled into one of
the Chinese Revolution, his version of the dictatorship of the
proletariat leading to the Cultural Revolution of 1966 – 1976.
Mao and the Chinese Communists did not appreciate
Krushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s totalitarianism after the
great leader’s death, thus China distancing itself from a
Moscow-centered Communist orthodoxy, establishing, in its
own turn, a so-called International Maoism movement. This,
along with International Trotskyism, defined itself as one of
Moscow’s two main rival Communist approaches. Although
Trotskyism appeared earlier than Maoism and is still influential
in some countries today, Robert J. Alexander, as late as 2001,
finds Maoism as the most outstanding Communist schism in
the history of International Communist organizations:
In sum, it can be said that International Maoism constituted, as
long as Mao lived, the most consequential schismatic
movement within International Communism since it came into
existence in 1919, with the establishment of the Communist
International (5).
The Chinese, quite remarkably, were able to adapt to
new economic circumstances, particularly in the post Cold War
age, their hybrid system being able to combine capitalist forms
of management and competition and Communist levels of

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cheap labor to turn into one of the new tigers of the
globalization age.
Culturally speaking, Maoism is still to be remembered
for its specific features. Thus, in the performing arts, the show
trials of the Chinese Revolution competed in displays of
hysteria with Stalin’s. Strictly in the domain of art, the
revolutionary operas, usually turned into film, were the most
remarkable products of Chinese popular culture as propaganda.
Nowadays, a new cultural and economic revolution is
unfolding. China’s formidable potential combines the
economic and the cultural in its manufacture and dissemination
of Western popular culture commodities as its main exports.
Ideologically and politically, Maoism as the official
doctrine of Communist China under Mao also had an
interesting journey into the Western world, with the US not
escaping its partial embrace. Maoism partially influenced the
New Left and the ideology of the Black Panther Party within a
distinct revolutionary cultural age, the age of the American
counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

II.25. Critical Theory and the beginning of Western

Cultural Marxism: Weber vs. Marx?
Western Marxism, more than orthodox Marxism or the official
Communist Marxism of totalitarian regimes in the Soviet
Union and then in the rest of the Communist bloc (if putting in
the same basket Russia, China, and Yugoslavia is accepted), is
the kind of materialist cultural discourse that has influenced the
development of Cultural Studies through its disregard of
Marx’s thesis of economic determinism (the material base
determines the ideological superstructure, ideology including
culture or being synonymous with it). Western Marxism, in
addition to the ‘quarrel with Marx’ on the issue of economic
determinism, adopted, adapted and reworked important Marxist
ideas. These are related to culture and civilization, ideology,
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alienation, commodity fetishism (turned into reification) as well
as a militant attitude to knowledge and society (what will be
called ‘critical’ in relation to ‘traditional’ theory). In short,
Western Marxism stresses the importance of the study of the
superstructure, especially of culture, not only for a better
understanding of society, but also with a view to promoting
social and political change for the better.
In addition to Marx, another main source of inspiration,
in addition to Freud, will be the sociologist Max Weber, whose
modernization theory based on rationalization often
contradicted Marx’s economic determinism. For Weber, ideas
(as part of the superstructure) counted much more in the
stability or dynamics of a society than the economic base, thus
paving the ground for later Marxists investing more theoretical
effort into the ‘superstructural business,’ so to speak.
A good illustration is his famous The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism which, written at the beginning of
the 20th century (published 1906), is still thought by
sociologists to be one of the most influential books of the
century, although considered by its orthodox Marxist
‘discontents’ to have reversed things, making the spirit primary
and the economic system secondary.
In his 2014 volume, Max Weber and The Protestant
Ethic: Twin Histories, Peter Gosh still sees Weber as the most
important thinker in the social sciences of the previous thinker,
while also drawing attention to the plurality of interpretations
that his work provoked:
Max Weber is without doubt the most prestigious thinker in
the social sciences today in Western Europe, North America
and East Asia. His works are used by innumerable people in
many disciplines, with the result that everyone knows “Max
Weber” in their own particular way (vii).

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 In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
Weber describes the configuration and meaning of advanced
capitalist societies in terms of its specific forms of rationalism,
which, in his opinion, were promoted by the … Protestant
spirit, obviously. Cary Boucock, in his volume on freedom, law
and modernity in Weber, identifies the defining words for
rationalism as the principle of the process of rationalization:
In only a few pages of the Protestant Ethic, one learns from
Weber's characterization of modern capitalism and its ethic of
professional vocationalism that ‘rational’ means deliberate,
systematic, calculable, impersonal, instrumental, exact,
quantitative, rule-governed, predictable, methodical,
purposeful, sober, scrupulous, efficacious, intelligible, and
consistent (19 – 20).
The sociology of religion associated with this text
shows the author’s main interest in the relationships which
involve symbolic systems and societies through the mediation
of religious ‘spirit’ (one can reread ‘Protestant spirit’ today as
‘Protestant ideology,’ and see how what the concept will soon
refer to is important for Weber as well). He describes the
workings of this Protestant spirit in terms of the prevailing
position occupied by its main principles. Asceticism, as
different from mysticism, is active. He calls it ‘inner-wordly’
(Protestant) asceticism, with an emphasis on individualism and
ethical conduct. Another concept used in this Protestant spirit
connection is ‘charisma,’ which has since gained currency in
everyday language, especially in politics.
However, both Weber and Marx can be placed together
within the long materialist tradition of critical cultural
discourse, Weber himself, in his Protestant Ethic…, insisting
on the common basis, rather than on the differences, between
his more spiritualist materialism and Marx’s more materialist
materialism, so to speak: ‘[…] it is […] not my aim to
substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided
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spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history’
(183). Besides being one of the most remarkable sociologists of
all time, like many people working in Cultural Studies today,
Weber had a finger in every disciplinary pie. Like Marx,
Weber is a historicist interested in the workings of capitalism,
as Talcott Parsons notes:
Weber was a true ‘historicist’ in one vital respect. His life
work focused on the problem of understanding the
significance of the society of his own time in Europe. It is
indicative that he called it capitalism, thus following the
Marxists’ terminology and in part sharing their negative
evaluation (172).
Capitalism, for Weber, was based on the rationalization
(Fordism and Taylorism) of its mechanisms, which contributed
to its success. The success of the ‘iron cage’ of rationalization
led to the confirmation of the system’s legitimacy, which
explains why the Bolshevik Revolution did not succeed in a
country like the United States. Modernization worked there.
Having so many and so varied interests (culture in
general, religion, economy, history, in addition to sociology)
Max Weber is inevitably limited in his ability to turn his
thought into comprehensive and systematic theoretical
constructs. However, his ideas have sparked responses in just
as many areas, all of them related to the development of
cultural studies today. Quite recently (2014), Peter Ghosh sees
him as both ‘dated’ and very much present in the current
theoretical discussions and confrontations today:
Max Weber is a historically dated figure in one obvious sense:
that, like all humanity, he has dates attached to him. However,
as a product of the most historically conscious era ever known
to European Kultur, he had an exceptionally acute and refined
awareness of this fact, and reasoned accordingly. The
proposition that ‘Max Weber is not our contemporary’ is
indeed a physiological truth, but it is an evident intellectual
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 falsehood. Never was there anyone more present on the page,
on the screen, and above all in our minds, than he is today
(391).
Whether Ghosh is right about Weber being ubiquitous in this
time and age is debatable, and so is his being a historically
dated figure more than any other prominent figure. We have all
learned from a long tradition in critical cultural discourse that
everything and everybody is under the sign of historicism,
more or less.
A good example of his contemporary influence, even if
it is not so openly acknowledged, is George Ritzer’s theory of
McDonaldization, which is not about the nefariousness of the
abuse of fast food in the contemporary world, as about the
effect of the iron cage of rationalization on contemporary
society, with particular relevance to forms of commodification
and rationalization of postmodern culture.

II.26. Walter Benjamin’s cultural revolution: from magic

to canonical art studies to mechanically-reproduced
popular culture studies.
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is an important figure in the
configuration of new forms of cultural critique that would be
brought under the umbrella of Western Marxism. He is usually
associated with the Frankfurt School as a link between
Marxism and the soon emerging forms of the New Left and of
British Cultural Studies. More specifically, he can be seen as
an interesting Marxist thinker whose ideas about culture,
sometimes diverging from Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s, shed
light on important issues. These have to do with the
development of cultural studies in the broad sense, while also
stimulating thinkers that would gain prominence in the soon
institutionalized cultural studies as … Cultural Studies to adopt
a pronounced populist attitude to Culture as … popular culture.

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 While acknowledging Benjamin’s complicated
background, his wide range of writings as well as the diversity
of the intellectual traditions that he eclectically drew the
inspiration for his highly idiosyncratic and syncretistic vision,
which embed him in a framework of preceding and
contemporary sources, Rolf J. Goebel notes Benjamin’s
relevance for subsequent theoretical ventures, inviting ‘re-
translations into other times, other cultures’:
The historical context of these intellectual explorations — the
modern European metropolis between the end of the bourgeois
materialism of the Wilhelminian Empire and the demise of the
Weimar Republic’s liberal democracy in the cataclysms of the
Third Reich and the Second World War — continues to
fascinate and terrify us, even though it is always threatened by
collective repression and oblivion. Paradoxically, however, the
very terms in which Benjamin focused on this particular
cultural territory contain anticipatory moments and even
dialectical reversals that transcend the particular space and
time of their origins and allow for a conceptual re-
translationinto other times, other cultures, other histories (1 –
2).
‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’ is an 1936 essay, Benjamin’s most interesting
contribution to the examination of contemporary culture from a
populist perspective, as a result of a personal account of the
development of the history of art. It is worth stressing that this
populist attitude is foreign to Adorno and Horkheimer’s
Dialectic of Enlightenment, making a comparative and
contrasting reading of the two texts a very ‘enlightening’
experience.
From a more Marxist position than the two above-
mentioned colleagues, Benjamin is interested in the ways in
which what he perceives as recent transformations in culture’s
material basis of production have changed the very nature of
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those cultural products and the attending social relations,
referring to the classical Marxist thesis of economic
determinism. The modern development of technical
reproductive media, beginning in the graphic arts and
photography, then cinema, are seen as a revolution in culture,
comparable and even more beneficial for the masses than
Gutenberg’s 15th century invention of the printing press. One of
the consequences is that the tendency is for art to be seen no
longer in terms of individual perception and appreciation in
private collections by its owners. With cinema as one of the
illustrations, it is being consumed collectively by large
numbers of ordinary people, not in one place, but in many
different places at the same time.
Mechanical reproduction, not seen like Adorno and
Horkheimer as one of the accomplices in the conspiracies of
the culture industry to consolidate control over people, may be
an empowering technological development, disseminating
knowledge, ideas, art to a wider and wider audience, including
the proletariat, art no longer destined for a limited cultural elite
only. This is seen as heralding a new episode in the
democratization of culture, while, through the concomitant
weakening of the monopoly exerted by the elites, it represents
a revolutionary change as well.
The epoch-making change is particularly obvious, in
addition to the more democratic cinema, in one of the
privileged sections of high culture, the fine arts. Ferris very
briefly summarizes Benjamin’s survey of the history of art
from magic to religion to the secularization of the cultivation of
beauty:
Benjamin traces this history of art through the magical and
cultic treatment of objects, through the development of a
sacred function for these objects in religion, and finally, to the
secularization of this sacred function in the cultivation of
beauty in art (104).
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Benjamin discusses the aura enveloping a painting by a grand
master before the appearance of the mechanical reproduction
techniques, accounted for from a historical perspective, from
its cultic and religious origins, created in conjunction with the
worshipping of the work’s special status, its uniqueness and
authenticity elevating it, like Keats’ Grecian Urn in his famous
ode, above its audience.
The aura, having to do with the masterpiece’s
authenticity and its uniqueness, produced both its artistic and
economic worth, which made it out of reach for the masses. Its
authenticity and uniqueness is reinforced and legitimated by
the intervention of art experts, an undertaking that enhances the
myth of the work of the artistic genius as a summit of
excellence, as a landmark in a venerable tradition.
The canonical work of art is seen as autonomous,
representing a self-sufficient, valuable entity above and
detached from the ‘terrestrial’ coordinates of its creation and
consumption. Consequently, it is out of the reach and
comprehension of the ordinary ways of social interpretation
and critique.
In Benjamin’s opinion the new media of mechanical
reproduction, such as film, photography, sound recording, have
inaugurated the revolutionary process of depriving the
canonical work of art of its aura. One might be tempted to
believe that, due to this revolutionary process, the countless
reproductions of the Mona Lisa on wrapped soap have both
empowered the masses and removed the aura from the painting
at the Louvre. Others might not.
The fact is that mass-produced and reproduced films
and music have enabled a much wider audience to participate
in the consumption of art, and a whole industry has become
prosperous, a development that Adorno and Horkheimer see
with less enthusiastic eyes in their description of the nefarious
effects of the culture industry.
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 The new cultural conditions also reshaped the view on
art’s interpretation. Previously, the aura surrounding the
masterpieces had elevated the realm of art, detaching it from
the mundane details of the economic and political here and
now, into the rarefied area of the aesthetic, art criticism having
nothing to do with the economic and the political. Mechanical
reproduction with its demystification of the aura has introduced
new criteria and standards that challenged the excellence linked
to a tradition of disinterested excellence, as well as aesthetic
criticism. Instead of the reverence toward the canon, it was
now political critique, announcing a paradigm shift from
canonical art studies to mechanically-reproduced popular
culture studies.
Although he admits that ‘Benjamin’s broader
assumptions about the emancipatory politics of film and
technical reproduction have often proved to be dead wrong’
(128), Lutz Koepnik appreciates his contribution to the
reconsideration of culture in the ‘Age of New Media,’ which,
as the phrase shows, highlights the tremendous impact that
mechanical reproductions have had on the way we view high
art and popular culture in our mass-media culture.

II.27.Gramsci: whose hegemony?

In what has come to be called Western Marxism, not to be
distinguished from … Marx’s Marxism, but from the ‘sci-fi’
‘scientific’ Marxism developed east of it, Antonio Gramsci has
become a legendary figure. Cultural Studies and Western
Marxism owe him what has been seen as his interpretation of
the relationship between false consciousness and ideology.
When one says Gramsci today, one thinks of his interpretation
of cultural hegemony.
Gramsci is seen as the prophet that enlightened
‘scientific’ Marxists on a couple of questions that had upset
Marx’s theory about the inexorable success of revolution in
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advanced capitalist societies. Why did revolution fail in
advanced post WWI Germany and succeeded in backward
feudal Russia instead? Why did the oppressed working classes
in the West accept the status quo, instead of following Marx’s
revolutionary invitation? Obviously, these thinkers were
unwilling to heed Weber’s explanations about modernization
as rationalization leading to the legitimation of the capitalist
system, they were too … bourgeois. Instead, Antonio Gramsci,
unlike Marx, Engels, Lenin and obviously Weber, had very
proletarian beginnings, experiencing severe material hardships
since childhood. He had been legitimated by his harsh
beginnings to explain the workings of capitalism, and his early
involvement in the activity of the workers’ councils in factories
in Turin had confirmed his leadership qualities.
For Marx, broadly speaking, ideology had been seen as
false consciousness, usually applied to the bourgeoisie,
considered as a homogeneous social bloc: the new oppressors.
The problems of ideology belong to the superstructure,
basically the state structure and culture. Since the proletariat is
strictly limited to manual work, it has nothing to do with
culture as high culture or with the running of the state,
consequently it has no right to have a consciousness, false or
otherwise. No ideology, no false consciousness, as far as Marx
is concerned.
Lenin had introduced further distinctions, elevating the
poor working classes to a … low level of consciousness, not
the false consciousness of the bourgeoisie, but a somewhat
spontaneous ‘trade-union’ consciousness, having to do with
their modest requirements for a less harsh existence. In
addition, there was the ‘reformist’ thought of the social
democrats, which was just as dangerous for the working classes
as bourgeois ideology. The reason? Because it did not coincide
with Lenin’s own vision, thus being a distraction from the right
path. For Lenin, both the bourgeoisie and the reformist social
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democrats were part of a considerable danger that had to be
dealt with.
Lenin used the concept of hegemony in a particular
sense, not in the one given to it by Gramsci and then adopted in
Cultural Studies and Western Marxism. For him hegemony
amounted to the Soviets’ totalitarianism, leading to the
dictatorship of the proletariat. This apparently long digression
is meant to provide the background for Gramsci’s next step in
the clarification of the mechanisms of hegemony, on the one
hand, and to contextualize some of Gramsci’s ideas as a
Communist leader, rather than as a Marxist thinker.
Writing as early as 1976, Thomas R. Bates draws
attention, in his ‘Antonio Gramsci and the Bolshevization of
the PCI,’ to new material (then), made available to him by the
Gramsci Institute in Rome, which shows serious changes in
Gramsci’s theoretical view and political behavior during the
time he was the leader of the Italian Communist Party. The
excerpts Bates quotes from Gramsci’s Note sul Machiavelli
show a totalitarian mind, different from the ideas in the Prison
Notebooks that will make him one of the sources of inspiration
for Western Marxism:
A totalitarian politics tends: 1. [to] ensure that the members of
a certain party find in this one party all the satisfaction they
formerly found in a multiplicity of organizations...; 2. destroy
all other organizations or incorporate them in a system of
which the party is the sole governor. This happens when: 1.
the given party is the vehicle of a new culture, and we have a
progressive phase; 2. the given party wants to prevent another
force, the vehicle of a new culture, from becoming totalitarian,
and we have an objectively regressive and reactionary phase,
even if the reaction (as always happens) tries to appear itself
as the vehicle of a new culture (in Bates 115).
Gramsci’s subordination to the orders of the Stalin-
controlled Comintern had contributed to him earning the
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position of leader of the Communist Party, thus pushing aside
Amadeo Bordiga (more independent from Stalin), the first
leader of the Communist Party of Italy. On the other hand,
unfortunately for him, the leader of the CPI got arrested and
imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime. Gramsci was
imprisoned in 1926, and he wrote his famous Prison Notebooks
from 1929 to 1935, when he was released, in very poor health.
In his book on Gramsci, a sympathetic Antonio
Santucci identifies two facets, which does not necessarily
imply the man was a double dealer:
Identifying two Gramscis does not imply contrasting the man
of action with the thinker, nor does it imply any hypothesis
about a radical change of opinion or political affiliation on his
part (165).
How about three Gramscis? The party leader who thinks what
is politically expedient and the radical revolutionary are two
facets of Gramsci’s identity, the third one being the most
important for Cultural Studies today, and probably just as
important for Western Marxism as a whole: the author of the
Prison Notebooks, with the reworking of the definition of
hegemony in new cultural contexts. In these notes, Gramsci
promotes the phrase ‘philosophy of praxis,’ which has been
interpreted in many ways, depending on which of the complex
circumstances of the time have been considered. Peter D.
Thomas believes that it shows, in evasive terms, a move
beyond Marxism:
the notion of a philosophy of praxis indicated a dimension of
Gramsci’s thought that, more or less implicitly or explicitly, in
a more or less nascent or developed state, pointed beyond or
outside of the Marxist traditions (98).
Through this ‘philosophy of praxis,’ comparing forms
of rule and domination based either on straightforward
coercion or on more subtle hegemony, Gramsci tried to
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discover the mechanisms making the latter form work for the
bourgeoisie to the detriment of the working classes. The first
form of domination was illustrated in Czarist Russia, where
force had been exerted on the vast majority of the population,
without the support of the prevailing ideology in Gramsci’s
sense (in Marx, ideology belonged only to the ruling class, so
the oppressed are not affected by it).
When a minority of revolutionaries attacked the Winter
Palace, the various sections of the population, unaffected by
the hegemony of the previous ruler, did not obstruct the regime
change. This was not as easy in countries under hegemonic, not
coercive, rule. In his theory, hegemony applies to all classes,
and the oppressed are affected by ‘false consciousness’ as well.
This hegemonic process maintains a pattern of ideas, meanings
and practices considered ‘true’ or ‘natural’ by the subordinate,
serving the interests of what he calls the hegemonic bloc in a
veiled way.
Instead of simplifying things in terms of the class
struggle opposing oppressors and oppressed, the bourgeoisie
and the proletariat, Gramsci sees a more complex site of
cultural confrontation between the ideas and meanings of a
group of ruling class sections that constitute the hegemonic
bloc at a certain moment and the ideas and meanings of a
possible counterhegemonic bloc that might emerge under
certain circumstances. In this confrontation, popular culture
becomes an area of central importance, replacing the economic
struggle in classic Marxist thought. Hegemonic blocs are not
stable, their components may compete for prevalence inside the
bloc, leading to new configurations. This competition draws
attention once more to the fact that ideology and culture are not
stable entities, but sites of confrontation and struggle, a
realization widely shared in Cultural Studies today.
Gramsci identifies a very important component of the
hegemonic bloc in Italy in the form of the Catholic Church,
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whose values and decisions have a strong hegemonic impact on
the vast majority of the population. Eyerman notes the line of
Gramsci’s reasoning on this particular aspect of the power of
hegemonic processes to create false consciousness:
Such consciousness was false not so much because it
identified its own particular interests with those of the ruling
classes, but rather because it blended an understanding of the
origins of its oppression with myth and folklore. It was the
Catholic religion which provided the framework for such
understanding; the Church taught that dignity and poverty
were identical concepts, and that poverty and political
domination were part of a God-given natural order (47).
Gramsci’s idea was that the role of the revolutionaries would
be to provide ideological counter-hegemony for the re-
education, and the transformation of this component of the
false consciousness into ideological class consciousness. For
some reason, this reasoning has not worked, the Italian
Communist Party realizing that that part of the ideological
superstructure was much too strongly … hegemonized. Those
interested in the special relationship between the Italian
Communists and the Vatican in the postwar age can find
interesting aspects to illustrate the creation of very special
hegemonic blocs, including apparently secular and religious
sections.
Going back to the pre World War II realitites, Gramsci
(who was to die in 1937) was fully aware that an attempt at
repeating the 1917 Winter Palace attack by a handful of sailors
amidst a large peasant population in countries ruled by
hegemony was doomed to failure. Defeating a hegemonic bloc
rule involved, first and foremost, ‘winning the minds’ of the
vast majority of the population, affected by the false
consciousness created by the prevailing set of ideas, meanings
and practices of the rulers and the promotion of a new culture,
a new ideology, which should become hegemonic, in its turn.
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 In advanced capitalist societies, ruled by bourgeois
hegemony, Gramsci found in the bourgeoisie not only the
opposing ruling class, as Alberto Pozzolini notes, but a
distinctly different civilization as one of the two major
protagonists of contemporary history at that time:
Gramsci clearly stated that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat
are the two protagonists of contemporary history. It is not just
a matter of two social classes, he said, but of two different
ways of conceiving life and of organising it, of two
‘civilisations’ (58).
The ‘enemy’ as the bourgeoisie then was not a social class in a
classic … class struggle, but a complete and different
civilization altogether, the task being first to create an
alternative, and more viable, civilization, supported by a new
hegemonic bloc.
This brings us back to the excerpt from Note sul
Machiavelli. Once winning the hegemonic-counterhegemonic
war, the next step to take was to establish a totalitarian rule,
meant to eliminate possible weaker members of the hegemonic
bloc and other ideological competitors outside. This step is
obviously not highlighted by supporters of Gramsci’s theories
today, living in a less totalitarian, highly efficient, rationalized,
legitimized, although imperfect, like any human construction,
society.
Speaking of society, one of fate’s little ironies
happened at the end of 1989 (October 25th to October 28th).
Frank Rosengarten, in his 2014 book on Gramsci’s
revolutionary Marxism, makes the connection between that
moment – the foundation of the International Gramsci Society
in Formia, Italy, and the collapse of the Communist system,
without stressing this irony.
For the Gramsci Society, the time had come to focus on
a careful selection of the thinker’s ideas. For Cultural Studies,

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especially in the 1970s and the 1980s, Gramsci’s concept of
cultural hegemony had assumed a … hegemonic role in the
theoretical framework of intellectual debates.
Thus, Stuart Hall in his well-known essay on the two
paradigms of Cultural Studies, acknowledges, in 1981, both
Gramsci’s and Foucault’s influence: ‘Foucault and Gramsci
between them account for much of the most productive work
on concrete analysis now being undertaken in the field’ (35).
Since then, especially with the rise and the remarkable
effervescence of the age witnessing the culture wars in
America and the Western world, the emergence of a plurality
of new subcultures and accompanying lifestyles under the sign
of diversity, Gramsci’s ideas about the workings of the
hegemonic bloc have been challenged, as Chris Barker (2004)
asserts, looking a little bit in retrospect but also ahead into the
first years of a new millenium:
Neo-Gramscian hegemony theory has been challenged on the
grounds that Western culture no longer has a dominant centre
either in terms of production or meaning. Rather, culture is
heterogeneous both in terms of the different kinds of texts
produced and the different meanings that compete within
texts. Right across the Western world, it is argued, we have
been witnessing the end of anything remotely resembling a
‘common culture’. In particular, the past thirty years have seen
the fragmentation of lifestyle cultures through the impact of
migration, the ‘reemergence’ of ethnicity, the rise and
segmentation of youth cultures and the impact of gender
politics. Above all, the restructuring of global capitalism,
niche marketing and the aestheticization of daily life through
the creation of an array of lifestyles centred on the
consumption, of aesthetic objects and signs has fragmented the
cultures of class blocs (84 – 85).
Chris Barker thus draws attention to a watershed in the
development of modern cultural studies in the second half of

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the twentieth century, still affecting processes going on in the
21st: the shift of emphasis from hegemony as a central concept
in this field of interdisciplinary inquiry to a variety of
apparently centrifugal concerns, reflecting the bewildering
complexity of the postmodern world, thus showing a large area
of overlap between cultural studies and cultural theory, on the
one hand, and postmodern theories, on the other.
Nevertheless, Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony
lies at the foundation of such contemporary theories as R.W.
Connell’s gender order theory, whose central concept in his
masculinity studies is ‘hegemonic masculinity,’ the normative
masculinity against which successive waves of feminist,
lesbian, transgender militants and theorists have risen, with
increasingly greater force over the last few decades.

