Culture and Power in Cultural Studies: The Politics of Signification 9780748641673

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Culture and Power in Cultural Studies

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For Jenny

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Culture and Power in Cultural Studies The Politics of Signification John Storey

Edinburgh University Press

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© John Storey, 2010 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in 11/13 Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4015 7 (hardback) The right of John Storey to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgments List of figures Preface 1. Culture and Power: The Politics of Signification 2. Matthew Arnold: The Politics of an Organic Intellectual 3. Rockin’ Hegemony: West Coast Rock and America’s War in Vietnam 4. Texts, Readers, Reading Formations: My Poll and My Partner Joe in Manchester in 1841 5. Cultural Studies: The Politics of an Academic Practice; an Academic Practice as Politics 6. The Sixties in the Nineties: Pastiche or Hyperconsciousness? 7. The Articulation of Memory and Desire: From Vietnam to the First Gulf War 8. The Social Life of Opera 9. The Culture of Globalisation 10. Inventing Opera as Art in Nineteenth-Century Manchester 11. The Invention of the English Christmas 12. ‘The Spoiled Adopted Child of Great Britain and Even of the Empire’: A Symptomatic Reading of Heart of Darkness Notes References Index

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Acknowledgments

Although the chapters here have been revised updated, and rewritten throughout, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the journals and publishers, where earlier versions of these chapters appeared, for permission to re-use this material as the basis for the writing of this book. I would, therefore, like to thank the following journals and publishers: Literature and History, Open University Press, Leuven University Press, Routledge, Manchester University Press, European Journal of Cultural Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Edinburgh University Press and Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.

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List of Figures

8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 9.1 9.2 9.3 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 10.8

Classic FM Opera extracts (Re)Introducing opera Introductory compilations ‘Pop marketing’ of opera composers/performers Mapping the narrative Carmen: lust/power/murder/superstition Coca-Cola people The ‘foreign’ Waiting For My Love, the Chinese version of Sex and the City The changing classifications of No Song No Supper Opera as performance, opera as text Opera and stage melodrama Opera and tight-rope walking Adding songs to opera Advertising theatre to a ‘knowing’ audience Mapping the narrative Advertising opera to a ‘knowing’ audience

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Preface

Culture and Power in Cultural Studies: The Politics of Signification is a collection of previously published book chapters and journal articles. The twelve essays collected here were originally written over a period of more than twenty years, and published between 1986 and 2009. They are presented here, with the exception of Chapter 1, in order of publication. Although they cover a variety of topics, what they all have in common is their focus on matters of culture and power and the politics of signification. Like most work in cultural studies, the chapters are all informed by history and organised by theory. I have revised and rewritten them (sometimes quite radically) to ensure that they flow together as a collection. I have also tried to correct lapses of clarity in the original published work and to update material where appropriate. I have, however, left some repetition between chapters in order to accommodate readers who decide to read selectively rather than the book as a whole. Each chapter expands and elaborates themes and issues touched upon in my more popular books (Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, and Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture). In this way, there is the possibility of a reciprocal relationship of support and elaboration between this book and the two books just mentioned. In other words, if you have found those books useful (or any of my other books), you will find here a further, more detailed, elaboration of certain key ideas and themes. In different ways and with a different focus of attention, each chapter argues that signification, and the struggle over meaning, is fundamental to the processes of hegemony. In some of the chapters this is made explicit, while in others it is more implicit. But all the chapters focus on the politics of signification: the struggle to define social reality; to make the world (and the things in it) mean in particular ways and with particular effects of power. Rather than engage in a fruitless quest for the true or essential meaning of something, the twelve chapters fix their critical gaze on how

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particular meanings acquire their authority and legitimacy, knowing that dominant modes of making the world meaningful are a fundamental aspect of the processes of hegemony. Chapter 1 outlines the organising claim of this book. I argue that there are two significant moments in the situating of culture and power as the central object of study in cultural studies. The first begins with Raymond Williams’s social definition of culture, especially when this concept is further elaborated to become culture as a realised signifying system. I chart the shift in Williams’s position from seeing culture as a network of shared meanings, to seeing it as consisting of both shared and contested meanings. The latter position, and the second significant moment, is a result of the introduction in the 1970s of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony into work in cultural studies. In other words, it is the coming together of Williams’s concept of culture as a realised signifying system and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony that situates culture and power as the central object of study in cultural studies. Chapter 2 also uses Gramscian theory, this time to engage with Matthew Arnold’s extremely influential cultural politics. I argue that Arnold is best understood as an ‘organic intellectual’ of the Victorian middle class, seeking to make this class hegemonic. According to Gramsci, intellectuals are distinguished by their social function. The organic intellectual functions as an organiser (in the broadest sense of the word): this can be in the field of culture, economics, political governance and so on. It is their task to ‘determine and to organise the reform of moral and intellectual life’ (1971: 453). For a class to be truly hegemonic it must have reached a certain level ‘of homogeneity, self-awareness and organisation’ (1971: 181). To achieve this it must go beyond the purely corporate interests of the class, to engage with the interests of subordinate groups and classes. Economic domination alone is not enough. As Arnold repeatedly warns the middle class, its economic power is on its own insufficient to guarantee it hegemony. A class must rise above its economic interests and attempt to saturate society with principles of morality, politics, religion, philosophy and so on, which place its own development on the ‘universal plane’ of society’s general development. It is to this task, the securing and sustaining of hegemony that organic intellectuals must address themselves. Arnold, as I show in Chapter 2, is such an organiser. In Chapter 3 I examine the music of the counterculture in terms of its opposition to America’s war in Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1970 the counterculture attempted to establish a non-competitive, non-belligerent ‘alternative’ society. It was a movement constructed around three factors; all, in different ways, political: a particular type of drug use (especially

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LSD), a new type of music (folk-rock, psychedelic rock, then just rock) and a vocal anti-war politics. Opposition to the war was the central organising principle of the counterculture. Beneath the banner ‘Make Love, Not War’ it engaged in a counter-hegemonic struggle over the meaning of the war. The music of the counterculture provided alternative explanations, helping to set limits on the ability of Johnson-Nixon America to sustain its war in Vietnam. However, eventually ‘resistance’ became ‘incorporation’, as the music and the wider practices of the counterculture were gradually drawn into the profit-making concerns of capitalist America. But for about five years the music of the counterculture acted as both a symbol and a focal point for opposition to America’s war in Vietnam. Chapter 4 investigates how a nineteenth-century stage melodrama might have been understood in a context of culture and power by a significant section of its contemporary working-class audience. Using Tony Bennett’s concept of the reading formation, the chapter analyses the interaction between a historically situated text and its historically situated audience. It gathers together the various discourses that were in circulation and explores how these might have productively activated a particular way of understanding the politics of John Thomas Haines’s My Poll and My Partner Joe, as the play was performed for three nights at the Queen’s Theatre in Manchester in April 1841. Early nineteenth-century melodrama always sides with the powerless. Its politics are formulated in terms of poor against the rich, weak against the strong, good against bad. What politically distinguishes one melodrama from another is the way the conflict is articulated to connect with social, economic and political conflicts outside the theatre. My argument is that for three nights in April 1841, My Poll and My Partner Joe may have been understood (contrary to mainstream theatre studies) by a significant section of its working-class audience as both giving expression to, and making connections with, political conflicts outside the theatre. Chapter 5 presents a discussion of cultural studies both as an academic practice concerned to think culture politically (the politics of cultural studies as academic work), and as an academic practice that attempts to think of itself as a political movement (the academic work of cultural studies as politics). The first part of the chapter discusses the introduction of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony into cultural studies in the 1970s and how this changed the study of popular culture. This is followed by an examination of the argument that cultural studies is ‘politics by other means’. Against this position, I argue that cultural studies, although always concerned with matters of culture and power, has to resist this

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political romance narrative and continue to organise itself as an academic discipline. In Chapter 6 I explore an aspect of postmodernism I have called ‘the sixties in the nineties’. There can be little doubt that the 1990s witnessed an explosion of interest in the texts and practices of the 1960s. There were, for example, a significant number of film versions of sixties television programmes. Similarly, television also began to recycle sixties programmes. Although this can be partly explained in terms of an economic need for cheap programming with the expansion of cable and satellite channels, it is also undoubtedly the case that such scheduling was driven by a desire to exploit a perceived wave of popular interest in the texts and practices of the 1960s. Like television and cinema, nineties pop music also recycled sounds and visual styles of the sixties. Similar things were also happening in advertising, fashion and in the different lived cultures of everyday life. The main focus of the chapter, however, is a critical consideration of how we might best understand this aspect of postmodernism. In particular, it compares the very influential arguments of American Marxist Fredric Jameson, made over the course of several essays, with an argument made by Jim Collins. As I explain, this can be reduced to a dispute between two explanatory concepts: pastiche and intertextual hyperconsciousness. But, as I also argue, if we are truly to understand the ‘sixties in the nineties’, we must not confuse or collapse together the repertoire of texts and practices recycled by the culture industries with what people actually take and make from this repertoire in the lived cultures of everyday life, In Chapter 7 I examine, within a context of culture and power, the complex relations between memory and desire. More specifically, I connect 1980s Hollywood representations of America’s war in Vietnam with George Bush senior’s campaign, in late 1990 and early 1991, to win support for US involvement in the First Gulf War. My argument is that Hollywood produced a particular ‘regime of truth’ about America’s war in Vietnam and that this body of ‘knowledge’ was articulated by Bush and others as an enabling ‘memory’ in the build-up to the First Gulf War. Put simply, Bush’s claim that the war in the Gulf would not be ‘another Vietnam . . . . Our troops will have the best possible support in the entire world. They will not be asked to fight with one hand tied behind their backs’, was a claim that was supported by an influential strand of Hollywood’s Vietnam. In other words, Hollywood’s Vietnam produced an enabling memory and a regime of truth that allowed Bush to make this claim, a claim that does not make historical sense when we remember the massive destructive power of US military force during the course of its war in Vietnam.

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For many people in the UK and USA opera represents (whether this is understood positively or negatively), the very embodiment of ‘high culture’. In the 1990s there were signs that opera’s status was changing, as it became more and more a feature of everyday cultural life. Chapter 8 examines the increasing social visibility of opera. This can be evidenced in the fairly extensive use of opera in advertising and film soundtracks. It is also evidenced in opera stars performing with pop stars, opera stars hosting variety shows, and opera stars performing at major sporting events. In particular, the chapter explores whether these and other changes (more are discussed in the chapter) make it possible to describe opera as an inclusive rather than an exclusive culture. The focus of Chapter 9 is the culture of globalisation. The chapter seeks to challenge the view that globalisation is the same as Americanisation. It also challenges the claim, often underpinning the Americanisation thesis, that commodities are the same as culture. I argue that this is a very reductive concept of culture. I also argue that the Americanisation thesis operates with a reductive concept of the foreign, suggesting, as it does, that the ‘local’ and the national are the same. Similarly, it also presents national cultures as monolithic and essential, hermetically sealed from one another. Against the Americanisation thesis, but without losing sight of issues of culture and power, I argue that hegemony provides a better way to understand the interpenetration of the ‘local’ and the ‘global’. In Chapter 10 I focus on the cultural meanings and the shifting social significance of opera and opera-going in nineteenth-century Manchester. To explore these changes in the culture of opera, I track the development of a particular discourse on opera; a discourse that enabled, constrained and constituted the meaning of opera and opera-going in nineteenthcentury Manchester. The establishment of this new network of meanings, through which opera was made to make sense, is probably still for most people the ‘common sense’ of opera and opera-going. As I point out in Chapter 8, by the nineteenth century opera had become established as a widely available form of popular entertainment consumed by people of all social classes. To turn opera into ‘high culture’ it had to be withdrawn from the everyday world of popular entertainment. Chapter 10 explores, with detailed reference to what happened in Manchester, how opera changed from being an inclusive form of commercial entertainment to become an exclusive aspect of ‘high culture’. The important point to understand historically about opera and opera-going in Manchester, then, is that it did not become unpopular, rather it was actively made unpopular. In short, opera was transformed from entertainment enjoyed by the many, into culture to be appreciated by the few.

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The focus of Chapter 11 is the invention of the ‘traditional’ English Christmas; invented, I argue, between the 1830s and 1880s. Its invention was directly connected to the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation and only indirectly connected to religion. In short, the invention of Christmas had more to do with hegemony than it ever had to do with the celebration of the Nativity. If a nativity was being celebrated, it was the birth of conspicuous consumption in a new industrial economy, articulated with a particular politics of charity and a nostalgia for the feudal social relations of the past. What was invented was a utopian version of industrial capitalism: a temporal and social space in which economic competition and exploitation is softened by the temporary articulation of feudal relations of power, in which exploitation and oppression can exist in harmony with deference and ‘goodwill to all men’. Instead of social equality and the redistribution of wealth, it articulates the mutual obligations of rich and poor permanently bound together in the best of all possible worlds. In the final chapter I use Louis Althusser’s concept of ‘the problematic’, and the method of ‘symptomatic reading’, as developed by Althusser and Pierre Macherey, to present a critical analysis of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. My claim is that at its most fundamental level Conrad’s novel is a political narrative about imperialism. However, the chapter does not seek to place the novel on one side of a divide between pro- and anti-imperialism. Contrary to this tradition, I argue that the novel is profoundly contradictory. In other words, the novel both attacks and supports imperialism. Although not the conscious intention of the novel to say such things about imperialism, it is nevertheless ‘compelled’ to say them in order to say what it wants to say. In short, when read symptomatically, Heart of Darkness says more about imperialism than Conrad, the spoiled adopted child of Great Britain and even of the Empire, might have wanted to say. But of course it is the text produced and not the text imagined that should be the object of a critical discourse. I hope that taken together these twelve chapters present a sustained examination of the various ways in which culture and power are entangled together. Although my focus here is mostly on power, we should never lose sight of the many ways power is resisted. As Michel Foucault points out, although we may always be entangled in relations of culture and power, ‘Where there is power there is resistance’ (2009: 315). Any form of politics, even a politics of reading, concedes too much to the prevailing structures of power if it remains blind to the potential for agency.

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C HA PT E R 1

Culture and Power: The Politics of Signification

My intention in this opening chapter is to outline the claim that the central object of study in cultural studies is culture and power. I will first explore and elaborate the development of the idea of culture as a realised signifying system as developed in the work of Raymond Williams. I will then chart the shift in Williams’s position from seeing culture as a network of shared meanings, to seeing it as consisting of both shared and contested meanings. The latter position, I will contend, is a result of the introduction in the 1970s of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony into work in cultural studies. It is the coming together of Williams’s concept of culture as a realised signifying system and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, I will argue, that situates culture and power as the central object of study in cultural studies. In all his definitions of culture (see especially Williams 1961, 1981, 1983), Williams works with an inclusive definition. That is, rather than study only what Matthew Arnold famously called ‘the best which has been thought and said’ (2009: 6), Williams is committed to examining ‘all forms of signification’ (1984: 240). This is a rejection of the Arnoldian/Leavisite mapping of the cultural field into culture/minority culture and anarchy/mass civilisation.1 The first, culture/minority culture, consisting of Great Art and, crucially, the ability to appreciate Great Art, demands serious consideration; while the second, anarchy/ mass civilisation, supposedly consisting of the remaining degraded mass culture, requires little more than a fleeting sociological glance – remaining long enough to condemn either the culture made for the ‘masses’ or (as in most versions) the culture of the ‘masses’. Against the Arnoldian/ Leavisite division of the cultural field into the culture/minority culture of an elite and anarchy/mass civilisation of the masses, Williams, writing in 1961, proposed the social definition of culture, in which culture is defined as:

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a particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour. The analysis of culture, from such a definition, is the clarification of the meanings and values implicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture . . . the characteristic forms through which members of the society communicate. (2009: 32)

This definition is crucial to the development of cultural studies as an interdisciplinary project for three reasons. First, Williams’s definition ‘democratically’ broadens the Arnoldian/Leavisite definition of culture, producing a more inclusive definition, in which instead of culture being defined as a body of only ‘elite’ texts and practices (ballet, opera, the novel, poetry, for example), it is redefined to include as culture television, cinema, pop music, advertising, for example. Second, culture as a particular way of life further broadens the definition of culture. So, for example, rather than culture being television as text, culture is embodied in the particular way of life that is involved in, say, the production, circulation and consumption of television. These two aspects of Williams’s definition are usually noted and the discussion ends there. However, there is a third element in Williams’s definition; one I think that is far more important for the intellectual formation of cultural studies than the other two: the connection he makes between culture and signification. The importance of a particular way of life is that it ‘expresses certain meanings and values’. Furthermore, cultural analysis from the perspective of this definition of culture ‘is the clarification of the meanings and values implicit in a particular way of life’. The emphasis in discussions of this passage is always on a particular way of life, but in my view, the idea of cultures as networks of meanings that are performed and made concrete (that is, culture as a realised signifying system) makes a far more significant contribution to the intellectual project of cultural studies. Moreover, culture as a realised signifying system is not reducible to a particular way of life, rather it is fundamental to the shaping and holding together of all ways of life. This is not to reduce everything to culture as a realised signifying system, but it is to insist that culture defined in this way should be seen ‘as essentially involved in all forms of social activity’ (Williams 1981: 13). As Williams further explains, ‘[T]he social organisation of culture, as a realised signifying system, is embedded in a whole range of activities, relations and institutions, of which some are manifestly “cultural”’ (1981: 209). While there is more to life than signifying systems, it is nevertheless the case that ‘it would . . . be wrong to suppose that we can ever usefully

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discuss a social system without including, as a central part of its practice, its signifying systems, on which, as a system, it fundamentally depends’ (1981: 207). In other words, signification is fundamental to all human activities. Nevertheless, while culture as a realised signifying system is ‘deeply present’ in all social activities, it remains the case that ‘other quite different human needs and actions are substantially and irreducibly present’. Moreover, in certain social activities signification becomes dissolved into what he calls ‘other needs and actions’ (1981: 209). To dissolve can mean two quite different things: to disappear, or to become liquid and form part of a solution. For example, if a parliament is dissolved it ceases to exist. However, when we dissolve sugar in tea, the sugar does not disappear; rather it becomes an invisible but fundamental part of the drink. It is the second usage of dissolve that best captures Williams’s intention. Nevertheless, the ambiguity of the term has allowed some critics to suggest that signification (that is, culture) is absent from certain human activities. This is a claim made by Terry Eagleton, for example: ‘But if car-making falls outside this definition, so does sport, which like any human practice involves signification, but hardly in the same cultural category as Homeric epic and graffiti’ (2000: 34). Social activities do not have to signify in the same way to fall within Williams’s definition of culture. Industrial manufacture and the works of Homer are not the same, do not signify in the same way, but they do both depend on signification. It may be true that car-making and sport do not signify in ways equivalent to, say, a sonnet by Shakespeare or a song by Lucinda Williams, but signification is still a fundamental part of both sport and the making of cars. We acknowledge as much when we use phrases like the culture of sport or the culture of the work place. In other words, signification exists in all aspects of human existence. Sometimes, it is the most important aspect of the activity, at other times it is overshadowed by more functional aspects. But it is never totally absent; culture always marks a human presence in the world. In my view, the logic of Williams’s position is this: signification saturates the social, but at times it simply becomes less visible in certain human activities. Poetry is more obviously about signification in a way that, say, plumbing appears not to be. But we know that without signification plumbing would not be possible (there is a culture of plumbing). Moreover, we also know that plumbing, as a human activity, has a variable history of signifying different things: civilisation, modernity, westernisation, class difference, for example. Culture, therefore, as defined by Williams, is not something restricted to the arts or to different forms of intellectual production, it is an aspect of all human activities.

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On the basis of Willliams’s redefinition of culture, cultural studies has gradually come to define culture as the production, circulation and consumption of meanings. As Stuart Hall explains: Culture . . . is not so much a set of things – novels and paintings or TV programmes and comics – as a process, a set of practices. Primarily, culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings – the ‘giving and taking of meaning’ – between the members of a society or group. (1997: 2)

According to this definition, cultures do not so much consist of, say, books. Rather, cultures are the shifting networks of signification in which, say, books are made to exist as meaningful objects. For example, if I pass a name card to someone in China, the polite way to do it is with two hands. If I pass it with one hand I may cause offence. This is clearly a matter of culture. However, the culture is not really in the gesture, it is in the meaning of the gesture. In other words, there is not anything essentially polite about using two hands; using two hands has been made to signify politeness. Nevertheless, signification has become embodied in a material practice, which can, in turn, produce material effects. As Williams insists, ‘Signification, the social creation of meanings . . . is . . . a practical material activity’ (1977: 34). Similarly, as Karl Marx observes, ‘[O]ne man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king’ (1976: 149). This relationship works because they share a culture in which such relations are meaningful. Outside such a culture, this relationship would have no meaning. Being a king, therefore, is not a gift of nature (or of God), but something constructed in culture; it is culture and not nature or God that gives these relations meaning; makes them signify, and, moreover, by signifying in a particular way they materially organise practice. To share a culture, according to this preliminary definition, is to interpret the world, make it meaningful and experience it as meaningful in recognisably similar ways. So-called ‘culture shock’ happens when we encounter radically different networks of meaning; that is, when our ‘natural’ or ‘common sense’ is confronted by someone else’s ‘natural’ or ‘common sense’. So far I have focused on culture as a system of shared meanings. This is more or less how culture tends to be presented in Williams’s early work. Although I started with a quotation from The Long Revolution (1961), the idea of culture as a realised signifying system is in fact first suggested in his essay ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (1958). The formulation is quite similar to that found in The Long Revolution, ‘A culture is common meanings, the

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product of a whole people’ (1989a: 8). Ten years later, in ‘The Idea of a Common Culture’ (1968), he is even more explicit about the ordinariness of the making of meanings, ‘[C]ulture is ordinary . . . there is not a special class, or group of men, who are involved in the creation of meanings and values, either in a general sense or in specific art and belief’ (1989c: 34). This recalls Gramsci’s point about intellectuals: ‘All men are intellectuals . . . but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals’ (2009: 77). But what is missing in Williams’s formulation is Gramsci’s insistence on relations of power – the many ways in which culture and power are entangled together. When Williams (1989a) said that ‘culture is ordinary’, he was drawing attention to the fact that meaning-making is not the privileged activity of the few, but something in which we are all involved. However, this does not of course mean that we are all involved in it in the same way; meaningmaking, like all other social activities, is always entangled in relations of power. While we may all be involved in the making of meanings, it is also the case that some meanings and the people who make them have more power than other people and other meanings. Having said this, Williams’s early work is not totally unaware that power features in the circulation and embedding of meanings. For example, in ‘The Idea of a Common Culture’ (1968) he observes: If it is at all true that the creation of meanings is an activity which engages all men, then one is bound to be shocked by any society which, in its most explicit culture, either suppresses the meanings and values of whole groups, or which fails to extend to these groups the possibility of articulating and communicating those meanings. (1989c: 35)

In fact it would be very unfair to Williams to suggest that even in this early work he is simply unaware of power. The essay ‘Communications and Community’ (1961) makes this absolutely clear: For in fact all of us, as individuals, grow up within a society, within the rules of a society, and these rules cut very deep, and include certain ways of seeing the world, certain ways of talking about the world. All the time people are being born into a society, shown what to see, shown how to talk about it. (1989b: 21–2)2

What is the case, however, is that he had not yet found a fully adequate way of articulating the relations between signification and power. The problem with Williams’s position in The Long Revolution, and in these other early texts, certainly from the perspective of the argument I am

