paradoxes of public connection nick couldry, london … · media’s role in sustaining them. this...
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PARADOXES OF PUBLIC CONNECTION
NICK COULDRY, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLTIICAL
SCIENCE
Dr Nick Couldry
Depts of Media and Communications/ Sociology
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE
UK
© NICK COULDRY 2004
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PARADOXES OF PUBLIC CONNECTION
NICK COULDRY, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLTIICAL
SCIENCE
Public lecture delivered at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of
Western Sydney, April 2004
Thanks very much to Ien Ang for inviting me to speak tonight and to be based at the
Centre for Cultural Research this autumn. It’s great to be here – and it’s exciting to
hear of the range of work on cultural transformation and cultural complexity going on
here - also of course to be involved in our Master Class which runs up to the weekend.
I hope that my comments tonight will be a productive contribution to the important
work at the Centre.
My title tonight - Paradoxes of Public Connection - signals a deep problem –
concerning the foundations, or possible foundations, of democratic politics, and
media’s role in sustaining them. This is one area, I think, where cultural research, and
particularly research across a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary positions that
has been informed by, not so much the ‘cultural turn’ (in that loose phrase), but rather
by the specific challenges of the best thinking under the banner of ‘cultural studies’ –
where such work can make an important, if until now largely neglected, contribution.
I’ll be discussing my own current research later on, which is just one of a range of
possible approaches to these issues, but before that I want to sketch a wider context.
At the close, I’ll offer also some reflections on how, more generally, we might
understand the contribution of critical cultural research to addressing the paradoxes
and challenges of public connection today.
The Philosophical Background
My starting-point is a question which is relatively familiar even if the form which it
takes in Australia, where formal participation in the political process (voting) is
compulsory, is necessarily rather particular. I mean the crisis of engagement in
democratic politics, or at least the particular forms of politics which are legitimated
and institutionally underwritten, the formal party system. This topic has been hotly
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debated by policymakers and academics across decades and continents. This concern
about engagement with - inevitably linked to the legitimacy of – the political process
is the policy background to the research project I’ll describe later on. But before I turn
to that more specifically, I want to look at the guidance which writing in political
philosophy and social sciences might provide for thinking about this crisis. Here a
helpful reference-point even today - and, as Michael Warner has argued, in spite of its
apparent conservatism - is Hannah Arendt’s concept of the public realm. Her concept
is quite distinctive. Arendt writes that: ‘being seen and being heard by others derive
their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different
position. This is the meaning of public life.’ (1958: 57, added emphasis)
Here we can not only find a precedent for contemporary debates on difference and
multiculturalism, but also see a parallel much earlier to Raymond Williams’ ideas,
recalling what he says in Culture and Society: ‘wherever we have started from, we
need to listen to others who have started from a different position’ (1958: 320). This
link to Williams will be important later on, as we’ll see.
But Arendt in her book The Human Condition emphasises that for various reasons the
public realm has in modernity been lost, perhaps irrevocably. And here there is a link
to a much wider sense of crisis across many versions of political theory. Jacques
Derrida has provided, perhaps, the most vivid image for this crisis. In Politics of
Friendship he writes of how ‘the resonant echo of all the great [political] discourse’
now issues, increasingly, in ‘mad and impossible pleas, almost speechless warnings’.
These warnings, he says, turn endlessly ‘like searchlights without a coast, they sweep
across the dark sky, shut down or disappear at regular intervals and harbour the
invisible in their very light’. For Derrida, the problem is a crisis in the nature of value
itself and in its place he offers a meditation on friendship. But whether or not the
crisis is as general as Derrida argues, we still need to find some specific link back to
the issue of the public world. Unfortunately Derrida offers no suggestions as to how
specifically we might do this.
This is where Chantal Mouffe’s book The Democratic Paradox is useful, at least at
first sight, because it takes on the task of rethinking the basis of democratic politics
from the anti-foundationalist perspective that Derrida’s work demands. Even if we
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suspect all foundations and points of origin, democratic politics still requires, as
Mouffe argues drawing on Wittgenstein, some shared ‘form of life’, a sufficient level
of shared beliefs and practices that allows us to ‘broaden the range of our
commitments to others, to build a more inclusive community’. However, then, we
stretch and re-work our concept of ‘politics’, there must be some meshing between the
places where we live, work and are governed and our allegiances to some shared
space or world. There must be some linkage that might provide the matter of politics.