II.28. The Frankfurt School in search of a distinct identity:

an overview
The phrase critical theory was used by Max Horkheimer to
define what he sees as the new ‘liberatory’ approach to society
and culture that he is intent on promoting. It is critical in its
opposition to the negative consequences of the Enlightenment
project. It undertakes a critique of modernization in general, of
modernization of the state more particularly, of the attending
institutions, ideologies, discourses associated with the dark side
of that project. Consequently, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin
and some others are referred to as the members of the Frankfurt
School of Critical Theory. The term ‘critical theory’ is also
used in a broader sense to refer to contemporary approaches to
literature and culture which share critical thinking principles
and which are usually included within the broad spectrum of
cultural studies such as feminism, postcolonialism, gay and
lesbian studies, in which concepts such as ideology and
hegemony feature prominently. The phrase is sometimes used
even more loosely, to accommodate all approaches
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(postmodernism, poststructuralism) linked to Cultural Theory
as the more abstract companion of Cultural Studies/ cultural
studies.
Marx’s famous thesis that the material base determines
the ideological superstructure had an interesting illustration in
post WWI Germany. The title of a subchapter in Rolf
Wiggershaus’s book on the Frankfurt School says it all: ‘Felix
Weil, Son of a Millionaire, Founds an Institute for Marxism,
Hoping One Day to Hand It Over to a Victorious German
Soviet State’(iv). The rich son’s material resources came, a
victorious German Soviet state did not materialize, but the
causes which prevented the victory of the proletariat in
Western Europe became one of the preoccupations of the new
institute.
The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory largely defined
itself, on the one hand, by its critical dialog with Western
Marxism, and with the drawbacks of the formal approach to
culture advocated by the three previously-mentioned branches
of structuralism, on the other hand. Completing the
comprehensive picture is the crisis within the German socialist
movement (which largely explains why Weil’s dream did not
come true) whose three major developments are identified and
then discussed by Martin Jay:
Schematically put, the crisis resulted from three unanticipated
developments in the convulsive history of Europe in the years
after 1914: first, the craven collaboration in national war
efforts by socialist parties pledged to international class
solidarity; second, the pathetic failure of German
revolutionaries after the war in contrast to the unexpected
success of their Russian counterparts; and third, the meteoric
rise of fascism as a competitor for the right to succeed liberal
capitalism (285).
These were the ‘convulsive’ circumstances under which
the Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in
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1923. Its first director was Carl Grunberg, who thought that the
main issue to be investigated was the reason why, in opposition
to Marx’s prophecy, communism had been victorious in
backward Russia, not in the more developed Western capitalist
countries, and what were the lessons and implications to be
derived from this as far as the prospects for a Soviet Germany
and for the future of Europe were concerned.
Grunberg was succeeded by Max Horkheimer in 1929,
whose initial interest in Marx and Feuerbach in the preliminary
stages heralding his subsequent version of critical theory is
duly acknowledged by John Abromeit in his study of the
foundations of the Frankfurt School:
Horkheimer’s Critical Theory in the late 1920s rested not only
on Marx’s critique of political economy, but also on
Horkheimer’s own materialist critique of the absolute and
unconditioned concepts of knowledge and subjectivity in
German Idealism. Marx’s appropriation and critique of
Feuerbach in the German Ideology, his insistence that history
is made neither by a transcendental or transcendent subject nor
– at least not yet – by a collective humanity, but rather by
concrete, sensuous, and suffering human individuals,
resonated with the strong Schopenhauerian moment in
Horkheimer’s thought (196).
Thus, in addition to the more empirical orientation
promoted by his predecessor, Horkheimer would undertake and
encourage the development of a new critical discourse with a
strong philosophical component.
Tom Bottomore acknowledges Horkheimer’s address,
given two years later, on the occasion of his installation as
director of the Institute, and the difference it made in terms of
the Institute’s orientation, its general philosophical bent
announcing the emergence of a critical cultural discourse:
‘Social philosophy’ now emerged as its main preoccupation;
not in the sense of a philosophical theory of value which
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 would provide a superior insight into the meaning of social
life, nor as some kind of synthesis of the results of the
specialized social sciences, but rather as the source of
important questions to be investigated by these sciences and as
a framework in which ‘the universal would not be lost sight
of’[1]. In subsequent essays of the 1930s Horkheimer
developed his conception of the role of philosophy primarily
through a criticism of modern positivism or empiricism (15).
The coming of an important new member, Herbert
Marcuse, a neo-Hegelian Marxist thinker, was supportive of
this new orientation. The other members of what would come
to be referred to as the Frankfurt School were social theorists,
literary people, philosophers and psychoanalysts, intent on
developing a theory meant to study the mechanisms of culture.
They were concerned with and concerned about the threat that
contemporary developments in the realm of culture might have
a negative impact on people’s capacity to critically view them
and themselves as contributors to the creation of new forms of
culture. All forms of texts, literary or otherwise, are not mere
reflections of the economic base, as in orthodox Marxist
thought. They also have cultural effects in given historical
contexts, they are forms of definite social action, for better or
worse, mainly for the latter, as it will be claimed in Dialectic of
Enlightenment.
The inadequacy of Western Marxism and of
structuralism to account for the unexpected success of Nazi
ideology prompted Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and
then Herbert Marcuse to find answers to new social
developments in terms of their so-called critical theory. The
critical theory involved a dialectic conversation with such 18th
century philosophers as Kant and Hegel, with the father figure
they took issue with, Marx, but also with more contemporary
voices, such as those of Max Weber or Georg Lukacs, as well
as with psychoanalysis.
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 An important manifesto of this critical theory is put
forth in Max Horkheimer’s 1937 essay, ‘Traditional and
Critical Theory.’ He describes ‘traditional theory’ as the
orientation followed by the modern natural sciences as it
appears in positivist/ empiricist philosophical approaches; this
orientation, Horkheimer notes, has been adopted by the social
sciences and the humanities as well, in an attempt to stress their
scientific status. He contrasts this with what he calls ‘critical
theory,’ which is more ‘subjective,’ more self-reflective.
Critical theory is aware of the cultural context from
which it emerges, it is aware that it has a social function to
perform, in relation to the interests and orientations of those
who promote it. This critical theory dismisses the method of
using conceptual systems to determine objective facts from an
apparently purely external point of view.
Horkheimer believes that social facts are not extrinsic
in the way assumed by the natural sciences, which leads the
critical thinking of the critical theory to try and overcome the
tension, and to eliminate the contradiction, between the
rationality of the individuals and the work-process
relationships of the social system in which they find
themselves.
The Frankfurt School thinkers preserved the dialectic
method of Hegel and Marx, but dismissed the determinist
Marxist claim that the base largely determines the cultural,
including the ideological, superstructure. They could clearly
see how the superstructure made all the difference in the social
changes affecting interwar Germany, especially the tremendous
power of propaganda. Cultural texts included propaganda
works, in whose dissemination the radio and the whole film
industry played an important part.
Adorno, Horkheimer and the other Frankfurt School
scholars must have noticed, to their horror, the impact of such
(now) classics of the propaganda film as Leni Riefenstahl’s
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The Triumph of the Will (1935), advertising and promoting
Hitler and the rising National Socialism. Developments in
science and technology had led to the emergence of a very
powerful culture industry, which appeared to be more real and
more culturally influential than Marx’s economic base at
critical moments. Its mechanisms had to be examined, which
will happen in such works as the already mentioned Dialectic
of Enlightenment.
It so happened, they realized, that the Enlightenment
project of human emancipation, through its progress of reason
and scientific knowledge, was leading to the enslavement of
whole populations through the extreme of prevailing ideologies
in the form of propaganda, disseminated through the emerging
omnipotence and ubiquity of the media. It turned out that the
dialectic of the Enlightenment, instead of emancipating
humankind through reason, led to its subordination through the
subtle uses of mass manipulation through the mass media.
The progressive project of the Enlightenment, it turned
out, had either remained incomplete or had failed (Habermas
would support the first claim, Adorno and Horkheimer the
second). The thinkers of the Frankfurt School would also soon
realize the power of progress, science and technology to lead to
unprecedented forms of mass destruction (the scientifically
managed extermination camps as well as such WMDs as the
atom bomb). The cult of progress and rationality promoted by
the Enlightenment had turned into extreme and horrible
irrationality, into the progress of unreason and barbarity,
usually associated since the rise of early liberal humanism with
the unenlightened, dark medieval age.
Wisely, the members of the Frankfurt School managed
to leave Nazi Germany before they got in serious trouble there.
Ironically, they found in the America that welcomed them an
equally effective and equally sinister (for them) culture
industry. The radio, the film, and then television, were creating
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the worst enemy of what they called culture by the inexorable
development of the mass-produced, stereotypical mass culture.
Through this mass culture, what were seen as the oppressive
practices of the culture industry were instrumental in
manipulating the masses into thinking, behaving and
consuming what their sophisticated power elites wanted.
It so happened that these exiles, seeing the drawbacks
of both the totalitarianism of their country of origin and the
negative consequences of the action of the culture industries in
less totalitarian America, were, whether critically through their
critical theory or not, also experiencing deeply personal crises,
being lost between disturbing systems, hardly able to make
sense of the new forms of cultural and social domination. An
exception would be Herbert Marcuse who, in his late sixties
and early seventies, would become the guru of the flower
power countercultural generation (in the young and restless
America, which was itself, although the century was in its late
sixties and early seventies, showing signs of cultural
revigoration).

II.29. Quo vadis, Enlightenment? Not the right way:

Dialectic of Enlightenment and mass culture as culture
industry
Horkheimer and Adorno brought together a number of texts
written since 1942, completed with new ones, initially
published in 1944 and re-published in final form in 1947 under
a title which combines Marx’s adopted method and the project
of earlier liberal humanist cultural discourse: Dialectic of
Enlightenment. The years 1942 and 1944, more than 1947,
justify the disaffected tone in which they introduce the
Enlightenment:
Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance
of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from

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 fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened
earth is radiant with triumphant calamity (1).
Horkheimer and Adorno put forth a new perspective on
history that is a critique of the Enlightenment’s ideology of
progress, and of Marxist historical materialism, both disproved
by the current historical developments around WW II. History
is to be viewed, in their opinion, as a dialectic process
combining mythological and enlightenment coordinates at all
its stages, not purely and distinctly mythological or
enlightenment sequences.
After they discuss the concept of the Enlightenment in
the first section of their book, they refer to the Ancient Greek
hero of the Odyssey in the second chapter, ‘Odysseus or Myth
and Enlightenment.’ They present the two sides of a dialectical
thesis - antithesis in both ancient and modern times. In the
early ages, a mythology-driven view also amounted to the
enlightened endeavor to master the irrational destiny imposed
by the external world and the irrational drives inherent in
human nature, a clear psychoanalytical influence to be detected
here as well. Secondly, they claim that the modern age
undertakes its own project to create a new mythology, in spite
of its own professed critique and dismissal of traditional
mythologies.
Adorno and Horkheimer consider that mythology
represents a stage (while also being a component or at least an
ingredient) in the journey toward the enlightenment, and the
enlightenment moves toward new mythological tendencies, by
dint of the same composite ‘mythological-enlightening’
formula. They draw attention to the emphasis that the Nazis
placed on ancient Teutonic myths, thus apparently legitimating
their ‘scientific’ theory of racial supremacy, while promoting
‘enlightening’ scientific and technological progress in one of
the most advanced economies in Europe in order to prepare for
less- enlightening utter destruction and genocide.
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 The onset of modernity, the Reformation and the
Enlightenment dramatically altered the basic conception of
reason. In Ancient Greece and medieval Europe reason had
been seen in teleological terms, spelling out the realization of
specific natural goals and values in the individuals’ lives and in
society. By contrast, the modern world had cut off the link
between means and goals that the earlier concept of reason
implied. Consequently, reason got to be regarded as a purely
objective, formal tool to be used for the management of human
activities toward goals that emerged somewhere else and were
thus irrational, beyond the scope of rational discursive
undertaking. Thus, rational discourse only dealt with the most
profitable instruments for the attainment of the proposed goals.
They called this kind of attitude instrumental reason, which
they saw as drawing a clear-cut dividing line between values
and facts, ethics and science, what technology did and the
consequences of its applications.
The modern idea of instrumental reason led to a
situation in which the Enlightenment was gradually turned into
a new mythology, pure and simple. Although the liberal
humanism of the Enlightenment had upheld the liberty and
rights of the individual against oppressive and intolerant
religious dogma and aristocratic supremacy, this had entailed a
high cost to be paid. The previous, backward form of medieval
domination was replaced by more subtle configurations of
domination and its nefarious consequences: human alienation
from nature, working people now seen as a resource to be
exploited and controlled for profit in the terms imposed by the
inexorable mechanism of the market.
This ‘brave new world’ led to the clear-cut class
demarcation between and among competing and antagonistic
social groups playing in the human exploitation game based on
individual property and an available, poor or impoverished and
therefore dependent, workforce. The ‘scientific,’ apparently
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impersonal, bureaucratic administration imposed by the more
advanced system replaced a certain sense of human solidarity
and community feeling with its formal, efficient system and
strict procedures that Max Weber had called rationalization, a
basic concept in classical sociology, also critical of this
negative late enlightenment trend. In brief, the Enlightenment,
which had meant human emancipation through better
understanding and progress, had led to a system in which
industrialization and capitalism amounted to tighter control and
exploitation of people. What’s more, as the German experience
had shown, technological and scientific progress had led to
another world war, to the rationalization of mass destruction
through more systematic use of devastatingly lethal weapons
(now called WMDs) and extermination camps.
Philosophy, which had been the realm of authentic
critical thought, had surrendered to the utilitarian urge
promoted by instrumental reason, either in the forms of
positivism, or in the forms of metaphysical systems attempting
to explain everything in terms of structures devoid of any
contribution that might be exerted by spontaneity, creativity,
human freedom.
One of the important terms used in Adorno and
Horkheimer’s analysis of contemporary culture was reification.
Inspired by Marx’s phrase ‘fetishism of commodities’ used in
the economic field, they used the concept of reification to refer
to a prevailing trend in contemporary culture to turn everything
– ideas, values, even individuals – into objects of economic
consumption and scientific analysis.
Another term linked to it was totalization, to refer to the
predilection shown by Enlightenment knowledge to encompass
and dominate the whole gamut of reified social experience.
Totalization also meant that knowledge with its web of linked
true propositions was also pervaded and permeated by a totality
of rationally monitored and managed processes and social
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relationships that dismissed as irrational any form of theoretical
resistance or critique. Totalization and its attending reification
and rationalization processes would later give rise to the
monolithic structure that would be referred to as ‘the system.’
On the other hand, Adorno, in his The Culture Industry:
Selected Essays on Mass Culture, is aware of the necessary evil
of rationalization and totalization in the management of
culture, with the dialectic interrelationsip between
‘administration’ and culture itself, with the latter naturally
trying to ‘break free’ as well:
Whoever speaks of culture speaks of administration as well,
whether this is his intention or not. The combination of so
many things lacking a common denomination – such as
philosophy and religion, science and art, forms of conduct and
mores – and finally the inclusion of the objective spirit of an
age in the single word ‘culture’ betrays from the outset the
administrative view, the task of which, looking down from on
high, is to assemble, distribute, evaluate and organize . . . At
the same time, however – according to German concepts –
culture is opposed to administration. Culture would like to be
higher and more pure, something untouchable which cannot be
tailored according to any tactical or technical considerations
(93).
Coming back to Dialectic of Enlightenment, in its
fourth chapter, which is also the best-known part of the
volume, Adorno and Horkheimer use the famous phrase
culture industry to describe the assembly-line production of a
culture shaped by the new mass media technology, as well as
another one to express what that culture was used for: mass
deception. They considered that the culture industry was a key
element in the development of the reification and totalization
processes that reinforced the domination of a modernity that
had turned into a new mythology. They viewed contemporary
forms of journalism, film, and the new medium of television,
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not as modernity’s tools against the barbarity of fascist
propaganda but as resources that can be fascism’s most
effective ally as well.
These new media, the culture industry as a whole, were
not seen by the two thinkers as a neutral tool that can be used
to achieve various jobs in general, but as supporting by their
very nature two trends of the Enlightenment project that might
reveal their sinister potential: cultural homogeneity and
predictability.
The standardization that both trends implied was seen
as being in keeping with the contemporary processes of
modernity which were also designed to achieve thorough social
control. That was arrived at through the blurring of class
distinctions, the blurring of the boundary between higher and
lower forms of culture, the elimination or genuine spontaneous
individual expressions, predictable patterns of cultural
production and consumption.
These mass culture products were meant to satisfy the
consumers’ expectations without challenging their individual
critical responses, encouraging a conformist attitude, all this in
the interest of those controlling the culture industry. Once
again, Adorno and Horkheimer believed that the goals of this
culture industry were very close to those interests of totalitarian
regimes and to their propaganda, even when the mass media
functioned in more democratic systems.
This is clearly formulated by Adorno a decade later, in
a similar examination of mass media effects, this time in a
1954 essay on the newest new medium, TV, ‘How to Look at
Television.’ He discusses the TV industry’s tendency to
achieve ‘totalization’ by channelizing audience reaction
through strategies exerted at all levels of ‘the message’ (from
hidden to the most overt ones). He reinforces the previous
statement in Dialectic of Enlightenment about totalitarian
creeds hidden under what may be anti-totalitarian explicit
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surface messages. He mentions a suspicion which he claims to
share with many, although hard to corroborate:
[…] ‘the majority of television shows today aim at producing
or at least reproducing the very smugness, intellectual
passivity, and gullibility that seem to fit in with totalitarian
creeds even if the explicit message of the shows may be
antitotalitarian’ (222).
It so turned out, much to Adorno and Horkheimer’s
dismay, that the Enlightenment, which initially was a form of
opposition to superstition and oppression, was turning, once
established as the prevailing system, into the new mythology,
designed to rationalize, totalize, and reify all aspects of cultural
experience, and present itself as infallible and unquestionable.
Is it that the grand narrative of the Enlightenment was going in
the wrong direction, that one can speak about the failure of the
Enlightenment project? Such questions will later be resumed
by another author linked to the Frankfurt School, Jurgen
Habermas.
Adorno and Horkheimer posited that the rise of early
20th century totalitarian regimes was not an accident of the
enlightenment project, but the natural consequence of the
development of any society that followed the main principles
of the Enlightenment. What they wanted to demonstrate was
that, as the Enlightenment consolidated itself in its new
condition as a new mythology (one might see that as ‘a strong
system supported by an unquestionable ideology’),
totalitarianism amounted to nothing short of one of the
prevailing expressions of Enlightenment's basic framework.
What is more, they presaged that what was thought to be a
happy ending – the defeat of fascism by the ‘free world’ liberal
democracies as representatives of the institutionalized
Enlightenment – would not put an end to what they saw as the
inexorable dialectic of the Enlightenment with its increasingly

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subtle forms of domination by reification and totalization, thus
making possible worse things to come.
Like Matthew Arnold in Victorian England, like the
Modernists in the early 20th century, Horkheimer and Adorno
might be seen as cultural elitists, determined to preserve culture
in an Arnoldian (19th century) or Leavisite (early 20th century)
sense, although that would be a slight exaggeration. Unlike the
more orthodox Marxists, they valued experimental forms of art,
such as dodecaphonic music or abstract painting, that one
might associate with Modernist high art, while being aware that
any cultural form, however ‘affirmative’ (a term that Marcuse
would soon use to promote authentic art), has the dangerous
potential of undergoing commodification and become
appropriated and included within the frameworks imposed by
the culture industry.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of what they called
the culture industries acquired an even sharper edge in
contemporary forms of critical cultural analysis, but the name
of critical theory came to be applied to most approaches which
are critical of the symbolic order associated with the prevailing
traditions of Western philosophy. Thus, some see such
discourses as postcolonial studies, poststructuralism,
postmodernism, feminism and postfeminism as forms of critical
theory, whether they are included in it or just overlapping
discursive formations, to use Foucault’s term, largely having to
do with the willingness, or lack of it, of its theorists and
practitioners to accept the comprehensive label.

II.30. A Frankfurter with a difference: the critical, but

enlightened, Jurgen Habermas
Another Frankfurter’s, Jurgen Habermas’s work critically
combines a continuation of some of the concerns of Adorno
and Horkheimer, as well as of other representatives of the
Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, with a pragmatist’s
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preoccupation with the practical effects as social action of
one’s research. His combination of philosophical and
sociological concerns, largely related to the political sphere in a
very humanistic manner, prepares him for the right formula of
what will become his personal brand of Critical Theory, as
Herbert Schnadelbach claims:
[…] his approach points to the unique interconnection of
philosophy and social theory, which is where he takes up the
project of Critical Theory. Habermas brings the two
disciplines together in such a manner that they change. ‘The
theory of communicative action’ is not a metatheory, but the
beginning of a social theory concerned to validate its own
critical standards (8).
It is more than a personal brand, it is a transformation of
Critical Theory in more ways than one, as well as a sort of
declaration, by Habermas, if not of independence, at least of
autonomy from his former professors at the Johann Wolfgang
Goethe University Frankfurt am Main Institute for Social
Research (the Frankfurt School for short). James Gordon
Finlayson, while acknowledging Habermas’s partial
indebtedness to his Frankfurt School mentors, also stresses his
divergence from them:
Habermas’s work always differed from that of his Frankfurt
School mentors in that his deep concern for individual
freedom was always wedded to an interest in the fate of
democratic institutions and in the prospects for the renewal of
democratic politics. Accordingly, he takes a much keener
interest in the concrete institutional structure of democratic
society than either Horkheimer or Adorno. In his view, critical
theory had to say something about what kinds of institutions
are needed to protect individuals against the attractions of
political extremism, on the one hand, and the depredations of a
burgeoning capitalist economy, on the other (14).

