From Cultural Studies to Cultural Criticism?
    Interview with Catherine Belsey
    
    Paul Bowman: How do you position yourself and your work in relation to the cultural studies project? Or, rather, do you see cultural studies as a ‘project’, and is contemporary cultural studies still the ‘same’ project or discipline as it once was? Catherine Belsey: I should make clear from the beginning that I address your questions from outside cultural studies itself. I have learnt a great deal from cultural studies, but in the process I have also developed some reservations about what seem to me (still from the outside, and perhaps, therefore, from a position less well informed than it might be) the limits of its focus. Or perhaps ‘reservations’ is too strong a term. My unease is not about what cultural studies does, and does well, but about the areas it appears to leave out. I reflect on the issues you raise, therefore, out of an interest in developing an alternative — cultural criticism — as a new field of study that embraces a wider range of material than most existing departments of cultural studies. To be more specific about what seems to me the motive for change, or at least modification, the absences in cultural studies as it exists now derive from the degree to which it is still the same project as it once was. Paradoxically, what was once its great strength has now begun to seem like a constraint. The strength was its popularising impulse; that impulse is now in danger of settling down as populism; and, as we in the UK found out in the Thatcher years, populism can too easily turn into conservatism.
    
    Bowman: Cultural studies is said to be a political project. What, to your mind, are the politics of cultural studies? Does it have ‘a’ politics, or is it, Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
    
    rather, political in some other way? Another way to phrase this would be to ask you what are the politics or what is the political significance of your own work? What do you consider to be the ‘proper destination’ of your work? Your second question allows me to move into a historical justification of the proposition that cultural studies slides towards populism, and that this is not unequivocally to its advantage. The story of the discipline is already familiar, but it might be worth rehearsing in order to suggest how a popularising and thus liberating drive can settle into a populist limitation. The early exponents of cultural studies in the 1950s, supremely Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, were reacting primarily against English studies as it was then understood, but that reaction was an ambivalent one, because of the uncertain status of the popular at the time. It was clear that English invested heavily in value judgements. Indeed, the main object of the exercise seemed to be grading. There were four great English novelists, F. R. Leavis insisted, paradoxically to a wide audience of schoolteachers and Penguin-readers, as well as academics. And there was also D. H. Lawrence, of course. But just how good was Dickens, who was a great popular success in his own day? Well, maybe Hard Times would make it into the canon. And Hardy, perhaps the nearest among the candidates for canonisation to a popular novelist? Ah, that was a tricky one. As far as poetry was concerned, Donne was heavily promoted by Leavis himself and by T. S. Eliot, but Milton, in the eyes of the same team, was an altogether bad influence, because he introduced a Latin element into the native rhythms of popular English speech. The value judgements in all this were unremitting, but the attitude to the popular was extraordinarily equivocal: it was judged a positive in relation to past cultures, but treated with deep suspicion when it came to the present. Eliot himself, meanwhile, was defending the proposition that only high culture could save civilization as we know it. This was Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy all over again, but without the liberal ideal that had made Arnold Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
    
    palatable. The Leavises, F. R. and Queenie, were busy denouncing the evils of contemporary mass culture. American criticism at this time was marginally less deeply immersed in hierarchies of value, and a good deal more attentive to the text. Those of us who couldn’t align ourselves with the imprecations of the Leavisites turned to New Criticism for sustenance. What we found there was more intellectual, more surprising, but radically a-historical — and still grounded in a vocabulary of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. A poem (poems were the main focus) was more or less successful to the degree that it was more or less ‘balanced’, ‘humane’, and politically uncommitted. I discovered New Criticism all by myself as an undergraduate (rather late in the day), seduced by the lyrical title of The Verbal Icon, and I tried ineffectually to cobble together a way of reading that also took account of some of the old historicism of C. S. Lewis. In a fumbling way, I was trying to relocate the icon in its cultural context. Lewis was brilliant. My respect for his knowledge has, if anything, deepened with time. And he told stories — of the progressive unfolding of medieval and early modern culture. But he, too, was given to value judgements, and his happy endings usually culminated in the founding of the Anglican Church. E. M. W. Tillyard, who was also interested in cultural history, but who sold to a wider public (and is still in print today), was committed, meanwhile, to demonstrating conclusively that we had all been much happier, and produced much better literary works, in England’s golden age, when we knew our place in the social order, and gave no thought to social mobility, criticism of the authorities, or, perish the thought, welfare states. The Second World War, however, had called into question the accepted social hierarchies of the previous generation. As everyone now knows, soldiers had seen their officers at close quarters and under pressure; the public schools no longer seemed to have a monopoly on courage or leadership; on the home front, too, the classes had mixed and mingled as never before. Even the BBC was recognising regional accents. The hierarchies of value English departments were still fostering in the 1950s, even though they were mainly meritocratic and bourgeois, rather than aristocratic and elite, seemed somehow out of tune with the moment. Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
    