But how can we characterise that linkage? Mouffe (2000) writes of ‘a common
symbolic space’, but nothing more about how that space might be created or
sustained. This gap in her argument is symptomatic of much writing in political
science and political theory. One of the rare philosophers prepared to move beyond
abstractions, and give some specific sense of what a regrounding of democratic
politics might involve, is Paul Ricoeur (1995). What blocks, he argues, a more open
exchange of narrative across difference is the rigidity of collective identity. How
might that rigidity be broken down? One way is through what Ricoeur calls a
‘translation ethos’ (or ‘language of hospitality’), that is, an openness to each other’s
narrative languages. Another is the ‘exchange of memories’, that offer conflicting
accounts of the same event. We need, Ricoeur implies, institutions and spaces where,
across differences of collective identity, we can exchange narratives of past
experience that, through their exchange, facilitate shared narratives of the future.
Hardly new issues in Australia, of course, even if it remains welcome that a European
philosopher is descending into specifics. But how to relate Ricoeur’s tantalising
suggestions to the question of public connection? Here we might hope to call on work
in the social sciences.
Public Connection in the Social Sciences But here we are largely disappointed. There has within a broadly social science
perspective been a long tradition of researching the ‘civic culture’ that surrounds, or is
believed to surround, the formal political process (as in Almond and Verba’s (1963)
classic work The Civic Culture). But there have been powerful critiques of that work
for its neglect of the fundamental exclusions that shape people’s relationships to that
process: exclusions of gender – as the Australian philosopher Carole Pateman (1989)
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argued - exclusions of class, as the US sociologist David Croteau (1995) has
demonstrated in detail. And Almond and Verba’s work seems ill-equipped to deal
with new questions about the decentring of politics, the loss of trust in, and respect
for, hierarchical forms of politics . . . Is there any recent empirical work that revisits
the underlying question of civic culture but in a more open and qualitatively rich way?
We look in vain here for example to the fast-growing literature on citizenship studies
whose value, for all its richness, may lie in the nakedness of the questions it asks,
rather than any answers. To quote two of its leading exponents: ‘what does it mean to
belong to society . . .?’ (Nick Stevenson, 2002), ‘what counts as community and
solidarity’ (Anthony Elliott, 2002)?
However one real step forward is the Swedish media scholar Peter Dahlgren’s (2003)
essay ‘Reconfiguring Civic Culture’. In this essay Dahlgren sidesteps problematic
assumptions that political engagement must take one standardised form (the formal
political process), and asks instead what are the ‘minimal shared commitments to the
visions and procedures of democracy’ which democratic politics of any sort requires?
Dahlgren’s answer is not simple – for he asks: what is the complex of things which
must be in place for civic culture to work?
Unfortunately I don’t have time to go into the details of his multi-dimensional model
of civic culture, but the reason it stands out is because it foregrounds how democratic
politics is based not just on a particular ‘attitude’ citizens must adopt but on the
presence of many interlocking processes: a sense of ‘affinity’ with a public world,
shared flows of information, spaces and times for civic talk, shared civic practices.
Nonetheless Dahlgren’s essay remains a theoretical model. So we have to ask: what is
the most useful approach for investigating how people do all these things (if they do),
how do they make sense of, and reflect upon, the connections between those various
processes, how does the lived experience of ‘civic culture’ (or its absence) emerge in
people’s accounts of themselves? Which raises the different question of how people’s
opportunities to give an account of themselves are constrained or enabled.