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 In his Knowledge and Human Interests, the book that
made him famous, Habermas is aware that Enlightenment
reason has been turned into an instrument of domination, and
that Horkheimer and Adorno had reached a very pessimistic
conclusion: the Enlightenment had turned from emancipation
to tighter control and domination. Since he and his
predecessors Adorno and Horkheimer saw critical theory as a
sort of Enlightenment discourse advocating emancipation, then
critical theory was itself doomed to failure.
However, unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, Habermas is
more optimistic about some of the aims and methods of the
liberal humanist tradition of the Enlightenment, adding to it a
less detached, less ‘instrumentally-rational,’ more socially
involved attitude. He firmly believes in the grand narrative of
emancipation of humanity seen as a universal subject, an
itinerary of development and formation reminiscent of Hegel’s
gradual ascent of the Universal Spirit as the essence of history
as History.
Habermas endeavors to create a theory of knowledge
and a methodology for critical social theory through a
systematic reconsideration of Hegel’s and Marx’s works, a
critique of various interpretations of science (positivism,
hermeneutics) with a view to updating them for achieving
human emancipation, one of his humanist keywords, in
addition to consensus.
His theory of knowledge attempts to establish a
connection between methodological rules and cognitive
interests, a project based on a theory of social evolution.
Habermas posits the notion of cognitive interests (which he
calls ‘knowledge-constitutive interests’) as a connection
between scientific methodology and social action. For him,
critical theory, which unites a social philosophy and an
empirical sociology, is the perspective from which these
cognitive interests can be assessed. These interests are
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fundamental orientations to knowledge and action deriving
from the basic conditions which underlie the development of
humankind.
Cognitive interests refer to the union between the
source, application, and validity of knowledge, a fusion which
is achieved by grounding knowledge in experience and action.
Habermas identifies three types of cognitive interests. The
technical interests have to do with successfully dealing with
the non-human environment. They designate dimensions of
knowledge-based action meant to successfully manipulate and
assume control of this environment. The practical interests
have to do with human interaction, not with the non-human
environment. They are those aspects of knowledge-action
meant to achieve and expand consensus based on
understanding. They are concerned with attaining and
extending consensus in human interactions. The emancipatory
interests aim at freeing people as individuals and groups from
constraints imposed by history through ‘self-reflexive’
processes on the path of evolution as human emancipation.
The emancipatory project of the Enlightenment, not as
mass deception as Adorno and Horkheimer had found it in the
early 20th century, although incomplete, still remains a
worthwhile goal to be addressed, in Habermas’s opinion. For
him, Enlightenment reason was, in addition to the instrumental
reason that had turned into fierce utilitarianism as extreme
rationalization, the critical reason of his version of critical
theory, meant to be instrumental in the above-mentioned
emancipatory project of the Enlightenment (or modernity).
In his Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas
identifies three kinds of knowledge grounded in the three types
of interests: analytical-empirical, historical-hermeneutic, and
critical-dialectical. The natural sciences rely on analytical-
empirical knowledge, which provides what is usually called
information and is framed in explanations. Information turns
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into useful knowledge: its application increases people’s
abilities of technical control and manipulation of the
environment, but it was extended, because of the prestige that it
had acquired in the Enlightenment project, to the social sphere
as well. Habermas criticizes the positivism of this type of
knowledge, claiming that it is inadequate for the social sphere.
In his opinion, the philosophy of science has employed an
inadequate kind of analytical-empirical knowledge as a
template for all kinds of knowledge. This is what he calls a
positivist or scientist approach. He prefers to its empiricism a
realist or essentialist approach. According to this realist or
essentialist approach, it is absolutely necessary that theory
should be able to encompass the social reality with its real
structure.
By contrast, the historical-hermeneutic knowledge of
what he calls the cultural sciences resorts to the hermeneutic
circle, a ‘cycle of interpretation’ whose processes of theorizing
always rely on a previous understanding of the object that
knowledge focuses upon. This kind of knowledge links social
products and ordinary statements to the social world in which
they emerge, which method Habermas simply calls Verstehen
(understanding, the hermeneutic keyword). Verstehen as
historical-hermeneutic knowledge produces interpretations,
being framed in processes of understanding. These
interpretations, as it is stressed in Knowledge and Human
Interests, are far from aimless theoretical considerations,
consisting in knowledge which is relevant from a practical
point of view, being instrumental for the ‘mutual understanding
in the conduct of life’(311).
Social science, where Habermas feels very much at
home, employs the critical-dialectical knowledge. It resorts to
the previously-mentioned two forms of knowledge, while also
acknowledging their limits, undertaking to shape them in a
higher synthesis. Examples of such critical approaches, in
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Habermas’s opinion, are Marxism and psychoanalysis.
Nevertheless, he asserts that both Freud and Marx, in their
attempt to give them scientific respectability, had a tendency to
give a strong positivist dimension to their works.
By comparison, critical theory has both a sociological
and a philosophical bent. The philosophical orientation of his
critical theory takes the link between knowledge and interests
as its object of investigation. Its sociological component deals
with the makeup of the different social forms throughout
history. Critical theory aims to make people aware of their
active potential, while also reminding them of their historical
constraints and limitations. Identifying which constraints on
their freedom are necessary, which are historically specific,
people are encouraged to develop a critique of society, whose
institutions are compared with the possible resources of human
evolution and with the ideal of a possible rational society.
Engaging in rational social change is therefore possible.
Habermas’s social theory, in Hegelian fashion, sees the
evolution of humankind as a process of formation (Bildung)
operating through language (symbolic representation), work
(instrumental action), and interaction (communicative action),
which he calls social media. In addition, the category of
domination designates the imperfections or distortions in the
process of social evolution that appear in the relationship
between work and interaction. The interconnectedness between
instrumental action (usually as social work) and
communicative action (social interaction) is what the project of
emancipation should pay attention to.
Instrumental action (work) assesses alternative options
for the successful control of external reality. This kind of
action involves universalism, neutrality, specificity,
performance. The learning process involved in instrumental
action, according to Habermas, involves the development of
practical skills of problem-solving. Instrumental action
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manifests itself in the labor process. Work is considered to be
the process managing the material interchange man - nature: it
is the process of transforming the material basis through which
the survival and reproduction of the species is ensured.
Communicative action (social interaction) is regulated
by consensus, norms which promote reciprocal behavior
expectations, much in the same way as the maxims of Grice’s
cooperative principle, applied to social communication, but
stemming from the pragmatics of natural language. Such norms
(like Grice’s maxims) are internalized by the actants. This type
of action is said by Habermas to follow ‘the rationality of
language games.’ Like instrumental action, communicative
action is perceived from the actant’s perspective. The learning
process involved in basically consists in the internalization of
motivations, failure to do so indicating deviance from
consensus. This process is based on reciprocity and mutuality
in social interaction. Each kind of communicative action can be
assessed in terms of the social systems in which it is
performed. Communicative action creates a ‘socio-cultural life-
world’) which takes shape in such systems as family and
kinship, extending throughout the social sphere. The sub-
system of instrumental action consists of the economy and the
state bureaucracy, both of which are inscribed within the
institutional framework.
Political economy has to do with the social systems of
instrumental action, having to do with the impact of power on
the distribution and management of economic resources. Work,
in Marxist fashion, is seen as the universal element of all social
life by means of which people try to satisfy basic needs. Marx
had also claimed that in all modes of production work was
done under ‘alienating’ conditions, engendered by domination
and exploitation.
The goal of Habermas’s critique of political economy is
to demonstrate that domination and exploitation are historically
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specific forms which can be eliminated in a rational society,
thus redeeming rationalization from the cage with which Max
Weber had associated it. Benjamin Barber, in his Jihad vs.
McWorld theory, sees this rationalizing drive of the
Enlightenment as one of the imperatives and motive forces of
McWorld in the current age of globalization:
Enlightenment science and the technologies derived from it
are inherently universalizing. They entail a quest for
descriptive principles of general application, a search for
universal solutions to particular problems, and an unswerving
embrace of objectivity and impartiality (34).
However, very much like the Frankfurt School theorists,
Barber is suspicious of these universalizing tendencies just as
much as of the opposing fundamentalism and parochialism,
neither force being seen as able to give an acceptable model for
the evolution of world communities.

II.31. Like a bridge over troubled waters: Marcuse’s

Frankfurt critical theory and the American counterculture
In a more specialized sense and in a more specific place, the
US, the critical theory as Critical Theory that influenced the
American New Left was less associated with the ‘more
German’ section of the Frankfurt School (Adorno,
Horkheimer) than with the ‘more Americanized’ Frankfurt
School of Marcuse, Fromm, Lowenthal; the latter form paved
the way for the better reception of the former, as Peter Uwe
Hohendahl notes in an 1991 article:
In this country, Critical Theory, particularly during the 1950s
and early 1960s, was primarily associated with Herbert
Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Leo Lowenthal, originally
members of the Institute for Social Research, who decided to
stay in America after World War II. Clearly, the American
New Left was informed and shaped by the work of Herbert
Marcuse, rather than that of Adorno or Walter Benjamin. Of
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 course, it is also true that Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and
One-Dimensional Man prepared the way for the reception of
Adorno’s and Benjamin’s more complex and demanding
oeuvres during the 1970s (198).
Adorno’s promotion of thought as an act of challenge, of
negation of anything that forces itself on it, its resistance to any
universalizing system that has the tendency to become ossified
in dogmatic mythologies, shows his relevance for subsequent
cultural discourse enterprises in new circumstances. If Adorno
and Horkheimer emerged during the terrible years of the rise of
Nazi totalitarianism in Germany, Marcuse became more
assertive concerning the emancipatory potential of active, not
subjected subjects during the American countercultural years.
As time passes and society changes, some prominent
figures of any historical survey either start shining more
brightly or somehow fade out, at least for a while. Herbert
Marcuse is associated with The Frankfurt School through his
German beginnings and with the American revolutionary
1960s and early 1970s, when he acquired iconic status with the
countercultural youth.
Another iconic figure of the countercultural age, Angela
Davis, assesses ‘Marcuse’s legacies’ of that time from the
vantage point of the third millenium in the Preface to the 3rd
volume of the collected papers of the ‘American Frankfurter.’
She nostalgically sees Marcuse as a symbolic figure of a
radical time, a time which is now remembered as utopia. She
also notes that Marcuse, who was the most relevant Frankfurt
School figure in America in the 1960s, has somehow gone
backstage, allowing Adorno and Horkheimer to return to the
limelight:
It is no less ironic that the best known and most widely read
thinker associated with the Frankfurt School in the 1970s
became the least studied in the 1980s and 1990s, while

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 Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin are
extensively studied in the contemporary era (viii).
Arguably, ‘ironic’ is not the best way to describe this shift,
which has to do with different receptions of the Frankfurt
School messages by two distinct audiences: the tumultuous
countercultural youths of the 1960s, to whom Marcuse
appealed more, and the more sedate ones of the new
millennium, for whom Adorno and Horkheimer are more
relevant. What might be seen as ironic, however, is that
Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man appeared in the 1960s, but
can be seen as more linked to the perception of the 1950s as a
more conformist age, while Eros and Civilization, published
ten years before, became a sort of manifesto of the next decade,
the tumultuous 1960s.
Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical
Inquiry into Freud was initially published in 1955. Speaking of
the difference that new audiences make as far as the reception
of a theory goes, this very ‘counterculturally’ revolutionary
book made a much greater impact with its second edition
(1966) in completely new cultural circumstances. In addition to
the effect that the same author’s 1964 One-Dimensional Man
had created, the defining element was the emergence among
the 1960s baby boomers of the countercultural ethos, in which
Marcuse was hailed as a prophet of the flower power
generation.
As the title shows, Marcuse engages in a civilizational
conversation with Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.
Although, in true Frankfurt School fashion, he also
acknowledges Marx’s overpowering shadow, with economic
and political domination as facets of advanced industrial
societies, he focuses on … Eros’s victimization by the ruthless
system, capitalist and Communist alike, driven by a
dehumanizing technical rationality, as K.L. Julka notes in an
account of Marcuse’s ‘messianic humanism’:
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 Marcuse’s basic contention is that political domination and
economic exploitation pale into insignificance before
instinctual repression in advanced industrial societies. How
then to ensure liberty in the face of technical rationality? His
answer lies not in managing the civilization but in
transcending it (13).
Significantly, as it appeared in a new context, the second
edition features a ‘political preface,’ which starts with a
justification of the title, associated with a somewhat optimistic
attitude in the aftermath of WW II. Marcuse had hoped that the
gains of what he calls ‘advanced industrial society’ would
reverse the direction Enlightenment progress had taken, thus
breaking the ‘fatal union’ between productivity and
destruction, liberty and repression. He invites people to learn
‘the gay science (gaya sciencia) of how to use the social wealth
for shaping man’s world in accordance with his Life Instincts,
in the concerted struggle against the purveyors of Death’ (xii).
While also defining itself in relation to Freud, Eros and
Civilization amounts to a theory of individual and social and
individual development comparable with Adorno and
Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Marcuse, who had,
like Horkheimer and Adorno, seen the horrors of the rise of
National Socialism and its global consequences, came to be
more critical of the Western rationalist system in more liberal,
democratic attire in postwar America. The author notes, to his
own dismay, in new circumstances, reason’s effects not in
terms of its emancipatory potential, but its complicity with the
opposite force of domination.
Horkheimer and Adorno had identified the dark side of
Enlightenment rationality, while Marcuse attempted to find the
foundation for a different concept of reason, called ‘erotic
rationality,’ in the individual’s instinctual makeup.
The book is divided into two parts, the first dealing
with civilization under the rule of Freud’s reality principle
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(work) as repressing Eros (the pleasure principle). The
Superego’s reactionary character is obviously the source of
repression in a repressive advanced industrial society. Unlike
Freud, who had concluded that, for the sake of social stability
and development, repression is a civilizational necessary evil,
Marcuse examines the subversive and revolutionary potential
of sexual instincts to free individuals from the constraints of
rationalized industrial society.
The first chapter of the first part (‘The Hidden Trend in
Psychoanalysis’ begins with a short summary of Freud’s pro-
civilization thesis, with the obvious aim of ‘deconstructing’ it.
He first notes that Freud’s both indicts and defends civilization,
then briefly describes ‘the history of man’ in terms of the
Freudian concept of repression:
The concept of man that emerges from Freudian theory is the
most irrefutable indictment of Western civilization - and at the
same time the most unshakable defense of this civilization.
According to Freud, the history of man is the history of his
repression. Culture constrains not only his societal but also his
biological existence, not only parts of the human being but his
instinctual structure itself. However, such constraint is the
very precondition of progress. Left free to pursue their natural
objectives, the basic instincts of man would be incompatible
with all lasting association and preservation: they would
destroy even where they unite. The uncontrolled Eros is just as
fatal as his deadly counterpart, the death instinct. Their
destructive force derives from the fact that they strive for a
gratification which culture cannot grant: gratification as such
and as an end in itself , at any moment. The instincts must
therefore be deflected from their goal, inhibited in their aim.
Civilization begins when the primary objective - namely,
integral satisfaction of needs - is effectively renounced (12).
Marcuse goes on to claim that ‘the hidden trend in
psychoanalysis,’ somehow supported by a consideration of the
economic potential of society would lead to the conclusion that
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a non-repressive civilization can be aimed at. The line of
reasoning starts from a distinction between Freud’s
interpretation of the reality principle and Marcuse’s.
Marcuse sees the reality principle fulfilling the
functions of both Ego and Superego, while Freud views the
same principle activated by the Ego, with the Superego as
mediator between the Id and the external world. For Marcuse,
the reality principle does not impede memory and recollection
to activate previous experiences, rather than to allow defense
mechanisms to repress them. The recollection of pleasurable
experiences, apart from the repression of traumatic
experiences, stresses the emancipatory potential of both the
psychic apparatus of the individual and of society and its
repressive mechanisms.
Therefore, repression only as exerted by society is a
historical phenomenon, not an inevitable and inexorable fact.
Douglas Kellner, in his Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of
Marxism, completes Marcuse’s reasoning:
Marcuse’s analysis implies that society trains the individual for the
systematic repression of those emancipatory memories, and
devalues experiences guided solely by the pleasure principle.
Following Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, Marcuse
criticizes ‘the one-sidedness of memory-training in civilization:
the faculty was chiefly directed towards remembering duties rather
than pleasures; memory was linked with bad conscience, guilt and
sin (160).
He thus follows the humanist tradition, not the purely liberal
humanist one allegedly having failed its Enlightenment project,
which ranks him as one of the discontents of civilization
merely seen as repression and discipline.

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II.32. 20th century hermeneutics figures and their
challenges to cultural discourse: Heidegger and Gadamer
The impact of German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s
influence goes beyond the critical discourse of hermeneutics,
also affecting the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and
important strands of poststructuralist thought. However,
Heidegger's ideas received their most explicit development in
the field of the hermeneutic critical cultural discourse.
The main difficulty one might encounter in evaluating
Heidegger's influence on 20th century hermeneutics and on
other critical discourses stems the fact that, unlike other
thinkers from various critical discourses mentioned so far,
Heidegger was first and foremost a major philosopher rather
than a cultural critic also interested in philosophical issues.
Nevertheless, a brief survey of his contribution in the field is of
use for a better understanding of major features displayed by
20th century hermeneutics.
Heidegger’s phenomenological hermeneutic of
existence displays and problematizes a couple of prevailing
themes for subsequent hermeneutics. He first claimed that any
hermeneutic undertaking implies a previous situatedness and
engagement in a specific here and now or there and then, a
situatedness referred to by his term, Dasein (literally, ‘being
either here or there’). Dasein is usually translated in English as
Being-in-the-world. Being in a position to ask a question
concerning a specific meaning of something, one has to be in
possession of some sort of preunderstanding, which
presupposes both some knowledge about the thing being
questioned as well as some expectation about what might be a
satisfactory answer to the question.
A suitable hermeneutic questioning will be reinforced
by the understanding and concern from which it stems and by
the goal which it is expected to attain. Consequently it is no use
expecting an objective, impartial interpretation, as it cannot
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have either a totally disinterested point of origin or a goal
entirely detached from the aims of the interpreter. It also
follows that each interpretive endeavor will say something
significant about what the interpreter already expects, knows,
and understands about her or his world, as well as about the
agenda pushing the interpreter toward a certain line of
interpretation, about the direction from and the direction
toward that the questioning and the questioner link.
An interpretation is confirmed by the articulation of the
meaning of what is subjected to that interpretation. This
articulation of its meaning is a key moment in the hermeneutic
process. The articulation concerns the object to be interpreted,
leaving unarticulated most of its context of preunderstanding
and the underlying interests propelling forward this process.
The articulation shows something about the understanding of
the matter under discussion, as well as omitting or concealing
or inevitably leaving out, for reasons of economy of space an d
time, information about more general contexts and interests.
An interpretation presupposes an interaction in which the
processes of framing, focusing on, and articulating a particular
subject or text also conceals, leaves out, downplays something
potentially significant about it. More often than not, this is not
part of a strategy meant to deceive, but part and parcel of the
limited and temporally and spatially-situated nature of human
understanding.
Heidegger was keen on showing how temporality
provides the final horizon of human existence. He used the
term to support his belief that time was of the order of
meanings, not of that of things, and that it constitutes the
ultimate horizon for the meaning of lived experience and of its
understanding. Then, instead of speaking of past, present, and
future in terms of three distinct sets of entities, Heidegger
describes Dasein in terms of three interrelated perspectives or
ek-stases: thrownness, circumspective concern, and projection,
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through which the individual experiences a sort of identitary
detachment from the self in existential experience.
Thrownness is used instead of the past, a perspective of
Dasein, to reveal the way in which human beings always and
already find themselves thrown into a world not of their own
choosing. This Heideggerian past, both one’s personal past and
the whole historical past, is not experienced as ‘dead history,’
but as constitutive and relevant to Dasein.
The circumspective concern is more than what less
philosophically-minded people call the present. The
circumspective concern represents the people, things and
events that a human being is concerned with and about, cares
about and cares for, what the human being values, is attached
to, is committed to. Projection is the perspective substituting
for what others call the future. It is not something indefinite,
which a fortune teller might decipher in the pattern of the folds
of an individual’s hand. Projection is active and meaningful,
consisting of what the individual is intent on doing, the kind of
person he or she is determined to become, the envisioned ideal
world to be enjoyed by the members of the next generation one
cares for.
Heidegger underlines the historicity of the individual
and of human existence as a whole through his analysis of the
perspectives of temporality. He defines Dasein in terms of the
interrelationship of the temporal perspectives or ekstases. Each
of the three perspectives stands for a distinct and irreducible
dimension of any form of understanding and of hermeneutics
as a whole. Heidegger's view on historicity opens new
perspectives for hermeneutics as a thoroughly critical
discourse, as it has come to involve much more than a
preoccupation with texts of a more immediate or remote past or
with the cultural world of the present. Heidegger’s
hermeneutics promotes an active engagement with what is

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relevant and significant from the past, growing out of present
concerns, in relation and in anticipation of a meaningful future.
Both in Being and Time and in Heidegger’s subsequent
work, the alienating dangers posed by science and technology
to human existence became a central concern. Like many other
thinkers of the time, Heidegger was concerned about the
possibility of the human race becoming a victim, like Dr.
Frankenstein, of its own technological monsters.
He went further in his concerns, identifying a serious
hermeneutical problem. Modern technology’s increasingly
stronger grip on the world is to be viewed as a deeper loss of
the close link between Dasein and Sein, between the human
being … being in the world and Being itself, a link that Being
and Time had tried to articulate. This process of alienation
from the existential bases of humankind had been perceived as
early as antiquity, but it was becoming more obvious and more
dramatically felt and perceived during the spectacular progress
of science and technology during the Industrial Revolution and
thereafter.
Science and technology had managed to place a
multitude of artificial objects enabling unprecedented and
considerable control over the natural environment and the
natural forces. This resulted in an equally considerable loss of
the fundamental existential values and meanings and of the
intellectual capabilities that might be instrumental in
recovering these existential meanings. In thrall to the
prevailing technological discourse of the natural sciences,
human thinking had itself turned technological, tempted to
measure, weigh and calculate truths and values by apparently
objective means and standards, a trend which is continuing
with increased speed even today in the age of globalization.
Heidegger thought and hoped that the way to retrieve
the lost sense of the fundamental existential qualities and to
reestablish control over the tendency to turn technological was
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by means of a meditative as opposed to a calculative mode of
thinking. That involved a systematic hermeneutic undertaking
meant to recover the fundamental ways that might help
humankind to orient itself in relation to the world and to live
meaningful lives.
This mode of thinking was designed to initiate a
critique of technology that would re-establish the thinking
man’s control over it, a project that has been informing, among
other attitudes, many dystopian narratives in the science-fiction
genre. Another path for a hermeneutic-driven critique
envisaged an increasing importance conferred on the arts,
especially on poetry, able to be of use, among other things, in
the resistance to the calculative mode of thinking.
Art, among other things, in addition, draws attention to
the mysterious and the un-said. For Heidegger, what
hermeneutics aims at is not merely stating what a text means,
but also considering what is un-said, what is suppressed or
obscured. Omissions are consequently significant. This idea of
understanding in terms of the combination of what is shown
and what is hidden or obscured, of interpretation as a path
through which what is brought forth is linked to what is
concealed, is an important contribution Heidegger makes to the
critical discourse of hermeneutics.
Among Heidegger’s outstanding merits as an influential
20th century philosopher, one should not overlook his major
contribution to the articulation of the link between the
philosophical concern with hermeneutics and a critique of
exaggerated, extreme technology-driven modes of thought, of
the whole historical tradition by means of which those modes
managed to rise and assume control over modern societies.
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics
would critically consider both truth and method, while the
temporal dimension of his life would span three centuries
(1900-2002). Gadamer is thought to be the most influential of
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those who have developed the implications of Heidegger's
thought for hermeneutic discourse (Surber 58). Following
Heidegger (who had been his teacher), Gadamer will proclaim
the philosophical hermeneutic perspective as a defining
characteristic of his work, thus highlighting the importance of
understanding and interpretation in any major philosophical
project.
Gadamer is intent on detaching his philosophical
hermeneutics from any preoccupation with specific methods,
apparently viewing the concepts in the title of his major
philosophical work, Truth and Method (1960) as opposites,
some sort of polemical engagement with the rationalism of
Descartes as confidently expressed in his Discourse on the
Method. The new reader to his work will then expect … truth,
and nothing but the truth, an expectation that will be thwarted.
Actually, Gadamer undertakes to argue that the action
of the totalizing propensity of methods to provide truths is
necessary, but not sufficient: the domain of truths has to be
deepened and made more extensive, as truths are not always
something that can be said about a dry set of criteria (as natural
scientific truths), but an existential experience or event through
which some people go and through which they are
considerably transformed. These people that experience truth
as event and are transformed by it are historically and
linguistically situated (they have what Gadamer calls, in plain
German, wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein, a historically-
effected consciousness).
Gadamer’s 1960 magnum opus seems to be concerned
with the problems of textuality. Although Gadamer’s interests
go beyond the interpretation of the text, the concept and what it
refers to acquire a more important part in his work than in his
teacher’s, the latter mainly concerned with the key issue of
Being and Being-in-the-world (Dasein), the former (Gadamer)