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making about his work, is that it does not yet fully connect culture with power. In The Long Revolution he is still able to claim that culture is ‘the sharing of common meanings . . . [in] which meanings that are valued by the community are shared and made active’ (1965: 55). It is Williams’s commitment to the possibilities of democratic socialism (a commitment I share) that makes him insist that working people are also makers of meanings. In other words, to use the phrase that later became popular in cultural studies, he refuses to see ‘ordinary people’ as ‘cultural dupes’. The problem is that his democratic socialist impulse tends to trap him in a form populism (albeit a radical populism), in which power is made to appear almost invisible. Or to put it another way, there is agency here, but no recognition of structure. As Williams would later insist, we always need to keep in play the ‘making’ of meanings and the fact that we are also ‘made’ by meanings that are not of our making. To put it very simply, most meanings are not of our making, they are generated by dominant groups and dominant institutions. Moreover, these meanings tend to operate in the interests of dominant groups and dominant institutions. It is not until ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’ (1980; originally 1973), Marxism and Literature (1977) and Culture (1981) that Williams really insists that signifying systems consist of both shared and contested meanings. As he consistently argues from 1973 onwards, cultures are where we share and contest meanings of ourselves, of each other and of the social worlds in which we live. For instance, to return to an example given earlier, people may recognise the meaning of the relations of kingship but reject and struggle against these relations. Such rejections and acts of struggle are part of the processes Gramsci (1971) calls hegemony. After the introduction of hegemony into Williams’s work in the 1970s, culture as a realised signifying system is always understood as consisting of both shared and contested meanings. Moreover, it is when he embraces Gramsci’s concept of hegemony that he locates culture and power as the object of study in cultural studies. Gramsci uses hegemony to describe processes of power in which a dominant group does not merely rule by force but leads by consent: it exerts ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ (2009: 75). Hegemony involves a specific kind of consensus, a consensus in which a social group presents its own particular interests as the general interests of the society as a whole; it turns the particular into the general. Hegemony works by the transformation of potential antagonism into simple difference. This works in part through the circulation of meanings, meanings that reinforce dominance and subordination by seeking to fix the meaning of social relations. As Williams explains:

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It [hegemony] is a lived system of meanings and values – constitutive and constituting – which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people . . . It is . . . in the strongest sense a ‘culture’ [understood as a realised signifying system], but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes. (1977: 110)

In other words, hegemony involves the attempt to saturate the social with meanings that support the prevailing structures of power. In a hegemonic situation subordinate groups appear actively to support and subscribe to values, ideals, objectives, and so on, which incorporate them into the prevailing structures of power: relations of dominance and subordination. However, hegemony, as Williams observes, ‘does not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged’ (1977: 112). Therefore, although hegemony is characterised by high levels of consensus, it is never without conflict; that is, there is always resistance. However, for hegemony to remain successful conflict and resistance must always be channelled and contained – re-articulated in the interests of the dominant (see Laclau 1979, Hall 2009a and Storey 2009a). There are two conclusions we can draw from Williams’s concept of culture as a realised signifying system. First, although the world exists in all its enabling and constraining materiality outside culture, it is only in culture that the world can be made to mean. In other words, signification has a ‘performative effect’ (Austin 1967, Butler 1999, 2009); it helps construct the realities it appears only to describe. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1979, 2001, 2009) have had a significant influence on cultural studies in Britain, especially through their impact on the work of Stuart Hall. They use the word discourse in much the same way as Williams uses the word culture. According to Laclau and Mouffe: If I kick a spherical object in the street or if I kick a ball in a football match, the physical fact is the same, but its meaning is different. The object is a football only to the extent that it establishes a system of relations with other objects, and these relations are not given by the mere referential materiality of the objects, but are, rather, socially constructed. This systematic set of relations is what we call discourse. (2009: 144–5)

Williams would call these systematic relations culture. However, both positions share the view that to stress the discursive or the cultural is not to deny the materiality of the real. Again, according to Laclau and Mouffe:

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[T]he discursive character of an object does not, by any means, imply putting its existence into question. The fact that a football is only a football as long as it is integrated within a system of socially constructed rules does not mean that it ceases to be a physical object. (2009: 145)

In other words, objects exist independently of their discursive or cultural articulation, but it is only within discourse or culture that they can exist as meaningful objects in meaningful relations. For example, earthquakes exist in the real world, but whether they are constructed in terms of ‘natural phenomena’ or ‘expressions of the wrath of God’, depends upon the structuring of a discursive field. What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive condition of emergence. (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 108)

This way of thinking about culture and/or discourse is obviously not without its critics. Catherine Gallagher, for example, is critical of the way in which cultural studies in general, and Williams in particular, use the concept of culture. As she explains: The puzzling thing about these writings . . . is their almost programmatic refusal to tell us what culture is not. ‘Nature’ was once its most widely agreed-upon opposite, but since the category of nature is now itself often perceived as culturally created, even that broad distinction has been weakened. (1995: 308)

Williams had been aware of this type of objection since as early as 1961: [I]t impossible for us to assume that there is any reality experienced by man into which man’s own observations and interpretations do not enter . . . Yet equally, the facts of perception in no way lead us to a late form of idealism; they do not require us to suppose that there is no kind of reality outside the human mind; they point rather to the insistence that all human experience is an interpretation of the non-human reality . . . We have to think . . . of human experience as both objective and subjective, in one inseparable process . . . We create our human world. (1965: 36, 54)

To argue that culture is best understood as a realised signifying system is not a denial that the material world exists in all its constraining and enabling reality outside signification. As Williams makes very clear, ‘[T] he natural world exists whether anyone signifies it or not’ (1979: 67). But

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what is also absolutely the case is that the material (or the natural) world exists for us – and only ever exists for us – layered and articulated in signification. The second conclusion we can draw from seeing culture as a realised signifying system concerns the potential for struggle over meaning. Given that different meanings can be ascribed to the same ‘sign’ (that is, anything that can be made to signify), meaning-making (that is, the making of culture) is, therefore, always a potential site of struggle. The making of meaning is always confronted by what Valentin Volosinov identifies as the ‘multi-accentuality’ of the sign. Rather than being inscribed with a single meaning, a sign can be articulated with different ‘accents’; that is, it can be made to mean different things in different contexts, with different effects of power. The sign, therefore, is always a potential site of ‘differently oriented social interests’, and is often in practice ‘an arena of . . . struggle’. Those with power seek ‘to make the sign uni-accentual’ (1973: 23): they seek to make what is multi-accentual appear as if it could only ever be uniaccentual. When The Four Tops, for example, sing ‘It’s the same old song, but with a different meaning since you’ve been gone’ they illustrate what Volosinov means by the multi-accentuality of the sign.3 The song tells the story of how words and music that once signified a loving relationship have now been re-articulated to signify only pain and regret. Nothing about the materiality of the song has changed (‘It’s the same old song’), but what has changed is the context in which the song is heard and made meaningful (‘with a different meaning since you’ve been gone’). A new context has produced a new meaning, but the new meaning has a constituting effect: the new context generates a new practice (sadness, regret and accompanying forms of behaviour). In other words (in a less danceable discourse), a text is not the issuing source of meaning but a site where the articulation of meaning (variable meanings) can be produced as it is re-articulated in specific contexts. We continually acknowledge the multi-accentuality of the sign when we describe an interpretation as, for example, a feminist reading, a queer reading, a postcolonial reading, a post-Marxist reading. In such instances, we implicitly acknowledge that the text in question has been made to mean from the critical perspective of a particular reading practice. Gender identities are also an example of the multi-accentuality of the sign. Masculinity, for example, has real material conditions of existence (we might call these ‘biological’)4 but there are different ways of representing masculinity, different ways of making masculinity signify. Therefore, although masculinity may exist in biological conditions of existence, what it means, and the struggle over what it means, always takes place in

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culture. This is not simply a issue of semantic difference, a simple question of interpreting the world differently. The different ways of making masculinity mean are not an innocent game of semantics, they are a significant part of a power struggle over what might be regarded as ‘normal’ – an example of the politics of signification. In other words, it is about who can claim the power and authority to define social reality to make the world (and the things in it) mean in particular ways and with particular effects of power. Therefore, rather than engage in a fruitless quest for the true or essential meaning of something, cultural studies fixes its critical gaze on how particular meanings acquire their authority and legitimacy.5 This makes culture and power the primary object of study in cultural studies. As Hall explains: Meanings [i.e. cultures] . . . regulate and organise our conduct and practices – they help to set the rules, norms and conventions by which social life is ordered and governed. They are . . . therefore, what those who wish to govern and regulate the conduct and ideas of others seek to structure and shape. (1997: 4)

Meanings have a ‘material’ existence in that they help organise practice; they establish norms of behaviour. My examples of masculinities and the passing of name cards in China are both examples of signification organising practice. Moreover, as Hall indicates, those with power often seek to regulate the impact of meanings on practice. In other words, dominant modes of making the world meaningful are a fundamental aspect of the processes of hegemony. As Hall makes clear, The signification of events is part of what has to be struggled over, for it is the means by which collective social understandings are created – and thus the means by which consent for particular outcomes can be effectively mobilized. (2009a: 123)

On the basis of Willliams’s redefinition of culture, cultural studies has gradually come to define culture as the production, circulation and consumption of meanings. To paraphrase what Williams (1989b: 22–3)6 said about communication systems in ‘Communications and Community’ (1961), we cannot think of culture as a realised signifying system as something that happens after reality has occurred, because it is through culture, as a realised signifying system, that the reality of ourselves, the reality of our society, is constituted and contested – and always entangled in relations of culture and power.

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C HA PT E R 2

Matthew Arnold: The Politics of an Organic Intellectual

The focus of this chapter is Matthew Arnold’s politics. In short, my argument is that Arnold is best understood as an ‘organic intellectual’ of the Victorian middle class. He writes for this class, his own class, and, moreover, what he writes is always written with their interests in mind. As we shall see, this usually takes the form of urging upon the middle class the necessity to cultivate the attributes of a truly hegemonic class. It is from this perspective that I approach Arnold’s politics, knowing full well that for some critics even to speak of Arnold having politics is to be already beyond the boundaries of Arnoldian criticism. For example, in an otherwise excellent biography of Arnold, Park Honan takes Lionel Trilling to task for what he calls ‘his remorseless politicizing of Arnold’s thought’ (1981: 322). To me such a criticism is almost incomprehensible: I cannot read Arnold without the politics. His work on poetry, religion, culture, criticism, education – they all resound with politics. Arnold does not need to be politicised, it is he who does the politicising. What does it mean to call Matthew Arnold an organic intellectual? For Antonio Gramsci, intellectuals are distinguished by their social function. That is to say, all men and women have the capacity for intellectual endeavour, but only certain men and women have in society the function of intellectuals.1 Each class, as Gramsci explains, creates its own intellectuals.2 Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields. The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organisers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc. (1971: 5)

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Clearly then, the organic intellectual functions as an organiser (in the broadest sense of the word): this can be in the field of culture, production, political administration, and so on. It is their task to ‘determine and to organise the reform of moral and intellectual life’ (1971: 453). They are, in short, the dominant class’s ‘deputies’, striving to secure and sustain its hegemony. Hegemony is undoubtedly Gramsci’s key concept; it is the axis on which all of his other concepts turn. It has, however, partly no doubt because of its centrality, proved a very difficult concept to define.3 An understanding of Gramsci’s concept is best approached by a knowledge of what it is not. First and foremost, it is not the simple domination of one class by another. Similarly, it is not something that is imposed on one class by another. Nor is it ideological manipulation and indoctrination understood in any simple sense. So what is it? Perhaps the clearest way to answer is to construct the concept piece by piece. First of all, as Raymond Williams points out, ‘[I]t is a lived system of meanings and values – constitutive and constituting – which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming’ (1977: 110). It is, to remain with Williams, ‘in the strongest sense a “culture”, but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes’ (1977: 110). In other words, it is a homogenising force which aims to achieve a particular type of homogeneity; one structured to protect the position of the dominant class. Saying this, one should not be misled into the belief that it is static, something that once achieved can be taken for granted. On the contrary, hegemony can never be taken for granted; it is a process of organisation and negotiation. Consent must be won not once but continually: it is a process of renewal, recreation, defence and modification. And of course it will meet resistence. Limitations will be introduced, alterations made. In short, hegemony always presupposes counter-hegemony. This means there must be compromises. Subordinate groups need to be induced not only to accept their subordination but to actually to ‘support’ it. To stress again, hegemony does not mean the imposition of the ideology of the dominant class upon that of the subordinate class. As Gramsci indicates, politics and history cannot be understood as ‘a continuous Marche de dupes, a competition in conjuring and slight of hand’ (1971: 164). It is never a matter of simply inculcating in subordinate classes a false consciousness. Hegemony is a process in which a synthesis of opposing class forces is produced. It should not be forgotten, however, that such a synthesis is weighted ultimately in the interests of the dominant class. As Gramsci explains: Undoubtedly the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be

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exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed – in other words, that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economiccorporate kind. But there is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential; for though hegemony is ethicalpolitical, it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity. (1971: 161)

For a class to attain the position of a truly hegemonic class it must have reached a certain level ‘of homogeneity, self-awareness and organisation’ (1971: 181).4 According to Gramsci, this is the culmination of three ‘moments’: the economic-corporate; the phase of class solidarity; and the hegemonic. A class first constitutes itself on the basis of certain common economic interests, which is then followed by an awareness of these interests, giving rise to an awareness of the general economic interests of the class as a whole. The third moment, constituting a move from the purely economic to the political, is the establishment of an awareness of the unity of the economic, political, intellectual and cultural needs of the class. It is this awareness that gives rise to the need to go beyond the purely corporate interests of the class, to engage with the interests of subordinate groups and classes, that marks the beginnings of hegemony. This is not a development which succeeds its establishment as a ruling class; it is the necessary prerequisite for such a victory. Gramsci insists on this: A social group can and indeed must, already exercise ‘leadership’ before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power); it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to ‘lead’ as well. (1971: 57–8)

Economic domination alone is clearly not enough. As we shall see later, Arnold repeatedly warns the middle class that its economic power is on its own insufficient to guarantee it hegemony. A class must rise above its economic interests and discover the interests it shares with other groups and classes and on this basis put itself forward as their intellectual and moral leaders – situating itself at the ‘intellectual centre’ of society. [I]t must be capable, in Gramsci’s terminology, of creating a ‘national-popular’. Hegemony presupposes a national popular dimension as well as a class dimension. As Gramsci points out, ‘it is in the concept of hegemony that those exigencies which are national in character are knotted together’ (1971: 241). A class must take account of national traditions, characteristics and circumstances, but it must also attempt to saturate society with

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principles of morality, politics, religion, philosophy and so on, which place its own development on the ‘universal plane’ of society’s general development. A class can only transcend the economic-corporate phase by taking into account the interests of other classes and social forces. It must find ways to combine its own interests with those of other social groups. Therefore, it must be prepared to make compromises in order to win consent to its leading position. This does not mean that it should simply deceive. As we have noted already, politics and history are not a ‘marche de dupes’. Genuine concessions must be made if hegemony is to be both secured and sustained. Clearly a class cannot become or remain hegemonic if it confines itself only to class interests. It must maintain what Gramsci calls a ‘compromise equilibrium’ (2009: 76), while situating its own development on the ‘universal plane’ of society’s development as a whole. It is to this task, the securing and sustaining of hegemony, that organic intellectuals must address themselves. However, it should not be supposed that they simply reflect the interests of the dominant class. On the contrary, they are the active organisers of such interests. Arnold, as I hope to show, is such an organiser; to an extent that justifies regarding him as an organic intellectual. Arnold certainly thought of himself as ‘one of his age’s intellectual deliverers’ (Super I: 20). Familiarity with his letters makes this perfectly clear. According to William Madden, Arnold had a ‘critical sense of duty as a member of the new intelligentsia’ (1967: vii). In Culture and Anarchy (1869), he makes clear the focus of his intellectual attention: ‘Almost all my attention has naturally been concentrated on my own class, the middle class, with which I am in closest sympathy, and which has been, besides, the great power of our day’ (1960a: 101). In A French Eton (1864), he expressed his task admirably: to convert ‘a middle class, narrow, ungenial, and unattractive’ into ‘a cultured, liberalised, ennobled, transformed middle class’, one to which the working class ‘may with joy direct its aspirations’ (1954: 343). From the 1860s onwards Arnold became increasingly worried about the prospect of England declining into ‘a sort of greater Holland’. In a letter to his younger sister, Frances, written in November 1865, he gives a clear exposition of his fears. I have a conviction that there is a real, an almost imminent danger of England . . . declining into a sort of greater Holland, for want of what I must call ideas, for want of perceiving how the world is going and must go, and preparing herself accordingly. This conviction haunts me, and at times even overwhelms me with depression; I would rather not live to see the change

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come to pass, for we shall all deteriorate under it. While there is still time I will do all I can, and in every way, to prevent its coming to pass. (1896I: 360)

One year later, in My Countrymen, Arnold offered evidence of the decline. ‘Palmerston found England the first power in the world’s estimation, and leaves . . . her the third, after France and the United States’ (Super V: 9). A little later in the same essay, Arnold is lectured by his alter ego, Arminius: ‘Unless you change, unless your middle class grows more intelligent, you will tell upon the world less and less, and end by being a second Holland’ (Super V: 27). Finally, in a letter declining an invitation to participate in an eiesteddfod in Chester, he identified the principal source of his fears: We in England have come to that point when the continued advance and greatness of our nation is threatened by one cause, and one cause above all. Far more than by the helplessness of an aristocracy whose day is fast coming to an end, far more than by the rawness of a lower class whose day is only just beginning, we are imperilled by what I call the Philistinism of our middle class. (1960b: 113)5

This letter is interesting not only because it pinpoints the cause of his worries, but also because it presents in embryonic form the three major themes in Arnold’s politics; the continuing, and sought for, marginalisation of the aristocracy; the need to prepare for the increasing significance of the working class in formal politics; and the need, above all, to turn the middle class into a truly hegemonic class. To the Victorians their age was one of transition. The words ‘transition’ and ‘transitional’ are to be found in Arnold and in the work of a wide variety of his contemporaries.6 But, as Walther Houghton points out, it was in many ways a curious transition, ‘[T]he past which they had outgrown was not the Romantic period and not even the eighteenth century. It was the Middle Ages . . . from their perspective it was the medieval tradition from which they had irrevocably broken’ (1957: 1–2). For some (those whom Gramsci calls traditional intellectuals) it was a transition from the safety of traditional institutions and ideas into a realm of chaos, doubt and uncertainty. While Arnold might have the occasional personal regret about such ‘decline’ and ‘destruction’, he was acutely aware that such changes could not, and should not, be resisted. The modern spirit dictated such alterations: society had outgrown these beliefs and institutions. Moreover, to use a favourite Arnoldian term, they were ‘inadequate’ to the needs of the modern age. Principal amongst them was the aristocracy.

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According to Arnold the aristocracy belonged to a time when society was still forming. It had been their historic mission to provide a bulwark against social disintegration following the collapse of the Roman Empire, but, because of what Arnold calls their lack of sympathy for ideas, they were no longer adequate as a ruling class in modern times. As he informed the Ipswich Working Men’s College in 1879: ‘It seems to me, it has long seemed to me, that the circumstances being now quite changed . . . the natural function is gone for which an aristocratic class with great landed estates was required’ (1973: 74). Although the time for an aristocracy had gone, the aristocracy itself had not. Arnold’s efforts to bid this unwelcomed guest goodbye were at times very radical indeed. He attacked the House of Lords as a chamber ‘representing the feeling and interests of the class of landowners almost exclusively’ (Super X: 221). In its place he argued for an Elected Second Chamber. Arnold also proposed ‘the extinction of title after death of the holder’ (Super X: 214). Both measures, together with his proposals in Equality to disperse aristocratic property, were designed to banish the aristocracy to history. But in what is a Duke of Norfolk or an Earl [of] Warwick, dressed in broadcloth and tweed, and going about his business or pleasure in hansom cabs and railways like the rest of us? Imagination herself would entreat him to take himself out of the way, and to leave us to the Norfolks and Warwicks of history. (Super X: 213)

In order to banish the aristocracy to history the middle class had to be prepared for power. As Arnold told Richard Cobden, ‘[T]ill the middle class is transformed, the aristocratic class . . . will rule’ (1896I: 261).7 Arnold’s attitude towards his own class, the middle class, has been, in my opinion, the subject of much misrepresentation. It has given rise to the myth that Arnold attacked the middle class in terms which make him appear, however ludicrous it may seem, as a kind of moralistic and romantic, and therefore, acceptable, version of Karl Marx. To the superficial eye there may indeed be similarities. But the differences are fundamental: Marx attacked the middle class as representatives of an oppressive and exploitative system; Arnold attacked them to change them, in order to secure their future – not close it. Certainly he called them Philistines. Certainly Culture and Anarchy, his most widely read work, has some rather unpleasant things to say about them. If, however, we move from this book into the whole gamut of Arnold’s work we get a very different view. All Arnold’s optimism for the future is based on this class; all his pessimism is based on this class failing to secure its future. The attacks therefore (and they are not as frequent as some critics suggest) are part of a strategy

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to transform the English Philistine into the English ruling class. To end the pretensions of the aristocracy and to assimilate the aspirations of the working class, this is, according to Arnold, the middle class’s historic mission. In short, Arnold was a middle-class critic of the middle class; his criticism was not intended to topple it, but to prevent it being toppled. The centrality of the middle class in Arnold’s thought should in fact be beyond question. As he said himself, ‘I write . . . above all for the reader of that class . . . which I am most solicitous to carry with me – the middle class’ (1973: 136). Certainly his principal concern is not to praise, but to change it (although as we shall see he is not averse to eulogy): ‘The master thought by which my politics are governed is . . . this, – the thought of the bad civilisation of the English Middle Class’ (Super IX: 137). This is ‘the great work to be done . . . a work of raising its whole level of civilisation and, in order to do this, of transforming the British Puritan’ (Super VIII: 346). So what is wrong with the ‘civilisation’ of the Victorian middle class? Arnold can be extremely critical. But to repeat, it is necessary to understand why the criticisms are made to appreciate fully Arnold’s position as an organic intellectual of the Victorian middle class. In general he bemoans the middle class’s want of culture. It is deceived by its ‘flatterers’ into reliance on a defective civilisation, which consists of a ‘defective type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low sense of manners’ (Super IX: 296). Culture and Anarchy contains a thumbnail sketch of the English Philistine: The graver self of one kind of Philistine likes fanaticism, business, and money-making; his more relaxed self, comfort and tea meetings. Of another kind of Philistine, the graver self likes rattening; the relaxed self, deputations, or hearing Mr. Odger speak. (1960a: 107–8).8

The problem, as Arnold perceives it, is that the English middle class is unfit to rule. But it must rule; the modern spirit demands it. Arnold’s concern therefore does not stem from the thought that it might not rule, only that its rule might be shortlived. He is, however, confident that changes are taking place that will situate the middle class at ‘the centre of the intellectual life of this country’ (1973: 155). Arnold’s fear is that its occupancy of this position will be a brief one. The middle class cannot assume rule as they are at present – it is impossible. And yet in the rule of this immense class . . . lies our future . . . But our middle class as it is at present, cannot take the lead which belongs to it. It has not the qualifications . . . they have lived in a narrow world of their

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own, without openness and flexibility of mind, without any notion of the variety of powers and possibilities in human life. They know neither man nor the world and on all the arduous questions presenting themselves to our age – political questions, social questions, the labour question, the religious question – they have at present no light, and can give none. I say, then, they cannot fill their right place as they are now (1973: 80–1).