It is here, I believe, that the strand of cultural studies work on the complexities of the
individual voice, the complex stake of individuals in wider cultural formations, for
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example Elspeth Probyn’s (1993) work, is especially useful. And it is here above all
that Raymond Williams (who I mentioned in passing before) is the missing term, the
missing theorist. Why? Because his early work (particularly Culture and Society and
The Long Revolution) emerged precisely as a challenge to what he saw as a
democratic crisis in post-world War II Britain and precisely as an insistence on the
exchange of narratives (in Ricoeur’s terms), on listening to others from different
positions . . . and an insistence too on the deconstruction (not that Williams used that
word of course) of the reified language of much public discourse (in his case, the
devalued language of ‘mass culture’ critiques). I will return at the end to why
Williams remains (even if subject to various transformations) a useful reference-point
for our research today.
What I am suggesting, let me emphasise, is the opposite of a nostalgic return to an
earlier ‘Master’ of cultural research: first, because it is the scepticism, the critical
edge, the inclusive democratic vision, of Williams that I’m concerned with (which
inevitably must be articulated differently now in different circumstances); and,
second, because as Handel Wright has pointed out, ‘cultural studies’ is not a linear
narrative with a single point of origin, but rather a huge current fed by many sources
from many parts of the world.
Some Paradoxes Nostalgia would also blind us to the need to address a number of paradoxes
concerning public connection, which, if not always new or unnoticed, certainly take
an acute form today:
1. the paradox (which challenges some well-known diagnoses of the public
sphere) that the crisis of democratic politics (if that is the right word) involves
not so much a loss of meaning but rather a saturation of meaning . . . not so
much a series of disconnected individuals, but rather multiply connected
individuals whose difficulty is not isolation in any simple sense, but rather
how to find, across the various narrative streams in which they are situated, a
common connection which is public and is shared with others . . . the paradox
summed up by Oscar Gandy (2002: 450) with nightmarish clarity when he
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suggests that we are approaching a situation where ‘individuals may actually
feel better about knowing less and less about the world around them’.
2. A version of that paradox was expressed back in the 1934s by John Dewey
when he wrote of the problem not of the absence of a public, but rather the
existence of ‘too much public’, ‘a public too diffused . . . and too intricate in
composition’ for it to ‘find and identify itself’ (1946: 137, 125).
3. We see a specific application of the same paradox in the combination of, on
the one hand, a huge multiplication of media flows within and across the
expanding range of significant media (and hence an exponential growth in
individuals’ possible paths of connection to a public world) - and, on the other
hand, fragmentation, the challenge of sustaining across those countless
trajectories some public connection that we can assume is shared between us.
4. The French sociologist Alain Touraine in his book Can We Live Together?
paints an even grander version of this paradox, a paradox of both globalisation
and individualisation. He writes, rather drastically, that (2000: 5-6) ‘we are on
the one hand world citizens who have neither responsibilities rights nor duties
and, on the other, defenders of a private space that has been flooded by waves
of world culture. Both individuals and groups [he writes] are therefore less and
less defined by the social relations which until now defined the field of
sociology whose goal was to explain behaviour in terms of the social relations
in which actors were involved’. A paradox here, then, not only for public
engagement, but also for sociological explanation.
5. Touraine’s paradox is too facile perhaps, but even if we step outside it
(arguing that on a daily basis we do find ways of connecting our globalised
allegiances to our local practice), there remains a further paradox in the wake
of two decades of post-structuralist debate: how can we reconcile our tendency
towards scepticism and anti-foundationalism with the need to go on thinking,
indeed to rethink, the basis of democratic engagement? This is the task
Chantal Mouffe takes on, as I mentioned, but her solution remains abstract and
theoretical, separate from the fine grain of everyday experience.
How to move beyond these paradoxes? Not of course by a further theoretical solution,
but rather, I suggest, by shifting to a different register: which means renewing our
attention to the issue of communication. There are, after all, some striking similarities
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between otherwise very different formulations of the theoretical challenge facing
older visions of democracy. Take Alain Touraine’s argument (2000: 14) that we need
‘to replace the old idea of democracy, defined as participation in the general will, with
the new idea of institutions that safeguard the freedom of the Subject and permit
communication between Subjects’; or take Jean-Luc Nancy’s evocation of ‘the
inoperative community’: inoperative in the sense that it is sustained through the
absence, not the presence, of the rhetorical operations on which conventional notions
of ‘community’ depend. ‘Community’, Nancy writes, ‘is the unworking of work that
is social, economic, technical and institutional’. On the face of it this is rather too
paradoxical to be helpful, but fortunately Nancy glosses it in terms which make clear
its links to communication:
‘“Political” [Nancy writes] would mean a community ordering itself to the
unworking of its communication, or destined to this unworking: community
consciously undergoing the experience of its sharing . . . undergoing, in whatever
manner, the experience of community as communication’ (1991: 40-41).