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paving the ground for other figures in the development of
critical cultural discourse ‘guilty’ of textualizing the world.
The dialog, sometimes to be seen as the argument or
debate with his precursor, Heidegger, sheds light on his work
as a whole, under the sign of understanding and interpretation
as dialog. Unlike Heidegger, who showed little enthusiasm in
integrating his work and his key issues within a distinct
philosophical framework, including the broad outlines of
liberal humanism, Gadamer’s acknowledgement of a definite
humanist tradition and his contemporary dialog with such
major hermeneutic representatives as Paul Ricoeur were very
explicit. Like Heidegger, this time, Gadamer is determined to
highlight and confirm the unity that the hermeneutic experience
displays in opposition to the contemporary technological
discourse. Understanding is seen by Gadamer as more than an
important human faculty; it is, very much like in Heidegger’s
philosophical hermeneutic vision, the basic attribute of
humankind, as the interpretation that it engenders guarantees
the discovery of essential truths, even before a particular
method is likely to be adopted.
In his Truth and Method, Gadamer attempts to steer
clear of the professed and aimed at detached objectivity of the
Enlightenment, especially as it manifested itself in the natural
sciences, of the Romantic-oriented interpretation theories of
Schleiermacher and Dilthey, which stressed the importance of
the recovery of the original intentions of the authors of texts
submitted to interpretation. In a more nuanced way than
Schleiermacher and Dilthey, Gadamer will try to map out the
pattern of the means through which subject and object, not
author and interpreter, are in permanent interaction or dialog.
Philosophical hermeneutics therefore has no direct
methodological consequences for the natural or human
sciences, nor will it result in a general canon of hermeneutic
principles equally applicable to any inquiry, but truth and
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method are there all right. Truth and Method investigates the
conditions of understanding as linked to truth even before any
question of adopting a method. These conditions make up the
horizon that provides the framework within which human
understanding works. This horizon of all human understanding
has historical and linguistic coordinates (historicality and
linguisticality).
Gadamer, following in the footsteps of Heidegger in
this particular respect, was aware that interpretation occupies a
specific place within a tradition. The interpreter and the act of
interpretation are receptive and open to this tradition.
Prejudices and prejudgments are not seen as negative, like
Bacon’s idols which prevent an accurate vision of the world,
but as assuming a formative function in preunderstanding, with
which any hermeneutic undertaking begins. Thus, Gadamer
sees the historicality of interpretation and the creative
dimension of interpretation in its attempt at recovering the past
as being enabled by the prejudgment supplied by the tradition
in which the interpreter is situated. The interpreter, as already
mentioned, has a historically-effected consciousness.
From their specific positions and horizons the
interpreters tackle the horizon of the text. A successful
engagement will ensure a fusion of horizons in the act of
interpretation, by means of which the interpreter appropriates
the text, makes it relevant to himself or herself through a
unique, creative act. However, there are no fixed and right
interpretations, since each interpreter will come up with their
own slightly different cultural horizon, even among his or her
contemporaries. What’s more, the horizon of each interpreter
keeps changing as they, while growing up and older, broaden
their life experience.
This is a relativism that is commonly accepted in our
age, where everything keeps changing, is in constant flux, an
unfolding narrative rather than an immutable essence. It is
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worth noting that Gadamer aims at limiting the damages of
excessive relativism and subjectivity in the process of
interpretation. He distinguishes the meaning of the text from
the interpreter’s subjective feelings (a possible mistaken
equation of the two will be called the affective fallacy). He also
maintains that he focuses on the meaning of the text, not on the
recovery of the intentions of the author, which was an
undertaking adopted by the first prominent hermeneutic
theorists (Schleiermacher, Dilthey). Trying to discuss the
meaning of the text in terms of the intentions the author may
have had is called the intentional fallacy. The two forms of
fallacious approach will be condemned by the proponents of
the New Criticism in literary interpretations.
Focusing on the text, not on the author, Gadamer
considers that its historicality implies that the author’s
historical horizon is to be reconstructed from the text itself by
the interpreter who also comes with his or her horizon.
Historicality and linguisticality are involved in the fusion of
horizons, with the latter stressing the linguistic nature of all
understanding, prior to any interpretation.
For Gadamer, language is more than a tool for
communicating by means of words: it is the air we breathe, the
cultural universe in which humans live and share meanings in
the dialogic event of successive waves of interpretation. In this
context, the text poses questions toward the horizon of the
world that it reveals, thus regulating the fusion of that horizons
with that of a plurality of historically-effected and
linguistically-effected interpreters.
Meaning is for him and for his friend and follower
Ricoeur the understanding arising out of the interaction text-
reader and not the fixed result emerging out of the operations
of formal language rules within a synchronic system of
differences, being more of a practice than the consequence of
application of a distinct theory. Ricoeur, in his Freud and
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Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, speaks about the
possibility of a general theory of interpretation as having to
accommodate two ‘interpretations of interpretation,’ one intent
on recovering the meaning from the text, the other as exposing
its underlying ideology or ‘the illusions and lies of
consciousness.’ The second orientation has come to designate a
certain school or hermeneutics of suspicion, a school in which
Ricoeur includes Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud (32).
In contemporary cultural studies, hermeneutical
approaches are seen as reader-empowering, positing that actual
readers achieve understanding and interpretation in a process
which depends equally on the features of the text and the
competence and imagination of the readers, being largely
linked to the development of the reader-response theory, as
Chris Barker notes:
The influence of hermeneutics within cultural studies has
largely been through a reader-reception theory that challenges
the idea that there is one textual meaning associated with
authorial intent. It also contests the notion that textual
meanings are able to police meanings created by
readers/audiences but instead stresses the interactive
relationship between the text and the audience. Thus the reader
approaches the text with certain expectations and anticipations
which are modified in the course of reading to be replaced by
new ‘projections’. Understanding is always from the position
and point of view of the person who understands. This
involves not merely reproduction of textual meaning but the
production of new meaning by the readers (85).
This empowering, however, is not as straightforward as that,
interpretations usually focusing on aspects of ideology and
power which turn literary works, for example, into texts
embedded into Cultural Theory discourse (Marxism, feminism,
postcolonial studies) in this hermeneutics of suspicion which
does not interpret works (texts) as remarkable wholes, only
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selecting special aspects of it, having to do with … Cultural
Studies.
This aspect of the interpretive process today is due,
according to Eugene Goodheart in his ‘Casualties of the
Culture Wars’ to ‘the political and cultural history of the past
four decades’(508) more explicitly, to the emergence of …
once again, Cultural Studies, which only goes on to show one
aspect of the so-called ‘culture wars’ animating the
contemporary intellectual scene in the humanities and the
social sciences, promoting the above-mentioned hermeneutics
of suspicion in a wider cultural context in which conspiracy
theories and dramatic ideological polarities have deeply
affected both the ‘groves of academe’ and the more
comprehensive public space shaped by the mass-media.

II.33. An inspirational figure playing hard to get: Michel

Foucault
Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984) is one of the 20th century
thinkers whose ideas have influenced various forms of
contemporary critical cultural discourses ranging from the
humanities to the social sciences, with cultural studies in
between.
His critical thought is seen to have developed in
connection with the tradition linking Hegel, Nietzsche, the
Frankfurt School (Payne 280), in terms of what he would call
the genealogy of discourse. For instance, his views on the
functioning of the discursive practices ‘disciplining’ the human
body can be traced back to Nietzsche, his main interest lies in
the concrete functioning of power in society in specific
historical contexts. The Foucaldian articulations of power and
knowledge are traced to Nietzsche, for whom considerations of
power relations are a prerequisite for the analysis of
knowledge. The very title of Foucault’s 1976 The Will to
Knowledge shows both his indebtedness to Nietzsche and to his
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‘will to power’ and his interest in developing his own power-
knowledge concept. Power-knowledge states that power shapes
knowledge in terms of its own hidden agenda. Power-
knowledge and then biopower, the set of practices and
disciplinary institutions through which large groups of people
are governed, will later be accompanied by the concept of
‘governmentality,’ covering more or less the same meaning.
As far as an archaeological perspective is concerned,
Foucault’s formative years coincide with the intellectual, often
conflicting coexistence in postwar France of Marxist and
existentialist thought, while structuralism is moving toward its
antithesis, poststructuralism, in dialogic fashion. Structuralism
has claimed him, Foucault has protested, rejecting both an
association with this disciplinary label and with the others: ‘I
have never been a Freudian, I have never been a Marxist and I
have never been a structuralist’ (Foucault 1997: 437).
Not being a structuralist, in the first place, means that
Foucault adopts the historicism associated with the
development of cultural studies, while structuralism focuses on
ahistorical examinations of system, following Saussure’s
synchronic approach. Foucault will historicize, never
universalize, his key terms of archaeology and genealogy
drawing attention to his cultural ‘excavations’ and the way he
traces ideas and their impact along various, sometimes
labyrinthine, trajectories. He does that in order to challenge
various models of society and to advocate political and social
causes.
Whether he is or he is not, and to what extent he can be
called, a structuralist is open to debate. However, what links
him to the structuralist or poststructuralist aspects of Louis
Althusser’s form of Marxism is the conception of the self. In
identity theories, as already mentioned, agency (the ability of
the subject to make choices) and structure (the constraining
force of the institutions on the subject) are each given their due.
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 Influenced by Louis Althusser’s project of removing any
trace of agency in his construction of the subject as completely
interpellated by the ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses),
Foucault sees the subject as subjected to external power
relations (his concept denoting the condition of the subjected
subject is assujettissement, ‘subjection’). Nevertheless, Lisa
Downing notes the indecision (she calls it a paradoxical
situation) concerning the condition of the subject running
through Foucault’s developing theories:
The Foucauldian notions of ‘self’ and ‘subject,’ then, are
paradoxical ones. They describe at once, and intriguingly, a
historical and political agent (affecting history by accessing
the impersonal and productive workings of power and
resistance) and the effect of the operations of historical
processes (2).
Therefore, in spite of various intellectual coordinates,
although his influence on Cultural Studies is duly
acknowledged, his ‘paradoxical’ position in relation to all the
‘connections’ rather than traditions, filiations, genealogies and
archaeologies are difficult to assess, given Foucault’s public
statements and very idiosyncratic style, as Downing notes:
The playfulness of Foucault’s project – the way in which he
tends to parody the discourses he is critiquing and to take
oppositional positions at certain moments for strategic reasons,
even if he later makes productive use of the very propositions
he was earlier critiquing; and the chameleon-like nature of his
ideas about the agency of the self discussed above – all make
Foucault a challenging, difficult, but always entertaining
writer (3).
As the title of his work Les mots et les choses: Une
archéologie des sciences humaines (1966) and of his 1969
treatise (L’archéologie du savoir) show, the methodology he
claims to use in these early works is called archaeology. He

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had also used the term and had started developing his idea in
his 1963 The Birth of the Clinic, whose subtitle is ‘An
Archaeology of Medical Perception.’ Foucault had already
begun to study the specific patters of thinking and acting
prevailing in different ages that were more than a passive
background for the formation of new ideologies and systems of
thought.
In Les mots et les choses (Eng. transl., The Order of
Things), Foucault investigates the unspoken, veiled rules that
regulate knowledge within a specific temporal and cultural
layer. Each historical layer has specific conditions of truth or
discourse, systems of knowledge, called epistemes or
discursive formations. These conditions or rules, the episteme,
gives shape to the framework within which knowledge is
considered valid at a certain historical moment. An episteme
establishes the limits and frameworks regulating what can be
stated in the various fields of knowledge of that time. Like
ideology, it operates beyond (or beneath) the consciousness of
individuals. Foucault makes a distinction between the episteme
of the Renaissance and that of the classical period, stating that
he is interested in identifying the specific conditions of truth or
discourse of the modern episteme.
Unlike other domains, such as the history of ideas,
which rely on filiations and smooth transitions, on tradition as
continuity, Foucault’s archaeology identifies these distinct
layers or epistemes, believing in the discontinuity of discourse
in its passage from one historical age to the next. Very much
like an archaeologist who discovers a shard of broken pottery
in a certain layer on a particular excavation site, going then on
to reconstruct the whole object by putting it in relation to the
material evidence of the age and the civilization that
incomplete piece of evidence is part of, Foucault undertakes to
investigate specific evidence testifying to the general
conditions of truth or discourse of a certain episteme.
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 As for the specific use of genealogy, Foucault’s work is
also significantly indebted to Nietzsche, his 1971 essay
(‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’) stating this genealogical
connection. Nietzsche’s ‘genealogy,’ unlike what a
‘genealogical tree’ confirms, does not legitimate a person,
practice or institution because of the long ‘pedigree,’ traceable
to one and only respected origin. It actually does the opposite,
deconstructing this belief, in true poststructuralist fashion,
genealogies, in Foucault’s system of thought being, far from
linear and continuous, displaying context-bound and localized
coordinates, illustrating ruptures and sharp transitions.
Actually, it it more than a relatively detached, anti-humanist
poststructuralist perspective, since it involves a clearly political
bias, announcing the involved critique of cultural studies. This
is particularly how Larry Shiner, in his article on Foucault’s
‘anti-method,’ sees his ‘genealogies,’ which, despite some
titles, are not to be viewed as ‘mere’ histories:
One must read his genealogies of the prison, sex, or of the human
sciences, therefore, as a political act rather than merely a history of
their development or a philosophy of their foundations. This is not
to deny that Foucault explicitly deals with "origins" or with
philosophical assumptions. On the contrary, he treats both the
historical and philosophical questions in the same breath and he
does so in the context of a political critique (382).
Nietzsche’s 1887 work, On the Genealogy of Morality: A
Polemic, which is Foucault’s inspiration for his own
methodology, ‘deconstructs’ the legitimation line going back to
the origins of the moral principles developed over the centuries
by systems of belief, such as Christianity and Judaism.
Raymond Geuss briefly summarizes Nietzsche’s critique of the
belief that morality goes back to one particular person or
institution:

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 The whole point of Genealogy of Morality is that Christian
morality results from a conjunction of a number of diverse
lines of development: the ressentiment of slaves directed
against their masters ( GM I . l - 1 0 ) , a psychological
connection between 'having debts' and 'suffering pain' that gets
established in archaic commercial transactions ( GM 1!.4-6 ) ,
a need people come to have to turn their aggression against
themselves which results from urbanization ( GM II. l 6 ) , a
certain desire on the part of a priestly caste to exercise
dominion over others ( GM III. l 6 ) etc. The genealogy
reveals Christian morality to arise from the historically
contingent conj unction of a large number of such separate
series of processes that ramify the further back one goes and
present no obvious or natural single stopping place that could
be designated 'the origin' (Geuss 4).
In her 2005 book on Foucault, Clare O’Farrell identifies
five strands in the practice of contemporary cultural studies,
one of which is more closely dependent on his work, although
all of them are indebted to him to a lesser or greater extent. The
first strand is the one inspired by the Birmingham Centre of
Contemporary Cultural Studies, tending to employ an ideology
related to Marxism and classical sociological methodologies on
such topics as youth subcultures (See Fiske and/ or Hebdige).
The second strand is closer to the humanities than to the social
sciences, focusing on close reading and textual analysis of texts
from popular culture, including film and media studies, while
also considering cultural history as one of its fields of
investigation. The third has to do with ‘identity politics,’
promoted by groups that consider that they have been, and still
are, discriminated against by mainstream culture (some ethnic
groups, feminists of various orientations, gays and lesbians).
The fourth strand is the closest to Foucault and the most recent
in cultural studies, focusing on the policies pursued by
institutions in their production and management of cultural
practices, the central concept being ‘governmentality.’
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Governmentality is a dimension of the all-pervasive and
pluridirectional nature of power, by means of which a
population is subjected to bureaucratic modes of discipline.
The fifth is thought by O’Farrell to encompass ‘cross-cultural
studies’ and anthropology, comparing various national cultural
groups and their corresponding institutions and cultural
practices, having less to do with power relations (one of the
defining features of cultural studies) and more to do with a
detached comparative analysis (O’Farrell 16-17).
Such distinctions are always welcome and always open
to qualification, as the field of cultural studies defies
classification and dogmatic ‘ossification.’ Its empirical
approaches reflect the spirit of the postmodern condition in
which skepticism and incredulity toward grand totalizing
stories is accompanied by the relativism of the ‘anything
goes’(as long as it works).
Foucault himself adopted an incredulity toward
universal truths and grand narratives, some of the
consequences of his project tipping the balance of interest
within Cultural Studies as well, aside from any attempt at
putting order in the interdisciplinary field.
Foucault’s theories about the production, dissemination
and functioning of power through disciplinary systems and
institutions, leading to forms of behavior internalized by the
subjected subject have made the landscape of ideology less
straightforward, more problematic. Society can no longer be
clearly divided between oppressors and oppressed, with power
as coercive imposed by very visible means, with very clear-cut
class distinctions and class interests. Foucauldian power flows
in all directions, sometimes ‘empowering’ the subjected
subjects, contributing to the definition of their identities.
Foucault was right when he dismissed any links to Marxist
cultural discourse. With his deconstruction of the Marxist
unidirectional view on power, ideology, hegemony, a new
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paradigm in cultural studies replaced the post-Gramscian age.
It is an age whose bewildering diversity features one particular
concept, identity, in an age of multiculturalism and identity
politics, in which the Foucauldian power-driven discourse also
stimulates postcolonial theory concepts, such as Edward Said’s
Orientalism.

II.34. ‘Mixing memory with desire’: Lacan’s very special

return to Freud
Jacques Lacan’s outstanding endeavor to redirect
psychoanalytical, social and cultural theories towards language
led to a large spectrum of critical responses, from the most
eulogistic to the most dismissive, hardly anyone manifesting
indifference to this ‘French Freud.’ Francis Hofstein, in his
‘The Institution of Lacan,’ refers to him in terms of his
foundational role as the initiator of a new institution, while
Kennedy Devereaux, in his review (‘Lacan Against Man’)
notes his ‘thorough-going attack on modern humanism’(46).
Lacan’s critical theory, moving between the discourses
of psychoanalysis, structuralism, and poststructuralism, had a
dramatic itinerary, largely due to the remarkable personality of
the one who famously decreed the necessity of ‘returning to
Freud,’ to be subsequently expelled from the International
Psychoanalytical Association, which had been founded by
Freud himself.
Lacan, in addition to carefully returning to Freud in
order to reinterpret him, had undergone the influence of the
main structuralist theorists (Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and
Jakobson). He starts from his structuralist predecessors’ ideas,
such as Roman Jakobson’s claim that metaphor and metonymy
are the two figures of speech that are instrumental in the
understanding of all human behavior and cultural discourse,
focusing on their importance in literary activity. The Freudian

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displacement is linked to metonymy, while condensation is
linked to the metaphorical poetic function.
The famous statement that Lacan promoted in his Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis was that ‘the
unconscious is structured like a language’ (20), developing the
consequences of the idea that the unconscious is a kind of
writing, initially processed in the oral medium, based on the
above-mentioned metonymic (displacement) and metaphoric
(condensation) functions. This was arguably part of the
influence that surrealists had had on him in his youth, when he
attended some of their literary events (attending Joyce’s
readings, among which excerpts from Finnegans Wake were
also to be displayed, is also relevant).
For Lacan, the unconscious assumes the central position
in the configuration of the human psyche, not a garbage dump
in which repression chooses to throw unwanted material. In
Lacan’s reinterpretation of the Freudian narrative of the
individual’s identity, the journey from the initial narcissistic
unity of the young baby and infant toward the ‘painful
splitting’ that socialization involves is reconsidered and
reversed. The immersion in the formative patterns of language
and the social world around presupposes, from the very
beginning, that the subject possesses the basic identity
coordinates.
Lacan’s topography of the psycho-social world features
the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. In infancy, the
subject experiences the ‘Imaginary,’ amounting to an identity
in which child, mother and world are fused in a pre-language
whole. From the order of nature, represented by the Imaginary
stage, the subject will move into the cultural stage of the
Symbolic, with its association with the patterns of language,
initially linked to the self-reflexivity associated with the
metaphor of the looking glass, or mirror.

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 Lacan had first used the concept of the ‘mirror stage’ to
refer to the sequence immediately following the baby
recognizing itself in the mirror, around the age of six months.
The subject is no longer undifferentiated from the rest of the
narcissistic world in the previous, Imaginary stage.
Paradoxically for people who think of narcissists as individuals
admiring themselves in the mirror, the moment the baby
recognizes itself, its narcissism is dealt a severe blow. The
infant realizes the double position of perceiving subject and
perceived object. Following that (‘post-mirror’) moment, the
individual enters the Symbolic stage, roughly extending from
the age of six months to one year and a half.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud had described
the game of an eighteen-month-old boy, throwing a reel out of
his cot, then pulling the string attached to the reel and getting
the object back, accompanying these gestures with the
interjections which apparently refer to the disappearance and
return of the object (‘the fort-da game’).
For Freud, the meaning of the game has to do with the
acknowledgement of the growing infant of the mother’s
disappearance and reappearance as a distinct entity, thus
becoming aware of its game as a declaration of temporary
autonomy, rather than of complete independence. Naturally,
the infant remains dependent on its mother, but the former is no
longer an indistinct part of its initially narcissistic world.
For Lacan, the interjections interpreted by Freud in
terms of ‘fort’ and ‘da’ as signaling symbolic detachment from
the body of the mother are seen as a linguistic attempt of
distinguishing between two phonemes or two linguistic units
having distinct spatial meanings, thus indicating disappearance
or distance, and return, or proximity. The infant becomes a
child who uses sounds to describe the world and its relation to
it, thus affirming the basic coordinates of its subjectivity,
determined by the use of language. The loss of the imaginary
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union with the mother leads to the entrance into the masculine
symbolic order, the Law of the Father. The concept of the
‘phallus’ in Lacan’s ‘linguistic’ interpretation is not linked to
the physical penis. It represents the ‘transcendental signifier’
on which the social order is founded.
In the interpretation of the third developmental stage,
the Real has nothing to do with what we commonly mean by
‘the real.’ The Real stage is to be seen as in sharp contrast to
the previous two stages. Lacan is aware that what people call
reality is actually the play of symbols in the complex processes
of signification. We are in the linguistic cage of this symbolic
‘social reality.’
The Lacanian Real both underpins and subverts this
social reality, always elusive, always resisting symbolization.
One might see it as the ‘mysterious stranger’ haunting the
boundaries of the symbolic realm of social reality, the unsaid,
the unknown, the difference that is instrumental in
reformulating the relationship between the Imaginary and the
Symbolic.
The Real will later be redefined by Lacan as the big
Other, in his explanation of the transition from the original loss
at the end of the Imaginary stage. Pushed by the insatiable
desire to compensate for this original loss, the subject moves
from object to object in search of that absence as Absence or as
the big Other. The big Other or the Real stands for everything
that the individual wishes to know and identify with, always
managing to stay out of reach. Since this desire is never
satisfied, the individual transfers it to the little other, an object
which functions as substitute for the big Other.
This permanent wild goose chase for the big Other,
where the object is ungraspable, reminds one of Levi-Strauss’s
remarks about the function of the signifier. Lacan realizes the
endless sliding of the signified under the signifier. The idea
that a signifier will never be able to fix meaning, the latter
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continually running away, so to speak, will be adopted by
Derrida and his equally famous (or rather notorious) statement
about the permanent deferral of meaning.
In an age whose patriarchal spirit is continually
challenged by militant feminists, Jean-Michel Rabaté, in his
Jacques Lacan and the Subject of Literature, finds Lacan’s
main revolutionary contribution to the field of post-Freudian
theory in a way which appears to be moving in the right
direction. The ominous Father figure is displaced, the original
mother figure promoted as part of the beginning of the identity
narrative:
[…] Lacan’s main revolutionary contribution to post-Freudian
theory has been to shift the emphasis from the father (whose
figure always has frightening features inherited from the
domineering and castrating leader of the horde portrayed by
Freud) to the mother: in numerous readings of Freud's texts
and literary classics (including Hamlet), he shows that human
desire cannot find its place without questioning its link with
the mother’s desire (13).
Is it a coincidence that Lacan’s revolutionary
contribution to Freud and the shift in emphasis from the Father
figure to the mother emerges at a time of dramatic
consciousness-raising associated with successive waves of
feminist thinking and activism? Should Lacan ‘plead guilty’?
Tony Thwaites, in his Reading Freud: Psychoanalysis
as Cultural Theory, while providing an ample framework for
the understanding and interpretation of Freud as a cultural
theorist, acknowledges the remarkable contribution made by
Jacques Lacan not only to the psychoanalytic cultural discourse
tradition, but also to a wide range of contemporary cultural
approaches, overtly or implicitly linked to what one might call
contemporary cultural studies:

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 Psychoanalysis is a significant presence in much recent
cultural theory, particularly that which is inflected by the work
of Jacques Lacan. We find it in the highly influential and
inventive work of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Ernesto
Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Joan Copjec, Slavoj Zizek, Renate
Salecl, Alenka Zupancic and Alain Badiou, where it has led to
things such as a reconsideration of theories of ideology and
sexual difference, powerful critiques of New Historicism and
Foucauldian concepts of the subject, and a powerful
framework for discussing things as different as the World
Trade Center attack and the logic of ethnic cleansing (xi).
Lacan and a whole psychoanalytic tradition going back to
Freud, but also including such important figures as Jung with
the heart of darkness of aspects of his collective unconscious,
have become reference points in the development of
contemporary cultural theories, in between forms of
psychology and sociology that have charted the field of culture
and of one of its central issues, group and cultural identity.