It is Arnold’s mission, as he sees it, to assist them to a condition where they can ‘fill their right place’, which is of course that of a truly hegemonic ruling class. If it does not achieve this, the consequence will indeed be grave. If it persists with ‘its industry and its Puritanism, and nothing more’ it will never be able to make way beyond a certain point, will never be able to divide power with the aristocratic class, much less to win for itself a preponderance of power. While it only tries to affirm its actual self, to impose its actual self it has no charm for men’s minds, and can achieve no great triumphs (1973: 158).

It is what Arnold calls their lack of ‘charm for men’s minds’ that might prove most disastrous. If they remain as they are, with their narrow, harsh, unintelligent, and unattractive spirit and culture, [they] will almost certainly fail to mould or assimilate the masses below them . . . [the middle classes are] their natural educators and initiators . . . if these classes cannot win their sympathy or give them their direction, society is in danger of falling into anarchy (1954: 566).

For at least part of Arnold’s definition of anarchy, we should read democracy without the safeguard of a strong middle class State. He was extremely pessimistic, to say the least, about the capacity of two middleclass shibboleths – laissez faire economics and utilitarianism – to provide a suitable (that is, safe) model for mass democracy. It was therefore necessary, as Arnold perceived it, to wean the middle class from certain outmoded beliefs and ideologies. This meant an assault on the middle class’s ‘want of flexibility’, its ‘inaptitude for seeing more than one side of a thing’ (1960a: 49). The principal reason for such rigidity was, according to Arnold, the predominance in the middle class of Hebraism over Hellenism. Although their aim is the same – ‘mans perfection or spiritual salvation’ (1960a: 130) – they each follow a different course: ‘Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience’ (1960a: 131). The first is governed by ‘spontaneity of consciousness’; the second by ‘strictures of conscience’ (1960a: 132). Admirable in its way,

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Hebraism, nevertheless, tends towards rigidity. In an age of transition, to fix one’s course to a dogma, say, like laissez faire, or the principle of the minimum State, is to risk losing sight of ‘the way things are going’ and as a consequence to lose control of the political situation. The middle class, Arnold suggests, have, as a result of their adherence to Hebraism, ‘developed one side of their humanity at the expense of all others, and have become incomplete and mutilated men in consequence’ (1960a: 11). That they fall short of ‘harmonious perfection’ is to be lamented, but there is worse: by not following ‘the true way of salvation . . . that way is made the harder for others to find’. As a result, ‘general perfection is put further off out of reach, and the confusion and perplexity in which our society now labours is increased’ (1960a: 11). Beneath the philosophical rhetoric there lurks a hard political argument. Unless the middle class broaden their outlook they will fail to assimilate the working class; fail to commit them to the new industrial and urban civilisation. In simple terms, the middle class must set an example; oppression is not enough, there must be willing, even if organised, consent (that is, hegemony). The failure to achieve this will surely result in further confusion and perplexity, which in the context of Arnold’s appeal means more Hyde Park riots, Sheffield outrages and Fenian bombings. Chief amongst such rigidities, in Arnold’s opinion, was utilitarianism. As Perry Anderson points out, ‘[I]ts fanatically bleak materialism ipso facto precluded it from creating that cultural and value system which is the mark of a hegemonic ideology’ (1966: 33). Arnold realised this, hence his vigorous advocacy of culture. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold describes Benthamism as ‘an inadequate conception of the religious side in man’ (1960a: 31). And a little later he writes of ‘the inadequacy of his mind and ideas for supplying the rule of human society, for perfection’ (1960a: 68).9 ‘By avoiding Benthamism,’ as Arnold explains, ‘culture makes us also avoid Miallism’ (1960a: 31). Arnold’s attack on men such as Edward Miall10 has often been presented as examples of Arnold’s general distaste for the middle class. Nothing could be further from the truth. Arnold’s attacks are made in the hope of breaking the influence of those he describes, in a letter to his sister, Mrs Forster, as ‘the old stagers (of) . . . vulgar liberalism’ (1896I: 249). In another letter, this time to Richard Cobden, Arnold reveals his optimism at the possibility of success: ‘[M]en like these have been . . . the kernel of the middle class. But a new generation is beginning to show itself in this class, with new impulses astir in them, more freedom and accessibility of spirit; it is on them one must work’ (Armytage 1949: 253). But before such work could take root it was necessary to break the

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influence of Miallism. In this Arnold was determined: ‘I mean . . . to deliver the middle class out of the hands of their Dissenting ministers’ (1896I: 264). We discussed earlier Gramsci’s notion that a class must transend the economic-corporate phase if it is to become truly hegemonic. Gramsci has himself commented on the development of bourgeois hegemony in England: ‘The new social grouping that grew up on the basis of modern industrialisation shows a remarkable economic-corporate development but advances only gropingly in the intellectual-political field’ (1971: 18). Arnold recognised the economic achievements of bourgeois society. But he knew that they were not absolute. He was acutely aware of the contradictions involved in speaking of such achievements when certain sections of the population lived in poverty and squalour.11 Moreover, he questioned the permanence of a civilisation built on such foundations. He warned that ‘the mere unfettered pursuit of the production of wealth, and the mechanical multiplying, for this end, of manufacture and population, threatens to create for us, if it has not created already, those vast, miserable unmanageable masses of sunken people’ (1960a: 193; my italics). This would be the inevitable result of pursuing only class interests. As he points out in Equality (1879): ‘An individual or a class, concentrating their efforts upon their own well-being exclusively, do but beget troubles both for others and for themselves also’ (1954: 580). The key word is ‘exclusively’. Arnold is not seeking to deny the achievements of capitalism, merely warning of its vulnerability, that is, the discontent of the working class (it is the troubles of ‘others’ that will lead to the troubles of ‘themselves’). In the Preface (1868) to Schools and Universities on the Continent, Arnold is explicit on this point. ‘[T]he labour questions which embarrass us owe their gravity and danger’, at least in part, ‘to the inadequacy of our middle class for dealing with such questions’. They appear incapable of ‘creating new relations between themselves and the working class when the old relations fail’ (Super IV: 28). Arnold was at pains to convince a middle class ‘drugged with business’ (Super V: 19) that unless it broadened its power base to include the interests of other classes its reign would indeed be a short one. As he told an audience at the opening of the winter session of the Liverpool University College in 1882: Money-making is not enough by itself. Industry is not enough by itself. Seriousness is not enough by itself . . . The need in man for intellect and knowledge, his desire for beauty, his instinct for society, and for pleasurable and graceful forms of society, require to have their stimulus felt also, felt and satisfied. (Super X: 83).

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Arnold probably had in mind the kind of bourgeois gentleman that Freidrich Engels met in Manchester in 1844: I once went into Manchester with such a bourgeois, and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful condition of the working people’s quarters, and asserted that I had never seen so ill-built a city. The man listened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we parted: ‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here: good morning, sir’. (Engels 1969: 301–2)

But it was not all gloom. Arnold was confident that the middle class could be saved. It was on this basis that he approached his work. As we noted earlier, he was not above eulogy: The Puritan middle class with all its faults is still the best stuff in this nation. Some have hated and persecuted it, many have flattered and derided it – flattered it that while they deride it they may use it – I have believed in it. It is the best stuff in this nation, and in its success is our best hope for the future. But to succeed it must be transformed (Super VIII: 347). In that great class [the middle class] strong by its numbers, its energy, its industry, strong by its freedom from frivolity, not by any law of nature prone to immobility of mind . . . in that class, liberalised by an ampler culture, admitted to a wider sphere of thought, living by larger ideas, with its provincialism dissipated, its intolerance cured, its pettiness purged away – what a power there will be, what an element of new life for England! Then let the middle class rule, then let it affirm its own spirit, when it has thus perfected itself (1973: 161–2).

This was Arnold’s vision of the truly hegemonic class. It can be summed up in his description of what characterised the English aristocracy in its ‘flowering time’. ‘I am thinking,’ he said, ‘of those public and conspicuous virtues by which the multitude is captivated and led – lofty spirit, commanding character, exquisite culture’ (1954: 556). We discussed earlier the Victorian’s perception of their age as one of transition. For many Victorians this meant a journey into doubt and uncertainty. While many of Arnold’s contemporaries wanted to call a halt to history, others claimed the end had actually been reached: the bourgeois millennium had arrived, ushered in by the gaining of various freedoms, political, religious and commercial. Culture and Anarchy, is in many ways an attack on this kind of complacency. For instance, Arnold cites a remark by John Roebuck, a radical politician of the Benthamite school:

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I look around me and ask what is the state of England? Is not every man able to say what he likes? I ask you whether the world over, or in past history, there is anything like it? Nothing. I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last. (1960a: 121).

For Arnold, praying is clearly inadequate. What is needed is preparation and organisation; the moral and intellectual leadership that is the necessary prerequisite of a truly hegemonic class. Therefore, while others worried about the disintegration of religion as a hegemonic force, Arnold sought to revitalise it, and where necessary, to supplement it with poetry. While others stood in the way of democracy, Arnold was astute enough to realise that industrial capitalism made such a course almost inevitable, and therefore, instead of raging against history, he sought ‘timely preparation’ for it. Again with education, while some were reluctant to ‘educate’ the working class for fear of provoking what Arnold called a ‘servants revolt’, he saw the advantages of such a course. Moreover, and more important in Arnold’s opinion, he perceived the political necessity of establishing a state-supervised system of education for the middle class.12 The past belonged to the aristocracy, the distant future could be offered to the working class, but the present belonged to the middle class. It was theirs to have and to hold. But to do so would require more than complacent allegiance to outmoded beliefs and ideologies. The great middle classes of this country are conscious of no weakness . . . they believe that the future belongs to them. No one esteems them more than I do; but those who esteem them most, and who most believe in their capabilities, can render them no better service than by pointing out in what they underrate their deficiencies, and how their deficiencies, if unremedied, may impair their future (1954: 564).

It was his class and he was determined to change it; in short, to transform it into a truly hegemonic class in the full Gramscian sense. It is his assumption of this role that justifies calling Matthew Arnold an organic intellectual of the Victorian middle class.

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C HA PT E R 3

Rockin’ Hegemony: West Coast Rock and America’s War in Vietnam

The West Coast Counterculture The counterculture was a social movement consisting of a variety of predominantly middle-class cultural groupings – hippies, yippies, freaks, heads, flower children, student radicals and so on – who between 1965 and 1970 attempted to establish a non-competitive, non-belligerent ‘alternative’ society. It was a culture constructed around three factors; all, in different ways, political: a particular type of drug use (LSD);1 a new type of music (folk-rock, psychedelic rock, then just rock); and anti-war politics. My focus here will be mainly on the relationship between music and opposition to America’s war in Vietnam. The counterculture came together on anti-war demonstrations, at loveins, happenings and, perhaps most of all, at free music festivals. Despite its fluidity, it is possible to distinguish between those who preferred the peace sign to the clenched fist, and spoke about America’s war in Vietnam in terms of moral outrage, rather than as a bloody example of US imperialism. The border separating the two groups could be extremely fluid. Individuals often straddled both, or drifted from one side to the other. At other times the differences became very marked. After the ‘Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam’ march in San Francisco, 15 April 1967, Country Joe McDonald of Country Joe and The Fish made the telling remark: ‘Man, I learned one thing that afternoon. There’s more than one revolution’ (quoted in Peck 1985: 61). Bands like Country Joe and The Fish, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors and the Byrds drifted from one side to the other. In the words of Iain Chambers, they ‘vibrated between the harsh edges of American politics and the utopian gestures of an alternative America’ (Chambers 1985: 94). One has to be careful not to press this distinction too far. Too often this apparent rejection of politics has been misconstrued. What was usually being rejected was the conventional political structures

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and channels of American society. For example, before Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young played to the ’15 November Moratorium Day’ rally at San Francisco in 1969, Stephen Stills announced to the crowd: ‘Politics is bullshit. Richard Nixon is bullshit. Spiro Agnew is bullshit. Our music isn’t bullshit’ (quoted in Denisoff 1972: 157). Stills is not saying he is apolitical, only that he rejects conventional politics. He could hardly mean otherwise, the Moratorium being clearly a political event. The counterculture developed around the colleges and universities of the West Coast. Student numbers had doubled between 1960 and 1966. The total student population was, by the mid-1960s, around 6 million. ‘Students were so numerous,’ according to Abe Peck, ‘that they seemed to constitute a new social class’ (Peck 1985: 20).2 This is in fact the argument Theodore Roszak makes in The Making of a Counter Culture: Just as the dark satanic mills of early industrialization concentrated labor and helped create the class-consciousness of the proletariat, so the university campus, where up to thirty thousand students may be gathered, has served to crystallize the group identity of the young – with the important effect of mingling freshmen of seventeen and eighteen with graduate students well away in their twenties (1971: 28).

It is easy to dismiss the counterculture’s ‘revolution’ as petty-bourgeois: idealist principles, utopian visions, yet another example of a subversive Bohemian variant of bourgeois individualism (see Middleton and Muncie 1981: 88). While some of this is clearly recognisable, there is undoubted power in the energy of its utopian politics. Its solutions may indeed have been inadequate, but it did highlight real problems, and help sustain real opposition to a real war. The counterculture was certainly not beyond criticism: if it is true, as Antonio Gramsci insisted, that ruling groups cannot wholly and absolutely absorb and incorporate subordinate groups into the dominant order, it is also true that subordinate groups cannot ever really drop out of the dominant order. Despite its claims to being an ‘alternative’ society, the counterculture remained firmly sited in capitalist America, subjected to its demands and desires. Certainly, at times, the connection seemed near to breaking point. But the tension soon eased, the profits flowed and the counterculture withered.

West Coast Rock: Resistance Rock music must not be seen apart from the movement among young people to reshape their lives . . . As such it is a profoundly political form of music,

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one that opts for a different form of social organization, one that lets people love rather than makes them go to war (Eisen 1969: xiv).

West Coast rock was mostly the product of men and women who had started out as folk musicians. Around 1965, following the example of Bob Dylan, they electrified their instruments.3 The Byrds had formed in 1964, but it was only with their recording of Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ in 1965 that they began to exist as anything other than a collection of folk musicians. Country Joe and The Fish, The Doors, The Great Society, Jefferson Airplane and The Warlocks (who changed their name to The Grateful Dead in 1966) all emerged in 1965. Early the following year, they were joined by Buffalo Springfield and Big Brother and The Holding Company. In 1968, as the West Coast counterculture was beginning to crumble, its first and last ‘supergroup’ was formed, Crosby, Stills and Nash, becoming in 1969 Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. West Coast rock’s folk heritage was never simply a question of music, more a way of looking at the world and the significance of music in it. A general sense that music was politics by other means was carried over from the folk circuit. This can be clearly heard for example in Country Joe McDonald’s ‘I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag’, undoubtedly the best anti-war song produced by the counterculture. Using irony and hyperbole, the war effort is presented as a distorted extension of the American Dream. The result is a song which holds up to ridicule the ugly triumvirate of capitalism, imperialism and war. Another influence, carried over from folk music, was the belief that they belonged to an alternative community rather than an entertainment industry. For the political folk singers music had been a means of class mobilisation, of organisation, the muse of solidarity. For the counterculture it was the central and unique mode of political and cultural expression. Put simply, the culture was built around the music. It was the means by which it discovered and reproduced itself. Rather than mass meetings and rallies, its organising events were festivals and dances. Its ‘coming out’ party took place at the ‘A Tribute to Doctor Strange’ dance held in San Francisco on 16 October 1965. Significantly, the same day marked the first big West Coast demonstration against America’s war in Vietnam, the Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee march to the navy installation at Oakland. The Doctor Strange dance featured Jefferson Airplane, the march was ‘entertained’ by the band that was soon to become Country Joe and The Fish, The Instant Action Jug Band. Luria Castell, one of the organisers of the Doctor Strange dance, told Ralph Gleason, music critic with the San Francisco Chronicle, ‘Music is the most beautiful way

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to communicate, it’s the way we’re going to change things’ (quoted in Gleason 1969: 3). Gleason, who attended the dance, described it as ‘a hippie happening, which signified the linkage of the political and social hip movements’ (1969: 6). West Coast rock addressed its audience as members, or potential members, of an ‘alternative’ society. Part of the sense of belonging involved an attitude to the Vietnam War. Without exception all the major musicians of the counterculture performed material opposing the war in Vietnam. The prevalence of this anti-war feeling was such that in the context of the counterculture all songs were in a sense against the war. What I mean is this: the fact that Country Joe and The Fish, for example, performed songs against the war was enough to make all their songs seem implicitly against the war. Opposition to the war was the central articulating principle of the counterculture.4 Music expressed the attitudes and values of the counterculture, while at the same time constituting and reproducing its values. Beneath a variety of slogans – ‘Make Love, Not War’ being, perhaps, the most famous – it engaged in a counter-hegemonic struggle over the meaning of the war. West Coast rock provided counter-explanations of the war and the draft. It helped set limits on the ability of Johnson-Nixon America to sustain its war in Vietnam. At its most powerful its utopian politics produced a cultural practice in which the present could be judged from the perspective of an alternative future. ‘Unknown Soldier’, for example, by The Doors is a song very much in this utopian mode. The song fades to the sound of celebratory bells and a jubilant voice proclaiming that ‘The war is over’. This is classic education of desire: the depiction of an imagined situation in order to produce the desire for such a situation in actuality (see Anderson 1980: 161). The fact that the West Coast musicians were, in the main, of the same ethnicity, class and generation (white, middle-class and mostly under 25) as their audience, reinforced their links to the counterculture. As Paul Kanter put it, referring both to Jefferson Airplane and the counterculture in general, ‘We’re middle-class kids. We’re spoiled and we’re selfish and some of that hangs over. That’s the way you grow up’ (quoted in Gleason 1969: 131). Despite, or perhaps as a consequence of, its class origins, the counterculture attempted to overturn commercial pop’s ideal of music as a private one-to-one experience. It insisted instead that music should be a collective event. Its favourite pronoun was ‘we’, its favourite adverb ‘together’. Perhaps the band that most epitomised this spirit was Jefferson Airplane. Songs such as ‘Volunteers’ and ‘We Can Be Together’ perfectly illustrate this ideal.

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West Coast rock advocated and articulated a culture in which the distance between producer and consumer was minimal. After the Doctor Strange dance, Paul Kantner made the following remark: ‘It was like a party. The audience often far overshadowed any of the bands, and the distance between the two was not that great. Grace [Slick] used to say that the stage was just the least crowded place to stand’ (quoted in Sculatti and Seay 1985: 48). This is a view shared by Ralph Gleason. On the Golden Gate free festivals: ‘At the Free Fairs you could see people like the Jefferson Airplane wandering around, just members of the crowd like anyone else, enjoying themselves. For the first time to my knowledge, an emerging mass entertainment style insisted that its leading figures were human beings’ (quoted in Gleason 1969: 38). And on the Doctor Strange dance: ‘That night you couldn’t tell the bands from the people. It was obvious that the bands represented the community itself’ (1969: 9). Jim Morrison of The Doors expressed the relationship thus: ‘A Doors concert is a public meeting called by us for a special kind of dramatic discussion and entertainment . . . When we perform, we’re participating in the creation of a world, and we celebrate that creation with the audience’ (quoted in Baxandall 1972: 386). As I have already indicated, the West Coast bands regarded their songs as ‘ideological forms’ (Marx 2009: 60), struggling to win the world to the ways of the counterculture. As Grace Slick told Gleason, ‘Music makes it easier to get your ideas across . . . being anti-war, music is a pleasant way of getting your ideas across’ (quoted in Gleason 1969: 159). The musicians’ assumption of this role, and the audiences’ acceptance that they were in fact playing such a role, gives the bands a striking resemblance to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual.5 Because we are in the main speaking of bands rather than individuals, we must modify Gramsci’s concept and speak of collective organic intellectuals. A good example of how this worked in practice can be heard in Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’, a song inspired by an early clash between the police and the counterculture: the breaking up of a peaceful anti-war demonstration in Los Angeles. The song does not simply narrate events, but offers a warning about the possible cost of commitment to the counterculture: There’s something happenin’ here What it is ain’t exactly clear There’s a man with a gun over there Tellin’ me I’ve got to beware I think it’s time we STOP, children What’s that sound? Everybody look what’s goin’ down.

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Another example is ‘Draft Morning’ by The Byrds. The song interrogates the ‘draft’ both lyrically and musically. It poses the question, within a musical structure that plays the cacophony of war against the peace and tranquillity of a West Coast morning, ‘Why should it happen?’ Other examples could be cited. But to repeat my argument, the point I am making is this: opposition to the war was genuine as articulated by the major West Coast bands at the centre of the counterculture. They were not following fashions and fads, but functioning as collective organic intellectuals, articulating one of the counterculture’s chief organising principles; America’s war in Vietnam was wrong and, therefore, involvement should be opposed and resisted.

West Coast Rock: Incorporation West Coast rock was a music that had developed from the ‘bottom’ up, and not music imposed from the ‘top’ down. But like all popular cultural initiatives under capitalism, it faced three possible futures: marginalisation, disappearance or incorporation into the system’s profit-making concerns. West Coast rock’s future was incorporation. By 1968, Michael Phillips, the vice-president of the Bank of California, was claiming that all the indications were that rock music was destined to become the fourth most important industry in San Francisco. What had started as a celebration of ‘flowers that grow so incredibly high’6 was being high-jacked by those who ‘Cultivate their flows to be/ Nothing more than something They invest in’.7 As I said earlier, the counterculture regarded its rock musicians as part of the community. To remain representative of the community they had to remain part of the community. Therefore, involvement with the music industry was greeted with great suspicion (at least initially) by both audience and artists. Commercial success threatened to break the links with the community. The problem was this: in order to make records musicians, however alternative, have to engage with capitalism in the form of the private ownership of the music industry. If you want to continue making records you have to continue making profits. Your audience is no longer the community, but the marketplace. Moreover, musicians have no control over the use of profits, a fact that shocked Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones: We found out, and it wasn’t for years that we did, that all the bread [money] we made for Decca was going into making black boxes that go into American Air Force bombers to bomb fucking North Vietnam. They took the bread

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we made for them and put it into the radar section of their business. When we found that out, it blew our minds. That was it. Goddam, you find out you’ve helped kill God knows how many thousands of people without even knowing it (quoted in Harker 1980: 103).