    It was time for change. Williams and Hoggart, ably supported by the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, all writing from their background in adult education on the edges of the then tiny and highly selective university system, called attention to the long, distinguished, and all-but buried tradition of popular culture, and addressed their analyses to a wide audience in paperback. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) famously sold a million copies for Penguin Books after its appearance in paperback in 1968.1 Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy2 first appeared in 1957, and came out as a Pelican paperback in 1958. Raymond Williams published Culture and Society in 1958, and The Long Revolution in 1961 (paperback 1965).3 At the beginning of an overdue expansion of higher education, the Birmingham postgraduate Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was founded in 1962 with Richard Hoggart as its first head. The first students were admitted in 1964. The impulse of the new discipline was to attend to working-class culture, which was by no means confined to written texts, but included oral and musical traditions, for example, and (though this was not at all the same thing) to consider the mass culture of the day, the forms of entertainment by which the workers who attended adult education classes, not to mention the students now coming into higher education, were actually surrounded. Mass-market fiction, cinema, popular music, radio to a degree, and in due course television became the material of the fledgling cultural studies. The motive was political: all the early pioneers were committed to one version or another of left-wing politics. The objective was in the first instance the defence of working-class values, and then increasingly the unmasking of the values promoted among the working class by capitalist mass culture. Sociology, with its attention to actual forms of life, as well as political economy and the possibility of social and economic change, was seen as an ally or, indeed, integral to the project: ‘cultural materialism’ was not an empty phrase. It was a heroic moment: here was an energy and a commitment that was largely lacking from the conventional academic disciplines at this time, and an openness, at least initially, to the possibility of new methodologies, new approaches, new Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
    
    ways of reading. The work of Roland Barthes on cultural myths and Louis Althusser on ideology was embraced when it became available in English in the early 1970s. The Birmingham Centre flowered under Stuart Hall, and truly radical developments in film theory took place in Screen in the course of the decade. So successful was the new discipline that its effects influenced practically every department of the Humanities. Do you mind if I take your question six1 out of order, and address it here? One by one, History, Art History, Classics and English itself were radicalised in the light of the new developments in cultural studies. This was not, perhaps, a simple case of cause and effect. For example, Christopher Hill’s brilliant accounts of the cultural disputes that made possible English Revolution were probably instrumental in the development of cultural studies, rather than its effects, but cultural studies in turn played a part in legitimating their uptake in otherwise relatively conservative history departments. In the 1980s Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism sprang out of American anthropology, not British cultural studies, but it did not seem shocking in the UK because cultural studies had accustomed us to seeing all culture as our province. Feminism also played a major part in the move to recover the work of women who had been hidden from a patriarchal history. But it was thanks to cultural studies that the literary canon was already well and truly on the way to breaking down at the stage when analysts of women’s writing astutely took advantage of the fact. If I might be autobiographical for a moment, my own efforts to define a different future for English departments were the direct consequence of an encounter in the heady 70s with cultural studies in general and film studies in particular. (I have never looked back.)
    
    1
    
    ‘6. What is, has been, might be, or might have been, the significance
    
    of cultural studies within the university?’
    
    Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
    
    But — and perhaps this takes us to your questions three and four2 — with the institutionalisation of cultural studies, with courses, and exam papers, and journals, and the pressure to publish and peer assessment of papers and book projects, with introductory guides and anthologies, and all the apparatus of respectability, something was unaccountably lost. I think perhaps it was flexibility. Of course, new fields of enquiry opened up and were mapped. Minority cultures and ethnicities were explored; phobias, racial and sexual, were challenged; and this could only be welcome. But the same was more likely to promise success than novelty. The previous generation judges the work of the new, and more readily endorses what it recognises. Institutionalisation slows down change. Moreover, true to its populist origins, when theory got hard, cultural studies became increasingly ambivalent towards it. Screen lost its theoretical edge after 1980; E. P. Thompson roundly denounced Althusserian Marxism; Terry Eagleton repudiated the French theory that had made him famous. Common sense and ‘experience’ reasserted themselves, but as Gramsci had long ago made plain, those areas are the last bastions of ideology, not guarantees of truth. Does it matter? I believe it does. The main theoretical casualties of the populist resistance to theory were psychoanalysis and deconstruction. It’s true — I’ve had the debate so many times — that neither of these knowledges is much use on the
    2
    
    ‘3. What are the institutions of cultural studies? That is, what
    
    works, methods, orientations, etc., have become instituted as the repositories of ‘knowledge’, methodology, and ways of going about doing things? This is as much as to say, what do these institutions (or the institution of these authoritative guarantors as ‘the proper’ or ‘the best’) forbid, censure/censor, limit and enable? What factors determined or overdetermined their institution?’; and: ‘4. How does the institutionalisation of cultural studies affect, support or undermine it?’
    
    Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
    
    picket line; neither is immediately and self-evidently indispensable to a group of workers looking to become a class in itself, or a rape crisis centre eager to shelter and support victims of patriarchy. But cultural studies also has a long-term agenda, and in the long term understanding our culture, the culture that arguably makes us what we are, requires all the skills we can muster. Capitalism would not have lasted so long, or endeared itself to the East as well as the West, if its seductions had been obvious or transparent, or, indeed, if they had been purely economic. Culture does not constitute its subjects as conditioned robots, but as complex, sophisticated, multifarious individuals. Psychoanalysis and deconstruction both offer ways of attending to the textual subtlety of culture, its nuances, hints and evasions, what it does not say, as well as what it does, the things it does its best to conceal, and blurts out inadvertently just the same. There is at work in every cultural ‘text’, from a cornflakes packet to a Canaletto, a textual resistance to its own overt project, and this matters to analysts of culture for a number of reasons. First, no position, no set of values or norms is so sedimented, so immovable that it cannot be challenged, and challenged, moreover, from within. The inevitable trace of the other that resides in the selfsame, the return of the repressed meaning(s) in any term or proposition, the radical alterity ‘definitively taken away from every process of presentation’4 all demonstrate an instability that points to the possibility of change. Second, that instability itself represents a pressure point for anyone interested in precipitating change. The politics of meaning is not merely referential. If meanings are constitutive of our hopes and desires, as well as our understanding of the way things are, these meanings themselves are a place of contest. And third, it is in the plurality of these meanings, the perpetual possibility of the return of the alterity that is excluded in order to make them appear both transparent and inevitable, that we can glimpse an alternative to the norms that set out to restrict our hopes and desires to the ‘possible’, the plausible, the obvious. What is more, the seductive strategies of cultural texts are not confined to their thematic content, but involve their mode of address to a reader, and the position they offer as the place from which they are most obviously intelligible. Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
    
