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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

n.couldry@lse.ac.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.