What Nancy here (echoing Dewey) reminds us of is that in attempting to think beyond
the crisis of democratic politics we are not required to assume that ‘politics’ as we
imagine it should necessarily bear a close relation to current institutional forms, which
may precisely, along with the inequalities and asymmetries on which they are based,
need to be rethought, reworked. But whether we follow Touraine or Nancy or any of
the other theorists of the democratic crisis that I mentioned, we are left, as I suggested
before, without any specific answer to what these new forms of communication, these
new communicative institutions, might be. On what principles can they even be
imagined? At this point I want to turn to the particular approach to researching public
connection that I’m currently developing in my own work, but holding onto that link
between the crisis in democratic politics and the issue of communication.
The Public Connection Project
I want to talk about a project which I described in outline when I was last here in
December 2002 – which had just then got funding. I’m working on this project with
my colleagues Sonia Livingstone and Tim Markham at LSE. We’re just coming to
end of our first 6 months so now I can give some idea of how we’re putting into
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practice the questions and methodological choices I outlined back then. This project,
which focuses on what we call ‘public connection’, aims to grasp (in much greater
detail than would be possible through surveys alone) the range of ways in which
people are orientated, or not, to a public world and whether or not media consumption
is important to sustaining those orientations.
The project is funded by the UK’s ESRC/ AHRB under their Cultures of
Consumption programme and its full title is ‘Media Consumption and the Future of
Public Connection’.1 It’s a 30 month project, we’re six months in, as I said: so at most
I can share with you the issues we are dealing with, not any results. The background,
as I said earlier, is widespread concern at policy level with the future of democratic
politics: declining voter turn-out (in countries where voting is not compulsory),
declining allegiance to formal political parties, declining interest in the formal
political process. There are, I must stress, different, more positive, readings of all this
(for example by Lance Bennett, Manuel Castells and Sidney Tarrow) in terms of a
shift of focus of politics away from institutions towards networks, away from parties
and towards single-issue campaigns. But there remains an interesting question which
serves to frame our research: what will be the basis of political legitimacy if
politicians’ usual working assumption that when they speak, a majority of the
population is potentially paying attention ceases to be a plausible assumption?
I’m not a political scientist, of course, but I have been intrigued for 3 years or more
about the media’s role in sustaining or not the level of shared attention necessary for
democratic politics. Because it is not only politics that might be changing; we are all
familiar also with parallel concerns about the decline in an older media world where
prime time television could be assumed to be prime-time, to provide a primary focus
for national attention. This of course is a long-term shift, linked to the multiplication
of outlets within media and the multiplication of media themselves. How this shift
plays out in conditions of cultural diversity (as obviously in the case of Australia and
less so the UK) is itself of course a complex question – as the Centre’s Living
Diversity report for SBS showed (Centre for Cultural Researh, 2002). But the hunch
underlying our research is that, as media and cultural analysts, we have a major
opportunity: to try to grasp the possible interactions between these two large-scale
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processes in which the social centrality of both formal politics and broadcast media
are (possibly) being eroded over the long-term.
Let’s move onto the Public Connection project in more detail. So what is our
empirical research strategy? I can explain this most directly by saying that we are
concerned to investigate the empirical validity of two connected and widely made
assumptions:
• First, that, in a democracy such as Britain, most people share an orientation to a
public world where matters of common concern are, or at least should be,
addressed (we call this orientation ‘public connection’); and
• Second, that this public connection is focussed principally on mediated versions of
that public world (ie that ‘public connection’ is principally sustained by a
convergence in what media people consume, sustained by what we might call
‘shared media consumption’).