    Unmasking is not enough, if we are to understand as clearly as we can the processes of inscription of the range of cultural meanings we live by. There is, in other words, a politics of reading, which is not the same as the politics of action, or even the exposure of ideology. Meanwhile, events began to diminish the initial difference of cultural studies, the feature that distinguished it from other disciplines, with the eventual result, as it seems to me, that it no longer makes sense to isolate popular culture. In view of the success cultural studies has had in directly or obliquely bringing about the transformation of other humanities disciplines, those disciplines themselves have been induced to acknowledge the contingency, the cultural relativity, of their own canons. In my view, the distinction between high and popular culture in itself presupposes a society divided along lines that, if they ever obtained, certainly do not hold now. There is not in the twenty-first century one culture for the bourgeoisie and another for the working class — if, indeed, there ever really was. The ruling ideology, Marx and Engels knew in 1848, is the ideology of the ruling class. The tabloid press, for instance, has a good deal to say about the Turner Prize, and its views on Martin Creed’s lights going on and off, or Tracey Emin’s bed, are not so radically different from those of some of the broadsheets. Indeed, ever since Duchamp, Thierry de Duve has argued, the question, ‘is it art?’ has been open to anyone to answer.5 Baz Luhrmann made Romeo and Juliet thrilling for a range of adolescents way beyond those doing A-Level English. Less locally, what does it mean to reflect on the cultural difference of postmodernity without reference to art, architecture and the novel, as well as the internet, The Simpsons, Ali G. and the movies of Quentin Tarantino? The citationality of the postmodern assumes a range of reference that is not readily divisible between two different kinds of culture. What does it mean, moreover, to discuss this same issue without a strong sense of the cultural history that permits us to begin to define the difference of the postmodern? And here I name my third anxiety about cultural studies now. Initially history played a significant part in its programme: Raymond Williams might be described as above all a cultural historian; E. P. Thompson made his name writing history. Michel Foucault, who Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
    
    surely transformed the list of questions we address to the past, based his work on the discontinuities of cultural history. Marx himself was perhaps the first figure to invoke history knowingly to denaturalise the present. But looking round for historical work under the aegis of cultural studies now, I have difficulty in finding much that goes further back than the nineteenth century, and even that seems very much a minority interest. (Forgive me if here I do nothing so much as betray my ignorance.)
    
    Having taken all your questions in the wrong order, and conflated three, (4) and (6) with question (2), without ever answering (2) directly, let me now, if I may, say something about the politics of cultural studies under the heading of your question (5)! Does cultural studies have any significance outside the university? I should hope so! The founding fathers (I wish I could invoke some mothers here) would turn in their respective graves if they had supposed cultural studies could confine itself to the academic world. And yet that is increasingly what has happened to all our work. With the much-needed expansion of universities, academic publishing has hived itself off and become profitable. It suits the publishers (we work for practically nothing); and it suits the Research Assessment tribunals, who know at once what counts as research from the logo on the jacket. Does it also suit us? Yes, in a way. We should need to write a good deal more engagingly if we had to enlist a genuinely popular audience. But in a sense it pushes cultural studies into a blind alley. We are talking mainly to each other. Of course, not everything everyone writes needs to be accessible to everyone else. Imagine imposing such a restriction on physics! I myself have just been defending high theory. But scientists have long since learnt to communicate some of the implications of their work to a wider audience. Have we? Only, I think, to a limited extent. But what we do (I include myself here as a cultural critic, though not as a specialist in cultural studies) matters, in the end, only if it matters widely. What we have to offer, in the long term, is an understanding of the relationship between human beings and the culture that shapes their values, aspirations, fantasies, dreams. Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
    
    We should be offering to exert an influence beyond the classroom, though of course the classroom remains crucial as the place where understanding is developed. The first priority at this moment, therefore, is to modernise the discipline itself. And so I come to your final question, ‘where is cultural studies going?’ And my answer, predictably, after everything I have said so far, is ‘towards cultural criticism’. Or, at least, that is what I hope for. Cultural criticism, as I understand the term, is the study of meanings wherever they are to be found. It therefore breaks with the limitations of cultural studies, in so far as cultural studies concentrates on the present and the popular. Cultural criticism embraces cultural history, if only in order to throw into relief the character — which is to say, the difference — of the present. And it sees no sense at this historical moment in isolating the culture of a class or group. While attending, of course, to the specificities of production processes, as well as target and actual audiences, cultural criticism would repudiate the idea that one big, overriding difference justifies the separation, when it comes to academic analysis, of mass-market romance, say, from other romance forms, including the ‘literary’ romances that win prizes. Cultural criticism also breaks, then, with the isolation of traditional humanities disciplines as this has obtained since the nineteenth century. The study of literature has already made this break: more and more members of English departments are attending to what was once art history, as well as invading relatively new terrains of visual culture: embroidery, woodcuts, book illustration, tomb sculpture. The cultural history of the book and reading practices is fast becoming as central as the study of authors and their writing practices once was. A familiarity with the history of sexuality and colonial conquest is now taken for granted in English departments, and it necessarily follows that the popular is no longer outside the frame. Marjorie Garber links Elvis Presley and Shakespearean comedy in a discussion of the implications of cross-dressing.6 Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
    