II.35. The Birmingham School of Contemporary Studies:

historical context
The shortest history of Cultural Studies usually starts in 1964,
when the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies was founded, following a series of postwar
developments in Great Britain. This is how Graeme Turner
singles out the main socio-cultural and political coordinates
that were linked to the perception of a new (postcolonial,
Americanized, more democratic) Britain and to the need for
new ways of dealing with new cultural phenomena:
[…] the revival of capitalist industrial production, the
establishment of the welfare state and the Western powers’
unity in opposition to Russian communism were all inflected
into a representation of a ‘new’ Britain. This was a culture
where class was said to have disappeared, where postwar

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 Britain could be congratulated for its putative discontinuity
with prewar Britain, and where modernity and the
Americanization of popular culture were signs of a new future
(33).
Preceding and accompanying the activity of those who
would be associated with the Birmingham center, there was
increased interest in the culture and value systems of the
British working classes, whose behavior and lifestyles were
becoming increasingly bourgeois within the framework of the
emerging welfare state, while the traditional British class
system, as one of the main cultural institutions, and the
educational system, equally important, were growing obsolete
in the new historical circumstances. Materially, more and more
people from the ‘subordinate’ classes could afford the
consumer goods associated with a more prosperous civilization
and a consumerist culture: cars, refrigerators, washing
machines, record players, TV sets. In addition, through new
legislation implemented by a succession of governments, of
left or right orientation, health and education became available
to more people in the new British welfare state. There were
significantly more young people from the working classes
enjoying a university education. Education was considered an
important component for the postwar reconstruction of the
country, in completely new circumstances, including the new
opportunities offered by the vaunted welfare state.
Education and culture were to be valued both at home
and abroad, in relation to the Commonwealth countries in the
first place, the postcolonial age for the former greatest colonial
power announcing new challenges and responsibilities.
Imperial Britain was turning into a significantly more
democratic country, in which, in addition to the rising presence
of the lower middle classes and of the British working classes,
there would be added consecutive waves of immigrants from
the former colonies, a phenomenon which gained prominence
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in the 1950s. Geopolitically, Britain was becoming a second-
order power in the new configurations promoted by the
ideological confrontation of the emerging Cold War.
A significant aspect that will be of some importance to
the genesis of Cultural Studies, both in Britain and elsewhere,
was the bankruptcy of the appeal of Marxism in its Soviet
formula in the 1950s. Stalin’s ruthless dictatorship was not the
only one to blame. After his death, there followed the
repression of the 1956 anti-communist uprising in Hungary.
Marxist-oriented thinkers in the West were looking for more
democratic ways of making a living in the realm of culture.
One significant trend was the emergence of the so-called New
Left in political thinking.
Edward P. Thomson, in his The Poverty of Theory,
describes the circumstances of him and other Communist Party
comrades, ‘acquiring the habit of reasoning,’ in 1956, by
expressing their own personal views inside the Party’s fence in
a new journal, The Reasoner. The CPGB (the Communist Party
of Great Britain) bosses did not like the idea, and the journal’s
suspension coincided with the October – November anti-
Communist Hungarian revolution and the exodus of thousands
of members from the British Communist Party. This mass
desertion included Thomson, who, the following year, was
among those who founded … The New Reasoner, to merge a
couple of years later with Universities & Left Review to form
the New Left Review (Thomson: i).
The people publishing in the New Left Review would be
associated with the emergence of something similar in the
study of culture - Cultural Studies – with the important
representatives of the New Left (in addition to Edward P.
Thomson, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart) also
described as ‘left culturalists,’ by contrast with previous ‘right
culturalists’ (such as Matthew Arnold or F.R. Leavis). It is
generally accepted that the three ‘new leftists,’ together with
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Stuart Hall, who will join them a little later, constitute the
‘founding fathers’ of British cultural studies as an
institutionalized field of inquiry and action: Cultural Studies.
Confining himself strictly to the British intellectual
scene, Turner notes the influence of early 1950s work on
aspects of common, popular culture, which would lead to the
founding of the ICA (the Institute of Contemporary Arts) in
London, as well as of what he calls its significant
accompanying movement:
[…] in the early 1950s the Independent Group (IG) was
examining the visual arts, architecture, graphic design and pop
art, and establishing itself at the Institute of Contemporary
Arts (ICA) in London. This movement, like cultural studies
later, was primarily interested in everyday, not elite, culture
and focused particularly on the influence of American popular
culture on British life – an influence that was largely to the
movement’s adherents’ taste (33 – 34).
The everyday British working class culture was seen as
authentic, but the influence on it by American culture was also
welcome. What soon will be called British Cultural Studies
would see that influence as far from salutary, thus continuing
the criticism of mass culture and the culture industry that the
Frankfurt School had initiated, but adopting a special position
in the debate between cultural elitism and cultural populism,
initially combining features of both perspectives.

II.36. The first wave of Cultural Studies: the culturalism of

R. Hoggart, R. Williams, E.P. Thomson
Stuart Hall, who would become the second director of the
Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,
defines the two directions, or rather paradigms, that British
Cultural Studies adopted as Culturalism and Structuralism, the
latter term to be understood more precisely as distinct from the
former in its concern with signifying practices and structures
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more than with lived experience. Very briefly, the more
empirical culturalism, focusing on culture as lived experience,
was still confident in the power of ordinary people to create
and share cultural meaning. The version of structuralism in
cultural studies that would acknowledge French
poststructuralist influence in the 1970s, focusing on the power
of ideology, will stress the subjected condition of people,
manipulated by such Ideological State Apparatuses as culture
or literature in Louis Althusser’s Marxist structuralist theory.
Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Edward
Thompson (1963) are seen as the initiators of the early stage of
left culturalism, continuing a longer culture vs. civilization
rather than culture and civilization tradition. British
Culturalism stresses the commonality of culture and the ability
of working class people to devise and share meaningful
cultural practices. There will be a continued preoccupation
with lived experience as culture, culture defined as an everyday
social interaction, explored in the frameworks offered by its
material coordinates of production and consumption. This is a
deliberately biased, subjective approach, stressing the class
foundations of culture, aiming to do justice and give voice to
subordinate social classes in newer, more democratic
redefinitions.
Culturalism is now seen in retrospect as an initially
literary humanist approach valuing organic cultural practice in
opposition to material civilization associated with the postwar
age (culturalism as left culturalism, as already mentioned).
Browitt and Milner (2002), however, have a slightly different
view on the use of the concept culturalism, including, in their
account of the development of cultural studies, a German
strand of culturalism (as hermeneutics and historicism) and the
already mentioned Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis as right-
wing culturalist predecessors of postwar New Left and British

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Cultural Studies figures as Hoggart, Williams and Hall
(Chapter 2: 21-56).
Those who would become the prominent figures of
British Cultural Studies in the earlier, culturalist stage of the
1960s were coming from the social sciences as well as from the
humanities, as Paul Bowman notes in his 2003 book on the
theory, politics and practice of Cultural Studies, in the form of
a somewhat ‘uneasy convergence’:
Modern Cultural Studies came into being during the 1960s out
of the uneasy convergence of, on the one hand, a strongly
functionalist kind of sociology that was strong on
measurement and description, but weak on critique or
evaluation, and, on the other, a form of literary study that had
almost no language at all with which to describe its object of
study, nor yet ways of checking its observations, but was
almost pathologically saturated with value and positively
addicted to orgies of discrimination and judgement. This
uneasy conjuncture finds expression in the contrasting
definitions of ‘culture’ to be found in the work of Raymond
Williams, when he was still in his left-Leavisite phase: culture
as anthropological ‘whole way of life’ (rituals, structures and
habits), and culture as expressive form (statues, poems and
novels) […](210).
This ‘uneasy convergence’ between sociological
description and literary interpretation was the starting point of
what would become British Cultural Studies. The first director
of the Birmingham center (or rather centre, since it was so
British) was Richard Hoggart, Professor of English Literature
at the University of Birmingham, whose important titles show
that he takes letters, words, and literature very seriously.
It is interesting to note that, prior to his foundational
role at Birmingham, Hoggart had worked in the Department of
Adult Education at Hull until the late 1950s, where his walks
must have crossed Philip Larkin’s, who had just been

197
appointed Head Librarian at Hull University. Larkin, the
‘hermit of Hull,’ the ‘less deceived’ poet would spend the rest
of his life there (and would write his best ‘parochial’ poetry).
Another remark worth making is that neither Philip
Larkin nor David Lodge (teaching at Birmingham University at
that time) would have appreciated the emergence of cultural
studies, although both can be largely seen as the product of the
postwar Welfare State that would facilitate the populism of
cultural studies as Cultural Studies.
Hoggart would not wait long before he moved to
Birmingham, where his walks, this time, would have crossed
young David Lodge’s, the latter intent on starting his campus
fiction trilogy. He would leave Birmingham and the
Birmingham centre in 1970, briefly serving as Assistant
Director-General of UNESCO in 1971, a position that made
him feel far from happy, in the opinion of his associate, Asa
Briggs (ix). However, for those that might be interested in the
political configurations within which the leadership of
UNESCO acted in the early 1970s, the appointment of a person
like Richard Hoggart, in true cultural studies fashion, is not
devoid of significance. Nevertheless, that appointment must
have placed him too high in the institutionalized frames of
power, even if that had to do with politics and policies linked
to education, culture, and science at international level, for
someone whose preoccupations linked him to ‘ordinary’ and
‘literate’ people.
Although Hoggart’s first volume had been an
unremarkably ‘orthodox’ book of literary criticism on the poet
W.H. Auden, he was soon contributing pieces describing
working-class ‘ways of life’ to Tribune, a leftist periodical,
also preparing to deal with the ‘abuses of literacy’ that cultural
elitists had made themselves guilty of. He dealt with these
abuses and with his response to them had appeared in book
form as early as in his … Uses of Literacy.
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 In The Uses of Literacy (1957), one saw Hoggart
introducing the distinction between popular and mass culture,
the latter term negatively viewed as culture industry by
Adorno and Horkheimer, as already noted. As the title and
subtitle show (The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class
Life with Special Reference to Publications and
Entertainments), the book is concerned with the impact of mass
publications on the working class culture of the previous four
decades (since the end of the First World War).
After setting the scene - a way of life dealing with an
oral tradition in terms of resistance and adaptation to new
contexts, family values, the importance of the neighborhood -
the book records the emergence in Britain of an inauthentic
mass culture, largely American, at the expense of a previous
genuine working class popular culture. British working class
culture is seen as an authentic, rich, organically connected
network of community practices and rituals involving family,
kin, and neighbors (the British pub, for example), specific
language forms. The distinction is therefore clear-cut for
Hoggart: mass culture (imported American movies, pop music
played on jukeboxes, comics, popular romances) is bad,
inauthentic, while popular culture is good (authentic).
Authenticity, as already seen in the discussion of the Frankfurt
School, is an important cultural coordinate, treated differently
by Benjamin or by Adorno and Horkheimer.
Hoggart himself, like Raymond Williams, was
connected through his working class origins to that
unsophisticated ‘organic,’ authentic culture. On the other hand,
he may be seen as a left-wing follower of Leavis, in his
endeavor to ‘elevate’ the working classes from the temptations
of mass culture. This is to be achieved through promoting an
interest in the more refined literary studies, but with a strong
democratic component, while at the same time urging ordinary

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people to preserve their authentic class culture, to draw on their
oral and local traditions.
In The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart believed that the
influence – extending at that time over half a century - of what
he called the modern mass media of communication, consisting
of popular papers and cinema, had not managed to change
ordinary people’s ways of speech and behavior: ‘if we are to
understand the present situation of the working classes we must
not pronounce it dead when it still has remarkable life’ (15).
Hoggart referred to the appeal of mass culture (he also calls it
‘the newer mass art’) in terms of an ‘invitation to a candy-floss
world’(weekly popular magazines, commercial popular songs)
or of ‘sex in shining packets’ (the juke-box, the ‘spicy’
magazines, the sex-and-violence novels).
One of the texts which provoked the left culturalists of
the Birmingham School to define their position was T.S.
Eliot’s Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, in which the
distinguished Modernist poet and critic, while acknowledging
the three associations of culture (of an individual, of a group or
class, of a whole society), follows in the wake of the ‘right
culturalist’ direction of Matthew Arnold, stressing the role of
the intellectual elite in the configuration of a type of
‘communal culture’ that would be a form of resistance against
the utilitarianism promoted by capitalist industrialization. This
kind of culture, however, is reminiscent of some of the ideal
features of an imagined pre-industrial community, even
medieval society, in its reverence for the preservation of the
social system and for established religion.
T.S. Eliot had converted to Anglo-Catholicism and had
then taken religion very seriously, which is obvious from the
very title of the volume in which the above essay is included:
Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. Although Eliot
admits, in the context of a more democratic and less class-
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ridden postwar Britain, that classes will one day disappear, he
acknowledges some ‘qualitative differences’ among
individuals, which compel him to devise, in a healthy and
common culture, a sort of division of labor (division of
hierarchical positions in relation to the common culture)
promoting the elites, which is reminiscent of the one imagined
by Plato in his Republic:
[…] some qualitative differences between individuals must
still be recognised, and that the superior individuals must be
formed into suitable groups, endowed with appropriate
powers, and perhaps with varied emoluments and honours.
Those groups, formed of individuals apt for powers of
government and administration, will direct the public life of
the nation; the individuals composing them will be spoken of
as ‘leaders.’ There will be groups concerned with art, and
groups concerned with science, and groups concerned with
philosophy, as well as groups consisting of men of action: and
these groups are what we call elites (108).
One of the last volumes in a very long life (straddling
two centuries, 1918 – 2014) is Richard Hoggart’s Everyday
Language and Everyday Life (2003). It has as motto a quote
from T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding: ‘For last year’s words belong
to last year’s language/ And next year’s words await another
voice.’ It announces, in retrospect, left-wing culturalism’s
argument with Eliot’s right-wing culturalism, while the book’s
title reaffirms the focus on the ordinary rather than the elite
dimension of the kind of culture investigated by British
Cultural Studies. T.S. Eliot’s ‘last year’s words’ belong to a
past in relation to which ‘next year’s words await another
voice,’ or other voices, among which the populist voices of
Hoggart’s 21st century successors are to be reckoned with in
the new interpretations of culture and active engagements with
it. However, the project of Everyday Language and Everyday
Life had begun with something preceding ‘last year’s words,’
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in a literal way, with a sort of recollection of the previous
decades as they had been lived by the working classes in
Northern England:
Such a book would best begin with the daily, conventional
speech habits of a particular people in time and place, not with
a scouring of dictionaries and linguistic records. If the
examination of idioms, as they were habitually used, was to be
revealing it should be rooted in a known, felt life. For me, that
had to be the daily life of the Northern English working class
from the 1930s onwards. So that was where I began; but did
not remain (xiii).
Hoggart was planning to go beyond the limited ground
covered in this book celebrating ‘everyday, common culture,’
examining how new language worlds are continually replacing
older ones, especially through the mass-media. These media,
for the better and for the worse, offer a new sense of belonging,
of togetherness, of sharing everyday experience and its
accompanying language in a predominantly mass-media
culture.
Raymond Williams’s 1958 volume, Culture and
Society: 1780 – 1950, like many other important works, is a
response to various challenges, including T.S. Eliot and the
right-wing culturalist tradition in which F.R. Leavis had also
been a prominent figure. Before it, Williams had written the
essay ‘The Idea of Culture,’ which provided the basis for his
classical book by now, Culture and Society, in which the elitist
orientation of culturalism is challenged from a left-wing
perspective.
Published in 1958, Culture and Society: 1780 – 1950
shows, through the time coordinates in the title, the drift of
Raymond Williams’s work. Although he would be Professor of
Literature at Jesus College, Cambridge (more precisely,
Professor of Drama) to the end of his career, that text and
subsequent work show a pronounced sociological bent, which
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Williams brings to the study of culture in general, to literature
in particular seen as a mode of cognition and exploration more
important than the epistemology of systemic social sciences, in
the opinion of R. Shashidhar (34).
Accepting T.S. Eliot’s general definition of culture as a
way of life, Williams goes further on the road diverging from
cultural elitism. The kind of culture Williams is interested in is
… common culture, not in the sense of a culture accepted by
common people and maintained by the elites. The relevance of
the concept of culture emerged in response to the Industrial
Revolution, to its distinct political and social changes, which
had brought to the fore, in addition to the bourgeoisie, the
working classes and their ways of life. In the book, which
became one of the foundationalist texts of British Cultural
Studies in the following decade, working-class cultural practice
is seen as a valuable enlargement of the traditional idea of
culture as intellectual and artistic excellence.
Williams will soon very explicitly proclaim that culture
is ordinary, that it is more than a repertoire of intellectual and
artistic work, essentially being a whole way of life. In his
interpretation of culture, Williams will so much broaden its
scope as to encompass the ‘collective democratic institution,’
all of this being clarified by the author toward the end of his
book:
The working class, because of its position, has not, since the
Industrial Revolution, produced a culture in the narrower
sense. The culture which it has produced, and which it is
important to recognize, is the collective democratic institution,
whether in the trade unions, the cooperative movement or a
political party. Working-class culture, in the stage through
which it has been passing, is primarily social (in that it has
created institutions) rather than individual (in particular
intellectual or imaginative work). When it is considered in

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 context, it can be seen as a very remarkable creative
achievement (346).
The idea of one culture gets challenged and replaced by that of
a plurality of class cultures, in which the distinction between
working-class and bourgeois culture is clear-cut because of the
different ideas of the nature of the social relationships as
reflected in the different ways of life.
In the more democratic postwar Britain Williams
considers that for the intelligentsia, middle-class individualism
was no longer the minority culture they should adhere to, but a
culture based on proletarian solidarity. He realizes that the
literary tradition is not so much the expression of a natural
selection based on excellence, but as the subjective outcome of
selections made on the basis of class interests by the people in
positions of authority at a certain historical moment.
However, the ideal of a common culture, rather than
that of a plurality of competing class cultures, assumes
particular importance in Williams’s utopian culturalist vision.
In The Long Revolution, he sees such a culture in the
foreseeable future. After the Industrial Revolution and the
gradual democratic revolution affecting British society, there is
a third one, the long revolution, which will be a cultural
revolution (for a 21st century reader, ‘cultural revolution’
brings the sinister connotations of the Chinese Cultural
Revolution spanning the decade after 1966, rather than the
American countercultural revolution of about the same period).
A starting point in his analysis of the contemporary
situation in Britain and of the bright prospects for the future in
The Long Revolution is here one of Williams’s definitions of
culture connecting the patterns of the activity of the mind and
the role of structures and institutions:
We are seeking to define and consider one central principle:
that of the essential relation, the true interaction, between

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 patterns learned and created in the mind and patterns
communicated and made active in relationships, conventions
and institutions. Culture is our name for this process (89).
Unlike outstanding Modernist literary people, like T.S.
Eliot, who deplored the cultural wasteland in which they were
immersed and who had little hope for the future, while looking
back nostalgically in quest of an imagined older culture,
Williams prophetically foresaw a ‘long revolution’ paving the
ground for a working-class, socialist-driven common culture.
Although he stressed the importance of the final
common culture resulting from the long revolution and the
temporary importance of class cultures in the society in which
he lived, Williams also noted how class distinctions are made
problematic, mainly in the cultural section having to do with
intellectual and imaginative work.
In the study of literature, and other cultural products,
Williams came up with the concept of structure of feeling,
which is to be seen as the distinct feature of a cultural period,
the special result of the interaction of all the cultural elements
in the general pattern of the time. This very complex and
elusive phrase seem to refer to the defining cultural feature of
an age, something to be shared by most members of a
knowable community transcending class distinctions. By
stressing this common ground, this community of feeling,
Williams seems to downplay social and political conflict, for
which he will be reproached by more Marxist-oriented cultural
studies theorists, such as the American Lawrence Grossberg.
This is how Browitt and Milner (2002) exemplify the phrase in
Williams’s vision, and the development of this vision in a
further stage:
[…] the English novel from Dickens to Lawrence becomes,
for Williams, one medium among many by which people seek
to master and absorb new experience through the articulation
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 of a structure of feeling, the key problem of which is that of
the ‘knowable community’ (Williams, 1974). Such deep
community must, of course, transcend class; and yet it remains
irredeemably marked by it. For the early, ‘left culturalist’
Raymond Williams this remained a circle that stubbornly
refused to be squared. Only in the course of a later encounter
with ‘western Marxism’ did it finally become possible for him
to explain, to his own satisfaction at least, how it is that
structures of feeling can be common to different classes, and
yet represent the interests of some particular class (35).

Defining himself and his extremely varied work within various

emerging theoretical frameworks but avoiding to allow himself
to be circumscribed by them (Marxism, culturalism, sociology
of culture, literary history), Williams looks for a way to mark
his own theoretical territory as ‘cultural materialism,’ part and
parcel of British Cultural Studies, as briefly summed up by
Asha S. Kanwar:
In the early 1960s, when Williams tried to establish his
position in regard to the notion of culture, he saw it as
‘creative activity’ and as ‘a whole way of life.’ In the 1970s,
he moved to a ‘theory of cultural materialism’ which he
defined as ‘the analysis of all forms of signification, including
quite centrally writing, within the actual means and conditions
of their product’(46).
In what he acknowledged to be a thesis-antithesis-
synthesis of Western Marxism and left culturalism, in his 1980
book Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays,
Williams came up with the concept of ‘cultural materialism’ to
define ‘a theory of culture as a (social and material) productive
process and of specific practices, of ‘arts,’ as social uses of
material means of production’(243), stressing that culture is
essentially real and material, mainly through the institutional
framework that enforces it (prisons, workhouses, schools, a

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controlled press, etc.) thus reminding one of the influence of
Foucault’s ideas on the development of Cultural Studies.
A couple of years earlier, in his 1977 Marxism and
Literature, Williams clarifies his accommodation of Western
Marxist and culturalist traditions. The way the central concept
is dealt with in its first chapter, ‘Culture,’ is reminiscent of the
Leavisite starting point, while the last chapter, ‘Ideology,’
acknowledges what makes Western Marxism different from
orthodox Marxism, especially after Gramsci refined the
workings of the superstructure by the introduction of
‘hegemony,’ an influence which is then duly acknowledged by
Williams. This is how Browitt and Milner (2002) see
Williams’s major theoretical Gramscian connection:
For Williams, Gramsci’s central achievement consisted of the
articulation of a culturalist sense of the wholeness of culture
with a more typically Marxist sense of the interestedness of
ideology. Culture is therefore neither ‘superstructural’ nor
‘ideological’, but rather ‘among the basic processes of the
formation’(37).
What’s more, Gramscian ‘hegemony,’ which is largely based
on consent, and cultural materialism in variants which will be
developed in the subsequent years to describe relations of
domination in the increasingly complex situation of the 1970s
and 1980s in a more appropriate way, will be landmarks in the
development of what can be called, even today, in the third
millennium, contemporary forms of cultural studies, British,
American, and otherwise.