Such revelations pointed to a basic contradiction at the heart of the counterculture’s music. On the one hand, it could inspire people to resist the draft and organise against the war in Vietnam, while on the other hand, it made profits that could be used to support the war effort. While Jefferson Airplane sang ‘All your private property/ Is target for your enemy/ And your enemy/ Is We’ (‘We Can Be Together’), RCA made money. In other words, the proliferation of Jefferson Airplane’s anti-capitalist politics increased the profits of their capitalist record company. This is a clear example of the process Gramsci calls hegemony: the way dominant groups in society negotiate oppositional voices onto a terrain which secures for the dominant groups a continued position of leadership.8 West Coast rock was not denied expression, but its expression was articulated in the economic interests of the capitalist music industry. It was a paradox record companies were more than happy to live with. By 1968 they had well and truly caught up with the spirit of the counterculture and had started marketing its music under slogans such as ‘The Revolutionaries are on Columbia/ The Man can’t Bust our Music (Columbia), ‘It’s Happening on Capital, Psychedelia – The Sound of the NOW Generation’ (MGM). This kind of language even penetrated the ‘business’ side of the industry. The 1968 ABC distributors’ conference was held under the slogan ‘Turn On To Profit Power’. And they certainly did – profits flowed. Between 1965 and 1970, US record sales increased from $862 million to $1,660 million (see Harker 1980: 223). The changing nature of the counterculture’s rock festivals provides another telling narrative of its incorporation and defusion. The first festivals took place between 1965 and 1967. They were free open-air concerts held in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, with attendance ranging from 10,000 to 15,000 people. The Human Be-In, held on 14 January 1967, attracted 20,000 people. Besides inspiring Jefferson Airplane to write ‘Won’t You Try/Saturday Afternoon’, and the Byrds to write ‘Tribal Gathering’, the event also inspired the Monterey Pop Festival (16–18 June 1967), the first ‘commercial’ countercultural festival of any note. The festival was intended as a countercultural happening, a display not just of its music, but its values. It was billed as ‘Three days of music, love and flowers’. The intended tone was struck by David Crosby, who was then with the Byrds, who spoke against America’s war in Vietnam and in

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praise of the wonders of LSD. What it became, however, was a showcase for the A&R men (they usually were men); a marketplace for the purchase of profit-making talent. On the bill were Country Joe and The Fish, The Byrds, Big Brother and The Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and others. They played for expenses only, the profits supposedly going to finance free clinics and ghetto music programmes. A total of 175,000 attended, $500,000 was raised but, apparently, and unfortunately, the money went astray.9 Two years later, on 15 August 1969, Woodstock happened. Only 50,000 were expected, but 500,000 turned up. Woodstock is usually regarded as the greatest achievement of the counterculture. It was a new beginning. Not a festival, but a nation. All this optimism is present in Joni Mitchell’s song ‘Woodstock’, as recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in 1970: ‘I dreamed I saw the bomber death planes/ Riding shotgun in the sky/ Turning into butterflies/ Above our nation.’ The optimism soon faded. If Woodstock was the beginning of anything it was the beginning of the realisation that the ‘political’ wing of the counterculture was now very much the junior partner in the movement. This knowledge had, perhaps, already been grasped after the events in Chicago the year before. It is surely significant that the yippies managed to attract only 10,000 to lobby the ‘Demokratic Death Convention’, while the organisers of Woodstock attracted 500,000. This point was compounded when Abbie Hoffman, while trying to make an appeal on behalf of the imprisoned White Panther John Sinclair, was knocked from the stage by Pete Townsend of The Who. Where Hoffman failed, others had some success. Country Joe McDonald got the audience to join him in a ‘fuck-the-war’ chant. Not satisfied with this, midway through his solo performance of ‘I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag’, he appealed for more commitment from the crowd: ‘Listen, people, I don’t know how you expect to ever stop the war if you can’t sing any better than that. There’s about 300,000 of you fuckers out there. I want you to start singing. Come on!’ Besides revealing the divisions within the culture, the festival again showed the extent to which the counterculture was open to commodification. While those on stage celebrated the size of the counterculture’s community, the record companies celebrated the size of the rock market. Monterey had been viewed by the industry as a showcase for new talent. Woodstock was a successful exercise in market research. Liberation News Service called Woodstock ‘a victory for the businessmen who make a profit by exploiting youth culture’ (quoted in Weiner 1985: 103). Bill Graham, ex-manager of Jefferson Airplane, made a similar comment: ‘The real thing that Woodstock accomplished was that it told

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people that rock was big business’ (1985: 104). When the film of the festival was shown in Berkeley, it was picketed by protesters who objected to the commodification of their culture. They carried banners proclaiming ‘We Made This Movie’. If the revelations about Woodstock were not exactly the end of the counterculture, December 1969 seemed very much like it. On 1 December the draft lottery was introduced.10 According to Abe Peck, this had immediate results: ‘Many of those who’d protested because the war wasn’t worth their lives now held numbers keyed to their birthdates that were high enough to keep them civilians, and many now said goodbye to the Movement’ (1985: 200). Worse was to follow: the first eight days of December witnessed the indictment of Charles Manson and his ‘family’ in Los Angeles for murder. The charges were heard amidst, to quote San Francisco’s ‘underground’ paper Good Times, ‘a public frenzy of hate and fear not only against Manson but also against communes and longhairs in general’ (1985: 227). Rolling Stone even felt obliged to pose the question: ‘Is Manson a hippie? (1985: 227). The event, however, that perhaps hurt the counterculture the most happened on 6 December at the Altamont Speedway, outside San Francisco. While The Rolling Stones performed, Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old black youth, was stabbed and beaten to death less than twenty feet from where Mick Jagger was dancing and singing. Hunter had sixteen stab wounds and various head abrasions, resulting from kicks. Earlier the same day, Hell’s Angels had attacked another black youth. Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane had gone to his assistance, only to be beaten unconscious. With the counterculture in disarray, many who had dropped out of America now considered dropping back in. The dilemma is dramatised in David Crosby’s wonderful mixture of humour and paranoia, ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young). In Crosby’s song, loyalty to the counterculture overcomes the temptation to cut and run.11 Coercion, the other side of the consent-winning strategies of hegemony, further limited options as the new decade began. On 4 May 1970 four students demonstrating at Kent State University against Nixon’s further escalation of the war into Cambodia were shot dead by National Guardsmen. Other demonstrators at other universities were met with similar violence. Twelve students at the State University of New York were wounded by shotgun blasts. Nine students at the University of New Mexico were bayoneted. Two students were killed and twelve others wounded at Jackson State University. Nixon’s response was to call anti-war students, ‘these bums, you know, blowing up campuses’ (quoted in Weiner 1985:

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135). Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s response was the Neil Young song ‘Ohio’. It begins: ‘Tin Soldiers and Nixon comin’/ We’re finally on our own/ This summer I hear the drumming/ Four dead in Ohio.’ West Coast rock acted as both a symbol and a focal point for the counterculture’s opposition to America’s war in Vietnam. Of course the music alone could not stop the war; West Coast rock’s achievement was to help to hold together a culture that made the making of war in Vietnam that much more difficult to justify and sustain. The counterculture gradually moved from a movement of resistance to become incorporated into the mainstream. But for a period of around four to five years, it represented an alternative to war, greed and conformity.

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C HA PT E R 4

Text, Readers, Reading Formations: My Poll and My Partner Joe in Manchester in 1841

In this chapter I want to explore how a typical early nineteenth-century nautical melodrama might have been read in a context of culture and power by a significant section of its contemporary audience. To facilitate this I will employ Tony Bennett’s concept of the reading formation: ‘a set of intersecting discourses which productively activate a given body of texts and relations between them in a specific way’ (1983: 222). Reading formations ‘concretely and historically structure the interaction between texts and readers’ (1983: 222) The result is ‘an interaction between the culturally activated text and the culturally activated reader, an interaction that is structured by the material, social, ideological and institutional relationships in which both text and readers are inescapably inscribed’ (1983: 222). What follows, then, is the exploration of one possible reading formation for the productive activation of My Poll and My Partner Joe in Manchester in 1841. My Poll and My Partner Joe was written by John Thomas Haines (1799?–1843). The first known performance took place on 31 August 1835 at the Surrey Theatre, London. On 13 May 1837, it had one performance at Manchester’s Queen’s Theatre. Four years later it ran there for three nights, Monday 26, Tuesday 27 and Wednesday 28 April 1841.1 It is these performances that are the main focus of my critical speculation. We know from the playbill for the Tuesday and Wednesday performances that the Monday performance had produced ‘tremendous applause’ and a ‘great overflow’. There is of course no guarantee that this resulted from My Poll and My Partner Joe. Although it topped the bill, on all three occasions it was accompanied by The Bride of Lammermoor, billed as a ‘highly interesting drama’, and Twice Killed, billed as a ‘laughable farce’. Two other performances followed: 4 June 1841 and 18 December 1844. On each occasion the play was compressed into two acts. There are no other recorded performances of the play. The Queen’s Theatre closed in 1869.

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The play also featured at Manchester’s Theatre Royal. It formed part of the repertoire of T. P. Cooke’s farewell tour in October–November 1849. Between Saturday 27 October and Saturday 3 November, Cooke played a selection of the nautical roles that had made him famous. He was advertised on the playbills as ‘The Celebrated Delineator of Sailor Characters’. He played William of Black-Eyed Susan on the first Saturday, Jack Somerton of Poor Jack on Tuesday and Friday, Long Tom Coffin of The Pilot on Wednesday and Saturday, and Harry Hallyard of My Poll and My Partner Joe on Monday and Thursday. The local press was generous in its appreciation. The Examiner and Times (31 October 1849) declared: ‘Though we understand he is beyond the term allotted to us – three-score years and ten – we saw him dance a hornpipe . . . with an agility and easy nonchalance.’ The Manchester Guardian (31 October 1849) echoed the praise: ‘He is not the actor-sailor, with curly locks, a sentimental air, and the gait of an opera dancer; but the sailor-actor, with nasty presence, weather-beaten but frank countenance, rough and husky voice . . . whimsical, and full of pathos.’ It is clear that in part the appeal of the Theatre Royal’s production of My Poll and My Partner Joe was dependent on T. P. Cooke’s reputation and popularity. What also seems clear is that the play would not have been performed but for Cooke’s presence. There is no other record of a performance in the next twenty-two years (I have only checked the records to 1870). French’s Acting Edition describes My Poll and My Partner Joe as ‘founded on a popular song of the renowned naval poet, Charles Dibdin’. Dibdin’s song is also called ‘My Poll and My Partner Joe’. It is illuminating to compare song and play; the differences perhaps telling us something about Haines’s political intentions. The song tells of a waterman (he is unnamed) contented with his work, and happy with his general situation: ‘Sure never man had friend and wife/Like my Poll and my partner Joe’ (Dibdin 1883: 23). Impressment removes him from this life, and though it wrings his heart, he performs his naval duty ‘manfully’. But on his return he finds Joe and Poll ‘Lock’d in each other’s arms!’ (Dibdin 1883: 23). The waterman responds by literally kicking out Poll and Joe. In short, Dibdin’s song is cosy and comic. Haines takes this basic structure and does essentially two things: he makes changes and he makes additions. First of all, Harry is not married to Poll, nor does he come home and chase the lovers off. Secondly, he adds five new features: the threat of arrest for debt, and a sense of the general economic insecurity of working-class existence; colonial slavery; the saving of Manly’s life (twice) and the reward of £300 a year; the death of Joe; and the reconciliation between Poll and Harry. What in effect Haines does is to replace

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Dibdin’s comedy with serious social issues, presented, admittedly, in a melodramatic way.2 If we read My Poll and My Partner Joe simply at the level of denotation3 we may produce an interpretation that would note the radical treatment of impressment and slavery, but finally lament the fact that it all too soon succumbed to the demands of the genre and became a story of lovers united against all odds. Such a reading would note Harry’s denunciation of the press-gang, would be ambivalent over his ‘patriotic’ attack on slavery, and would conclude with the details of the heartbreak suffered by Poll: married to Joe, haunted by guilt, and still in love with Harry. The happy ending, obligatory for the love story, would accordingly be said to have cancelled out the play’s brief moments of social protest – another case of the conventions of the genre ensuring that any social protest is always stillborn. This is essentially how the play has been read within mainstream theatre studies.4 Using Bennett’s concept of the reading formation, I would like to explore an alternative way of reading the play: an exploration of how it might have been read by a significant section of its predominantly working-class audience in Manchester in 1841. I want to begin by first making some points about the text.5 In the play’s first scene Old Sam Sculler is threatened with imprisonment for debt. It is not his own debt, but one he stood security for belonging to Harry Heartly, who died in ‘the great battle of late’ (Haines n.d.: 12). That someone who had died for his country should still be in debt is perhaps bad enough, but worse is the ruin it will bring to Old Sam Sculler: ‘and now, if these harpies come for poor Heartly’s debt, they’ll sell up all the sticks, and leave the old man without a rug of canvas to weather out his days’ (n.d.: 13). Black Brandon is determined to collect the debt, and, with the help of Sam Snatchem, he proceeds to do so. It is only Harry Hallyard’s payment of the debt (money he and Poll had saved for their wedding day) that prevents Harry and his fellow workers from seeing ‘Old Sam Sculler, a man whose hairs are grown white in honesty and industry, dragged like a dog to gaol’ (n.d.: 15). Harry’s arguments are to no avail: [Y]ou would never be so stone-hearted as to strip an old man of his hard earnings of sixty years of weary toil . . .. To pay your demand, he must sell his boat, then what remains for him? He must go to the workhouse;6 the winter of his days must be passed at the tireless hearth of charity, after having honestly toiled away his summer to build himself a home of independence. (n.d.: 16)

Brandon’s response is simple, and straight to the monetary point: ‘Am I to be paid, or must the man go to prison?’ (n.d.: 16).

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What this scene dramatises is the uncertain and insecure place of working-class men and women in an economic system in which the cash nexus demands precedence over all other relationships. The watermen want to resist, but it is only the power of Harry and Poll’s savings that rescues Sam. Many of the play’s Manchester audience would not have had recourse to the same guarantee of security. A symbol of what the future might hold, if one were needed, was there for all Mancunians to see: ‘[T] he Workhouse, the “Poor-Law Bastille” of Manchester . . . like a citadel, looks threateningly down from behind its high walls and parapets . . . upon the working people’s quarter below’ (Engels 1969: 84). What makes the play so powerful is not just that it dramatises the lack of economic security experienced by working-class men and women, but that it exposes the arguments in circulation to the contrary. In the second scene, Poll (Mary Maybud) is ‘educating’ Abigail Holdforth on the opportunities the city has to offer: ‘London is a large place, and the industrious never need starve in it’ (Haines, n.d.: 17). Poll’s platitudinous advice is almost immediately undercut by her admission: ‘I am a stranger to London . . .. So, you see . . . I could direct you but badly’ (Haines, n.d.: 17). The final clause reverberates across all that she has said to Abigail. Her earlier claim that the industrious never need starve is thrown into sharp relief. It is qualified by Poll’s own inexperience. Moreover, it is shown to be totally untrue by the enactment of Old Sam Sculler’s predicament in the first scene. What the play seems to be doing is staging a particular ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault 2002: 131), and testing it against the experiences of a group of working-class characters, and, more importantly, against the experiences of a predominantly working-class audience. The working men and women who saw the Queen’s Theatre’s production in 1841 would have been painfully aware of the total inadequacy of Poll’s analysis, situated as they were at the depth of the deepest economic slump of the Industrial Revolution. But the point is not that Poll is naive, rather it is that she is repeating uncritically another class’s advice – the middle class discourse of self-help.7 She asks Joe not to call her Poll because ‘Harry is in a fair way to be a most respectable proprietor of boats; and he wouldn’t like his wife to be called Poll . . . Decent people must have decent comportment’ (Haines n.d.: 18). Perhaps a more telling reason is that ‘there’s a parrot at the public house – she calls herself Pretty Poll’ (n.d.: 18). The reference draws attention to Poll’s own willingness to parrot the middleclass discourse of self-help and social mobility. This is compounded by the fact that Harry rarely calls her Mary, preferring Poll instead. The inadequacy of this mixture of the middle-class discourse of selfhelp and social mobility is returned to throughout the play. Harry tells the

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audience: ‘[W]e were both poor; I won a wherry; it enabled me to earn and to save money’ (n.d.: 20). Thus it was a mixture of skill and good fortune which formed the basis of his limited prosperity. Without this opportunity things would have been quite different. Subsequently the reverse of good fortune is never far from Harry’s thoughts. When he returns to Battersea to find his mother’s house shuttered, his immediate response is: ‘Have they fallen foul of any misfortune?’(n.d.: 45). He offers Poll money with the warning: ‘[Y]ou may have need of it; the shoals of adversity aren’t always to be avoided’ (n.d.: 50). If Harry had been dead, as Joe and Poll thought, Joe’s fatal accident would have undoubtedly placed Poll on the very shoals of adversity. It is in the play’s combination of staged demonstration and unstaged challenge that the middle-class discourse of selfhelp and social mobility is exposed as inadequate and inappropriate to the needs of the working-class men and women who made up the majority of the Manchester audience for My Poll and My Partner Joe. Haines uses the melodramatic villain to great effect. Black Brandon plays a significant role in the play’s connotative radicalism. He figures at the centre of its three moments of injustice: the threat of prison or the workhouse; Harry’s impressment; and the transportation of slaves. It is Brandon who demands repayment of Heartly’s debt or Old Sam Sculler must go to prison or the workhouse. He is told in this scene by Watchful Waxend that he would ‘make a capital slave-driver’ (n.d.: 14). By the late 1830s, and certainly by the 1840s, it was common to see the new industrial society as divided between capital and labour. Waxend’s comment perhaps provides a hint of Brandon’s metonymic function. This is reinforced by Brandon’s dismissal of extenuating circumstances; he has an agreement and he intends to collect his debt: ‘[Y]ou can talk about honesty when I’m gone; it’s not a saleable commodity, and I know nothing about it’ (n.d.: 21). When the press-gang arrive to impress Harry, it is Brandon who directs them to him. He instructs Ben Bowes, the leader of the press-gang, to ‘seize’ Harry. Brandon then reappears as the captain of the slave ship. His racism is used to reinforce his status as villain. He refers to the slaves as ‘black cattle’ (n.d.: 28–9), and ‘nigger animals’ (n.d.: 28). Brandon’s villainous activities thus establish a connection between economic insecurity, impressment and colonial slavery. The play is in effect saying that there is a relationship between the three. Slavery is, as I shall attempt to show, the key to this relationship. It is through the audience’s response to Brandonthe-slaver that it would understand the significance of Brandon-the-debtcollector and Brandon-the-impresser. The opposition of the Manchester working class to slavery is well

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documented. Mass petitioning of Parliament against slavery began in Manchester in the late 1780s. Four decades later, when William Cobbett stood as MP for Oldham in 1832, he supported abolition because ‘it is the general wish of the people in these great towns of the north that slaves should be totally emancipated’ (quoted in the Manchester Guardian, 8 September 1832). During the 1860s the Manchester working class supported the North in the American Civil War. Despite great economic hardship it refused to be recruited to an employers’ campaign to force the North to lift its cotton blockade. Such unselfishness, particularly by the cotton workers, was noted by Karl Marx: The English working class has reaped ever-lasting historic honour by its enthusiastic mass meetings held to crush the repeated attempts of the ruling classes to intervene on the side of the American slave-holders, although the continuation of the American Civil War has inflicted the most terrible suffering and privation on a million English workers (1973: 355).

The Manchester working class’s support for abolition, and its subsequent support for the North in the American Civil War, tells us something about the kind of response we might expect from an audience at a nautical melodrama dealing with the issue of slavery. If this was the whole story, it would not be telling us very much. There is, however, another side to the play’s anti-slavery politics: the connection it makes between what the [Manchester] Poor Man’s Advocate (3 August 1832) called ‘British colonial slavery’ and ‘British domestic slavery’. The Manchester Courier (8 December 1832) reported a political meeting in Bolton in which workers carried banners which proclaimed: ‘The Victims of Political Economy / Success to the Loom / Better Wages to the Weaver / Abolition of Slavery’. The report makes clear that abolition was part of the radical agenda of the Bolton working class. In Manchester itself, Robert Owen gave a lecture in July 1833 in which he connected the plight of factory children with that of colonial slaves. ‘Factory slavery’ or ‘white slavery’ was in fact the main rhetorical figure in the struggle for factory reform. Richard Oastler is perhaps the most famous employer of the analogy. He called factory workers ‘victims of slavery . . . slaves without the only comfort which the negro has. He knows it is his sordid, mercenary master’s interest that he should live, be strong and healthy’ (quoted in Cole and Postgate 1961: 316–17). When Oastler visited Manchester on 23 August 1832, he was welcomed by a public procession. At the head of the procession two men carried a banner depicting a deformed factory worker. The banner was inscribed with the words: ‘Am I not a man and a brother? No White

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Slavery’. This was followed by other banners declaring: ‘No White Slavery’ (Cole and Postgate 1961: 320–1). The tradition of linking colonial slavery and industrial conditions did not, of course, begin in the 1830s. A Salford Methodist, Samuel Bradburn, published a pamphlet in Manchester in 1792 in which he argued for a sugar boycott as a means to end slavery of ‘our fellow subjects, the negroes’. He did not advocate abolition as a solely humanitarian gesture, but as a preemptive attack on ‘The same usurping power [that] might try to enslave you and your posterity’ (quoted in Drescher 1986: 143). Abolitionist rhetoric, naturally, produced its opposite, anti-abolitionist rhetoric. Defenders of slavery launched a vigorous counter-attack. Part of this consisted in exposing the working conditions of English workers: at the climax of emancipation in 1832–33 abolitionist lecturers were pursued by West Indian agents who probed deeply into very specific comparisons between the new industrial order and the old plantations. Both sets of specialists provided workers with food for thought of their own (Drescher 1986: 158)

It was in part against this background that Haines wrote My Poll and My Partner Joe in 1835. Moreover, whether or not a worker supported abolition or opposed it, it would be very difficult to remain unaware of the links being made between colonial slavery and industrial working conditions by abolitionists, anti-abolitionists and factory reformers. What I am suggesting is that a melodrama that featured slavery would carry political connotations well beyond those produced by its denotative reading. To dramatise colonial slavery might almost be seen as a coded way of dramatising the oppression and exploitation of the English working class. Making a connection between slavery and working conditions under industrial capitalism would prompt a Queen’s Theatre audience to read My Poll and My Partner Joe beyond the denotative level of a nautical love story to its connotative critique of life in industrial Manchester. The play certainly works to allow the connection. There is first of all the parallel experience of Zinga and Harry. ‘Three years ago you tore me from my country, from the presence of my parents, and the arms of the maid, who is now my wife . . . you dragged me away to slavery’ (Haines n.d.: 28). This is in essence Harry’s own story: taken from his country, from his mother, and from the arms of his wife-to-be. Brandon is responsible in both cases. In his denunciation of impressment Harry makes clear his own status as a slave: ‘I leave . . . a country that treats me as a slave’ (n.d.: 24). Waxend confirms the similarity when he affirms that Brandon had treated him ‘like a white nigger’ (n.d.: 29). Later he tells Harry: ‘I was a slave myself – they

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made a white nigger of me’ (n.d.: 34). The parallel between Zinga and Harry is again brought to the fore when Harry comments on Zamba’s relation to Zinga: ‘She’s the Poll of his heart’ (n.d.: 33). Given these parallels, Harry’s surge of patriotism might at first sight seem incongruous. ‘Dance, you black angels, no more captivity, the British flag flies over your head, and the very rustling of its folds knocks every fetter from the limbs of the poor slave’ (n.d.: 33). What we must understand here is that patriotism was not in the nineteenth century the monopoly of the political right. Patriotism could be articulated in many different ways. It could mean flag-waving jingoism, or liberation from foreign oppression. To many working-class radicals (and traditional Tories) industrial capitalism was itself a foreign invader, an intruder into the traditional practices and values of old England. In the 1840s it was by no means a secure invader, certain of victory. It is only in the 1880s that capitalism is seen as an immovable horizon, its class society as a life sentence.8 With this in mind, Harry’s patriotic outburst prior to the attack on the slavers’s fortress no longer seems like mindless jingoism. ‘Dam’me, I’ll plant the British flag on their fort . . .. Bear a-head, lads, old England for ever!’ (Haines n.d.: 35). We should note that although Harry speaks of the British flag it is in the name of old England that he attacks the slavers’s fortress. Given the political resonance of old England, and the fact that it is an attack on slavery, this would seem to give Harry’s patriotism a radical edge. By the time My Poll and My Partner Joe played Manchester in 1841, the connection between colonial slavery and industrial labour was being articulated in a new political context – Chartism. The first major outdoor meeting in the North organised explicitly for Chartism took place on 24 September 1838 on Kersal Moor, near Manchester. The purpose of the meeting was to elect delegates to the first National Convention. Attendance on Kersal Moor was somewhere between 30,000 (Manchester Guardian) and 300,000 (Morning Advertiser). The meeting had been organised by the Manchester Political Union of the Working Classes. Three months earlier, in June, twenty-three of Manchester’s trade unions had boycotted the Coronation procession. The Manchester and Salford Advertiser reported their protest: We, the Trades Unions have had no encouragement from our national and local rulers to join any of their schemes, since we find the wealthy, in and out of parliament, conspiring against the labouring poor to deprive them of the rights of industry, and withholding from them the political rights and liberties of free-born British subjects, at the same time they call upon us to testify

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our allegiance to that very system of government which offers us no protection – which manifests no sympathy for the destitute poor of our country, but upon all occasions takes advantage of the power they possess to treat us as slaves, stigmatize us as combinators [trade unionists] and persecute us as criminals. . . . The forthcoming Coronation will convince the government that the people are becoming tired of the system which encourages luxurious idleness, excessive taxation, constant persecutions of the poor, and the useless squanderings of the hard earnings of the labouring millions (quoted in Sykes 1982: 159–61)

On 20 July 1840, a conference was held at the Griffin Inn, Great Ancoats Street, Manchester (Frow and Frow 1980: 10). The Manchester Chartist James Leach was in the chair. The conference established the National Charter Association, ‘which was to constitute the backbone of Chartist organisation for the next dozen years’ (Royle 1980: 27). It . . . extended itself throughout the industrial districts of England, then more widely across the country, into Wales and Scotland, with a permanent Executive sitting in London. Under its auspices lecturing circuits were arranged among the localities, and a general framework established which enabled Chartism to survive as a movement between 1842 and 1848. Through it O’Connor launched his Land Plan, the arrangements for regular Conventions were made, and the second and third petitions organised (Royle 1980: 69–70).