    Something very similar also goes for art history itself. Attribution and brush strokes still matter, of course, but the ideological implications of the debates between mimetic and conceptual values in art are at least as important now. Genres that were once repudiated, like nineteenth-century narrative painting, have taken on a new importance as the material of cultural history. Visuality itself, the possibility of different ways of seeing, has come to constitute an issue in its own right. Film studies, meanwhile, acknowledges an overlap with art history: Stephen Heath’s film theory and Norman’s Bryson’s analysis of paintings draw on one another, while both appeal to Lacanian psychoanalysis. And when it comes to the work of Slavoj Žižek, there are no holds barred. When Žižek slips easily and wittily between Kantian philosophy and demotic jokes, Hegel and Hitchcock, the effect is exhilarating. In other words, at the level of intellectual enquiry, the walls between the disciplines have already fallen, and the first instances of cultural criticism are in place. We are all increasingly polymaths now. The only thing capable of holding us back is the need to develop appropriate reading skills for such a wide range of ‘texts’. But where there’s a will, there’s a way. Besides, we don’t all need all of them at our individual fingertips. At last there is a real motive for co-operation and collective work in the humanities, as there has long been in the sciences. In all fields these reading skills will depend for their subtlety, however, on a familiarity with the insights of theory into the complexity of signifying practice. We cannot afford to neglect whatever psychoanalysis and poststructuralism have to tell us about the waywardness of the signifier, its density and difficulty. There is no cultural criticism without an understanding of signifying practice. Cardiff University now offers an undergraduate joint degree in Cultural Criticism. There is no attempt, in the time available, at ‘coverage’, that shibboleth of English in its traditional form. Coverage, as each subject expands into new territories, is already a lost cause for the existing humanities disciplines. In Cultural Criticism the emphasis is on skills: students need to learn to interpret a wide variety of cultural forms: written, visual, oral, past and present. They need, in other words, Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
    
    to engage with a range of semiotic practices. The students put them to work in options focused on specialised areas, from the prehistoric to the posthuman. They end the course not with a map of a demarcated field of knowledge, but with an attentiveness to signifying practice that will, ideally, enable them to make (a) sense of whatever cultural world(s) they go on to inhabit in the future. Cultural Criticism as an undergraduate discipline shares with cultural studies an interest in a range of media. What it largely excludes, however, is the overlap with sociology that characterises cultural studies as an academic institution. The primary concern of cultural criticism is signification, the making of meanings, wherever that is to be found. It treats culture, including social behaviour and practices, as of interest in the first instance as the inscription of meanings, given that meanings, as I have tried to suggest, are complex sites of political struggle. If it is legitimate to end the discussion with a personal comment, I should say that I have never taught with more conviction or more energy than I do in this new degree scheme. The students, aware that they are doing something out of the ordinary, seeing themselves as adventurers, are alert, involved, and ready for more or less anything. Some of this shared energy is no doubt the effect of novelty itself. Probably cultural criticism will be institutionalised in due course, with its own promotion procedures and journals and introductions and anthologies, its own hierarchies and habits. And then it will be time for another change. If cultural history teaches us anything, it must be that other times demand other practices, and new problems require new solutions. No discipline is for ever. If we are not to be at the mercy of our own institutions, we probably need to take the initiative in defining the direction of change. There is work to do!
    
    1
    
    E.P. Thompson, The Making of The English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1957).
    
    2
    
    Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
    
    3
    
    Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958); and Raymond
    
    Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961).
    4
    
    Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’, ‘Speech and Phenomena’ and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory
    
    of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 151, pp. 129-60.
    5
    
    Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (Harmondsworth:
    
    6
    
    Penguin, 1993).
    
    Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.

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