II.37. New directions in the second wave: Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall (1932 – 2014), born in Jamaica, came to Britain as
a teenager in 1951. He enjoyed a literary higher education at
Oxford, before extending his interests into mass cultural forms,
film and television, increasingly from the position of a (highly
educated) migrant in postcolonial Britain. If Richard Hoggart is
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seen as the foundational figure of the Birmingham Centre,
Francis Mulhern considers Stuart Hall to be its guiding spirit,
particularly in terms of the new orientation that he promoted:
Without Richard Hoggart there would not have been a
Centre. But the inspirational figure in the history of the
CCCS, the individual who did more than any other to
fashion its character, was Hoggart’s deputy and eventual
successor in the role of Director, Stuart Hall (98).
Stuart Hall became the director of the Centre in 1968. His
contribution, his fashioning the character of cultural studies, as
Mulhern notes, largely consisted in exploring and promoting
new ways of studying and defining cultural issues, as well as
new areas of legitimate cultural practices, until then left outside
the scope of cultural analysis in the British cultural studies of
the first generation. On the other hand, he undertook to reassess
Marxism and to invite new considerations of old concepts in
new contexts, while also contributing his own (see his ‘theory
of articulation’).
Hall, together with a number of other researchers,
including Dick Hebdige, another Birmingham Center writer, in
a kind of cooperative group authorship that he would engage in
throughout his career, started extensive work on youth
subcultures in such volumes as Resistance through Rituals:
youth subcultures in post-war Britain. First published in 1975,
the book saw many editions well into the 21st century. Both the
more theoretical chapters and the ethnographic ones (on the
Teds, the Mods, the Skinheads, the Rastafarians, on the
communes) display a documentary value and still contribute to
cultural studies keeping up with the new challenges of a
permanently changing cultural world. The contributors to this
volume defined themselves as the Subcultures Group within
the larger context of the Cultural Studies project at the
Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. In
addition to class, which was becoming an increasingly fuzzy
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and porous category in the context of British society defining
itself in other terms, the Subcultures Group focused on the
political dimension of youth culture, including pop music,
fashion, even drug-induced psychedelic lifestyles responding to
the ‘societal control culture’ of the Establishment.
Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and
Order (1978), by Hall and his collaborators Critcher, Jefferson,
Clarke, and Roberts, focuses on the way the combined theme
of race, crime (mugging) and youth serves to address the
disintegration of social order and how it functions as an
instrument that the state can use, and is using, in the opinion of
Hall et al., for the articulation of a consensus based on
increased authoritarianism. Although the book was inspired by
a case of mugging in Handsworth, Birmingham, in 1973, which
attracted public attention then, the issues of the connection
between violence, moral panics, and the way the state deals
with widespread fears and anxieties to advocate increased,
legitimized powers, reminds one of similar developments,
although of a much greater amplitude, related to 9/11 and the
USA PATRIOT Act, immediately following it.
Stuart Hall’s famous essay, ‘Cultural Studies: Two
Paradigms,’ shows both two distinct directions in cultural
analysis and a dilemma that Hall himself had seemed to
experience. Is it more opportune to follow the anti-humanist
structuralist line and study cultures and cultural phenomena as
definite systems or structures or Raymond Williams’s left
culturalist approach, acknowledging a certain power of agency
on the part of the people, engaged in dynamic forms of cultural
formations? For a while, the culturalist, rather than the
structuralist line was the more acceptable, as it was also
supported by the so-called ‘Gramscian turn’ (the rediscovery of
Gramsci’s theory about the dynamics and relative autonomy of
the superstructure, of hegemony as fought over rather than

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imposed, economically determined) that would be adopted by
Stuart Hall himself.
As for the beginnings, before the above-mentioned
crossroads, Hall mentions, in the above-mentioned essay, the
two important books associated with the emergence of cultural
studies: Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy and Williams’s Culture
and Society, which were, in his opinion, not so much distinctly
new, as ‘works of recovery’ from what has been previously
called here ‘left culturalism’:
Hoggart’s book took its reference from the ‘cultural debate,’
long sustained in the arguments around ‘mass society’ in the
tradition of work identified with Leavis and Scrutiny. Culture
and Society reconstructed a long tradition which Williams
defined as consisting, in sum, of ‘a record of a number of
important and continuing reactions to changes in our social,
economic and political life’ and offering ‘a special d of map
by means of which the nature of the changes can be
explored’(19).
In a later, 1990 essay (‘The Emergence of Cultural
Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities’), from the vantage
point secured by the accomplishments of a long career, Stuart
Hall once more respectfully acknowledges the Birmingham
Centre’s indebtedness to the more conservative culturalism of
F.R. Leavis. Although Leavis had an elitist orientation toward
the implementation of an educational program, believing in
‘the manifest destiny of English studies in relation to the
national culture’(14), he took cultural issues very seriously. He
was fully aware that key issues of culture and its
transformations should not be brushed aside.
Even if Leavis’s position was conservative, Hall admits
that the cultural conversation that he promoted provided the
platform for the subsequent shift to the left. This leftward shift
nevertheless continued the culturalist discourse, much in the
same way in which Hoggart, although associated with the
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transformations linked to the democratization of culture in
post-war Britain, still kept at a distance from the more militant
leftism that would become apparent after his departure from
Birmingham and after the arrival of Stuart Hall.
The above-mentioned ‘Gramscian turn’ of the 1980s in
British Cultural Studies can be seen in Stuart Hall’s ‘theory of
articulation,’ starting from the importance of ‘hegemony’
which had replaced the older (and mistaken, in Hall’s opinion)
claim of the so-called Marxist economic determinism or
reductionism.
Stuart Hall tries to revive Marxism after a number of
thinkers, in his opinion, misunderstood Marx’s concept of
ideology, for example. These ‘young intellectuals’ ‘have
settled their accounts’ with Marxism and have found ‘fresh
intellectual fields and pastures,’ he bitterly remarks in his 1986
essay, ‘The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees’
(25).
New conditions, new contexts, new developments
require a reconsideration of the meaning and uses of the
concept of ideology, formerly seen as the mechanism
producing the consent of the subordinate classes. Hall prefers
to introduce his own concept, ‘articulation,’ to be employed in
the new, more complex cultural contexts. Articulation, more
than hegemony, allows more ‘autonomy’ to human subjects in
the cultural and political games that are affected by, and that
affect, them.
Thus, culture and its products are not solely determined
by the economic base, nor are they fundamentally determined
by the impact of hegemony on people. They are the result of
individuals and groups combining (‘articulating’) different
sorts of objects, texts, ideas, practices, apparently disparate,
inscribing them with meaning that serves people’s interests.
Therefore, meaning does not reside in the cultural objects

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proper, but in the people’s endowing them with meaning by
means of articulation.
Unlike power, ideology, hegemony, which cover a
broad scope and have a general meaning, articulation is
opportunistic, contingent, depending on concrete
circumstances, actors, items, often being made more complex
by the responses it triggers. Similar elements, actors and actors
in new circumstances are bound to lead to new articulations.
Jennifer Daryl Slack, in her essay, ‘The Theory and Method of
Articulation in Cultural Studies,’ describes the levels at which
Hall’s articulation works, mainly at the epistemological, the
political and the strategic ones:
Epistemologically, articulation is a way of thinking the
structures of what we know as a play of correspondences, non-
correspondences and contradictions, as fragments in the
constitution of what we take to be unities. Politically,
articulation is a way of foregrounding the structure and play of
power that entail in relations of dominance and subordination.
Strategically, articulation provides a mechanism for shaping
intervention within a particular social formation, conjuncture
or context (112).
The emphasis put on actors who are creatively, spontaneously
articulating objects in specific cultural practices and situations
is Stuart Hall’s response to the anti-humanist, structuralist
excesses of the theories of the subjected subject promoted by
such thinkers as Louis Althusser (see his emphasis on the
omnipotence of the Ideological State Apparatuses, turning
‘interpellated’ individuals into puppets). His essay ‘Encoding/
Decoding’ places the process of articulation within the
framework of communication provided by modern media
systems, more specifically in the televisual discourse
(newscasts), involving, obviously, more than the mechanical
transmission of a message from a sender to a receiver:

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 Events can only be signified within the aural-visual forms of
the televisual discourse. In the moment when a historical event
passes under the sign of discourse, it is subject to all the
complex formal ‘rules’ by which language signifies. To put it
paradoxically, the event must become a ‘story’ before it can
become a communicative event. In that moment the formal
sub-rules of discourse are ‘in dominance’, without, of course,
subordinating out of existence the historical event so signified,
the social relations in which the rules are set to work or the
social and political consequences of the event having been
signified in this way (118).
Thus, a historical event is turned, through discourse, into a
communicative event, which will be articulated, depending on
specific interests, with significant elements having to do with
social relations and political consequences, with anticipated
expectations and needs of the addressees. All this articulation
work is part of the encoding/decoding process, in which the
original decoder also becomes a cultural producer, not only a
passive receiver.
Hall’s involvement in, and promotion of, critical race
and ethnicity studies, of the diasporic identity that immigration
triggers, broke new ground, thus accompanying and getting
into a fruitful conversation with postcolonial studies in an
increasingly multiethnic cultural landscape in what we can still
call, if not contemporary, then post-1968 Britain. This
increasingly kaleidoscopic landscape to which he contributed
so much will justify the final section of this volume, in which
one major issue, multiculturalism, animating the stage of
contemporary cultural studies will be briefly evoked in relation
to other hot issues that are high on the theoretical and political
agenda of theorists, practitioners and militants of various
affiliations advocating change in contemporary societies.

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II.38. How political can watching TV be?: John Fiske
If F.R. Leavis and Richard Hoggart can be seen as transitional
figures between a more conservative and elitist kind of
culturalism toward the more populist culturalism of the first
generation at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall is obviously seen as one of the
pillars of the same centre (an American would spell it center,
but this centre, central to cultural studies, is definitely British).
As for John Fiske (b. 1939), he is arguably an important
transatlantic link between British and American cultural
studies, in more ways than one. First, he was educated at
Cambridge University, UK, before traveling and teaching in
Australia and New Zealand, before settling at the Univerity of
Wisconsin-Madison, where he became Professor of
Communication Arts.
Although his main field of interest has become the
mechanisms through which American mass-media create
meaning, he is also a very useful observer of developments in
British cultural studies on the other side of the ideological
pond, as it were. He combines this with a discussion of the role
of the media (TV, more specifically) in his essay, ‘British
Cultural Studies and Television.’ Although the tendency in the
US to neglect the political and ideological commitment of
previous cultural analysts and theorists is very clear, Fiske, as a
trueborn, but expatriate, British cultural studies practitioner,
stresses the original meaning of culture as political in
emphasis, denoting a way of life in industrial societies:
The term culture, as used in the phrase ‘cultural studies,’ is
neither aesthetic nor humanist in emphasis, but political.
Culture is not conceived of as the aesthetic ideals of form and
beauty found in great art, or in more humanist terms as the
voice of the ‘human spirit’ that transcends boundaries of time
and nation to speak to a hypothetical universal man (the
gender is deliberate - women play little or no role in this
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 conception of culture). Culture is not, then, the aesthetic
products of the human spirit acting as a bulwark against the
tide of grubby industrial materialism and vulgarity, but rather
a way of living within an industrial society that encompasses
all the meanings of that social experience (Fiske 1992:214).
In his 1987 Television Culture, he goes on to examine the
complex relationships within popular culture featuring, among
others, television and politics. In it, he explores, in turn, the
codes and terminology of television. He examines the
polysemy of the television text, making distinctions
reminiscent of Umberto Eco and of Roland Barthes (open,
writerly texts), while also introducing his own, ‘producerly
texts’(95). He investigates forms of realism and radicalism in
connection with ideology, as well as the association of
television with social change.
In Reading Television, he starts from Jakobson’s
structuralist communication model and his theory about the
metaphoric – metonymic axis, combining structuralist and
political dimensions in his investigation of what such TV
discourse ingredients as broadcast news and the police series
(The Sweeney and Starsky and Hutch) have in common and
what distinguishes them:
Broadcast news and the police series have much in common.
If the police series is a metaphoric displacement of the events
of real life, then television news is a metonym of the same
events. Both, however, tend to establish syntagmatic structures
which allow the viewer to recognize and distinguish the
particular show s/he is watching from week to week or day to
day. The news operates with a limited number of known elite
people, who recur over many episodes, and are largely drawn
from the world of politics. The way they are presented
depends upon their cultural function rather than whatever they
might be doing (154).

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 In his comparison of the way specific televisual codes are
employed in journalism and in police series, John Fiske
appears to confirm a perception that many educated viewers
today may share. Fiske notes the falling standards of news
reporting, which seems to have abandoned its critical,
investigative vantage point, the codes of clarity, consistency,
precision, balance, cause and effect sequencing, in favor of
sensationalism and triviality. It exploits graphic violence and
fails to evaluate the significance of the item of news ‘under
investigation,’ if this kind of work can be called investigative
at all. It turns out that Fiske is willing to take news reporting
and investigative journalism more seriously than some
practitioners of his very serious, very responsible cultural
practice, both reporting and viewing to be considered as very
important coordinates in contemporary forms of cultural
dialog.
In Introduction to Communication Studies, Fiske displays
the same combination of structuralist and ideological
perspectives in comparing the function of the mass media in
contemporary industrial society (and cultural studies is the
investigation of the construction, distribution and consumption
of meaning in capitalist societies) with that of myth in tribal,
oral communities, following in Lévi-Strauss’s steps, but
keeping up with developments in ideology-driven cultural
studies approaches:
So Lévi-Strauss’s theories can be applied to the contemporary
mass media, in both their fictional and factual modes. Thus all
the episodes of a television series may be seen as various
paroles of its deep structure or langue. This may be extended,
too, so that each example of a genre may be seen as a
particular realization of the potential of its deep structure.
Viewed in this way, all westerns would be specific versions of
the same myth of The Western, or, to put it another way, the

216
 same deep structure of binarily opposed concepts can generate
an infinite number of individual westerns (124 – 125).
Having established that an infinite number of episodes can be
produced (generated) by the same deep structure, much in the
same way that an equally infinite number of headlines and
pictures can be generated by the deep structure of the front
page of a tabloid, Fiske goes on to apply this realization to the
comparative analysis of the cover of a sensationalist,
outlandish tabloid (The Weekly World News) and of a western
(The Searchers).

II.39. From class to subcultures and group identities in

multicultural communities: Hebdige, Chambers
Since the early 1960s onward, subsequent versions of cultural
studies shifted their focus from class (the beginnings of the
Birmingham Centre) to subcultures and then group identities in
an increasingly multicultural world, in Britain, the US and in a
number of other countries, especially in the Western world.
Like any generalization, though, this should be treated with
caution, as it only indicates a trend. Thus, Anita Biressi and
Heather Nunn (2013), focusing on the Thatcherite decade of
the 1980s and its aftermath, although being aware that
[…] the 1980s has been heavily cited as the decade in which
already-foundering traditional class structures and class-based
affiliations finally broke down, giving way to the more fluid
and individualised social formations fostered by the processes
of neoliberalism (2),
go on to stress the continuing relevance of class in their Class
and Contemporary British Culture. They define the central
concept not as a stable reality, but as a dynamic social process
in an age of increased social mobility, which is a relatively new
social development.
Dick Hebdige is one transitional figure that may
illustrate such connections and significant shifts. He was born
217
the year Stuart Hall came to Britain. Like Hall, he is linked to
the Birmingham Centre, from which he graduated and where
he started his work in cultural studies. Unlike Hall, he then
went on to teach at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
where he has held important positions.
Both Stuart Hall (with Tony Jefferson) in Resistance to
Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (1975) and
Hebdige, four years later (Subculture: The Meaning of Style)
draw attention to a significant focus shift in British cultural
studies in that decade, from class to subcultures. Ken Gelder
identifies in this fact both problems and symptoms associated
with it and with the new central concept for many of the studies
following these moments:
The key to British Cultural Studies in the 1970s is class,
and specifically the working class or proletariat; but as
we have seen, subcultures are often positioned outside of
class, closer in kind to Marx’s lumpenproletariat, lacking
class consciousness, self-absorbed or self-interested, at a
distance from organised or sanctioned forms of labour,
and so on. Subcultures were therefore a problem for
British Cultural Studies, but also a kind of symptom, an
effect. The focus on class both caused that problem, and
seemed to help explain it (83).
The focus therefore shifts, with some important cultural
theorists in the Birmingham school line, upon subcultures,
which paves the ground for subsequent cultural shifts.
Hebdige’s 1979 book deals with such subcultural formations as
hipsters, beats and teddy boys, rockers, Rastafarians,
discussing the importance of style as an identity-related
signifying practice. This practice functions as a form of
resistance to mainstream culture. Style, promoting patterns
within the framework of cultural symbols associated with
social values and structures, contributes to the consistency of
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the play of a particular group or subculture in relationships
with the institutions and practices in which these groups are,
whether as nonconformist or not, embedded.
Hebdige undertakes to link the encoding cultural
practice of the entertainment and of the fashion industries to
their social consequences (how those cultural products are
used), thus adapting to the times, rather than deploring the
emergence of ‘Americanized’ cultural (subcultural) forms, like
some of his Birmingham Centre predecessors, such as Richard
Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy, for example.
In addition to subcultural formations like those
investigated by Hebdige, the focus on groups based on race,
ethnicity and gender, with religion also being relevant, have
become particularly prominent since the 1970s, assuming
center stage in contemporary cultural studies, particularly in
countries proclaiming and promoting multiculturalism, such as
the US today.
Iain Chambers’ Migrancy, Culture, Identity (1994)
draws attention to the importance of groups in an age of
increased migration and bewildering cultural diversity. He also
reassesses the behavior of marginalized ethnic groups, rather
than dealing, like the first wave British cultural studies writers,
with class and class consciousness. He is particularly interested
in the ways massive forms of migration today affect cultures
and individual and group identities, as the title of his volume
clearly states. He is engaging with a dramatic transformation –
migration – and is looking for patterns that might make sense
of this experience in terms of identity and alterity. He notes this
[…] movement and migration – from Africa to the Americas, from
rural space to urban life, from ex-colonies to metropolitan centres
– involves a complex transformation. For, beyond the generalities
of ‘modernity’ or ‘capitalism’, there is no single frame or
cognitive map that unites these experiences and histories(26).

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 What Chambers finds hard to grasp, as far as the
complexity of the phenomenon goes, is even more complex
today, a quarter of a century later, when migration has acquired
even more dramatic overtones, while affecting the lives of
millions of people all over the world, thus obscuring the
significance of class and stressing the impact of cultural and
civilizational transformations affecting groups and whole
nations.
In addition to the examination of migration and its
formidable impact, moving from class to groups, especially
previously marginalized or oppressed groups, is one of the
most prominent trends in cultural studies today. Although this
volume is only meant to deal with a historical account of the
tributaries that have converged into the mighty and tumultuous
river called cultural studies and cultural theory rolled into one,
what follows will tackle some of the hottest issues animating
the cultural sphere today, leading to important political debates,
the 2016 presidential elections in the US being a good
illustration.

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 III. CULTURE, DIVERSITY, GENDER
IDENTITY: A BIRD’S EYE VIEW OF
SOME CONTEMPORARY ISSUES AND
DEBATES

III.1. A multiculturally brave new world

The declared aim of this volume is to provide an account of
some key figures, issues, moments and developments that have
led to the emergence of 20th century critical cultural discourses
and their institutionalization (the Birmingham School of
Contemporary Cultural Studies being the best know
illustration), to the awareness that popular culture is an
important field of cultural critique. This account highlights
aspects of the so-called archaeologies and genealogies of these
discourses, while placing promoters of critical reassessments of
culture in opposition to more traditional, elitist positions,
associated with the ‘discontents of cultural studies.’
What follows only announces what was left out: what is
going on in this interdisciplinary field of inquiry and in the
various realms that it engages with. This section briefly
sketches what deserves to be dealt with in more comprehensive
approaches to what appears to be a tiny slice of a centuries old
modernity project of not taking for granted traditional
pronouncements, supported by influential institutions, on what
each generation and each age declares to be culture.
One of the chief characteristics of the contemporary
stage of this account is a generalization which may be
welcomed by some, deplored by others (the ‘discontents’), at a
time when any generalization is commonly accepted to be
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distortive: contemporary culture is largely popular culture, and
popular culture is media culture, in which the internet seems to
reign supreme, where Hollywood and Bollywood, radio and
television, video games and comics, assume more prominent
positions than the study of the canonical, Eurocentric cultural
heritage of the Judeo-Christian traditions, declaring the triumph
of cultural populism in an increasingly multicultural and
politically correct environment in more and more areas of the
world. Should educational curricula, for one thing, stress
cultural excellence and time-honored canons, or should popular
culture, since it addresses a larger demographic section of the
population, feature more prominently, as a worthier field of
interest?
In literary studies and cultural studies (remember
Easthope’s Literary into Cultural Studies book), the trend
from stability to movement and difference has become one of
the defining features, and Sten Pultz Moslund, in an essay on
the ‘presencing’ of place in literature, is only one of the many
voices noting it:
One of the most remarkable developments within cultural and
literary studies within the last fifty years has been the
liberation of notions like movement, migration, multiplicity,
difference, and displacement from a subordinate status as mere
exceptions to an archaic thinking of individual and cultural life
as matters of identity and sedentary settlement (29).
In liberal and radical circles, including academic circles, with
cultural studies spanning the interdisciplinary fields between
the humanities and the social sciences, this development exerts
an emphasis which appears to be laid on the engagement with a
culture of diversity, of difference, focusing on marginalized
groups, while at the same time marginalizing, or downplaying
the importance of Western canonical culture seen as having
had a patriarchal, imperialist legitimation for a long time.

222
 This is done as a form of compensation for a long
period of keeping oppressed minorities and their culture out of
the prevailing cultural landscape. How would various
communities strike a reasonable balance between the
encouragement and promotion of the diversity of the culture of
the minorities and the emphasis on the need of a common
culture and a common identity?
Should common moral, aesthetic principles and values
be preserved, or should cultural relativism and a preoccupation
with aspects of identity as diversity in terms of race, gender,
ethnicity, religion be substituted for them, to an overwhelming
extent? Are the honorable principles driving multiculturalism
and political correctness leading to a better understanding and
better social harmony and cohesion or, through some of their
extreme forms, are they leading to dramatic backlashes and
polarizations? What would be the reasonable middle way? In
the relatively new politically correct atmosphere of
multiculturalism, critical reassessments of the representations
and practices of gender, race and ethnicity, with class still part
of the agenda in a world in which the class system is becoming
increasingly confusing, are vigorously going on, once again in
an important section of the public sphere, among militants,
activists, theorists, both on campuses and outside them. What
follows raises some of the important issues, asks or evokes
important questions animating this multiculturally brave new
world, announces more far-reaching, more comprehensive
accounts (obviously, as far as the author of this volume is
concerned, in a subsequent volume).

III.2. Is there a culture war going on? Multiculturalism and

political correctness
Such words and phrases as identity politics, multiculturalism,
positive discrimination promoted as affirmative action,
political correctness, have provided the dramatic elements that
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have fueled heated debates between more conservative and
more liberal people in the US over the last few decades. A
cultural contestation of what was seen as a conservative
establishment defined the countercultural ethos of the late
1960s and early 1970s. The 1980s, as marked by the two terms
of President Ronald Reagan, have added substance to the
conservative – liberal debate that would be seen as ‘the culture
wars’ in the US.
In his Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars,
published the same year that presidential candidate Pat
Buchanan had used the phrase (‘culture wars’) in his speech
made at the 1992 Republican National Convention to describe
a mortal combat for the soul of the nation, distinguished
Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. sees that battle in
more balanced terms, as the expression of a cultural pluralism
or multiculturalism having to do with what is commonly
perceived as a distinct American identity:
Few commentators could have predicted that one of the issues
dominating academic and popular discourse in the final decade
of the twentieth century — concomitant with the fall of
apartheid in South Africa, communism in Russia, and the
subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union — would be the
matter of cultural pluralism in our high school and college
curricula and its relation to the ‘American’ national identity
(xi).
One of the interesting perceptions of the ‘culture wars’ raging
in the 1980s in America is the contrast between the ‘groves of
Academe’ and the political sphere: if liberal academics are seen
to have won the battle for the soul of the country on the
humanities and social science side of the campuses, the
conservatives put Ronald Reagan in the White House, thus
setting the pace for the neoliberal ‘counterrevolution’ of the
‘Roaring Nineties.’

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 This ‘war,’ in more dramatic terms, or ‘expression of
cultural difference and pluralism,’ in more sedate ones, is an
ideological battle over the power to promote, or even to
impose, special forms of representation, going as far as
changing ordinary language.
One recent illustration of this is a law passed by the
Canadian Parliament in 2017, which is meant to fight
transgender discrimination. Its full title is ‘An Act to amend the
Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code.’ In
connection with it, a heated debate had been going on in
Canada and elsewhere (it started when Bill C-16 had not been
passed into the above-mentioned law) and has been going on
after it was passed. It concerned such specific issues as
enforcing by law the pronouns that everyone should use when
addressing and speaking about transgender persons, obviously
different from the unpolitically correct you, he, she, they,
which might offend some transgender people.
All of this language debate has to do with how people
interpret images of other people and how they use words to
interact and communicate. What is alterity and what is the
relationship between Self and Other, between mainstream
groups and traditionally marginalized groups, in terms of
sometimes unnamed, traditional positions of superiority or
inferiority?
In addition to gender, race and ethnicity, rather than class
or social status, have been sensitive parameters of
representation and identity in contemporary Western cultures.
In cultural debates on discrimination, race has a tendency to be
replaced by ethnicity for a number of reasons, Stephen Spencer
being one of those stressing its problematic character:
‘Race’ is an extraordinarily problematic term, debated and reviled
and contested so fiercely yet still employed as it is clearly so
intrinsically woven into the fabric of western cultural history
(inverted commas are often employed to indicate that the term is,
225
 at best, part of a dubious fossil record of an inglorious history
(33).
Any concept that has a long history is difficult to grasp in
terms of a definite meaning, as its voyage through time and
culture has led to significant semantic changes and overtones in
different social, political, cultural contexts. Spencer is aware of
that and, in his 2006 book, Race and Ethnicity: Culture, Identity
and Representation, he first surveys the successive, shifting
meanings of race, having to do with the prevailing theories of
monogenism (14th – 18th century), polygenism (18th – 19th
century), evolutionism (late 19th century), which, in relatively
decreasing degree, were genetically-based. There appeared,
since the nineteenth century, succeeding theories moving from
natural, genetic criteria to socio-economic and cultural criteria
(race as class, race as culture), finally equating race with
ethnicity (Spencer 32 – 52).
Multiculturalism has to do with these key parameters of
group identity (race, class, gender, ethnicity), and has been of
particular relevance in a country, the US, in which what were
once seen as less visible minorities constitute the majority of
the population. Multiculturalism or cultural pluralism is a hotly
debated concept, whose humble beginnings and sudden
explosion on the cultural market within a mere two decades are
noted by Nathan Glazer, who also links it to American
exceptionalism. The most straightforward connection one can
make is with the equally sensitive concept of identity politics,
promoted in the wake of the dramatic years of the Civil Rights
Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Glazer notes the explosion in usage of the term and its
quick dissemination from the US to Europe in the last two
decades of the twentieth century and the amazing range of
situations that it was made to deal with, up to the point when
the question arose whether America should still be allowed to
celebrate Columbus Day:
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 A few years ago, I noted with interest that the term
‘multiculturalism,’ whose use in the United States had
exploded, was also beginning to appear in European countries.
We had enough difficulty in the United States deciding what
multiculturalism meant, and what it portended for the United
States. The term ‘multiculturalism,’ which appeared in only
forty articles (as reported in the database covering leading
American newspapers and periodicals, Nexis) in 1981,
appeared in 2,000 in 1992. Its use had spread from education,
higher and lower, still the primary venue for its appearance, to
cover disputes over the handling of racial stories in
newspapers, seminars to sensitize public and private
employees to the nuances of word usage affecting racial and
minority groups, conflicts over how to celebrate—if at all—
the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage (183).
Some see multiculturalism as a policy pursued by the
structures and institutions of a multi-ethnic community. Its aim
is to preserve the community’s cultural diversity, laying
particular stress on the maintenance of the identity of
previously oppressed and marginalized groups.
While acknowledging the importance of state policies
aimed at ensuring diversity, Amanda Wise and Selvaraj
Velayutham, in the ‘Introduction’ they write for the volume
they edit, focus, like the contributors to the volume, on aspects
of the everyday multiculturalism perspective, giving substance
to the official, top-down perspective:
Multiculturalism has traditionally been talked about from a
top-down perspective as a set of policies concerned with the
management and containment of diversity by nation states,
with a typical focus on group-based rights and cultural
maintenance, multicultural service provision, multicultural
education […] The everyday multiculturalism perspective on
the other hand explores how cultural diversity is experienced
and negotiated on the ground in everyday situations (2).