Manchester was also the birthplace of the Anti-Corn Law League. Chartists and members of the League often clashed at each other’s meetings; and just as confrontations between anti-slavery and pro-slavery groups had kept the question of slavery in the public domain, so clashes between the League and Chartists kept class politics in public circulation. The Chartists actively used the analogy between colonial slavery and industrial labour to win support for the six points of the Charter.9 On 9 December 1837, the Chartist paper the Manchester and Salford Advertiser declared that ‘the truth was . . . working men were all white slaves’. The Northern Star (5 May 1838), widely read in Manchester, carried an account of a Chartist rally in Birmingham in 1838. It reported how the mover of the resolution to launch the first national petition announced amidst cheers that he had just come from a celebration of ‘the emancipation of the blacks in Jamaica’, and was now ready ‘to work out the emancipation of the whites at home’. Again, on 16 March 1839, the Northern Star claimed that industrial capitalism was a system in which there was nothing ‘but work, work, work

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for the slave and money, money, money for his master’. On 12 December 1840, the Northern Star carried a report of a Chartist intervention at a meeting of the British India Society in Manchester. Chartists pointed out that it was unnecessary to travel fourteen or fifteen thousand miles to find slavery when ‘there were so many white slaves here moving among us’. Finally, the [Manchester] Chartist and Republican Journal (April 1841, the month in which My Poll and My Partner Joe played at the Queen’s Theatre) was determined to learn from the mobilisation of public opinion against colonial slavery, to ensure a similar mobilisation against the ‘tyrannical wealth and ambitious usurpation’ of the oppressive and exploitative power of industrial capitalism. My Poll and My Partner Joe has other things to say which complement its general points about colonial slavery and industrial labour. The play presents Harry as enjoying a good relationship with his officers, Oakheart and Manly. This seems to have been a common theme in nautical melodrama. Naval reality, however, was very different: the ship was a community of hostile groups. Officers and men understood this class system in terms of parts of the ship. They spoke of people as places. The officers as a whole were ‘the quarterdeck’. The men were the ‘focsle’ (forecastle) or the ‘lower deck’. Junior officers were ‘midshipmen’. (Neale 1985: 18)

If we insist on a strict realist decoding, melodrama is again found wanting; another example of failed realism. But there is another possibility: this is an example of melodrama’s utopian power, the depiction of a relationship not as it is, but as it might be. Melodrama’s good relationship frequently extended to the sailor hero saving the life of one of his superior officers. William saves the life of Captain Crosstree in Black-Eyed Susan; Harry actually saves the life of Lieutenant Manly twice in My Poll and My Partner Joe. This seems to me to be one of nautical melodrama’s most telling metaphors: the recognition that the middle class (the officers) owed their very existence to the efforts of the working class (the sailors). Seen in conjunction, good relationship and relationship of dependency, it becomes a depiction of the relationship not as it might be, but as it should be. Another example of the way the play can be read at a connotative level is its use of the press-gang. Both Frank Rahill (1967) and Gilbert Cross (1977) privilege Harry’s denunciation of impressment as an isolated moment of radical protest. Jim Davis makes a similar point: ‘The blurring [between ‘the larger issues’ and ‘the domestic’] also occurs in My Poll and My Partner Joe, when the ravages of the press-gang are played down and the domestic situation again emphasised’ (1988: 138). But, as Davis is

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aware, impressment had been discontinued at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. He also knows that nautical melodrama continued to impress sailors long after the practice had ended historically. There is clearly an interesting contradiction here between historical fact and theatrical fiction. Davis’s comparison of fact and fiction makes him aware of the contradiction, but his methodology does not allow him to explain or explore it, but merely to comment on its existence. How can we explain it? One way might be to see it as an example of melodrama’s empty radicalism – moving safely in past historical time, attacking something that is no longer in existence. However, given what I have argued so far about the connection in the popular imagination between colonial slavery and the oppression and exploitation of industrial capitalism, impressment must be seen as nautical melodrama’s key metaphor for the economic conscription which drove men, women and children into town and factory. As Jonathan Neale points out, ‘These ships were among the largest workplaces in the world and, in many ways, were [like] a modern car factory’ (1985: 9). Samuel Leech, writing in 1842, remembering his youth in the navy, used the image of the factory to describe the conditions on board ship: ‘A ship contains a set of human machinery, in which every man is a wheel, a band, or a crank, all moving with wonderful regularity and precision to the will of its machinist – the all-powerful captain’ (quoted in Neale 1985: 8). Once reinscribed in its Manchester reading formation (or one possible Manchester reading formation) the play’s treatment of impressment, for example, no longer looks like an isolated moment of radicalism, but part of a sustained connotative critique of a society seemingly without justice, waiting only for the right reading formation to productively to activate such meanings. It is not difficult to see why such a reading should be activated by Manchester’s working-class audience. Henry Colman, a Unitarian minister from the the United States, who visited Manchester in April 1843 (two years after My Poll and My Partner Joe’s three-night run at the Queen’s Theatre), was appalled by what he saw. He responded in the language of melodrama: ‘Wretched, defrauded, oppressed, crushed human nature, lying in bleeding fragments all over the face of society. Every day I live I thank Heaven that I am not a poor man with a family in England’ (quoted in Briggs 1968: 116). Little wonder, then, that Engels (1969) saw revolution as the only resolution to the class divisions being established and hardened in Manchester in the 1840s. So far I have said little about the audience for My Poll and My Partner Joe. However, I have called it a working-class audience. This is partly based on the general scholarship of theatre historians. Michael Booth is

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more or less typical when he claims that melodrama ‘was essentially entertainment of the industrial working class’ (1965: 52). If this is the general case, Manchester in 1841, with an estimated 64 per cent of its population classified as working class (Gadian 1986: 40), would not appear to be a candidate to prove the rule by exception. We also know something about the politics of the town. From a population of 217,000, the second National Petition contained 99,680 signatures from Manchester. When we compare this to the 200,000 signatures from London with its population of 1,873,676, it reveals something of the radical nature of the theatre’s potential audience.10 There is little hard evidence to support my contention about the class nature of the audience at the Queen’s Theatre. However, there is some circumstantial evidence that may support my general argument. It may also tell us something about the political complexion of the audience. Engels describes Manchester in the early 1840s as consisting of three separate regions, each encircling the other (Engels 1969: 79). In the middle is the commercial district. Next is the working-class quarter. Finally, there is the middle-class residential area. The Queen’s Theatre was situated in the commercial district, which meant that its immediate catchment zone was the working-class quarter. Between July 1831 and April 1841, the theatre advertised on its playbills that tickets were to be had at various public houses in the town. With the exception of one public house in the commercial district, just around the corner from the theatre, all the public houses listed were situated in the working-class quarter of Manchester. Whether or not the theatre’s audience was indeed working class, what is certain is that the theatre was actually targeting this section of the Manchester population. Between 1829 and 1831 the Queen’s Theatre was called the Royal Minor Theatre. In October 1829, the Royal Minor Theatre announced: ‘The depressed state of the times have induced Mr Neville (in accordance with the opinion of many friends) to Lower the prices of Admission . . . for the season of 1829.’11 The year 1829 saw a very bitter six-month strike by the Manchester cotton spinners. They had struck against a proposal to reduce their wages. The strike collapsed on 3 October (Cole 1953: 17); Neville’s announcement was made on 5 October. It would be difficult for a working-class man or woman, especially those in John Doherty’s union (see below and Note 12), not to read the announcement as a reference, not just to the general economic depression, but to the defeat of the cotton workers. On 9 July 1830, Neville made another announcement, posted outside the theatre:

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in compliance with the injunction of the Lord Chamberlain that ‘all places of Amusement be closed for the two days of his late Majesty’s lying in State, and the day of Royal Internment’, Mr Neville respectfully announces that after this Night’s Performance, the Theatre will close until Friday July 16th.

What I find especially interesting about the announcement is the way in which it presents the closure of the theatre as something imposed, rather than as something undertaken in a spirit of patriotic mourning and sorrow. Again this hints at a particular politics and a particular audience. In June 1831, the Royal Minor Theatre changed its name to the Queen’s Theatre. Neville remained as manager. Given everything I have claimed about the politics of the theatre, it might seem strange that it would rename itself the Queen’s Theatre. In the absence of real evidence, I think there is a possible explanation. The theatre re-opened as the Queen’s Theatre after the death of George IV and George’s dispute with his wife, Caroline, had been something of an issue in radical politics. As Cole and Postgate explain, ‘Radicals had espoused her cause, less for her own sake than because it gave them a stick wherewith to belabour the Government and draw attention to the notorious immorality of the Prince Regent [later George IV]’ (1961: 228). Part of the dispute was George’s attempt to prevent Caroline from becoming Queen. It may well be, then, that the theatre was, at the very moment of his death, reminding Mancunians of the man he had been during his lifetime. In other words, there was republican politics behind what seemed like a monarchical gesture. One of the first things the theatre did under its new name was to hold a benefit on 30 June ‘for the relief of the distress in Ireland’. Two weeks later, the playbill for 12 July announced a new outlet for the sale of theatre tickets: ‘Tickets [were] to be had . . . at the offices of the Voice of the People.’ The Voice of the People was the newspaper of the National Association for the Protection of Labour (NAPL). The NAPL represented an early attempt to combine different trades together into a single union federation. It was organised by John Doherty, described by E. P. Thompson as ‘the greatest of the leaders of the Lancashire cotton workers . . . one of the . . . truly impressive trade union leaders who emerged in these early years’ (1980: 471, 851). Both organisation and newspaper were Owenite socialist in philosophy and practice. The stated aim of the Voice of the People was to organise the new industrial working class: ‘We shall endeavour to collect their scattered energies into a common focus, to give them importance and consequence, by acquainting them with their strength’ (quoted in Hollis 1970: 23).

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The Queen’s Theatre was thus associating itself (and could be seen to be associating itself) with an illegal newspaper and an organisation committed to the principles of Owenite socialism. Was it doing this out of political support, or out of a sense of the political affiliations of an influential section of its audience? Whatever the answer, it is difficult to believe that such a policy had no connection with the theatre’s sense of its audience. On 27 June 1839, the theatre held a benefit ‘in aid of the funds for the support of the London Bookbinders’. Tickets were available at all the usual public houses in the town, ‘and at all the Trade Society Houses’. Two months later, on 23 August, a bill was posted at the theatre addressed to ‘Fellow Workmen’. It reminded them of the benefit held for the London bookbinders’ strike fund, and announced ‘the unparalleled success attending that event’. The poster singled out for special commendation the actor James Harding, who ‘left no stone unturned whereby our cause could be promoted’. The poster then went on to urge ‘all our Trade Society friends’ to give ‘unqualified support, and . . . best exertions to promote his benefit’. The poster concluded in large type, ‘Remember! August 28, Harding’s Benefit! The Operative’s Friend!’12 This means that on three separate occasions during the course of the summer of 1839, the Queen’s Theatre aligned itself with radical sections of the Manchester working class. This was of course the period of the submission and failure of the first Chartist National Petition. It was a time of political turmoil in Manchester. The press was full of stories of armed Chartists, Chartist leaders being systematically arrested, the police being attacked, and a three-day general strike in support of the Charter (Sykes 1985). Again, its working-class audience would be forgiven for thinking the theatre was taking sides. It is difficult to say to what extent Haines himself would have been an active force in the reading formation I am outlining. I know of no evidence that suggests that a specific author’s name on a playbill would necessarily increase attendance in general, or encourage the attendance of a specific section of the audience in particular. Of course, this does not mean that this was not the case. Audiences may well have sought with pleasure the latest work of their favourite author. What is the case is that theatre historians have tended to dismiss all authors of melodrama as literary hacks. A great deal of research will have to be done to reverse the general acceptance of the claim that melodrama was the product of ‘men of the theatre, rather than men of literature and culture’, the result being ‘mediocrity’ (Booth 1965: 16). In the spirit of this general claim, Maurice Disher says of Haines that his ‘usual work was to make hasty “original” versions of plays which were succeeding at rival houses’ (1949: 158). Haines was

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certainly productive. Allardyce Nicoll’s catalogue of early nineteenthcentury dramatists credits him with having written thirty-two plays, three spectaculars, two operas, two burlettas and one vaudeville (1930: 322–3). My own research in the Manchester Central Library Theatre Collection has uncovered a playbill for another play, The Spinner’s Dream; or, Eight Hours in Ancoats, 1829!13 It is difficult to judge the content of the play from the playbill, but it may prove to be one of the first so-called factory melodramas.14 The Spinner’s Dream features Haines as John Mule, a journeyman spinner. Another of the principal characters is called Mr Surly, a manufacturer. The play is divided into two parts, Introduction and Dream. The dream section moves the action to the West Indies. Here we encounter slaves, a French cotton planter called Le Brute, and a character called Labour, the Genius of Industry.15 It is difficult to know what the play is really about. We can perhaps make certain guesses. First of all, names such as Surly and Le Brute would seem to indicate the political colouring of the drama. Secondly, it is clear that some connection is being made between the West Indies and Ancoats, and between colonial slavery and cotton spinning. At the close of the play, Surly is stabbed to death and the overseer is shot; perhaps suggesting support for physical force Chartism?16 Another of Haines’s plays, The Yew Tree Ruins, is described on the Queen’s Theatre playbill for 3 March 1841 as ‘The most popular drama ever exhibited in Manchester’. This was only a month before the theatre’s production of My Poll and My Partner Joe. What the limited information I have gathered establishes is that Haines would have been known by some of Manchester’s older theatregoers as an actor;17 and, more importantly, he would have had a reputation as a successful and entertaining, and, at times, radical playwright. Such information, if known, would have certainly informed the reading formation I have been outlining. Early nineteenth-century melodrama always sides with the powerless. Its politics are formulated in terms of the poor against the rich, the weak against the strong, the good against the bad. What politically distinguishes one melodrama from another is the way the conflict is articulated to connect with social, economic and political conflicts outside the theatre; to inform an understanding of these extra-textual conflicts.18 My argument is that for three nights in April 1841, My Poll and My Partner Joe may well have been actively understood (contrary to mainstream theatre studies) by its working-class audience as both giving expression to, and making connections with, conflicts outside the theatre. What I have tried to do, therefore, in this chapter is to place My Poll and My Partner Joe in one of its possible reading formations. Clearly I have simplified. Perhaps I have over-politicised the play’s audience. Paradoxically, I have almost

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certainly not said enough about Chartism or the Factory Movement. But I hope I have made a contribution to the case for seeing the meaning(s) of the play as being dependent ultimately on the interaction between text, audience and reading formation in a context of culture and power. It was, after all, the circulation of abolitionist, anti-abolitionist and factory reform rhetoric within a context of Chartist politics which made possible what I have called the connotative reading of My Poll and My Partner Joe. Finally, I realise that in the last instance I have really established little more than an interesting case for the possibility of a specific productive activation of My Poll and My Partner Joe. But it strikes me that this in itself promises to tell us a great deal more about the play and its audience than one can ever expect from claims made on the basis of a fatuous dialectic of ‘historical background’ and textual analysis.

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C HA PT E R 5

Cultural Studies: The Politics of an Academic Practice; an Academic Practice as Politics

There have been many claims and counter-claims about the politics of cultural studies. The aim of this chapter is to discuss cultural studies both as an academic practice concerned to think culture politically (the politics of cultural studies as academic work), and as an academic practice which attempts to think of itself as a political movement (the academic work of cultural studies as politics).

Cultural Studies: The Politics of an Academic Practice The introduction of Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) concept of hegemony into British cultural studies in the early 1970s brought about a rethinking of popular culture. It did this in two ways. First of all it produced a rethinking of the politics of popular culture; popular culture was now seen as a key site for the production and reproduction of hegemony (see, for example, Hall and Jefferson 1976 and Hall et al. 1978). In this new formulation, popular culture was understood as a field of struggle and negotiation between the interests of dominant groups and the interests of subordinate groups; between the imposition of dominant meanings and resistance of subordinate meanings. Second, the introduction of hegemony into cultural studies produced a rethinking of the concept of popular culture itself: this rethinking involved bringing into active relationship two previously dominant but antagonistic ways of thinking about popular culture. The first viewed popular culture as a culture imposed by the culture industries; a culture provided for profit and ideological manipulation, establishing subject positions and imposing meanings (that is, the Frankfurt School, structuralism, some versions of post-structuralism, political economy). This is popular culture as structure. The second position conceptualised popular culture as a culture spontaneously emerging from below; an authentic subordinate culture

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(that is, culturalism, and some versions of social and cultural history, especially ‘history from below’). This is popular culture as agency. According to cultural studies, now informed by hegemony, popular culture is neither an authentic subordinate culture, nor a culture imposed by the culture industries, but what Gramsci calls a ‘compromise equilibrium’ (2009: 76) between the two; a contradictory mix of forces from both below and above; both commercial and authentic, marked by both resistance and incorporation, structure and agency. Looking at popular culture as a compromise equilibrium, what interests cultural studies is not so much the cultural commodities provided by the culture industries but the way these cultural commodities are appropriated and made meaningful in acts of consumption, often in ways not intended or even imagined by their producers. A key moment in this way of thinking about popular culture in cultural studies is the early work on the consumption practices of spectacular youth subcultures (see Hall and Jefferson 1976, Willis 1978 and Hebdige 1979). It is through rituals of consumption, the selective appropriation and group use of what the culture industries make available, that youth subcultures form meaningful identities. Through patterns of conspicuous consumption they engage in symbolic acts of ‘resistance’ to the demands of the dominant culture. But, as Dick Hebdige points out, the moment of resistance eventually gives way to the moment of incorporation: ‘Youth cultural styles may begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must end by establishing new sets of conventions; by creating new commodities, new industries or rejuvenating old ones’ (1979: 96). Gramscian cultural studies pays particular attention to the study of consumption for two reasons. The first is a theoretical reason. To know how cultural texts1 are made to mean requires a consideration of consumption (for further discussion see Storey 1999). This will take us beyond an interest in the meaning of a text, to a focus on the range of meanings that a text makes possible. Cultural studies has never really been interested in the meaning of a cultural text; that is, meaning as something essential, inscribed and guaranteed. Cultural studies has always been more concerned with the meanings of texts; that is, their social meanings, how they are appropriated and used in practice: meaning as ascription, rather than inscription. This point is often missed in critiques of ethnography in cultural studies. Cultural studies ethnography is not a means to verify the ‘true’ meaning of a text; rather, it is a means to discover the meanings people make; the meanings which circulate and become embedded in the lived cultures of people’s everyday lives. Working with hegemony may at times lead to a certain celebration of the lived cultures of ordinary people,

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but such celebrations are always made in the full knowledge that what in one context is ‘resistance’ can become very easily in another context ‘incorporation’. For these reasons ethnographic research, if all that is intended by the term is an uncritical listening, followed by a report on what has been heard, is not enough. Cultural studies informed by Gramsci’s theory of hegemony has always insisted that there is a dialectic between the processes of production and the activities of consumption. A consumer, situated in a specific social context, always confronts a commodity in its material existence as a result of determinate conditions of production. But in the same way, a commodity is confronted by a consumer, situated in a specific social context, who appropriates as culture, and ‘produces in use’ the range of possible meanings the commodity can be made to bear – these cannot just be read off from the materiality of a commodity, or from the means or relations of its production. The dominant mode in cultural studies for understanding the ‘compromise equilibrium’ of the field of consumption is Stuart Hall’s (1996, 2009a) concept of ‘articulation’. As he explains, articulation has a nice double meaning because “articulate” means to utter, to speak forth, to be articulate. It carries that sense of language-ing, of expressing, etc. But we also speak of an “articulated” lorry (truck): a lorry where the front (cab) and back (trailer) can, but need not necessarily, be connected to one another. (1996: 141)

Using articulation, the first point Hall makes is that cultural texts are not inscribed with meaning, meaning has to be ‘articulated’; that is, meaning has to be made. This is articulation as expression. Hall’s second point is that meanings are always made in the conditions of a context. This is articulation as connection, the argument that when and where something is done impacts on how it is done. In other words, as I have already insisted, texts are not inscribed with meaning, guaranteed by authorial intention or mode of production; meaning has to be articulated; that is, actively produced in a practice of consumption. Hall’s model is also informed by the work of the Russian theorist Valentin Volosinov (1973). According to Volosinov, as we noted in Chapter 1, texts are always ‘multi-accentual’. That is, they can always be made to speak with different ‘accents’. In this way, meaning is always a social production – the world has to be made to mean. Furthermore, because different meanings can be ascribed to the same text, meaning will always be a site of struggle and negotiation. According to Hall, the cultural field is marked by this struggle to articulate, disarticulate and rearticulate

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texts for particular ideologies and particular social interests. For example, in Mechanic Accents, Michael Denning uses Hall’s mixture of Gramsci and Volosinov to assess the ‘place and function’ of dime novels ‘within working-class cultures’ in the United States in the nineteenth century (1987: 3). Denning recognises the novels as ‘products of the culture industry’, but he refuses to locate them as simply operating on one side of a binary opposition of incorporation or resistance. In a Gramscian move informed by the work of Volosinov, he insists that the novels can be understood neither as forms of deception, manipulation, and social control nor as expressions of a genuine people’s culture, opposing and resisting the dominant culture. Rather they are best seen as a contested terrain, a field of cultural conflict where signs with wide appeal and resonance take on contradictory disguises and are spoken in contrary accents. Just as the signs of a dominant culture can be articulated in the accents of the people, so the signs of the culture of the working classes can be dispossessed in varieties of ventriloquism (1987: 3).

Using the concept of ‘articulation’, therefore, is to insist that a text is not the issuing source of meaning but a site where the articulation of meaning – variable meaning(s) – can be produced in specific contexts of culture and power for particular competing social interests. The second reason Gramscian cultural studies is concerned with consumption is political. Cultural studies has always rejected the pessimistic elitism that haunts so much work in cultural theory and analysis (I have in mind Leavisism, the Frankfurt School, most versions of structuralism, economistic versions of Marxism, political economy; for further discussion see Storey 2009a) which always seem to want to suggest that ‘agency’ is always overwhelmed by ‘structure’; that consumption is a mere shadow of production; that audience negotiations are fictions, merely illusory moves in a game of economic power. Moreover, pessimistic elitism is a way of thinking which seeks to represent itself as a form of radical cultural politics. But too often this is a politics in which attacks on power end up being little more than self-serving revelations about how other people are always ‘cultural dupes’ (see Williams 1963: 289 for a similar argument with regard to the deployment of the term ‘masses’). Although cultural studies recognises that the culture industries are a major site of ideological production, constructing powerful images, descriptions, definitions, frames of reference for understanding the world, Gramscian cultural studies rejects the view that those who consume these productions are ‘cultural dupes’, victims of ‘an up-dated form of the opium of the people’ (Hall 2009b: 512).