Let me take these assumptions in turn. The first assumption is, we would argue,
implicit in most political science and political theory (especially republican and civil
society models of democracy, but also liberal models and even, it can be argued, elite
models of democracy). For it is only on the basis of this first assumption that the
(separate) assumption of the legitimacy of democratic political authority can be built:
consent to political authority in a democracy requires that people’s attention to the
public world can be assumed, or at least that a general orientation to that world can be
assumed which from time to time (including the times when consent is explicitly
requested) results in actual attention! This orientation (which itself can be analysed
into many aspects, including cognitive and emotive) is what we mean by ‘public
connection’.
Note that in calling this orientation public connection, we are taking a view on what
itself is a highly contested term: ‘publicness’. Drawing on Jeffrey Weintraub’s work
(1997) we acknowledge the doubleness of the ‘public/ private’ distinction: which, on
the one hand, identifies a zone of collective concerns that is properly ‘political’ and,
on the other, identifies a generally visible (and accessible) world that is distinct from
the space of private life (protected therefore from visibility). The two questions of
collectivity and visibility are related, but distinct. Sometimes the crossover between
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them is contentious as in the famous feminist principle that ‘the personal is political’,
which can be interpreted to mean: some things that some regard as private (not
accessible) are in fact of collective concern, and therefore must be made visible, so
that they become accessible to collective intervention. We are not minimising such
debates when we suggest, following Jean Elshtain (1997), that underlying those
classic debates was still the assumption that we can give meaning to the distinction
between what is of collective concern and what is not. And it is this collective
dimension (of the public/ private distinction) that is more important to our research;
when we talk about public connection, we mean connection to a world of collective
concern. This is the position of Hannah Arendt, John Dewey, and others; it remains
open to challenge, for example from a radical feminist position which might challenge
the usefulness of the public/ private distinction at all; indeed from a quite different
perspective, one might argue the public/private distinction it is inseparable from
Western secularism. But any research has to start from some set of assumptions, and
the salience of the public/private distinction is ours, as it underlies our interest in what
substance ‘public connection’ takes on in people’s lives. Enough then on the first
assumption we’re investigating.
The second initial assumption is detachable from the first – you could believe that
public connection is sustained by processes other than media consumption, or even
(as in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone thesis) that aspects of media consumption
undermine public connection. This second assumption, nonetheless, is also, in some
form or other, implicit in much political science and media sociology, so once again it
is worth examining to see what basis it has in people’s lives.
Now you might react that these assumptions are formulated in a quite general, abstract
fashion (itself distant from the language we might use in everyday life). The reason is
our concern with the empirical validity of a frame of public orientation that could be
shared by people even if they disagreed over any of the following more specific
issues:
• Their political values
• Their cultural allegiances and attachments
• The range of things that are appropriate topics for political discussion and action
• The range of people who are legitimate political actors
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• The institutional sites appropriate for political discussion and action.
Indeed we cannot any more assume common answers to those detailed questions after
decades of feminist debate, shifts in the focus of political engagement (cf work on
‘postmaterialist values’ by Inglehart (1997) and others), debates about what politics
should be about. Such disagreements, however, can be seen as dependent upon a
shared orientation to a public world (whose contents, precisely, they debate). Hence
our attempt to focus our research on that underlying public connection.
Our question then is whether the assumption of public connection has any empirical
basis, and if so what basis, in people’s lives and actions, and particularly the uses, or
not, they make of media? There are a range of specific reasons for putting this double
assumption to the test in contemporary Britain:
• The fragmentation, perhaps, of people’s attention to any public world (because of
pressures of time from changing work patterns etc)
• The diminishing, quite possibly, of people’s practical connection to institutions of
political participation
• The fragmentation, perhaps, of media consumption, across and within media, into
multiple non-connecting ‘sphericules’ (as Todd Gitlin (1998) once put it).
Whether these factors are as determining as some believe is what we want to
understand.
So how are we trying to do this? Potentially this is a huge and long-term undertaking.