227
 Wise and Velayutham go on to survey the diversity of
themes that the everyday multiculturalism encompasses,
including Bourdieu’s habitus and cultural capital and a host of
other issues: embodiment, gift exchange, solidarity, humor,
everyday racism, cultural hybridity (2-3). Everyday
multiculturalism, involving the social aspects referred to by
such themes and issues, refers to the practices and experience
that are linked to the daily negotiation of cultural difference in
specific communities, sometimes growing bigger and bigger in
importance and urgency, often leading to vast, far-reaching
campaigns having very serious consequences.
Thus, a campaign like ‘Black Lives Matter,’ which
turned into an international militant movement as a result of
Michael Brown’s death, shows how sensitive a racial issue is
within the context of multiculturalism and political correctness.
The unfortunate circumstances which led to the shooting of a
violent youth, and which then surrounded the incident (later
clarified in the grand jury verdict concerning the policeman
who had shot and killed Brown) revealed two interpretations of
the ‘Black Lives Matter’: the militants’ (the in-group’s)
message appeared to be, to people of the out-group, ‘black
lives matter more, because of a long past of discrimination.’
Another interpretation, unacceptable to the militants, coming
from the out-group, appeared to claim, ‘all lives, whether black
or any other color, matter.’
Multiculturalism, obviously, promotes the former
interpretation, invoking current compensation and positive
discrimination for past injustice. Apparently, being a member
of a formerly disadvantaged group should now give an
individual more opportunities or extenuating circumstances (in
criminal cases, for example). As such, multiculturalism treats
the individual as, first and foremost, a member of a group, with
special attention being given to members of groups with a
history of suffering oppression and discrimination.
228
 In their introductory essay, collapsing ‘introduction’
and ‘acknowledgements,’ to their The Crises of
Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age, Lentin and
Titley highlight the term’s elusive range of meanings, requiring
specification and contextualization:
Multiculturalism, as almost everybody recognizes, is a
slippery and fluid term, and it has accrued a vast range of
associations and accents through decades of political,
contextual and linguistic translation. It may retain a fairly
useful if limited descriptive sense in post-colonial, migration
societies, but it also skitters off to index normative debates,
real and imagined policies, mainstream political rhetorics,
consumerist desires, and resistant political appropriations (2).
As a trend or movement affecting communities in the
Western world, multiculturalism emerged in the post-1968 age,
as John Rex (in his ‘The concept of a multicultural society’)
notes. Writing as recently as 2010, he draws attention to
multiculturalism still being confused by some specialists: ‘even
today much research is directed by another and quite different
value standpoint, namely that which emphasizes equality of
individual opportunity’ (218).
Rex, like other authors in the field, discriminates
between a policy of equality for all members of a community
and a policy of respect for difference. He also distinguishes the
public and the private domain and the way they are treated in a
society that aims at multiculturalism. The distinction between
the promotion of individual rights as distinct from the
furthering of the rights of previously disadvantaged groups
drives the debate having at its core multiculturalism and
political correctness, with the latter being dealt with a little
later in this section.
The public domain perspective of one such type of
multicultural society promotes a unitary culture that enforces
equality for each individual, irrespective of any group or sub-
229
group she or he might belong to. This public domain promoting
equality for all is basically made up of the rule of law, of the
political and economic realms offering equal opportunities.
However, unofficially, practically, in multicultural
communites as they function today, the stress will be laid on
the needs of previously oppressed and discriminated against
groups (such as African-Americans, Native Americans and
women in the U.S.), and less on the rule of law or on the public
domain perspective. Rex particularly values the structure of the
private domain for immigrant minority communities in an
increasingly impersonal society, even if aiming at
multiculturalism. The public domain perspective does not
merely consider individuals as individuals only, but their close,
kinship relations as well, which, in a global, impersonal age,
extend beyond national boundaries, thus confirming individual
identity:
The structure of the private domain among immigrant
minority communities includes kinship that extends back into
a homeland, a network of associations and a system of
religious organization and belief. This structure provides a
valuable means in an impersonal society of providing a home
and a source of identity for individuals (229).
The provision of a source of identity for individuals as
members of groups is done, in the pursuance of one of these
two types of a multicultural policy, by affirmative action or
positive discrimination, in an effort to compensate for the
injustice of the past having affected the groups these
‘positively discriminated against’ individuals come from or
belong to.
Affirmative action in the US refers to policies pursued
by the federal government or by individual states of the union.
It involves offering more employment and educational
opportunities to groups which had been disadvantaged or
which are seen as such (ethnic minorities, women, people with
230
disabilities, the elderly). It became part of official American
policies during John Kennedy’s presidential term, then
consecrated in 1964, by President Johnson’s Civil Rights Act
and the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
In education, affirmative action meant, among others, a
more generous quota for free tuition for members of ethnic
minorities, which, when going beyond reasonable limits, was
perceived by many as what it actually was, although having an
honorable justification: discrimination will remain
discrimination, whether positive or negative.
In academic circles, an interesting detail concerns the
2018 EAAS biennial conference (London, April 2018). The
call for papers ‘dictatorially’ announces that all-male panels
will not be accepted, which is a clear example of affirmative
action, which some might see with amusement, others with
‘mutiny and rage.’ Will the gender of the potential conferees
be checked before their abstracts are considered, so that the
above-mentioned ‘mighty decree’ may be enforced? What if
one of the male conferees is still considering to stay male or to
do trans gender? Wouldn’t this affect his final decision to stay
where he is or to move to another gender position?
The phrase ‘political correctness,’ like
‘multiculturalism,’ has come to divide and polarize left wing
and right wing voices in Western countries in general, in
America and Canada in particular. John K. Wilson would like
to downplay this dramatic division, especially on university
campuses, the title of his book claiming the phrase was, from
the beginning, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a dismissive
way of calling the excesses of the left, while what it refers to
amounts to no more than a myth created by conservative
circles: The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative
Attack on Higher Education:
‘Political correctness’ became the rallying cry of the
conservative critics of academia, the phrase behind which all
231
 of their enemies- multiculturalism, affirmative action, speech
codes, feminism, and tenured radicals - could be united into a
single conspiracy. The mythology of political correctness
declares that conservatives are the victims of a prevailing
leftist ideology in American universities, oppressed by radical
students and faculty determined to brainwash them (1).
The same position is adopted by Richard Feldstein in his
Political Correctness: A Response from the Cultural Left,
which, from its very title, defines the ideological perspective
from which it is written. In his volume, Feldstein first traces
the history of the culturally divisive phrase. Political
correctness had first been used by Jewish voices to criticize
Stalin’s mishandling of Communism in the 1930s and the
1940s. He refers to the ‘politically correct fairy tales’ invented
by the right to label the left’s agenda as ‘repressive’ and
‘Stalinist’ and the extent to which it has become a widespread
perception for many Americans:
If you ask a group of Americans what political correctness
means, chances are many of them would link the phrase to a
"repressive agenda" set forth by "tenured radicals" on college
campuses today. Right-wing commentators have constructed
this agenda, which many Americans find alien. They do not
understand why it is necessary to refer to blacks as African
Americans, Orientals as Asian Americans, and women as
womyn (1).
At the other side of the political and ideological
spectrum, the British conservative voice of David G. Green
sounds the alarm: ‘the officially protected victim groups are no
longer in the minority but add up to 73 percent of the
population’(vii). The situation (the percentage) invoked above
shows the multiethnic makeup of early 21st century Britain,
ready to show an anti-diversity, anti-migration backlash against
the groups and the language advocating political correctness.
Green sees the cultural discourse of political correctness and its
232
impositions reversing the tide of inequality and oppression,
turning the former victims into victimizers of the vast majority
of what is seen as American liberal culture.
Instead of being the platform of left wing liberalism,
political correctness as a form of ‘modern victimhood’(9) is far
from a left wing emancipatory discourse only, and the recent
referendum that promoted Brexit in 2017 is largely connected
with the fears expressed by such voices in Great Britain more
than a decade ago. Each strong revolutionary movement is
likely to have its own excesses, and this sometimes plays into
the hands of the opposing, ‘reactionary’ side.

III.3.Troubled Gender? Femininities and masculinities in

times of ‘identity subversion’
The sketch of a short question above starts from Judith Butler’s
1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity, a seminal work which questions second-wave feminist
identity claims, while also announcing hotly debated issues
becoming prominent in the 1990s, having to do with the rise of
third-wave feminism and postfeminism, as well as with the
actions of the united front of the LGBT movement gaining
momentum.
The subsequent pages on what happened before the
1990s are meant to place current gender debates in a more
comprehensive context, since a more detailed account of
feminism does not feature in other sections of this book.
Should one start from the problems of the present and then
trace their origins in the past or the other way round, and if so,
how far into the past should one go?
What is certain is that the discussion of these critical
situations and moments, as well as the theoretical positions and
accompanying movements, can more easily be dealt with if one
focuses on the age that has brought the most drama to the
reassessment of previously unchallenged positions. Things
233
appeared to change when the patriarchal construction of
femininity, promoted by the authority structures worldwide -
think of a brief historical outline featuring the femininities of
Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, emblems of masculine
virtus Romana, of the Victorian Angel in the House behaving
herself and then of Florence Nightingale going to war, although
as a nurse – was undermined by the ones who had kept women
in their subordinate place. What about the public promotion in
America of a new kind of femininity as wartime Rosie the
Riveter? Even if it did not last long, and women, especially
middle class ones, were then invited to equate femininity with
the condition of the happy suburban wife, the relativity and
historicity of gender construction had become apparent. Some
women were ready to resume what the suffragette movement
had started more than half a century before. Culture and
identity for these women had to do now with how individuals
as individuals and as members of disadvantaged groups saw
their gender condition in an increasingly democratic society.
The postwar years in which both cultural studies and
gender studies appeared, especially women’s movements and
their accompanying women’s studies, turned out to be more
generous with all sections of Western society, especially in
America. It was the age of the welfare state, a milder, more
‘humane’ form of capitalism, what Manfred Steger calls ‘the
golden age of controlled capitalism’ of the Bretton Woods
regime (30).
It was a time in which America was becoming more
democratic at a faster speed than previously. It almost invited
oppressed groups to realize that, although, materially speaking,
conditions were considerably better for a large section of the
community, injustice and discrimination of gender and race
still featured prominently.
Since those times, in addition to the reconsideration of
what culture as a whole is, the province of cultural studies as a
234
whole, gender studies in particular, has focused on both critical
femininity and masculinity issues. Even if progress is supposed
to bring more emancipation, it also highlights the critical
component becoming more visible in any time of dramatic
social transformations. It so happened that gender and race
became more critical and more visible, thus inviting
interpretation and reassessment.
Within the more specific fields of gender studies, both
women’s studies and men’s studies, in addition to masculinity
studies, are to be seen as central components of contemporary
cultural studies, at the same time fueling or accompanying
related movements.
Domna C. Stanton and Abigail C. Stuart, in their account
of ‘feminisms in the academy,’ while describing women’s
studies and their critical approaches and interdisciplinary
realms, implicitly subsume this field of inquiry to cultural
studies in its broadest sense:
[…] women’s studies is, and should be, both within and not
within the disciplines, as it tends predominantly to be
institutionally situated both within and separate from any
particular disciplinary department. If the field, like its
practitioners, came out of the disciplines, and came out
through critiques of those disciplines, it did so by virtue of a
perspective gained or a method borrowed from a practice
outside of any single field or even of the academy. These
include the civil rights movement, leftist politics, and the
women’s movement, which these oppositional practices
helped to shape, as well as Marxist analysis and critical
thinking of the academy’s borders (3).
In terms of approach (critical and oppositional), of
plurality of methods and political biases, women’s studies,
feminisms, academic or not, define themselves in exactly the
same way as cultural studies, differences consisting in specific
priorities and emphases. Gender and its constructions are
235
historically and politically defined, with everyday life, as
Raewyn Connel notes in her foundational book, Masculinities,
‘an arena of gender politics, not an escape from it’(3).

III.4. Surfing feminism’s second wave

The first important post-war cultural movement associated
with feminism was its so-called ‘second wave,’ heralded by
Simone de Beauvoir’s manifesto, The Second Sex (Le deuxième
sexe, 1949, translated into English a few years later). The
author draws attention to the cultural construction of gender as
secondary, as women are not born as such, they become
women in relation to ‘the first sex’: ‘man defines woman not in
herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an
autonomous being’(15).
Although the book was published in 1949, its echoes
lead to other feminist responses a little later, with Betty
Friedan’s liberal feminist The Feminine Mystique (1963) about
an equally subaltern, subordinate, secondary female figure, the
white, middle-class suburban housewife. Liberal feminist
voices, like Friedan’s, while acknowledging the importance of
women as a group, focuses on the importance of rights and
liberties that should empower individuals, while not paying
attention to groups of women that were less fortunate and more
oppressed. However, it should be added that Friedan had been
familiar with working class women, and that, as it will be
briefly mentioned a little later, she will become involved in
promoting their cause as well.
Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1969), after describing
sex scenes in a number of fictional texts written by ‘male
chauvinists’(Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer),
stresses the political dimension of gender, with man the
oppressor and woman the oppressed, continuing de Beauvoir’s
‘quarrel with Freud,’ which will become a characteristic of
second-wave feminism in particular, as well as feminism in
236
general. Millett hopes that ‘a second wave of the sexual
revolution’(363) will free women from their long
subordination, also hoping that, one day, they will even ‘be
able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics’(Ibid.).
Millett, in addition to introducing the issue of ‘sexual politics’
in gender studies, defines the pillar of feminist positions,
patriarchy, in the terms in which the central concept has been
established since then: not as a particular family situation in
which one respected patriarch wields authority (private
patriarchy), but also as an overall form of institutionalized,
generalized male dominance over women (public patriarchy).
Second-wave feminism, like British (male) cultural
studies, emerged as a political movement in the 1960s, having
slightly different contexts in Britain and the US. Both cultural
studies and feminism(s) deal with a critical view on the
production, representation and consumption of symbolic
meaning with a view to exposing inequalities and injustice.
Both are based on conflict and resistance to prevailing
ideologies. If second-wave feminism deplores the cultural
construction of gender and stresses women’s victim status at
the ideological hands of centuries-old patriarchy as the most
oppressive institution, the first wave of British cultural studies
focuses on class and the importance of authentic, popular,
working class culture as a British form of resistance to the
Americanization of the world by means of mass culture.
Like cultural studies, second-wave feminisms, more
liberal or more radical, define themselves through their critical
dialog with other critical cultural discourses, like Marxisms,
more or less post, and postmodernisms. Sheila Rowbotham, for
example, in her Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, notes
that complications of class and gender used to lead to such
situations as those in which ‘Marxists were impatient of the
claim that middle-class women were oppressed and confident
that feminism was a deviation from class politics’(ix), a
237
situation which also affects the relationship between first-wave
British cultural studies and second-wave feminism, more
liberal or more radical.
Philosophically, feminists challenged the concept of
reality seen from a male perspective. Like a number of critical
voices in the wake of the Frankfurt School theorists, feminists
have challenged the ‘masculine’ Enlightenment project, as Ann
Brooks notes,
feminism has challenged the concept of a traditional
‘Enlightenment’, rationalist epistemology whose
characteristics including rationality, objectivity, reason and
language are seen by some branches of feminism as essentially
masculinist (29).
The critical anti-patriarchy positions expressed by Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique led to the emergence in 1966
of a distinctly liberal movement, bearing an urgent name:
NOW (National Organization for Women). The organization,
much like those of the suffragettes of the late 19th and early
20th centuries, but in more radical terms, in the distinctly new
socio-economical and political conditions of the revolutionary
counterculture years, fought for equal rights, for both
responsibilities and privileges being evenly shared by men and
women.
The same revolutionary, countercultural age was
accommodating other distinct forms of activism: the non-
violent Civil Rights movement of the African Americans, the
Students for a Democratic Society, and, as the Vietnam War
was becoming increasingly unpopular in the late 1960s, a
strong anti-war movement. This is the context in which a more
left-wing movement rose to prominence: Women’s Liberation.
The process of ‘consciousness-raising,’ a phrase that has
gained currency in various other areas of political debate, was
promoted by a number of groups of Women’s Lib to draw

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attention to a phenomenon that forms of 20th century cultural
studies had drawn attention to. Oppressed groups are better
controlled by hegemony than by physical coercion, so by
raising women’s consciousness, by identifying the elements of
patriarchal thought that they had unwittingly internalized and
implicitly taken for granted, they could take the first important
step toward their liberation. Women’s Lib thus advocated a
revolution in consciousness as the defining feature of
consciousness-raising. Some of the aspects that Women’s Lib
rose against were the patriarchal institutions of marriage and
continuous child birth and child raising, as well as
patriarchally-imposed sexual practices. Even the exploitation
of the beauty myth by means of beauty contests was opposed
by both British and American second-wave feminism. Sue
Thornham describes, among other things, one particular
revolutionary action against the use by women of ‘objects of
female torture,’ such as … bras:
Among the demonstrators’ actions was the creation of a
‘Freedom Trash Can’ into which were thrown ‘objects of
female torture’ such as dishcloths, high heels, bras and
girdles—and the media myth of ‘bra-burning’ was born (26).
Bra-burning was one form of second-wave feminist
rebellion associated with the ‘Freedom Trash Can,’ into which
Shulamith Firestone, the author of The Dialectic of Sex: The
Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) also throws more
comprehensive cultural constructs (‘trash’?), such as the myth
of romantic love, myths which are thought to have kept women
in bondage until then. ‘Fiery’ Firestone believes that
demolishing the current sexual class system would be the first
successful revolution in history, no more no less, her book
being dedicated to less fiery Simone de Beauvoir, who
passively ‘endured’ (both Sartre the man in particular and
patriarchy in general). The author, like many second-wave

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feminists, critically engage with Freud’s patriarchal theories as
the new ‘church’ that most people worship in America at that
time, sometimes under the guise of a combination of faked
feminist self-irony and imagined, Freud – induced male
anxieties and complexes:
Freudianism has become, with its confessionals and penance,
its proselytes and converts, with the millions spent on its
upkeep, our modern Church. We attack it only uneasily, for
you never know, on the day of final judgment, whether they
might be right. Who can be sure that he is as healthy as he can
get? Who is functioning at his highest capacity? And who is
not scared out of his wits? Who does not hate his mother and
his father? Who does not compete with his brother? What girl
at some time did not wish she were a boy? (42).
It was Juliet Mitchell, a few years later, who engaged
with psychoanalysis more systematically, not as dismissively
as the anti-Freudian female voices, adding a critique of
Wilhelm Reich and R.D. Laing, while also focusing on
Freudianism (the castration complex, penis envy, the pre-
Oedipal Mother and the Oedipal Father) and assessing
previous feminist approaches to Freud (such as Simone de
Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, and Shulamith
Firestone). She finds that Reich’s and Laing’s theories
resemble feminist theories in denying the power of the
unconscious, while acknowledging the usefulness of the attacks
mounted by feminism against ‘debased Freudianism’: ‘The
feminists have produced a necessary attack on debased
Freudianism with its biologically deterministic theory and
adaptation therapy’(356).
Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, begun in the early
1970s in the wake of the controversial Supreme Court Roe vs.
Wade decision that abortion should be legalized, thus giving
women more power over their own bodies, but published a
decade later, is another second-wave text that urges women to
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speak in their own voice, not in the voice of patriarchy. Gillian
questions the voice of the Victorian icon of femininity as
represented in Coventry Patmore’s poem about the Angel in
the House. This Angel and successive generations of nice
women have been speaking in the shadow of a patriarchal man
or of patriarchy as a whole, not in their own voice.
The 1970s also witnessed the rise from the underground
of a new form of cultural production and gender representation
in clothes, fanzines, music: punk. Unlike other emerging forms,
punk insisted on staying ‘untutored,’ keeping its distance from
the standards of the culture industry of the time, as well as
from the requirements of patriarchy that would have tried to
interpellate them into traditional romance scenarios. Milestone
and Meyer note its main features: its accessibility to ordinary
people and its disregard for hierarchies: ‘Punk provided the
impetus for new forms of cultural production which, on the
face of it, were more accessible and less hierarchical than
earlier modes of cultural production’(60).
In its attitudes, female punk follows the agendas of
trends of feminisms, refusing gender stereotyping imposed by
mainstream society. In the 1990s, punk will be seen in
opposition to what will be dealt with in the next section as a
form of postfeminist cultural form: ‘Girl Power.’ If
underground punk illustrates feminist ideologies, ‘Girl Power,’
with its more individualist, liberal attitudes, will be a better
illustration of postfeminism, seen by many as not a step
forward.

III.5. Postfeminism: key positions, cultural echoes

Ann Brooks, in her Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory
and Cultural Forms (first edition, 1997), challenges by the
very plural in the title the apparent homogeneity of the trend,
while also, as a preliminary undertaking, examining the
challenges and the fragmentation of the equally plurivocal
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‘second-wave’(her view was acknowledged in the previous
section on the second-wave). These questionings and
challenges become even more critical in postmodernism,
associated, in Brooks’s opinion, with a paradigm shift in
theorizing, with Michel Foucault’s theory on discourse and
power adding urgency to the undertaking.
In one of the subchapters in her above-mentioned book,
she describes ‘the landscapes of postfeminism’ as being at the
crossroads of postmodernism, postcolonialism and feminism
(92 – 116), rather than simply following a straight,
unproblematic feminist path. That is a valid assessment of the
landscapes and pathways that these intersecting positions seem
to have in common, as they, like cultural studies as a whole,
reject the established normativity of authority structures and
representations.
Postmodernism, in the atmosphere of multiculturalism,
has advocated difference and poststructuralist, Derridean
difference. However, if both postcolonial (particularly Spivak)
and feminist voices initially ask the question, ‘can the subaltern
speak?’, postfeminists, leaving in a very post-postcolonial
world, appear to speak, and even sing, very assertively, without
deploring the terrible patriarchal constraints. Postfeminists in
developed countries, unlike second-wave feminists, think that
discrimination has significantly decreased and that more
opportunities are available to women.
Angela McRobbie, another authority on feminism,
postfeminism and cultural studies, supports Brook’s
assessment. Acknowledging the contradictory character of the
concept of postfeminism and the equally contradictory
responses that it provokes, McRobbie traces the term to the
sites it wanders in, as well as to the perceptions that it
occasions, as well as the perspectives from which it is claimed
to speak:

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 Loathed by some and celebrated by others, it emerged in the
late twentieth century in a number of cultural, academic and
political contexts, from popular journalism and media to
feminist analyses, postmodern theories and neo-liberal
rhetoric. Critics have claimed and appropriated the term for a
variety of definitions, ranging from a conservative backlash,
Girl Power, third wave feminism and postmodern/
poststructuralist feminism (1).
The word ‘backlash’ that McRobbie uses above undoubtedly
hints at Susan Faludi’s 1991 book, Backlash; The Undeclared
War Against American Women, one of the key texts
announcing, in the 1990s, both the rise and the debate around
postfeminism. As for the ‘Girl Power’ phrase, it became one of
the most outstanding slogans of a postfeminist generation in
which the Spice Girls made quite a successful show of
appearing ‘girly’ and ‘feminine,’ but far from the ‘victimized
woman’ type of previous generations of less fortunate ‘female
friends.’ Far from accepting a subaltern status, ‘the girls’
became the most successful British pop group, male or female,
since the Beatles. Should one see them as the innocent victims
of the ‘culture industry’ or as its most outstanding
beneficiaries?
Stephanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon, in
Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories, like Angela
McRobbie, give their due to Girl Power, also associating it
with the above-mentioned British musical group, but also with
a literary subgenre which announces another British ‘cultural
invasion’ on the American cultural market: ‘chick lit.’
If the traditional romance narratives, in the footsteps of
traditional, patriarchal fairy tales, cast young women in anti-
feminist scenarios, with ‘romantic love’ and providentially
‘meeting Mr. Right’ as the only possible option in life, the
‘postfeminist’ protagonists of a new literary subgenre are
young, sophisticated, single women, working in large firms in
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the global cities, dreaming of a brilliant career, sometimes
more than of the bliss of a more sedentary matrimony, far from
the madding crowd.
Genz and Brabon invoke Nikolas Rose, who, in his essay
on a distinctly neoliberal enterprising self (‘Governing the
Enterprising Self’), sheds light on the enterprise culture and its
postfeminist politics. This politics displays a double code.
Referring to Rose’s views, Genz and Brabon acknowledge that
this political stand is ‘part of a neo-liberal political economy
that relies on the image of an “enterprising self” characterised
by initiative, ambition and personal responsibility’(166). When
they are young and aspiring to find the best way to the top in
their careers, these neoliberal, enterprising women run for a
main part/role in a chick lit novel or in a chick flick (British
films, American movies, to be more precise).
Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary was the first
novel in a long series of popular fiction products which came
to be marketed as ‘chick lit.’ ‘Chick,’ and ‘girl,’ used by men
to refer to women, are obviously not politically correct terms.
However, since Girl Power and Chick Lit address young urban
female audiences, the labels have stuck, being accepted by
female audiences and readerships. They sell like hot cakes in
an age when commodification of culture reigns supreme.
Should one link Girl Power and Chick Lit to the already
mentioned position expressed by Susan Faludi? In one of the
chapters of the above-mentioned book, ‘Backlash and New
Traditionalism,’ Genz and Brabon discuss the echoes that
forms of postfeminism associated with the above-mentioned
phrases (‘girl power’ and ‘chick lit’) make, being
key strands of postfeminism, a largely pessimistic position that
equates postfeminism with an anti-feminist and media-driven
backlash characterised by a rejection of feminist goals and an
attempt to turn the clock back to pre-feminist times. Emerging
at the close of Reaganite America and Thatcherite Britain,
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 such approaches interpret postfeminism as primarily a
polemical tool with limited critical and analytical value (51).
Postfeminist forms of culture like those mentioned above are
just one aspect of the plurality of voices and orientations in
popular culture, obviously not as critical approaches. The
women adopting them are too young to be accused of rejecting
feminist goals or trying to return womankind to patriarchal,
pre-feminist times. When they grow old and wise they might
change their ways; in the meantime, they are seizing the
consumerist, hedonist day. They read fashion magazines (some
even work for them), buy trendy, designer clothes, dream of
becoming pop stars one day or of winning a Miss Universe
contest (an aspiration that feminists naturally abhor). When
they read, they read books like The Devil Wears Prada or
Confessions of a Shopaholic, making sure to see the film
versions as well. In short, these young women read chick lit
and view ‘chick flicks’ and feel more empowered than their
grandmothers, who had lived their youth in more austere times.
The culture industry providing them with ‘the meaning of
style’ both caters to their taste and ‘interpellates’ them, in
Althusserian parlance, as subjected subjects: subjected to
consumerism, individualism, materialism as neoliberal
ideological coordinates.