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Although we should never lose sight of the manipulative powers of capital and the authoritarian, and authoring, structures of production, we must always insist on the active complexity, and situated agency, of consumption. Culture is not something already-made which we ‘consume’; culture is what we make in the varied practices of consumption. Consumption is the making of culture; this is why it matters. Moreover, it is a central argument of cultural studies that making culture is complex and contradictory, and cannot be explained by simple notions of determination, co-option, manipulation, and false consciousness (whether capitalist, imperialist, patriarchal, or heteronormative). Meanings are never definitive but always provisional always dependent on context. Gramscian cultural studies is informed by the proposition that people make culture from the repertoire of commodities supplied by the culture industries. Making culture – ‘production in use’ – can be empowering to subordinate and resistant to dominant understandings of the world. But this is not to say that consumption is always empowering and resistant. To deny the passivity of consumption is not to deny that sometimes consumption is passive; to deny that the consumers of the commodities produced by the culture industries are cultural dupes is not to deny that the culture industries seek to manipulate. But it is to deny that culture of everyday life is little more than a degraded landscape of commercial and ideological manipulation, imposed from above in order to make profit and secure social control. Gramscian cultural studies insists that to decide these matters requires vigilance and attention to the details of the active relationship between production and consumption. These are not matters that can be decided once and for all (outside the contingencies of history and politics) with an elitist glance and a condescending sneer. Nor can they be read off from the moment of production (locating meaning, pleasure, ideological effect, incorporation, resistance, in, variously, the intention, the means of production or the production itself): these are only aspects of the contexts for consumption as ‘production in use’; and it is, ultimately, in ‘production in use’ that questions of meaning, pleasure, ideological effect, incorporation or resistance, can be (contingently) decided. The introduction of hegemony into cultural studies has provided the means for a way of seeing consumption always in terms of an active relationship between production and consumption. However, perhaps it is now time to suggest that this is a relationship which should no longer be thought of exclusively in terms of ‘incorporation’ and ‘resistance’, but more inclusively, in a way that does not necessarily prejudge the range of possible outcomes, as an active relationship of ‘structure’ (production) and ‘agency’ (consumption). Certainly, there can be no doubt that there are

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already, as I have observed elsewhere (Storey 1996), many different ways of thinking, different ways of using, what Hall calls ‘the enormously productive metaphor of hegemony’ (1992: 280). Hegemony in cultural studies has never quite operated as first formulated by Gramsci. The concept has been expanded and elaborated to take into account other areas and relations of negotiation and struggle. Whereas for Gramsci, the concept is used to explain and explore relations of power articulated in terms of social class, formulations in cultural studies have extended the concept to include, for example, gender, ethnicity, meaning and pleasure. What has remained constant (or relatively constant under the impact of political and theoretical change, from left-Leavisism to debates about postmodernism) is a particular guiding principle of cultural analysis. It is found first in what Michael Green quite rightly calls Richard Hoggart’s ‘remarkably enduring formulation’ (1996: 52). ‘Against this background may be seen how much the more generally diffused appeals of the mass publications connect with commonly accepted attitudes, how they are altering those attitudes and how they are meeting resistance’ (Hoggart 1990: 19). In the 1960s it is given a culturalist accent by Hall and Whannel: ‘Teenage culture is a contradictory mixture of the authentic and the manufactured: it is an area of self-expression for the young and a lush grazing pasture for the commercial providers’ (2009: 47). In the 1970s it is found in the more formally Gramscian tones of John Clarke et al.: men and women are . . . formed, and form themselves through society, culture and history. So the existing cultural patterns form a sort of historical reservoir – a pre-constituted “field of possibilities” – which groups take up, transform, develop. Each group makes something of its starting conditions – and through this “making”, through this practice, culture is reproduced and transmitted. (1976: 11)

In the 1980s we hear it in the Foucauldian analysis of Mica Nava: ‘Consumerism is far more than just economic activity: it is also about dream and consolation, communication and confrontation, image and identity. . . Consumerism is a discourse through which disciplinary power is both exercised and contested’ (1987: 209–10). In the 1990s it is there in Marie Gillespie’s account of the relationship between media consumption and the cultures of migrant and diasporic communities, demonstrating how young Punjabi Londoners are ‘shaped by but at the same time reshaping the images and meanings circulated in the media’ – what she calls ‘re-creative consumption’ (1995: 2, 3). In every decade in the history of cultural studies the point has been made. It is the ‘Gramscian insistence’ (before, with and after Gramsci), learned from Marx (1977), that

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we make culture and we are made by culture; there is agency and there is structure. It is not enough to celebrate agency; nor is it enough to detail the structure(s) of power, we must always keep in mind the dialectical play between agency and structure, between production and consumption. This is not a denial of the relationship between culture and power, but an insistence that this relationship is always far more complex than the ‘topdown’ model of power can ever explain.

Cultural Studies: An Academic Practice As Politics In the early days of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), cultural studies was regarded by some as ‘politics by other means’ (Hall 1990: 12). As Hall explains, ‘[T]here is no doubt in my mind that we [at the CCCS] were trying to find an institutional practice in cultural studies that might produce an organic intellectual’ (1992: 281). This is a claim that has gradually been modified in recognition of the academic conditions of cultural studies. However, it is also a claim that has echoed down the years, and one that has grown in volume in recent times. It can be heard in many publications and conference papers. For example, in a widely known essay, ‘The Need for Cultural Studies’, Henry A. Giroux et al. make the collective call for cultural studies to become ‘a counter-disciplinary praxis’ (1995: 648), claiming that ‘one of the central goals of cultural studies [is] the creation of . . . resisting intellectuals’ (1995: 653). Their aim is to produce ‘cultural studies . . . as an oppositional public sphere’ (1995: 654). ‘Only a counter-disciplinary praxis developed by intellectuals who resist disciplinary formation is likely to produce emancipatory social practice’ (1995: 654). To achieve this requires going outside institutions of education to construct ‘various sorts of collectives, variously membered – study groups, counter-disciplinary research groups, even societies and institutes’ (1995: 656).2 Now it is one thing to claim that the academic analysis of the relations between culture and power (outlined in the first part of this paper) – to think culture politically – is a political project; it is another matter entirely to claim that such intellectual work is the expression of something like a political movement (see Storey 1997). What is needed, as Hall points out, is ‘a practice which understands the need for intellectual modesty’ (1992: 286). Cultural studies is not a political movement. It has to mature and recognise itself as above all a theoretical, research and pedagogic practice. We must face the fact that cultural studies is potentially no more political than, say, literary studies, sociology or history. Its politics are those

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of the academy and of intellectual life as it is lived outside institutions of education. There is of course a politics of pedagogy. How and what we teach is always to some extent a question of politics. Most who teach cultural studies would probably agree with bell hooks’ point that cultural studies, ‘in its acknowledgment that education is not politically neutral’, must work for pedagogical strategies which enable ‘students to . . . unite knowledge learned in classrooms with life outside’ (1994: 4). In my own cultural studies teaching, for example, I hope I teach students not how to think about the world in a particular way – I’m not recruiting for a political party – but that I encourage them (and they me) to think critically and to engage critically with the world outside our programme of study. There may be a temptation to live in the ‘as if’ of what Hall describes as ‘the possibility that there could be, sometime, a movement which would be larger than the movement of petit-bourgeois intellectuals’ (1992: 288). But this is a temptation that must be grounded in the ‘as is’ of teaching and research in institutions of education. Despite his hopes for the production of organic intellectuals at the CCCS, Hall (1996) also remembers having to insist upon the status of its intellectual work: ‘[W]hat we do within the Centre are ideas, individually and as groupings, informed groupings, which you can take back [to a range of political constituencies]. But that’s a different thing from saying the Centre organizationally is going to lead this or that project – it was not a political party’ (1996: 667). The extent to which such intellectual work is political is always contingent, as is the case with intellectual work from other academic disciplines, on its context of operation. As Ien Ang and Jon Stratton contend, repeating Hall’s call for modesty, ‘[W]e believe that cultural studies must find a new politics of intellectual work, a more modest one which addresses the conditions of the present using terms that provide for critical, though partial and localized, conjunctural interrogation: a cultural studies without guarantees’ (1996: 77). Much of the recent resistance to disciplinarity stems from a political romance of cultural studies. The ‘institutionalization’ of cultural studies, especially in America, is seen as ‘a moment of profound danger’ (Hall 1992: 285). Giroux et al., for example, argue that cultural studies must remain undisciplined, claiming that, ‘Disciplinary study requires constant attention to those few questions that constitute its current specialized concern. These questions are inevitably far removed from the genuine controversies in a given culture’ (1995: 650). Such a claim does not square with the working practices of radical intellectuals in, say, sociology, history or literary studies. Even if it did, there is nothing in the logic of disciplinarity that would dictate that this should be the case with cultural studies. Too often accounts of the interdisciplinarity of cultural studies have depended

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for their coherence on unconvincing claims that all other academic areas of work are hopelessly disciplined and monolithic. Any investigation of the humanities and social sciences would encounter disciplines marked by shifting objects of study and theoretical and methodological plurality and conflict. It is arrogant to think that cultural studies is different in this respect from, say, sociology, history or literary studies. Clear thinking about the disciplinary future of cultural studies is not helped by arguments that assume an opposition between cultural studies as a heroic resisting practice and cultural studies as institutionally incorporated. Such narratives depend on the assumption that cultural studies was formed and has existed outside the sustenance of an institutional space and a pedagogic practice. In other words, it depends on a view of cultural studies as a political movement with a significant existence outside institutions of education. It is only this kind of narrative that can seriously suggest that cultural studies is now in danger of being co-opted (see Davies 1995: 158). What can these narratives of co-option possibly mean – the expansion of more programmes in cultural studies? Keeping it small and on the margins will keep it heroic and resisting?3 Against this political romance we have to recognise that cultural studies has always been first and foremost a pedagogic project and academic practice; educational institutions have always been its primary context of operation. For these reasons ‘the institutionalisation of cultural studies’ is a deeply misleading phrase, implying that there was once upon a time a pure political moment of cultural studies, prior to its emergence in academic life. But this is simply not true: cultural studies was from its very beginnings an academic practice in an institutional space. This does not mean that its birth was not induced by social and political forces outside the university. But there has never existed a pure political cultural studies, freewheeling outside the conditions of an educational space. It is a myth which derives sustenance from Hall’s claim that ‘cultural studies was not conceptualised as an academic discipline at all’; the Birmingham Centre was nothing more than a convenient refuge; a ‘locus to which we retreated when that conversation in the open world could no longer be continued: it was politics by other means’ (1990: 12).4 The cost of seeing cultural studies as existing in strategic political retreat in Birmingham in the early 1960s (with its political origins in adult education and the New Left) is that all subsequent developments must be seen as being on the low road to ‘incorporation’. This is cultural studies as radical subculture – from moment of resistance to moment of incorporation. In conclusion, then, I think it is very difficult not to agree with Tony Bennett’s insistence that we must reject ‘the view that the institutionalization

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of cultural studies is a danger we should be wary of rather than something to be welcomed and explicitly cultivated because of the limited but still worthwhile possibilities it offers’ (1996: 146). To repeat the point I made earlier, it is one thing to claim that the academic analysis of the relations between culture and power – to think culture politically – is a political project; it is another matter entirely to claim that such intellectual work is the expression of something like a political movement. There can be little doubt that some people expect too much of cultural studies. But it is not the programme of a political movement; it is not politics by other means; it is a theoretical practice and a research and pedagogic project. As such it must continue to recognise and organise itself as an academic discipline, albeit a ‘political’ one (as I argued in the first part of this chapter). This, I think, is the future of cultural studies.

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C HA PT E R 6

The Sixties in the Nineties: Pastiche or Hyperconsciousness?

The Sixties Revisited In this chapter I want to examine a particular aspect of postmodernism, what I am calling the ‘sixties in the nineties’. What I mean by this is the way that during the 1990s there was a significant revival of interest in texts and practices of the 1960s. This was seen in the number of film versions of popular sixties television programmes, including The Avengers (1998), The Fugitive (1993), Mission Impossible (1996), The Mod Squad (1999) and The Saint (1997). It was also evident in the way in which many successful bands of the nineties seemed to make a conscious effort to look and sound like bands from the sixties. Similarly, there was a massive growth in sixties tribute bands. Television was also more than happy to recycle the sixties. While the eagerness of cable and satellite channels to recycle television programmes from the sixties can be partly explained in terms of an economic need for cheap programming, it was also undoubtedly the case that such scheduling was driven by a desire to exploit a perceived wave of popular interest in these television series. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) could be cited as a very profitable example of the sixties in the nineties. The movie is said to have grossed almost $55 million within a week of its release in the USA (Floyd 1999: 77), increasing to $100 million in two weeks (Palmer 1999:78).1 As Mike Myers (the film’s writer, producer and principal star) himself explains, ‘I’m a police composite of every comedian I’ve ever liked, Peter Sellars, Alec Guinness, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Woody Allen, Monty Python, The Goodies, the British TV show Some Mother’s Do ‘Ave’ Em, On the Buses, the Carry On films’ (quoted in Floyd 1999: 78). Moreover, Myers’s account of the origins of Austin Powers could itself be cited as evidence of the sixties in the nineties:

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I just love the conventions of James Bond and sixties movies. Wayne’s World is everything I was watching, growing up in the suburbs of Toronto in the mid-seventies, Austin Powers is everything I watched [on TV in the late sixties]. My parents were from Liverpool, and there’s no one more English than an Englishman who no longer lives there. Every molecule of British culture that came across the Atlantic was tasted and worshipped. (Myers, quoted in Duncan 1999: 18). Around 1994, I was driving and listening to Burt Bacharach’s The Look of Love, which is so sixties. And it made me think of all those cult TV shows. I went back home and I wrote the original Austin Powers script in just three weeks . . . I mean, this stuff is coming direct from my childhood (Myers, quoted in Palmer 1999).

Indeed, the very character of Austin Powers can himself be seen as symptomatic of the sixties in the nineties: cryogenically frozen in 1967 (the summer of love) and unfrozen in 1997 (Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery). Even this plot could be seen as a postmodern ‘quotation’ from the sixties – Myers’s story-line almost certainly being indebted to the BBC drama series Adam Adamant Lives! (1966–7) in which an Edwardian adventurer entombed in a block of ice since 1902 is defrosted amid the coffee bars and fashion boutiques of the sixties, battling with various criminals as he tries to come to terms with the culture of ‘Swinging London’.

Postmodernism: Inside the Imaginary Museum Of all the critics who have engaged in the debate over what is postmodernism, the American Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson is perhaps the most relevant to a discussion of the sixties in the nineties. For Jameson postmodernism is more than just a particular cultural style, it is ‘the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism’ (1984: 85). His argument is informed by Ernest Mandel’s model of capitalism’s three-stage development: ‘market capitalism’, ‘monopoly capitalism’ and ‘late or multinational capitalism’ (Jameson 1984: 78). According to Jameson, capitalism’s third stage ‘constitutes . . . the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas’ (1984: 78).2 Postmodernism is, supposedly, as Jameson claims, a hopelessly commodified culture. Unlike modernism, which taunted the commercial culture of capitalism from a safe critical distance, postmodern culture, rather than resisting, ‘replicates and reproduces . . . the logic of consumer capitalism’ (1983: 125); moreover, ‘it reinforces and intensifies it’ (1984:

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85). As a result, ‘aesthetic production . . . has become integrated into commodity production generally’ (1984: 56). Culture is no longer ideological, disguising the economic activities of capitalism, it is itself an economic activity, perhaps the most important economic activity of them all. Jameson also claims that postmodernism is a ‘schizophrenic’ culture. To call it schizophrenic is to suggest that, like the individual sufferer, society as a whole no longer experiences time as a continuum (pastpresent-future), but as a perpetual present, which is only occasionally marked by the intrusion of the past, or the possibility of a future. The ‘reward’ for the loss of this conventional temporality (the sense of always being located within a temporal continuum) is an intensified sense of the present – what Dick Hebdige (2009) calls ‘acid perspectivism’ (suggesting that the experience Jameson describes is similar to ‘tripping’ – being under the influence of the hallucinogenic drug LSD).3 In other words, to call postmodern culture schizophrenic is to claim that it has lost its sense of history (and its sense of a future different from the present). It is a culture suffering from ‘historical amnesia’, locked into the discontinuous flow of perpetual presents. The temporal culture of modernism has given way to the spatial culture of postmodernism. Jameson relates this development to the claim that postmodernism marks the ‘death of the subject’ (1984: 63). He argues that ‘the disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal consequences, the increasing unavailability of the personal style, engender the well nigh universal practice today of what may be called pastiche’ (1984: 64). According to Jameson, this means the end of the private and unique vision which is said to have informed the aesthetic thinking and cultural practices of high modernism. The moment of individual style has passed. It has been replaced by a world of pastiche; a world in which stylistic invention and innovation is no longer possible.4 Given this, ‘the producers of [postmodern] culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture’ (1984: 65). Therefore, rather than a culture of pristine creativity, postmodern culture is said to be a culture of quotations, a culture of hollow intertextuality. Instead of original cultural production, there is said to be only cultural production born out of other cultural production. In short, according to Jameson, it is a culture that ‘involve[s] the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past’ (1983: 116). Postmodern culture is, therefore, a culture ‘of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense’ (1984: 60). It is characterised by shallow surfaces, without latent possibilities; it derives its hermeneutic force from

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other surfaces; the interplay of intertextuality. – What Jameson refers to as the ‘complacent play of historical allusion’ (1988: 105). Jameson’s best known example of the practice of pastiche in postmodern culture is what he calls the ‘nostalgia film’. The category could include a number of films from the 1980s and 1990s: Back to the Future I, II, and III (1985, 1989, 1990), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Rumble Fish (1983), Angel Heart (1987), Blue Velvet (1986). He argues that the nostalgia film sets out to recapture the atmosphere and stylistic peculiarities of the past, especially the 1950s – he claims that ‘for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the privileged lost object of desire – not merely the stability and prosperity of a pax Americana, but also the first naive innocence of the countercultural impulses of early rock and roll and youth gangs’ (1984: 67). As he insists, the nostalgia film is not just another name for the historical film. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that his own list includes the Star Wars trilogy. Now it might seem strange to suggest that a film about the future can be nostalgic for the past, but as Jameson explains, ‘[Star Wars] is metonymically a . . . nostalgia film . . . it does not reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality; rather [it does it], by reinventing the feel and shape of [a] characteristic art object of an older period’ (1983: 116). Films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (1991), Judge Dredd (1995), Independence Day (1996), Star Wars, Episode One: The Phantom Menace (1999), operate in a similar way to evoke metonymically a sense of the narrative certainties of the past. Therefore, according to Jameson, the nostalgia film works in one and/or two ways: it recaptures and represents the atmosphere and stylistic features of the past; and it recaptures and represents certain styles of viewing of the past. What is of crucial significance for Jameson is that such films do not attempt to recapture or represent the ‘real’ past, but always make do instead with certain cultural myths and stereotypes about the past. In other words, they offer a kind of fake realism: films about other films, representations of other representations. History is effaced by ‘historicism . . . the random cannibalisation of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion’ (1984: 65–6). Moreover, he insists that our awareness of the play of stylistic allusion is now a constitutive and essential part of a film’s structure: we are now in ‘intertextuality’ as a deliberate, built-in feature of the aesthetic effect, and as the operator of a new connotation of ‘pastness’ and pseudo-historical depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history. (1984: 67)

I think there are two responses that can be made to Jameson’s position. The first is to point to the fact that most of the despair and ‘cultural

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pessimism’ generated by the supposed postmodern condition is an attitude and a perspective which has run concomitant with the development, since the nineteenth century, of what is usually described pejoratively as mass culture. If we situate Jameson’s critique of postmodernism in this tradition, it can easily be shown to repeat points that can be found in earlier work by Matthew Arnold, the Leavisites, the Frankfurt School, and positions taken in the debate about mass culture in the USA in the 1950s.5 According to Jameson, when compared to ‘the Utopian “high seriousness” of the great modernisms’, postmodern culture is marked by an ‘essential triviality’ (1984: 85): the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture. This is perhaps the most distressing development of all from an academic standpoint, which has traditionally had a vested interest in preserving a realm of high or elite culture against the surrounding environment of philistinism, of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture, and in transmitting difficult and complex skills of reading, listening and seeing to its initiates (1983: 112).

Again, in a piece of classic Frankfurt School rhetoric, he writes of the older kinds of folk and genuinely ‘popular’ culture which flourished when the older social classes of a peasantry and an urban artisanat still existed and which, from the mid-nineteenth century on, have gradually been colonised and extinguished by commodification and the market system (1988: 112).

The supposed extinction of a genuine culture of the people, together with the claim that high culture has been sucked into the degraded domain of commodified mass culture, produces again what sounds remarkably like the standard Frankfurt School/Leavisite dismissal of popular culture. Lawrence Grossberg describes Jameson’s position with economy: For Jameson . . . [t]he masses . . . remain mute and passive, cultural dopes who are deceived by the dominant ideologies. . . . Hopeless they are and shall remain, presumably until someone else provides them with the necessary maps of intelligibility and critical models of resistance. (1988: 174)

In spite of his rejection of a moral critique as inappropriate (‘a category mistake’), and regardless of his citing of Marx’s insistence on a dialectical approach (1984: 86), which would see postmodern culture as both a positive and a negative development, his argument drifts inexorably to the standard Frankfurt School/Leavisite critique of popular culture. As Iain

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Chambers has observed, the debate over the postmodern condition can in part be understood as the symptom of the disruptive ingression of popular culture, its aesthetics and intimate possibilities, into a previously privileged domain. Theory and academic discourses are confronted by the wider, unsystematized, popular networks of cultural production and knowledge. The intellectual’s privilege to explain and distribute knowledge is threatened. (1988: 216)6

There can be little doubt that ‘the disruptive ingression of popular culture’ that Chambers refers to has its origins in the 1960s. It is in the sixties that we see the beginnings of the connection between popular culture and what is now understood as postmodernism (a more positive, optimistic version of postmodernism than presented by Jameson). In the work of the American cultural critic, Susan Sontag, for example, we encounter the celebration of what she calls a ‘new sensibility’. As she explains, ‘One important consequence of the new sensibility [is] that the distinction between “high” and “low” culture seems less and less meaningful’ (1966: 302). We might think, for example, of the cultural valorisation of the music of popular performers like Bob Dylan or The Beatles. Another obvious example is the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, with its rejection of the distinction between popular and high culture: as Pop Art’s first theorist, Lawrence Alloway explains: The area of contact was mass produced urban culture: movies, advertising, science fiction, pop music. We felt none of the dislike of commercial culture standard among most intellectuals, but accepted it as a fact, discussed it in detail, and consumed it enthusiastically. One result of our discussions was to take Pop culture out of the realm of ‘escapism’, ‘sheer entertainment’, ‘relaxation’, and to treat it with the seriousness of art. (quoted in Storey 2009a: 183)

The postmodern ‘new sensibility’ rejected the cultural elitism of modernism. Although it often ‘quoted’ popular culture, modernism was marked by a deep suspicion of all things popular. Its entry into the museum and the academy as official culture was undoubtedly made easier (despite its declared antagonism to ‘bourgeois philistinism’) by its appeal to, and homologous relationship with, the elitism of class society. The response of the postmodern ‘new sensibility’ to modernism’s canonisation was a re-evaluation of popular culture. The postmodernism of the 1960s was therefore in part a populist attack on the elitism of modernism. It signalled a refusal of what Andreas Huyssen calls ‘the great divide . . . [a] discourse

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which insists on the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture’ (1986: viii). Moreover, according to Huyssen, ‘To a large extent, it is by the distance we have travelled from this “great divide” between mass culture and modernism that we can measure our own cultural postmodernity’ (1986: 57). It is clearly the case that Jameson has not himself travelled very far beyond the great divide. John Docker even claims to detect in his approach ‘a near automised distaste for mass culture’ (1994: 127). Bryan Turner’s general point about intellectuals and popular culture may have particular relevance to Jameson’s position: Intellectuals find it difficult to come to terms with the egalitarian implications of mass consumption, since intellectual culture is based upon the assumption that knowledge can only be achieved through the asceticism of disciplined education. Mass education, mass culture, modern systems of transport and contemporary forms of consumerism are generally criticised as a falsification of genuine standards, individual freedom and the autonomy of educated tastes. (1987: 153)

The second response that can be made to Jameson’s position is to point to the fact that what is being claimed as new is really only an acceleration and intensification of what has been happening in the traditions of popular entertainment since at least the nineteenth century. In other words, what Jameson, and others like him, identify as postmodern culture has always been a feature of modern popular culture. As David Chaney observes: [T]he privileged qualities of postmodernism – parody/pastiche, depthlessness, allegory, spectacular show, and an ironic celebration of artifice – have all been central to the submerged traditions of popular culture. One has only to think of the traditions of music hall and vaudeville, the fair-ground, the circus and pantomime, the melodramatic theatre and the literatures of crime and romance to find all these qualities clearly displayed. (1994: 204).