For now, we are engaged in a more modest first stage: a detailed qualitative enquiry
with around 30 subjects designed (through an open-ended diary form) to uncover the
range of understandings they have of their ‘public connection’ (if any), and its links
(if any) to their media consumption. While we start with the individual voice, we
don’t want to study the individual in isolation, hence our interest in following the
trajectory of individuals’ discussions of such issues with others, and conducting
subsequent interviews and focus-groups with diarists that will track some of those
discussions. Towards the end of our project we will do a national survey to generalise
out some of the themes that emerge from the detailed qualitative work.
I should say something more about our ‘diary’ method:
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1. We are using diaries because we are convinced that interviews alone (ie
methods involving the presence of the researcher) wouldn’t necessarily be
adequate in uncovering people’s ongoing reflections on such difficult issues.
This is why we want to combine researcher-absent methods - as Liz Bird
(2003) calls them in her recent book The Audience in Everyday Life – (that is,
diaries) with researcher-present methods (interviews, focus groups) that can
anticipate and reflect back on the diary-writing.
2. There is some precedent for this combination eg in the literature around
observing medical conditions but virtually no precedent for the type of diaries
we want people to produce: the research literature on diaries has generally
been concerned either with using diaries as an alternative to observation (of
time-use, or the practices of sick patients) or as open-ended and completely
unstructured form of self-expression more like an auto-biographical diary . . .
So our approach – which seeks people’s reflections but within a specific
framework – is unusual.
3. Who are we recruiting? For such an intensive method, the sample must be
small. We have recruited nearly 40 people around England from metropolitan,
small town, suburban and rural areas (6 regions in all). Because of the need to
ensure not only a regional spread but also an even gender and age balance, and
a range of classes and ethnicities, the recruitment has involved working
closely with market researchers – I’ll come back to that point in a moment.
4. Another issue is how to guide the diarists in a structured and reasonably
‘transparent’ way without directing them . . . This is why we’ve opted for a
blank diary format but whose context is closely structured through
introductory letters, initial interview, subsequent letters/ phone calls, all
planned and recorded as part of the data we gather.
5. We’re well aware that a written diary format will suit some people better than
others: gender differences (as Liz Bird argues) may be important here,
probably also ethnic and cultural differences. So we’re building in flexibility
into the diary format: not just a basic written format, but also email (which
many people are using), phone messages, and tapes recorded on mini tape-
recorders (which 4 of our diarists are currently using).
6. All those are technical questions about method, which can to a large degree be
technically solved. But there’s also a more fundamental problem which we
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must at least acknowledge: the risk that our diarists ‘sample’ will be self-
selecting. Our recruiters did not, of course, specifically look out for people
with an intense sense of public connection and the various other sampling
requirements would have cut across that in any case, but nonetheless there
remains a risk a significant degree of engagement with the public world is a
precondition for anyone wanting to commit to writing a diary for 3 months.
There is no final answer on this of course: it is related to the problem of
control. Constructing the sort of sample we needed meant relying on the
mediation of those with recruitment expertise - market researchers – giving up,
therefore, full control over the process of recruitment, including over the most
difficult thing to control against in any qualitative research: the self-selection
of those who give up the time to speak to or deal with you. We are here back
with what in the context of quantum mechanics Karl Popper (1970) called ‘the
Oedipus effect’ – the more closely you try to identify a precise object of
investigation, such as a sub-atomic particle, the more likely you are to distort
that very object, because of the properties of your measuring instrument. And
if that’s true of quantum mechanics there’s no reason to suppose it’s less true
of cultural research!
Our actual conclusions are of course some way in the future, but what type of
conclusions in principle could we even now anticipate as interesting outcomes of this
research? We are ready to find, for example, that
• A number of people lack any sense of public connection (with some of them
wanting things otherwise, and others wanting things to remain that way)
• Or, that while everyone we ask reports a sense of public connection, it is focussed
on a range of public worlds which differ and may even be exclusive of each other
(in terms of institutional site, scale, geographical focus – and let me stress that we
do not assume that people’s public world is necessarily national rather than local,
national rather than global or transnational)
• Or, that there are a number of people for whom media consumption is less
important than our second starting assumption claims (so for them ‘public
connection’ is sustained through local groups, which meet face-to-face around
agendas not reflected in media narratives)
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• Or that, for some people, their sense of public connection is pre-structured by
larger forms of disconnection (racism, discrimination based on gender or
sexuality, exile) – or, put the other way round, that the absence of such major
factors of exclusion for others is what makes ‘natural’ their ‘connection’ to a
public world. This is one of the clearest differences coming out of our preliminary
interviews.