III.6. The cultural construction of masculinity and its

(feminist and transgender) discontents
Although one might think that ‘the first sex’ is by definition
patriarchally central and problem-free, several waves of men’s
studies and masculinity studies have shown that masculinity is
both plural and experiencing various crises brought about by
various cultural challenges. Tim Edwards, in Cultures of
Masculinity, is not certain the use of the phrase ‘crisis of
masculinity’ is of much use, although he refers to some of the
factors that might justify its use:
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 the impact of second-wave feminism on men, competition
with women either at school or at work, the escalating levels
of violent acts men are seen to commit, anxieties concerning
how men should act within the home or within personal
relationships, the representation of men in negative terms in
the media, or the undermining of traditional male sex roles (6).
Masculinities, like femininities, are culturally produced,
represented, disseminated and consumed, establishing specific
symbolic coordinates and practices, within the framework of a
long narrative of discrimination and oppression, as both
enlightened men and women have noted.
Historically, one can safely say that since time
immemorial, representations of masculinity and femininity
were promoted and imposed by the prevailing authority figures
in a hierarchical community - empire, kingdom, princedom,
tribe - especially in times of trouble, when masculinity was
perceived as primordial. The community had to stick together
and to defend itself both against internal unrest and against
external enemies. Some of the ‘virtues’ of masculinity had to
be assigned to certain groups of individuals and to be
confirmed through the prevailing ideology.
Until the beginning of modernity, until the longer story
of cultural studies starts, the class of warriors associated with
the nobility had displayed the apparently contradictory values
of courage and loyalty. Courage involved the cultivation of an
indomitable, aggressive spirit, which will remain a prevailing
masculinity stereotype, while loyalty to the sovereign, a highly
valued feudal asset, would later be transferred to femininity (as
faithfulness to the husband as sovereign).
In the first French feudal epic poem, The Song of
Roland, the eponymous protagonist illustrates these central
feudal masculinity features (bravery and loyalty to the king),
while the villain, Ganelon, is ‘unmanly,’ showing cowardice
and betrayal. This very briefly indicates that gender
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representations are socially, politically, culturally constructed,
highlighting historically defined characteristics and attitudes
and how they are valued by the community.
Does one need to do extra research to find whether in
the post-feudal age of Modernity, culminating in the
Enlightenment, the rising class of the bourgeoisie promoted
other masculinity features? One of the gender stereotypes
brought into the masculinity narrative was rationality, as the
outline in the second section of this volume stated. Middle
class men asserted their masculinity through their reason,
leaving to the nobility, which supplied the higher ranks of the
military, courage, aggressiveness and loyalty to their king or
emperor. In addition, the men of the middle classes thought of
having a social contract with the king. They meant business,
and God’s representative on earth had to assume certain
responsibilities, mainly to protect his subjects. The rising
bourgeoisie appeared to transfer their aggressive masculinity to
a specific section of the ‘body politik’ whose head was the
sovereign (see again some of the ‘unmanly’ ideas in Hobbes’s
Leviathan), whose armed … arms were supposed to offer
security to the subjects, including security for their businesses
and property.
Each generation, age and new development contributes
to the narrative of gender construction, obviously under the
overwhelming shadow of patriarchy. Patriarchy has obviously
promoted masculinity and assigned femininity to the lower
echelons of the power structures of a community. The most
successful subjection of women has apparently been achieved
through the internalization of the discriminatory ideology of
patriarchy. Many women have been blamed for promoting
patriarchy, some even associated with the development of
feminist thinking (a good illustration would be Virginia
Woolf).

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 Roughly in the decades coinciding with the rise of
cultural studies and of the various waves of feminism and
postfeminism, very often supporting their critical claims, a
number of men’s studies and masculinity studies appeared.
Their theoretical positions became visible, although these
intellectual, progressive undertakings did not appear to enjoy
the same amount of popular support as women’s movements,
and for a very obvious reason. Fewer and smaller sections of
the male population have openly expressed fears about their
own vulnerabilities, harassment, injustice being directed at
them by the mainstream community. Domestic violence, for
example, has mainly taken the form of wife battering, rather
than husband battering (the abusive husband, that is, battering
the abused wife).
Writing in the mid 1980s about ‘a new sociology of
masculinity,’ Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell, and John Lee
describe the circumstances which led to the emergence of
studies related to the complex patterns of masculinity in the
contemporary world:
The upheaval in sexual politics of the last twenty years has
mainly been discussed as a change in the social position of
women. Yet change in one term of a relationship signals
change in the other. From very early in the history of Women's
Liberation it was clear that its politics had radical implications
for men. A small ‘Men's Liberation’ movement developed in
the 1970s among heterosexual men. Gay men became
politicized as the new feminism was developing, and Gay
Liberation politics have continued to call in question the
conventional understanding of what it is to be a man (551).
The identity narrative of one of the three authors, Bob Connell,
supports the claim that gender construction is a far from simple
matter, likely to undergo radical change in specific existential
situations. The Australian sociologist, who would become a
leading authority on masculinity studies, went on to define
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himself, from Bob to R.W. Connell (R.W. from Robert
William), and this is the name under which he authors his
fundamental 1995 work, Masculinities.
Ten years later, as he (or she) writes his (or her)
‘Introduction to the Second Edition,’ Connell traces both the
professional journey leading to the theoretical work in his/her
1995 book version and his/her personal life story. In the late
1970s, Connell was doing research in secondary schools on
inequalities in education, on masculinity and femininity
patterns among teenagers there. A few years later he did the
work that led to the above-mentioned new sociology of
masculinity with the two gay activists and theoreticians with
whom he wrote the study (Carrigan and Lee).
Connell’s work on gender as a social structure came
out, as he/she acknowledges it, out of his intersection with
feminism, notably in the life and work of sociologist Pam
Benton, his wife. Connell was writing the preface to the first
edition of Masculinities in 1994. At that particular time when
Pam Benton, the wife, was fighting a form of cancer, the
couple, with their daughter, were traveling and teaching in
several universities in Australia and abroad. Soon, the name
would change from R.W. Connell to Raewyn Connell, the
well-established masculinity theorist choosing to undergo
gender transformation. Identity narratives have a way of telling
the story from the vantage point of the most advanced
episodes, so reference to any previous work by Bob, or R.W.,
or Raewyn Connell will be seen as Raewyn Connell’s, and her
major contribution to masculinity studies substantially provides
the basis of the brief outline that follows.
Connell’s masculinity theory started from previous
work done in the 1980s on specific constructions in specific
settings (workplaces, education, sport), as well as historical
surveys of changing views on masculinities, research that was
moving beyond the prevailing sex role theory of the previous
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decades, developed by American sociologist Talcott Parsons
into more specific studies of masculinities.
Sex role theories had focused on the nuclear family and
examined ways in which socialization and specialized,
complementary roles clearly assumed by men and women
create the gender patterns of a community. Thus, the nuclear
family, with father as the provider and mother as the manager
of the household, would socialize children, encouraging boys
to develop instrumental, go-getting attributes, while girls
would develop expressive attributes. This American family
was, implicitly, white, middle class, with the man showing
both authority at home and allegiance, faithfulness and loyalty,
gender stereotypes attributed to the feminine, toward his
employer in prosperous, postwar America.
Contemporary gender theories consider that the
unequality of the nuclear family, with the father assuming
almost complete authority, is a thing of the past for many
families today, while a larger spectrum of gender
manifestations has become acceptable (see the story of Raewyn
Connell before and what follows here on directions and issues
in masculinity studies).
In tracing the story of masculinities in order to
understand the current gender framework, one should stress the
importance of the expansion of the global empires of
modernity. This process not only shapes the construction of
masculinities, but, in its turn, it is influenced by them. It has to
do with what John Beynon, in Masculinities and Culture,
discusses in his examination of ‘Imperial masculinity’ or
‘masculinity in the Age of Empire’ (26 – 27).
Managing new frontiers and meeting danger and the
unknown have led to the representation of masculine figures as
pillars of empires or of expanding nations, such as America in
the 19th century. It is no wonder that in popular culture such
masculinity figures as the frontiersman and patriot Davy
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Crockett or of the solitary sheriff or gunslinger in the western
genre in fiction and film achieve prominence, bringing together
masculinity and violence as necessary elements of survival in
hostile circumstances.
The modern gender order, featuring masculinity as its
central component, appeared as the outcome of important
developments at the beginning of Modernity. The first one
mentioned by Connell is the one that has been considered in
this volume as heralding the first important episodes in the long
history of cultural studies: the contestation of medieval
absolutism by the secular strands of the Renaissance and by the
Protestant Reformation. The power of Catholicism to control
the private lives of families was seriously undermined, and the
nuclear, patriarchal family with the pater familias gained
prominence. The Protestant emphasis on the individual’s direct
relationship with God also meant that individualism and the
idea of the autonomous self paved the ground for the
emergence of an assertive, individualistic masculinity, with
reason as one of its attributes. Thus, the legitimation of
Western civilization and of masculinity went hand in hand,
Connel notes:
With masculinity defined as a character structure marked by
rationality, and Western civilization defined as the bearer of
reason to a benighted world, a cultural link between the
legitimation of patriarchy and the legitimation of empire was
forged (186 – 187).
The creation of overseas empires was a masculinity
project, especially at the beginning, with the conquistadors as
the first distinct masculinity group: violent toward the
conquered, unruly even in relation to the remote authority.
Later came the civil servants of the empire, with the wives of
the military and of the colonial administrators assuming their
subordinate role, while the subaltern, colonized populations

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were themselves pictured as inferior, helpless, needing
protection and guidance, becoming, in Kipling’s words, ‘the
white man’s burden.’
In the public sphere, the transition from the violent male
(the conquistator) to the father figure male (the civilizer) was
significant in the development and administration of empires.
Then there came the growth of the commercial cities, where
everyday experience became more disciplined than in the
wilderness or on the frontier of expanding empires. It is in
connection with what Max Weber called the ‘Protestant work
ethic’ as being the spirit of capitalism, its gendered
characteristic being a calculated rationality rather than
aggressiveness and courage. Connell thus identifies the new,
capitalist forms of gendered work and power consecrating a
special form of masculinity:
The entrepreneurial culture and workplaces of commercial
capitalism institutionalized a form of masculinity, creating and
legitimating new forms of gendered work and power in the
counting-house, the warehouse and the exchange (188).
Another important development affecting gender politics came
as a consequence of the religious wars and theology
reassessments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with
the Quakers, for example, advocating equality in religion for
women worshippers.
An opposing gender tendency came out of those
religious wars leading to the Peace of Westphalia and the
emergence of the European state system, with the strong
despotic monarchy as a consolidated form of patriarchal power
(even when the state was ruled by a queen). As briefly alluded
to in the initial survey, an existing feudal masculinity construct,
associated with the medieval knights, was transferred to the
power structure of the centralized nation state and the ideology

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of nationalism, in the form of masculinity as the military
prowess of the professional army.
Although the future appeared to belong to the
bourgeoisie, the form of calculated rationality associated with
it was not the dominant form of masculinity in the eighteenth
century, but that of the gentry, of the hereditary landowners,
whose power, based on land ownership, appeared to command
more respect and prestige. The masculinity of the gentry
supported the power of the state in administration and the
military and its code of honor included such institutions as the
dicing-with-death duel, supposed to deal with honor and
expressing manhood. The duel would also be assumed by the
members of the bourgeoisie in the 19th century, eager to define
themselves through it, as Connell remarks.
The historical outline of the development of
masculinity over the first centuries of Modernity may explain
the coordinates and features which will undergo
transformations during the two centuries preceding our
contemporary scene. Starting from the dominant gentry
masculinity of the 18th century, there arose new hegemonic
forms, as well as a series of subaltern, subordinated or
marginalized forms of masculinity in new cultural and political
circumstances. In nineteenth century Prussia, for example, the
masculinity of the military was largely dependent on gentry
masculinity, while in post World War I Germany, the
fortunately short (historically speaking) episodes of fascism
and Nazism, largely leading to WWII, glorified forms of
masculinity based on racist irrationality.
It is interesting to see the American construction of
middle class masculinity of the late 1940s and the 1950s: the
breadwinner as pater familias, playing his traditional,
patriarchal role alongside his wife as suburban mistress of the
household and devoted mother in a society perceived as very

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conformist, and a very special reaction against it by rebellious,
nonconformist voices.
One of the critical voices that examined the forces
imposing this culture of conformity on men and women alike
was sociologist C. Wright Mills. He did not only focus on
constructions of masculinity that interpellated white middle
class male employees, eager to please their employers and
enjoying suburban marital bliss. He addressed three types of
men, including the men living and acting at the top of the
social ladder in his trilogy dealing with power structures in
postwar America: The New Men of Power (1948), White Collar
(1951), and his most important volume in the series, The Power
Elite (1956). The first volume deals with the ‘new men of
power,’ the labor leaders who use, sometimes very
mysteriously, their status and influence to join the power elite.
They, more like the already established elite, illustrate the
patriarchal American dream as successful ‘self-made men.’
White Collar deals with the conformist middle class men, while
the title of the third volume clearly states who the text is all
about.
C. Wright Mills’s analysis avoided the Marxist
perspective involving the class struggle, focusing on three
types of determinism supporting one form of hegemonic male
power: political, economic, and military determinism. The
‘power elite’ mainly expressed the patriarchal power wielded
by the men at the top of what President Eisenhower, in his
Farewell Address, would call ‘the military-industrial
complex’(avoiding, for obvious reasons, the third dimension –
the political). At that time, that male patriarchal power did not
merely rule America, but the whole of the Western world.
In her The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the
Flight from Commitment, Barbara Ehrenreich, humorously and
ironically, from an obvious feminist perspective, describes the
sudden success, in the early, very conformist 1950s, of a men’s
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publication, Playboy, and its active role in the battle of the
sexes, through its condemnation of the masculinity
construction of man as the breadwinning family figure and as
head of the nuclear family. One of the features of the Playboy
men’s culture announced the emergence of what would be
some of the characteristics of the New Man of the 1980s, the
consumerist and the narcissistic side, as Ehrenreich notes, also
stressing aspects of conspicuous consumption as a
‘revolutionary’ attribute:
Playboy had much more to offer the ‘enslaved’ sex than
rhetoric: It also proposed an alternative way of life that
became ever more concrete and vivid as the years went on
[…]New products for men, like toiletries and sports clothes,
appeared in the fifties, and familiar products, like liquor, were
presented in Playboy as accessories to private male pleasures.
The new male-centered ensemble of commodities presented in
Playboy meant that a man could display his status or simply
flaunt his earnings without possessing either a house or a
wife—and this was, in its own small way, a revolutionary
possibility (49).
The main oppositional forces to the prevailing gender
order naturally came from women, not from Playboy’s
‘revolutionary sybarites,’ to coin a suitable descriptive phrase.
These critical responses came from both middle-class and
upper class women, and from working class women, and some
of the aspects of this contestation were evoked in the previous
section on feminisms. In response to new conditions and
challenges, what Connell would call ‘hegemonic masculinity’
would have to adapt in order to maintain its privileged
position, its most recent forms of adaptation providing the basis
for any assessment of masculinity representations today, as one
of the focuses of cultural studies.
Tim Edwards focuses on these contemporary forms in
terms of their cultural representations. His Cultures of
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Masculinity offers a contemporary outline of socio-cultural
circumstances and theoretical positions that inhabit the field of
masculinities. He addresses such important questions as the
relationships defining men, weaving together masculinity and
violence today, and relations involving marginalized
masculinities (black and male homosexual).
He also discusses the promotion of new cultural
representations of masculinity such as ‘the New Man’ and ‘the
New Lad’ (in the 1970s, 1980s, and the 1990s), which, as the
author claims, are merely media fabrications having to do with
the commodification of masculinities:
[…] neither the New Man nor the New Lad truly exists outside
of its media invention. In addition, both of these media
inventions are often connected more to patterns of
consumption and marketing, or the commodification of
masculinities, than to second-wave feminism and sexual
politics. However, second-wave feminism and sexual politics
do frequently inform contemporary discourses concerning
men’s violence (4).
Paul Willis, in his Learning to Labour, focuses on a
section of working class young men still working in the
manufacturing industries in Great Britain, who assert their
‘tough,’ ‘masculine’ identity by identification with ‘manly’
manual labor in opposition to ‘feminine’ intellectual work, thus
accepting their interpellation as a subordinate class.
Like the Hell’s Angels in America, Willis’s ‘the
motorbike boys’ in his previous Profane Culture associate the
power of the motorbike, which is central in their subculture,
with manhood, freedom and masculine solidarity, associated
with the loud noise with which they ‘territorialize’ their
itineraries and with the mobility that the bike stands for. They
identify themselves, in their profane culture, by a strong and
loud shout of defiance, as Willis suggests, supported by the
fierce power of the bike:
256
 Chromium-plated double exhaust pipes and high exuberant
mudguards all helped to give the bikes an exaggerated look of
fierce power. It was also common practice to remove the
baffles from the silencer box on the exhaust, in order to allow
the straight-through thumping of the exhaust gases from the
cylinder to carry their explosion directly into the atmosphere.
The eȉect could be startling. The breathy, loud, slightly
irregular bang and splutter brought the hardness and power of
the metal piston exploding down the metal cylinder, abruptly
and inevitably reversing up again, right out into the still air.
The minutely engineered turn of the crankshaft brought a
power and impersonal ferocity right out into the vulnerable
zone of human sensibilities (75).
In a combination of class and masculinity, this subordinate
group creatively exploits one of the new technological wonders
promoted by the dominant system, by exaggerating its material
possibilities, thus appropriating it and asserting their resistance
and distinct identity.
The transition, by means of the cultural marketplace, of
the culture industry, in which fashion figures prominently for
men as well, from the media fabrications of the New Man to
those of the New Lad, are dealt with in detail by John Beynon
in Chapter 5 of his Masculinities and Culture, drawing
extensively from the above-mentioned Tim Edwards and
focusing on British cultural representations. Thus, the 1980s
saw a postmodern reconfiguration of masculinity by
considerable economic and commercial processes, introducing
the New Man as the yuppie, dismissing the construction of the
‘old industrial man’ and patriarchal, dominant masculinity. The
New Man is seen by Beynon as a construction bringing
together the nurturing and the narcissistic man (99), willing,
among others, to support a woman’s endeavor to pursue an
important career. The narcissistic side, showing emphasis on
physical attractiveness and trendy fashion possessions, is also
associated, very much like previous discourses of femininity,
257
with sexual objectification. The male becomes a sex object. So
what? So much the better, some New Men are likely to say.
Another one of the early (Protean) faces and facets of the
New Man appears illustrated in Robert Bly’s Iron John: A
Book about Men (1981), an attempt to adopt a mythical
approach to ‘new masculinity,’ a contemporary reinterpretation
of the Grimm brothers’ story about a ‘hairy man’ emerging
from the marshes of the Unconscious, acting as a mentor to a
King’s son, whom he kidnaps, teaching him what manhood is
all about, displaying the features of the nurturing, assertive,
sensitive side of an otherwise macho man of the new, post-
Sylvester Stallone age, so to speak. It is an invitation for ‘new
men’ to return to the wildness of the wilderness to recover the
vital energy lost in civilization. This is largely to be achieved
by means of masculine rites of initiation administered by Iron
John-type male mentors. In the process, Bly risks evoking and
invoking some horribly sexist, patriarchal, mythical
masculinity figures such as Zeus, a serious crime in
contemporary cultural debates today:
It is in the old myths that we hear, for example, of Zeus
energy, that positive leadership energy in men, which popular
culture constantly declares does not exist; from King Arthur
we learn the value of the male mentor in the lives of young
men; we hear from the Iron John story the importance of
moving from the mother's realm to the father's realm (ix).
Although Robert Bly tries hard to be politically correct in
an age where most men’s studies voices adopt a defensive,
guilt-ridden attitude, caused by the long series of patriarchal
abuse stretching back to the beginnings of history, Iron John,
by its very title, has invited critical responses both from
feminists and men’s and masculinity theorists, which makes it
as an important textual landmark in the discussion of
contemporary ‘imaginings’ of masculinity.

258
 A less mythical, more consumerist-oriented approach to
the New Man is Sean Nixon’s Hard Looks: Masculinities,
Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption (1996),
describing four types of ‘spectatorships’ as cultural
dissemination through advertising in the mass media: TV, the
written press, men’s popular magazines more specifically, as
well as through ‘menswear and the spectacle of shopping.’ The
author places the examination of these popular culture practices
and their contribution to the shaping of masculinity in what he
considers the poststructuralist, post-Althusserian tradition of
cultural studies dealing with subjectivization as institutional
interpellation:
In foregrounding in the book these institutional practices and
the commercial imperatives with which they were associated,
however, my ambition has not been to push for a form of
economic reductionism in the analysis of the ‘new man’
imagery. Rather, my account has been driven- as I made clear
on a number of occasions by the concern to rethink the usual
relations of determination that are assumed between economic
and cultural practices within the tradition of post-Althusserian
cultural analysis (198).
In other words, the ‘hard looks’ are created through the
concerted media assault on ‘poor innocent, subjected men,’ one
might say, rather than by men displaying some of their ‘inner
self’ attributes, as former essentialist views would have liked to
claim. These hard looks, largely based on a commercially-
driven male narcissism, would be followed, in the 1990s, by a
harder masculinity construction for whose success Beynon
makes magazines like Loaded responsible, a cultural voice that
addresses a larger target audience than the previous New Man
cultural practices of the previous decade (109).
Affluence was now available to larger sections of the
male population, so, among the target audience of the new
‘laddish’ masculinity discourse were ‘rougher’ people
259
previously unaffected by ‘metropolitan chic,’ slightly
undergoing treatment, such as the previously less civilized,
pub-crawling, soccer fans/ hooligans/ aficionados, eager to
respond to the threat posed to their masculinity status by the
increasing consciousness-raising of feminists.
As there is an increasingly large literature on men’s and
masculinity studies, any survey, especially avowedly brief ones
like this one, would fail to express the multiplicity of trends
and voices, and the danger of faulty generalizations is likely to
remain in some of the most comprehensive ones. This would
confirm the idea that culture, especially popular culture, is a
site of struggle, response, confrontation, in addition to one of
acknowledging filiations and traditions.
Culture is, to complete Raymond Williams’s previously
mentioned assertion, both ordinary and extraordinary, a
dynamic kaleidoscope permanently displaying new
configurations, permanently combining continuity and change,
and cultural studies is, like a Ulysses figure from the age of
multiculturalism, trying hard to grasp this elusive, Protean
shape.

260
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