Elizabeth Wilson makes a similar point with regard to fashion: ‘[S]ome of the themes and hallmarks of what is today termed postmodernism have been around for a long, long time’ (2009: 450). She maintains that ‘Fashion [which she describes ‘as the most popular aesthetic practice of all’ (2009: 452)] . . . has relied on pastiche and the recycling of styles throughout the industrial period’ (2009: 445). More generally, she contends: This evidence [especially Hollywood film from the 1920s onwards] from the past that pastiche and nostalgia have been pervasive in popular culture throughout the twentieth century and indeed earlier appears to contradict

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Jameson’s belief that ‘nostalgia mode’ is peculiarly a feature of his postmodern epoch. (2009: 447)

Another feature shared by the texts of the postmodern and the traditions of popular entertainment, is the play of, and playing with, intertextuality. But this is not something that can be understood using only the concepts of pastiche or nostalgic recycling. As Chaney observes: Popular entertainment may be structured by the reiteration of certain formulas and genres which provide staple narrative forms, and there may be endless nostalgic regression in re-cycling previous eras and styles, but even so there will be an overwhelming need for novelty in performance, styles and manners. The history of popular music since the development of cheap recordings as a medium of mass entertainment specifically targeted at youth audiences has shown this clearly (1994: 210).

The intertextual understood as a form of borrowing from what already exists is always also (at least potentially) a making new from combinations of what is old. In this way, popular culture is, and has always been, about more than pastiche or a nostalgic recycling of what has been before. I quoted earlier, Myers’s account of the origins of Austin Powers.7 Other things he has to say about how he came to write the first two films point to something more complex than pastiche – a certain kind of parody, not of the sixties but of a particular way of understanding the sixties. As he explains: The movie isn’t about the 60s. If anything it’s about straight culture’s view of the 60s. It’s like Matt Helm [secret agent played by Dean Martin in The Silencers (1965), Murderer’s Row (1966), The Ambushers (1967), and The Wrecking Crew (1969)]. Dean Martin was a man of the 40s and 50s thrust into the context of the 60s and having to deal with all these liberated young people. That was his response to it, it wasn’t pot it was booze. It’s something I noticed with my dad. He had mutton chops and dyed hair and he put in a bar downstairs at our house. He was like, ‘Hey, I’m still a swinger’. It’s the whole world of straight culture going, ‘I’m with it. Like the kids, you know?’ That’s what the whole Austin Powers thing is about . . . Austin Powers is like a huge in-joke that I never thought anyone else would get. (quoted in Braund 1999: 92)

There may therefore be a certain (postmodern) irony in Jameson’s complaint about nostalgia effacing history, given that his own critique is structured by a profound nostalgia for modernist ‘certainty’, promoted, as it is, at the expense of detailed historical understanding of the traditions of popular entertainment.8

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Postmodern Hyperconsciousness If neither Jameson’s complaint, nor the object of his complaint, is new, does this mean that postmodernism does not itself provide an explanation for the emergence of the sixties in the nineties? I will now discuss work on postmodern culture which in my view, particularly because, unlike Jameson, it keeps in play both ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ (Storey 1999),9 does present a way of thinking critically about ‘nostalgia’, ‘intertextuality’, ‘recycling’, ‘pastiche’, and ‘pleasure’. Jim Collins has identified what he calls an ‘emergent type of genericity’ (2009: 459): popular films which ‘quote’ other films, self-consciously making reference to and borrowing from different genres of film. What makes Collins’s position more convincing than Jameson’s, is his insistence that such films appeal to (and help constitute) an audience of knowing bricoleurs, who take pleasure from this and other forms of bricolage. Moreover, whereas Jameson argues that such forms of cinema are characterised by a failure to be truly historical, Peter Brooker and Will Brooker, following Collins, see instead ‘a new historical sense . . . the shared pleasure of intertextual recognition, the critical effect of play with narrative conventions, character and cultural stereotypes, and the power rather than passivity of nostalgia’ (1997a: 7). Brooker and Brooker argue that Quentin Tarantino’s films can be seen as reactivating jaded conventions and audience alike, enabling a more active nostalgia and intertextual exploration than a term such as ‘pastiche’, which has nowhere to go but deeper into the recycling factory, implies. Instead of ‘pastiche’, we might think of ‘re-writing’ or ‘re-viewing’ and, in terms of the spectator’s experience, of the ‘re-activation’ and ‘reconfiguration’ of a given generational ‘structure of feeling’ within a more dynamic and varied set of histories. (1997a: 7).

They point to the ways in which Tarantino’s work presents an ‘aesthetic of recycling . . . an affirmative “bringing back to life”, a “making new”’ (1997b: 56). Popular culture (television, pop music, cinema, fashion and so on) has always recycled its own history (remakes, revivals, cover versions, comebacks and so on). Rapid advances in technology (for example, the technologies of ‘sampling’, the introduction of cable, satellite and digital television, the film-on-DVD market and so on) have in recent years rapidly expanded and accelerated this process. But are the textual results of this process (which include the materials for the making of the sixties in the nineties) best understood using the term ‘pastiche’?

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‘Sampling’ is a favourite example of what Jameson, and those who share his perspective, conceptualise as postmodern pastiche. But, as Andrew Goodwin points out, what is often missed in such claims is the way in which sampling is used: [T]hese critical strategies miss both the historicizing function of sampling technologies in contemporary pop and the ways in which textual incorporation cannot be adequately understood as ‘blank parody’. We need categories to add to pastiche, which demonstrate how contemporary pop opposes, celebrates and promotes the texts it steals from. (1991: 173)

Goodwin insists that sampling is often ‘used to invoke history and authenticity’ and that ‘it has often been overlooked that the “quoting” of sounds and styles acts to historicize contemporary culture’ (1991: 175).10 For example, the blues and folk revivals of the 1960s recycled and reworked folk and blues music that a Jameson critique might describe as pastiche. But whether or not this is true, the revivals also brought into contemporary visibility a whole range of material that seemed to have disappeared. In this way, then, regardless of the motivations of those involved, the comtemporary was enriched by a new historical dimension. According to Collins, part of what is postmodern about Western societies is the fact that the old is not simply replaced by the new, but is recycled for circulation together with the new. As he explains, ‘The ever-expanding number of texts and technologies is both a reflection of and a significant contribution to the “array” – the perpetual circulation and recirculation of signs that forms the fabric of postmodern cultural life’ (2009: 457). He argues that ‘This foregrounded, hyperconscious intertextuality reflects changes in terms of audience competence and narrative technique, as well as a fundamental shift in what constitutes both entertainment and cultural literacy in [postmodern culture]’ (2009: 460). As a consequence of this, Collins argues, ‘Narrative action now operates at two levels simultaneously – in reference to character adventure and in reference to a text’s adventures in the array of contemporary cultural production’ (2009: 464). The widespread eclecticism of postmodern culture is encouraging and helping to produce what Collins calls the ‘sophisticated bricoleur’ (1992: 337) of postmodern culture. For example, a television series like Twin Peaks both constitutes an audience as bricoleurs and in turn is watched by an audience who celebrate its bricolage. Postmodernist eclecticism might only occasionally be a preconceived design choice in individual programs, but it is built into the technologies of media sophisticated societies. Thus television, like the postmodern subject, must

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be conceived as a site – an intersection of multiple, conflicting cultural messages. Only by recognising this interdependency of bricolage and eclecticism can we come to appreciate the profound changes in the relationship of reception and production in postmodern cultures. Not only has reception become another form of meaning production, but production has increasingly become a form of reception as it rearticulates antecedent and competing forms of representation (1993: 338).

In a similar way, Umberto Eco, drawing on Charles Jencks’s notion of ‘double coding’, identifies a postmodern sensibility exhibited in an awareness of what he calls the ‘already said’. He gives the example of a man who cannot tell his lover ‘I love you madly’, out of fear that it might produce only ridicule, and so says instead: ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’ (quoted in Collins 1993: 333). Given that we now live in an increasingly media-saturated world, the ‘already said’ is, as Collins observes, ‘still being said’; for example, in the way television (in an effort to fill the space opened up by the growth in satellite and cable channels) recycles its own accumulated past, and that of cinema, and broadcasts these alongside what is new in both media. This does not mean that we must despair in the face of Jameson’s postmodern ‘structure’; rather we should think in terms of both ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ – which ultimately is always a question of ‘articulation’ (Hall 1996, Storey 2009a). Collins provides this example of different strategies of articulation: The Christian Broadcasting Network and Nickelodeon both broadcast series from the late fifties and early sixties, but whereas the former presents these series as a model for family entertainment the way it used to be, the latter offers them as fun for the contemporary family, ‘camped up’ with parodic voice-overs, super-graphics, reediting designed to deride their quaint vision of American family life, which we all know never really existed even ‘back then’. (Collins 1993: 334)

There can be little doubt that similar things are happening in, for example, music, television, advertising, fashion and in the different lived cultures of everyday life. It is not a sign that there has been a general collapse of the distinctions people make between, say, high culture/low culture, past/present, history/nostalgia, fiction/reality; but it is a sign that such distinctions (first noticed in the sixties, and gradually more so ever since) are becoming increasingly less important, less obvious, less taken for granted. But this does not of course mean that such distinctions cannot be, and are not being articulated and mobilised for particular strategies of social distinction. The presence of the sixties in the nineties is the

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result of many different articulations, and as Mike Myers warns us, we should not take any of these at face value; we must always be alert to the what, why and for whom something is being articulated, and how it can always be articulated differently, in other contexts. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, the sixties have made an impressive comeback in the nineties. But if we are truly to understand this comeback, we must not confuse or collapse together the repertoire of texts recycled by the culture industries with what people actually take and make from this repertoire in the lived cultures of everyday life. Moreover, we have to recognise that texts have always been produced and consumed in an ever-changing context of intertextuality; texts produced from other texts, consumption guided by previous consumption in a continuous process of accumulation and recycling. In such a situation it seems naive to talk of originality as the making of something out of nothing or to insist on pastiche as anything other than one method of production and not one that is particularly dominant.

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C HA PT E R 7

The Articulation of Memory and Desire: From Vietnam to the First Gulf War

In this chapter I want to explore, within a context of culture and power, the complex relations between memory and desire. More specifically, I want to connect 1980s Hollywood representations of America’s war in Vietnam (what I will call ‘Hollywood’s Vietnam’) with George Bush senior’s campaign, in late 1990 and early 1991, to win support for US involvement in what became the First Gulf War. My argument is that Hollywood produced a particular ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault 2002: 131) about America’s war in Vietnam and that this body of ‘knowledge’ was ‘articulated’ by Bush as an enabling ‘memory’ in the build up to the war in the Gulf.1

Vietnam Revisionism and the First Gulf War In the weeks leading up to the First Gulf War, Newsweek (10 December 1990) featured a cover showing a photograph of a serious-looking Bush. Above the photograph was the banner headline, ‘This will not be another Vietnam’. The headline was taken from a speech made by Bush in which he said, ‘In our country, I know that there are fears of another Vietnam. Let me assure you . . . this will not be another Vietnam.’ In another speech, he again assured his American audience that, ‘This will not be another Vietnam . . . Our troops will have the best possible support in the entire world. They will not be asked to fight with one hand tied behind their backs’.2 In the two Bush speeches from which I have quoted, and in many other similar speeches, Bush was articulating what some powerful American voices throughout the 1980s had sought to make the dominant meaning of the war: ‘the Vietnam War as a noble cause betrayed – an American tragedy’. For example, in the 1980 presidential campaign Ronald Reagan declared, in an attempt to put an end to the Vietnam Syndrome, ‘It is time

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we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause’ (quoted in Rowe and Berg 1991: 10). Moreover, Reagan insisted, ‘Let us tell those who fought in that war that we will never again ask young men to fight and possibly die in a war our government is afraid to let us win’ (quoted in Vlastos 1991: 69). In 1982 (almost a decade after the last US combat troops left Vietnam), when the Vietnam Veterans’ memorial was unveiled in Washington DC, Reagan observed that Americans were ‘beginning to appreciate that [the Vietnam War] was a just cause’ (quoted in Zelizer 1995: 220). In 1984 (eleven years after the last US combat troops left Vietnam) the Unknown Vietnam Soldier was buried; at the ceremony President Reagan claimed, ‘An American hero has returned home . . . He accepted his mission and did his duty. And his honest patriotism overwhelms us’ (quoted in Rowe and Berg 1991: 10). In 1985 (twelve years after the last US combat troops left Vietnam), New York staged the first of the ‘Welcome Home’ parades for Vietnam veterans. In this powerful mix of political rhetoric and national events, there is a clear attempt to put in place a new ‘consensus’ about the meaning of America’s war in Vietnam. It begins in 1980 in Reagan’s successful presidential campaign and ends in 1991 with the triumphalism of Bush after victory in the First Gulf War. The political and historical revisionism of the 1980s produced a mythology about why the US had been defeated in Vietnam. It was a mythology seeking to put to rest a spectre that had come to haunt America’s political and military self-image what Richard Nixon and others had called the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’.3 The debate over American foreign policy had, according to Nixon, been ‘grotesquely distorted’ by an unwillingness ‘to use power to defend national interests’ (1986: 13). Fear of another Vietnam had made America ‘ashamed of . . . [its] power, guilty about being strong’ (1986: 19). In other words, it was a mythology that had more to do with preparing for the future than it ever had to do with explaining the past. As Reagan had stated, in his 1980 presidential campaign, ‘[The United States has] an inescapable duty to act as tutor and protector of the free world . . . [To fulfil this duty] we must first rid ourselves of the Vietnam Syndrome’ (quoted in Martin 1993: 91). In this sense, 1980s revisionism was an enabling discourse; its aim was to enable the US once again to take up the role of ‘tutor and protector of the Free World’. To achieve these aims, Bush (and Reagan before him) had both to acknowledge and limit the meaning of America’s war in Vietnam. In this task of mixing memory and desire, Bush (and Reagan before him) received significant support (I will argue) from Hollywood’s Vietnam. Films such as Cutter’s Way (1981), First Blood (1982), Uncommon Valor (1983), Missing in Action (1984), Missing in Action II – The Beginning (1985), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Platoon

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(1986), POW: The Escape (1986), The Hanoi Hilton (1987), Braddock: Missing in Action III (1988), Casualties of War (1989), Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and others, helped to create a memory of the war, and a desire to win the war retrospectively, that enabled Bush to say, with some credibility and conviction, that the First Gulf War would not be another Vietnam. The difficulty, of course, is in connecting Hollywood films to people’s thinking on Vietnam and the war in the Gulf. For some film critics the influence of Hollywood is self-evident. Robert Burgoyne, for example, points to what he calls ‘the preeminent role that film has assumed in interpreting the past for contemporary [US] society’ (1997: 3–4). He also refers to ‘the central role that the cinema plays in the imaging of the nation’ (1997: 122). Similarly, Robert Brent Toplin claims, without offering much in the way of evidence, that ‘Historical films help shape the thinking of millions. Often the depictions seen on the screen influence the public’s view of historical subjects much more than books do’ (1996: vii).4 In a discussion of French cinema in the 1970s Michel Foucault argued that recent French films (featuring the French Resistance) were engaged in ‘a battle . . . to reprogramme . . . [the] popular memory [and] . . . to . . . impose on people a framework in which to interpret the present . . . So people are shown not what they were, but what they must remember having been. (1975: 28). Although I reject Foucault’s rather crude notion that films can ‘reprogramme . . . popular memory’, I do like the idea that memory is one of the sites where culture and power may become entangled. To explore the relations between memory, culture and power, I will build my analysis on an ‘appropriation’ of the work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. In particular, I will deploy his concept of ‘the collective memory’ (Halbwachs 1980).

Memories are Made of This Halbwachs makes four overlapping claims about what he calls ‘collective memory’. First, memory is as much collective as individual. Halbwachs explains this in two ways. First of all, like Sigmund Freud (1973), Halbwachs recognised that memories are often fragmented and incomplete. But whereas Freud searched for completion in the unconscious, Halbwachs argued that completion should be sought in the social world outside the individual. In other words, what is provisional in our own memories is confirmed by the memories of others. As he explains: We appeal to witnesses to corroborate or invalidate as well as supplement what we somehow know already about an event . . . Our confidence in the

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accuracy of our [memory] . . . increases . . . if it can be supported by others’ remembrances . . . Don’t we believe that we relive the past more fully because we no longer represent it alone . . . but through the eyes of another as well? (1980: 22–3)

This is not to deny that individuals have memories, which are their own, but to point to the ways in which individual memories and collective memories intermingle. As he explains, ‘[T]he individual memory, in order to corroborate and make precise and even to cover the gaps in its remembrances, relies upon, relocates itself within, momentarily merges with, the collective memory’ (1980: 50–1). Think of what happens when a photograph album is produced at a family gathering. As the photographs are passed around, particular photographs cue memories for one family member, which are then supported, elaborated or challenged by other members of the family. The discussions which ensue seek collectively to fix specific memories to particular photographs. In this way, family histories are rehearsed, elaborated and (temporarily) ‘fixed’. Memory is also collective in another way. We often remember with others what we did not ourselves experience firsthand. Halbwachs explains it like this: During my life, my national society has been a theater for a number of events that I say I ‘remember’, events that I know about only from newspapers or the testimony of those directly involved . . . In recalling them, I must rely entirely upon the memory of others, a memory that comes, not as corroborator or completer of my own, but as the very source of what I wish to repeat. I often know such events no better nor in any other manner than I know historical events that occurred before I was born. I carry a baggage load of historical remembrances that I can increase through conversation and reading (1980: 50).

In an argument similar to Halbwachs’s, Alison Landsberg has coined the term ‘prosthetic memory’ to describe the ways in which mass media (especially cinema) enable people to experience as memories what they did not themselves live. As she explains: Because the mass media fundamentally alter our notion of what counts as experience, they might be a privileged arena for the production and circulation of prosthetic memories. The cinema, in particular, as an institution which makes available images for mass consumption, has long been aware of its ability to generate experiences and to install memories of them – memories which become experiences that film consumers both possess and feel possessed by (1995: 176).5

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Moreover, she claims that ‘What individuals see might affect them so significantly that the images actually become part of their own personal archive of experience’ (1995: 179). Halbwachs’s second claim about memory is to point to how remembering is not a process in which we resurrect a ‘pure’ past; memories are not veridical reports of past events; remembering is always an act of reconstruction and representation. In a study of eyewitness testimony, Elisabeth Loftus (1996) shows how a person’s memory for an event that they had witnessed can be influenced and altered. Loftus argues that if witnesses are exposed to additional information during the period between witnessing an event and recounting the event, the post-event information can have the effect of modifying, changing or supplementing the original memory. This results from a process social psychologists call ‘destructive updating’ (Cohen 1996), in which what was originally remembered is displaced, transformed and sometimes lost. What is true of eyewitness testimony is also true of memory in everyday life. What we remember does not stay the same; memories are forgotten, revised, reorganised, updated, as they undergo rehearsal, interpretation and retelling. Moreover, the more important the event remembered, the more it is vulnerable to reconstruction, as it will be more frequently rehearsed, interpreted and retold. Halbwachs’s third point is to argue that remembering is always presentsituated; memories do not take us into ‘the past’, rather they bring ‘the past’ into the present; remembering involves what psychologist Frederic Bartlett calls an ‘effort after meaning’ (1967: 227). In other words, remembering is about making meaning in the present and in response to the present. That is, in order for our memories to remain meaningful to us, they have to make sense in the context of the present. As Bartlett explains, memories ‘live with our interests and with them they change’ (1967: 212). Put simply, our memories change as we change. As Halbwachs explains, ‘[A] remembrance is in very large measure a reconstruction of the past achieved with data borrowed from the present’ (1980: 69). To study memory, therefore, is not to study the past as we normally understand it, but the past as it exists in the present (there is a past-present dialectic). Moreover, it is the play of the past in the present that makes memory, and appeals to memory, always potentially political. Halbwachs’s final point is that collective memory is embodied in mnemonic artefacts, forms of commemoration such as shrines, statues, war memorials and so on – what French historian Pierre Nora calls ‘sites of memory’ (1989: 7). I think we can add to Halbwachs’s list of mnemonic artefacts what I will call the ‘memory industries’; that part of the culture industries concerned with articulating the past. Heritage

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sites and museums are obvious examples, but we should also include the mass media (including cinema). The memory industries, like the culture industries of which they form a part, produce representations (‘cultural memorials’), with which we are invited to think, feel and recognise the past. But these representations do not embody memory as such, they embody the materials for memory; they provide the materials from which ‘collective memory’ can be made. The process is not of course monolithic or uncontested; there is always in circulation and potential contestation both dominant and subordinate memories and traditions and mythologies. It is my claim, however, that Hollywood in the 1980s produced compelling materials out of which could be made memories of America’s war in Vietnam. As Marita Sturken observes: [S]urvivors of traumatic historical events often relate that as time goes by, they have difficulty distinguishing their personal memories from those of popular culture. For many World War II veterans, Hollywood’s World War II movies have subsumed their individual memories into a general script (1997: 6).

Again, as Sturken notes (more specifically related to my argument), ‘Some Vietnam veterans say they have forgotten where some of their memories came from – their own experiences, documentary photographs, or Hollywood movies?’ (1997: 20). For example, Vietnam veteran William Adams makes this telling point: When Platoon was first released, a number of people asked me, ‘Was the war really like that?’ I never found an answer, in part because, no matter how graphic and realistic, a movie is after all a movie, and war is only like itself. But I also failed to find an answer because what ‘really’ happened is now so thoroughly mixed up in my mind with what has been said about what happened that the pure experience is no longer there. This is odd, even painful, in some ways. But it is also testimony to the way our memories work. The Vietnam War is no longer a definite event so much as it is a collective and mobile script in which we continue to scrawl, erase, rewrite our conflicting and changing view of ourselves (quoted in Sturken 1997: 86).