These points might not be surprising in the abstract, but what matters is to see how
such constraints on connection are lived out in everyday experience, with or without
media. And this, we would argue, is something that can only become visible through
the particular combination of deep qualitative and quantitative methods that we’re
attempting.
Conclusion
But I don’t want to end there – because it might suggest that our UK project has a
privileged position in addressing the broad concerns about the basis of democratic
politics I started from – and of course it doesn’t. There’s a huge terrain of inquiry
here, and inevitably many different ways of approaching it. I want then to finish by
asking whether there are any more general implications emerging from what I’ve said
about how best we can research people’s relationship to a public world or worlds.
What is the contribution of an approach broadly influenced by cultural studies to the
questions of ‘politics’ - however we define it - and the ‘public world’, questions that
traditionally have been the monopoly of political science and political theory? And
what does this tell us about the broader relevance today of the research tradition that
has emerged out of cultural studies?
It’s relatively clear what we don’t need: we certainly don’t need the hyper-
theoreticism of much cultural studies in the 1980s and early 1990s, which regarded
‘practice’ - what people do on a daily basis, in their homes, in public space and
particularly at work – as something to be theoretically transcended, rather than
understood and tracked in all its complexity . . . Nor do we need another version of
the populism so familiar from some types of cultural studies (as if old debates about
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the relevance of popular culture in the broader public world were still live debates that
should be determining what we research now – clearly they are not). . .
To say what we do need is, of course, more difficult and I can only offer my own
perspective. Here it is worth holding onto something simple, but I think profound, in
Raymond Williams’ work, the idea I mentioned at the start that, as intellectuals and
also as citizens, and ‘wherever we have started from, we need to listen to others who
have started from a different position’. This is not only an insistence that we listen
across the major structuring differences in our social world, whether class difference
(which Williams had in mind) or gender, ethnicity, sexuality, centre/ periphery. It
means also, if we link it with some notion of democracy, attending sufficiently to the
huge range of people’s everyday experience.
It is worth remembering that for Raymond Williams one of the key incitements to
new thinking, and indeed to the very idea of a new discipline which he could not yet
name as cultural studies, was the encounter between teachers and students through the
British workers’ education movement. For Williams this educational encounter with
those outside the formal education system, this ‘communication between Subjects’ (in
Touraine’s phrase) was productive because it required serious attention to the
complexity of others’ voices, and to the complexity of what it is to have (or not have)
a legitimate voice in the public world.
Put this way, it seems clear that cultural studies remains a tradition of academic work
that can teach us vital lessons, but one whose implications and insights for the
contemporary world have barely been developed. There are surely many cultural
contexts that have so far been neglected in the broad sweep of cultural research, but
which we have no right to neglect: the hospital (where the Centre is in fact doing
pioneering work), the school, the public hearing, the sales meeting, the employment
centre to name a few! All of them are sites where various forms of public connection
are played out, identities performed, representations negotiated.
If we engage with those unfamiliar sites, it should of course not be in a naïvely
celebratory way (as if our role were simply to find patterns of survival or resistance in
the cultural domain). But rather, recalling the inspirational work of the American
17
cultural theorist Henry Giroux (2002), with a critical reflexivity that acknowledges
how much is at stake - in a world riven by profound inequalities – in understanding
accurately and without sentimentality the material constraints on individual agency
and voice, on collective narrative and representation.
The time has come then, perhaps, for those who have emerged from the disputed
lineage of ‘cultural studies’ not to retreat, not to use the words of past (and in some
cases present) opponents as cover for a return to old frameworks and familiar
accommodations, but instead to be bold, to look around us and see just how much
work there remains still to be done by open, empirically informed, and continuously
critical research into the complexities and paradoxes of contemporary culture.
© NICK COULDRY 2004
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1 Many thanks to the ESRC for its financial assistance to this project under grant number RES-143-25-0011.