History Lessons: You Must Remember This Memories do not just consist of what is remembered but also of what has been forgotten. The memory industries, therefore, do not just circulate things to remember, they also, and significantly, fail to articulate that which might also be remembered. I want to consider briefly four examples of what Hollywood ‘forgot’ about America’s war in Vietnam.

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Forgetting Vietnam Nowhere in Hollywood’s discourse on Vietnam are we informed about the extent of the resistance to the war. The counterculture, and the anti-war movement in general, have been given little visual space in Hollywood representations of the war. Yet, according to US Justice Department figures, between 1966 and 1973, 191,840 men refused to be drafted (Klein 1990: 18). This has never been represented. One can of course respond by pointing out that these are war films, and therefore the anti-war movement is peripheral to their narrative project. To a certain extent this is of course true. But can the same argument be used to exclude representations of the opposition to the war which existed within the US armed forces? Between 1966 and 1973, 503,926 members of the US armed forces engaged in what the US Defense Department described as ‘incidents of desertion’ (quoted in Klein 1990: 18). The extent of the problem is made clear by the fact that 28,661 deserters were still at large in 1974 (Franklin 1993). By 1970, according to Pentagon sources, there were 209 verified ‘fraggings’ (killing of officers by their own men) in Vietnam. Michael Klein suggests that ‘the death toll from fragging by soldiers disaffected with the war may be as high as 5 per cent of the total loss of life in combat sustained by the US armed forces during the war’ (1990: 17). There are also the known instances of mutinies. Perhaps the most famous example is the mutiny of marines at Da Nang in 1968 (1990: 16). To counter the optimism and propaganda of the very official newspaper Stars and Stripes, it has been estimated that something like 144 alternative newspapers were in circulation on US bases in Vietnam (1990: 17).6 Hollywood also ‘forgets’ the details of the gender and ethnicity of those Americans who fought in Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1972, the US sent between 10,000 (Mithers 1991) and 15,000 (Marshall 1987) women to the war in Vietnam, 75 per cent of whom were exposed to combat and hostile fire.7 Watching only Hollywood representations of the war, one would get no sense of this at all. African-Americans have suffered a similar exclusion. As Wallace Terry points out: [B]lack soldiers were dying at a greater rate, proportionately, than American soldiers of other races. In the early years of the fighting, blacks made up 23% of the fatalities . . . [In 1969] Black combat fatalities had dropped to 14%, still proportionately higher than the 11% which blacks represented in the American population (1984: 22).

Similarly, once drafted and in Vietnam, the likelihood of seeing heavy combat makes interesting reading when related to ethnicity: white Americans 29 per cent, African-Americans 34 per cent, Hispanic-Americans 41 per cent

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(Jeffords 1989: 190). Again, relying only on Hollywood representations of Vietnam, one would get no sense of the extent to which African-American and Hispanic-American soldiers were fighting and dying in the war. Hollywood also ‘forgets’ the extent of US firepower deployed in Vietnam. Put simply, the US deployed in Vietnam the most intensive firepower the world had ever witnessed. Hollywood narratives do not feature the deliberate defoliation of large areas of Vietnam, the napalm strikes, the search-and-destroy missions, the use of Free Fire Zones, the mass bombing. For example, during the ‘Christmas bombing’ campaign of 1972, the US ‘dropped more tonnage of bombs on Hanoi and Haiphong than Germany dropped on Great Britain from 1940 to 1945’ (Franklin 1993: 43). In total, the US dropped three times the number of bombs on Vietnam as had been dropped anywhere during the whole of the World War II (Pilger 1990). In a memorandum to President Johnson in 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara wrote ‘[The] picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week [his estimate of the human cost of the US bombing campaign], while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not pretty’ (quoted in Martin 1993: 66). The bombing only intensified as the war continued for another six years. Daniel Ellsberg, who worked for McNamara, was equally damning about US involvement in Vietnam. He described America’s war in Vietnam as a ‘crime . . . a brutal fraud, a lawless imperial adventure’ (1993: 66). The destructive power and the perverse logic of the war is captured perfectly by a US officer’s comment on the destruction of Ben Tre: ‘It was necessary to destroy the town in order to save it’ (quoted in Franklin 1993: 43). The documented American atrocities (My Lai being the most reported example) committed during the course of the war tend to be presented (when presented at all) as isolated moments of understandable madness or as individual acts of sadism, and never as the inevitable result of the logic of America’s prosecution of the war. Hollywood also ‘forgets’ the human costs of the war. If our knowledge of the war was derived solely from Hollywood’s Vietnam, we would be forgiven for thinking that America suffered an enormous number of both casualties and fatalities in Vietnam. The figure recorded on the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial (‘The Wall’) is 58,191 dead. Without wishing to diminish the suffering that this number represents, it has to be placed in the context of a figure of at least 2,000,000 Vietnamese dead.

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Remembering Vietnam I want now to examine the other side of memory. That is, what Hollywood ‘remembers’ about America’s war in Vietnam. To see Hollywood’s power as not (or not only) about forgetting but also as about remembering differently, I take as my guide Michel Foucault’s work on ‘power’. Using Foucault to read Hollywood’s Vietnam, it does not really matter whether Hollywood’s representations are ‘true’ or ‘false’ (historically accurate or not), what matters is the ‘regime of truth’ they put into circulation. From this perspective, Hollywood’s power is not a negative force, something which denies, represses, negates. On the contrary, Hollywood’s power is productive. Foucault’s general point about power is also true with regard to Hollywood’s power: [W]e must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth (1979: 194).

I will now describe briefly three narrative paradigms, or ‘rituals of truth’, in Hollywood’s Vietnam in the 1980s. I have chosen these particular ‘rituals of truth’ because of the way they inform and underpin the comments made by Bush in the political and military build-up to the First Gulf War. The first of my chosen narrative paradigms is ‘the war as betrayal’. This is first of all a discourse about bad leaders. In Uncommon Valor, Missing in Action I, Missing in Action II – The Beginning, Braddock: Missing in Action III and Rambo: First Blood Part II, for example, politicians are blamed for America’s defeat in Vietnam. When John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is asked to return to Vietnam in search of American soldiers missing in action, he asks, with great bitterness: ‘Do we get to win this time?’8 In other words, will the politicians let them win. Second, it is a discourse about weak military leadership in the field. In Platoon and Casualties of War, for example, defeat, it is suggested, is the result of an incompetent military command. Third, it is also a discourse about civilian betrayal. Both Cutter’s Way and First Blood suggest that the war effort was betrayed back home in America. Again John Rambo’s comments are symptomatic. When he is told by Colonel Trautman, ‘It’s over Johnny’, he responds: Nothing is over. You don’t just turn it off. It wasn’t my war. You asked me, and I did what I had to do to win, but somebody wouldn’t let us win. And I come back to the world and see these maggots protesting at the airport, calling me baby-killer. Who are they to protest me? I was there, they weren’t!

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Interestingly, all the films in this category are structured around loss. In Uncommon Valor, Missing in Action I, II, and III, Rambo: First Blood Part II and POW: The Escape, it is lost prisoners; in Cutter’s Way, First Blood and Born on the 4th of July, it is lost pride; in Platoon and Casualties of War it is lost innocence. It seems clear that the different versions of what is lost are symptomatic of a displacement of a greater loss: the displacement of that which can barely be named, America’s defeat in Vietnam. The use of American POWs is undoubtedly the most ideologically charged of these displacement strategies. It seems to offer the possibility of three powerful ‘rituals of truth’.9 First, to accept the myth that there are Americans still being held in Vietnam is to begin to justify retrospectively the original intervention. If the Vietnamese are so barbaric as to hold prisoners decades after the conclusion of the conflict, then there is no need to feel guilty about the war, as they surely deserved the full force of US military intervention. Second, Susan Jeffords identifies a process she calls the ‘femininization of loss’ (1989: 145). That is, those blamed for America’s defeat, whether they are unpatriotic protesters, an uncaring government, a weak and incompetent military command, or corrupt politicians, are always represented as stereotypically feminine: ‘the stereotyped characteristics associated with the feminine in dominant U.S. culture – weakness, indecisiveness, dependence, emotion, nonviolence, negotiation, unpredictability, deception’ (1997: 146).10 Jeffords’s argument is illustrated perfectly in the MIA cycle of films in which the ‘feminine’ negotiating stance of the politicians is played out against the ‘masculine’, no-nonsense approach of the returning veterans; the implication being that ‘masculine’ strength and single-mindedness would have won the war, whilst ‘feminine’ weakness and duplicity lost it. There can be little doubt that this aspect of Hollywood’s discourse provides support for Bush’s claims about the lessons to be learned from America’s war in Vietnam. Third, perhaps most importantly of all, is how these films turned what was thought to be lost into something that was only missing. Defeat is displaced by the ‘victory’ of finding and recovering American POWs. Puzzled by the unexpected success of Uncommon Valor in 1983, the New York Times sent a journalist to interview the film’s ‘audience’. One moviegoer was quite clear why the film was such a boxoffice success: ‘We get to win the Vietnam War’ (quoted in Franklin 1993: 141). The second narrative paradigm is what I will call ‘the inverted firepower syndrome’. This is a narrative device in which the America’s massive techno-military advantage (as discussed earlier) is inverted. Instead of scenes of the massive destructive power of US military force, we are

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shown countless narratives of individual Americans fighting the numberless (and often invisible) forces of the North Vietnamese Army and/or the ‘sinister’ and ‘shadowy’ men and women of the National Liberation Front (‘Viet Cong’). Missing In Action I, II, and III, Rambo: First Blood Part II and Platoon, all contain scenes of lone Americans struggling against overwhelming odds. John Rambo, armed only with a bow and arrow, is perhaps the most ridiculous example. Platoon, however, takes this narrative strategy onto another plane altogether. In a key scene, ‘good’ Sergeant Elias is pursued by a countless number of North Vietnamese soldiers. He is shot continually until he falls to his knees, spreading his arms out in a Christ-like gesture of agony and betrayal. The camera pans slowly to emphasise the pathos of his death throes. In Britain the film was promoted with a poster showing Elias in the full pain of his ‘crucifixion’.11 Above the image is written the legend: ‘The First Casualty of War is Innocence’. Loss of innocence is presented as both a realisation of the realities of modern warfare and as a result of America playing fair against a brutal and ruthless enemy. The ideological implication is clear: if America lost by playing the good guy, it is ‘obvious’ that it will be necessary in all future conflicts to play the tough guy in order to win. Such a narrative of course gives credence to Bush’s Gulf War boast that this time America would not fight ‘with one hand tied behind [its] back’ (quoted in the Daily Telegraph, January 1991). The third narrative paradigm is ‘the Americanisation of the war’. What I want to indicate by this term is the way in which the meaning of America’s war in Vietnam has become in Hollywood’s Vietnam (and elsewhere in US cultural production) an absolutely American phenomenon. This is an example of what we might call ‘imperial narcissism’, in which the US is centred and Vietnam and the Vietnamese exist only to provide a context for an American tragedy, whose ultimate brutality is the loss of American innocence.12 And like any good tragedy, it was doomed from the beginning to follow the dictates of fate. It was something that just happened. Hollywood’s Vietnam exhibits what Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud call a ‘mystique of unintelligibility’ (1990: 13). Perhaps the most compelling example of the mystique of unintelligibility is the opening sequence in the American video version of Platoon. It begins with a few words of endorsement from the then chairman of the Chrysler Corporation. We see him moving through a clearing in a forest towards a jeep. He stops at the jeep, and resting against it, addresses the camera: This jeep is a museum piece, a relic of war. Normandy, Anzio, Guadalcanal, Korea, Vietnam. I hope we will never have to build another jeep for war.

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This film Platoon is a memorial not to war but to all the men and women who fought in a time and in a place nobody really understood, who knew only one thing: they were called and they went. It was the same from the first musket fired at Concord to the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta: they were called and they went. That in the truest sense is the spirit of America. The more we understand it, the more we honor those who kept it alive. (quoted in Haines 1990: 81)

This is a discourse in which there is nothing to explain but American survival. Getting ‘Back to the World’ is everything it is about. It is an American tragedy and America and Americans are its only victims. The myth is expressed with numbing precision in Chris Taylor’s (Charlie Sheen) narration at the end of Platoon. Taylor looks back from the deck of a rising helicopter on the dead and dying of the battlefield below. Samuel Barber’s mournful and very beautiful Adagio for Strings seems to dictate the cadence and rhythm of his voice as he speaks these words of psychobabble: I think now looking back, we did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves. The enemy was in us. The war is over for me now, but it will always be there for the rest of my days. As I’m sure Elias will be, fighting with Barnes for what Rhah called ‘the possession of my soul’.

Time Magazine’s (26 January 1987) review of the film echoes and elaborates this theme: Welcome back to the war that, just 20 years ago, turned America schizophrenic. Suddenly we were a nation split between left and right, black and white, hip and square, mothers and fathers, parents and children. For a nation whose war history had read like a John Wayne war movie – where good guys finished first by being tough and playing fair – the polarisation was soul-souring. Americans were fighting themselves, and both sides lost.

Platoon’s function in this scenario is to heal the schizophrenia of the American body politic. To do this it reduces the war to an American psychodrama. As Klein contends, ‘[T]he war is decontextualized, mystified as a tragic mistake, an existential adventure, or a rite of passage through which the White American Hero discovers his identity’ (1990: 10). The film’s rewriting of the war not only excludes the Vietnamese, it also rewrites the place of the anti-war movement. Pro-war and anti-war politics are re-enacted as different positions in a debate on how best to fight and win the war. One group, led by the ‘good’ Sergeant Elias (who listen to Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ and smoke marijuana), want

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to fight the war with honour and dignity, whilst the other, led by the ‘bad’ Sergeant Barnes (who listen to Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie from Muskogee’ and drink beer), want to fight the war in any way that will win it. We are asked to believe that this was the essential conflict that tore America apart – the anti-war movement, dissolved into a conflict on how best to fight and win the war.

Liberation from Old Ghosts and Doubts When, in the build-up to the First Gulf War, Bush had asked Americans to remember the Vietnam War, the memories recalled by many Americans would have been of a war they had lived cinematically; a war of bravery and betrayal. Hollywood’s Vietnam had provided the materials to rehearse, elaborate, interpret and retell an increasingly dominant memory of America’s war in Vietnam. Although academic and Vietnam veteran Michael Clark does not use the term, he is clearly referring to what I have called the ‘memory industries’ when he writes of how the ticker-tape welcome home parade for Vietnam veterans staged in New York in 1985, together with the media coverage of the parade and the Hollywood films that seemed to provide the context for the parade, had worked together to produce a particular memory of the war – a memory with potentially deadly effects. He writes of how they [the memory industries, especially film] had constituted our memory of the war all along . . . [They] healed over the wounds that had refused to close for ten years with a balm of nostalgia, and transformed guilt and doubt into duty and pride. And with a triumphant flourish [they] offered us the spectacle of [their] most successful creation, the veterans who will fight the next war. (1991: 180)

Moreover, as Clark is at pains to stress, ‘the memory of Vietnam has ceased to be a point of resistance to imperialist ambitions and is now invoked as a vivid warning to do it right next time’ (1991: 206). At one of the many homecoming celebrations for returning veterans of the First Gulf War, Bush told his audience: You know, you all not only helped liberate Kuwait; you helped this country liberate itself from old ghosts and doubts . . . When you left, it was still fashionable to question America’s decency, America’s courage, America’s resolve. No one, no one in the whole world doubts us anymore . . . Let this new spirit give proper recognition to the Vietnam veterans. Their time has come (quoted in Haines 1995: 48).

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At the end of the war, Bush boasted, as if the war had been fought for no other reason than to overcome a traumatic memory, ‘By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all’ (quoted in Franklin 1993: 177). Echoing Bush’s comments, the New York Times (2 December 1993) featured an article with the title, ‘Is the Vietnam Syndrome Dead? Happily, It’s Buried in the Gulf’. Vietnam, the sign of American loss and division, had been buried in the sands of the Persian Gulf.13 Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome (with the help of Hollywood’s Vietnam) had supposedly liberated a nation from old ghosts and doubts; had made America once again strong, whole, and ready for the next war.14

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C HA PT E R 8

The Social Life of Opera

For many people in the UK and USA opera represents (whether this is understood positively or negatively) the very embodiment of ‘high culture’. Yet lately there have been signs that opera’s status is changing, as it becomes more and more a feature of everyday cultural life. The increasing social visibility of opera can be illustrated in a number of ways. For example, by the fairly extensive use of opera in advertising.1 The use of opera in cinema tells much the same story.2 At a more general level, one could point to opera stars performing with pop stars, opera stars hosting variety shows and opera stars performing at major sporting events. A key aspect of these changes is encapsulated in the way in which on the cover of Classic FM Monserrat Caballé is contextualised: not as a great soprano but as Freddie Mercury’s favourite diva (see Figure 8.1).3 What I want to explore in this chapter is whether these (and other) changes (I will discuss more later) have now made it possible to describe opera as an inclusive rather than an exclusive culture.

Opera as Commercial Entertainment In order to understand fully what has been happening to opera in recent years I think it is first necessary to examine something of the history of opera. Traditionally, opera is said to have been invented in the late sixteenth century by a group of Florentine intellectuals known as the Camerata. However, according to musicologist Susan McClary: Despite the humanistic red herrings proffered by Peri, Caccini [members of the Camerata], and others to the effect that they were reviving Greek performance practices, these gentlemen knew very well that they were basing their new reciting style on the improvisatory practices of contemporary

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Figure 8.1 Classic FM popular music. Thus the eagerness with which the humanist myth was constructed and elaborated sought both to conceal the vulgar origins of its techniques and to flatter the erudition of its cultivated patrons. (1985: 154–55)

Although there may be some dispute over the intellectual origins of opera, there is general agreement about its commercial beginnings.

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Significantly, the opera house was the ‘first musical institution to open its doors to the general public’ (Zelechow 1993: 261). The first opera house opened in Venice in 1637: it presented ‘commercial opera run for profit . . . offering the new, up-to-date entertainment to anyone who could afford a ticket’ (Raynor 1972: 169). By the end of the century Venice had sixteen opera houses open to the general public. Interestingly, as Henry Raynor observes, ‘The Venetian audience consisted of all social classes’ (1972: 171). Bernard Zelechow argues that this remained the case throughout Europe and North America for the next two centuries: By the late eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century the opera played a preeminent role in the cultural life of Europe. The opera was enjoyed and understood by a broad cross section of urban Europeans and Americans. The opera house became the meeting place of all social classes in society . . . The absence of the concept of a classical repertoire is an index of the popularity and vigor of opera as a mode of communication and entertainment. (1993: 262)4

By the nineteenth century, then, opera was established as a widely available form of popular entertainment consumed by people of all social classes. As Lawrence W. Levine explains, referring specifically to the US (but also the case in most of Europe), opera was an integral part of a shared public culture, ‘performed in a variety of settings, [it] enjoyed great popularity, and [was] shared by a broad segment of the population’ (1988: 85).5 For example, on returning to the United States from England in 1866, where he had been American Consul, George Makepeace Towle noted how in England ‘Lucretia Borgia [Donizetti, 1833] and Faust [Gounod, 1859], The Barber of Seville [Rossini, 1816] and Don Giovanni [Mozart, 1787] are everywhere popular; you may hear their airs in the drawing room and concert halls, as well as whistled by the street boys and ground out on the hand organs’ (quoted in Levine 1988: 99–100).

Turning Opera into ‘High Culture’ To turn opera into ‘high culture’ it had to be withdrawn from the everyday world of popular entertainment, especially from the heterogeneous dictates of the market and the commercial reach of cultural entrepreneurs. Bruce A. McConachie argues that between 1825 and 1850 elite social groups in New York developed three overlapping social strategies which gradually separated opera from the everyday world of popular entertainment. The first was to separate it from theatre by establishing buildings specifically for the performance of opera. Second, they

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also worked to sharpen and objectify a code of behaviour, including a dress code, deemed proper when attending the opera. Finally, upper-class New Yorkers increasingly insisted that only foreign-language opera could meet their standards of excellence – standards upheld by behaviour and criticism employing foreign words and specialized language impenetrable to all but the cognoscenti. (1988: 182)

As he further explains: In 1825 theatre audiences from all classes enjoyed opera as a part of the social conventions of traditional playgoing behaviour. By the Civil War [1861–5] the elite had excluded all but themselves and spectators from other classes willing to behave in ways deemed ‘proper’ according to upper-class norms. (1988: 182)

Levine, however, maintains that it is only at the end of the nineteenth century that opera can be said to have been effectively isolated from other forms of entertainment. It is only then, he argues, that there begins to be a growing social acceptance of the ‘insistence that opera was a “higher” form of art demanding a cultivated audience’ (1988: 102). For example, in 1900 the Metropolitan Opera, New York, had completed its season with a production of four acts from four different operas. This had been a common theatrical practice throughout most of the nineteenth century (see Figure 8.2). But times were changing and music critic W. J Henderson, writing in the New York Times, was quick to remind his readers of the new dispensation: there were people who had never heard ‘Carmen’ before. There were people who had never heard of ‘Il Flauto Magico’. There were people who had never heard ‘Lucia’ . . . There were people who did not know any one of the three ladies in ‘The Magic Flute’

This was an audience there only to hear ‘the famous singers’. What they got was ‘a hotch-potch . . . of extracts . . . a program of broken candy’. In producing such a show, the Metropolitan Opera had, according to Henderson, removed ‘all semblance of art in the opera house’ (quoted in Levine 1988: 103). Henderson’s words no longer signalled a threatened elitism, as they might have done fifty years earlier. On the contrary, Henderson was articulating what would become the commonplace attitude of the culture of twentieth-century opera: opera was no longer a form of living entertainment, it was increasingly a source of ‘Culture’ with a capital C – a resource of both aesthetic enlightenment and social validation. As Levine explains:

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Figure 8.2 Opera extracts What was invented in the late nineteenth century were the rituals accompanying th[e] appreciation [of high culture]; what was invented was the illusion that the aesthetic products of high culture were originally created to be appreciated in precisely the manner late nineteenth-century Americans were taught to observe: with reverent, informed, disciplined seriousness. (1988: 229)

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The success of the invention can be seen in Oscar Hammerstein’s confident claim (made in 1910) that grand opera [is] . . . the most elevating influence upon modern society, after religion. From the earliest days it has ever been the most elegant of all forms of entertainment . . . it employs and unifies all the arts . . . I sincerely believe that nothing will make better citizenship than familiarity with grand opera. It lifts one so out of the sordid affairs of life and makes material things seem so petty, so inconsequential, that it places one for the time being, at least, in a higher and better world . . . Grand opera . . . is the awakening of the soul to the sublime and the divine. (quoted in DiMaggio 1992: 35)

Like Levine, Paul DiMaggio argues that ‘The distinction between high and popular culture, in its American version, emerged in the period between 1850 and 1900 out of the efforts of urban elites to build organisational forms that, first, isolated high culture and, second, differentiated it from popular culture’ (2009: 519). With particular reference to Boston, DiMaggio argues that [t]o create an institutional high culture, Boston’s upper class had to accomplish three concurrent, but analytically distinct, projects: entrepreneurship, classification and framing. By entrepreneurship, I mean the creation of an organisational form that members of the elite could control and govern. By classification, I refer to the erection of strong and clearly defined boundaries between art and entertainment, the definition of a high art that elites and segments of the middle class could appropriate as their own cultural property; and the acknowledgement of that classification’s legitimacy by other classes and the state. Finally, I use the term framing to refer to the development of a new etiquette of appropriation, a new relationship between the audience and the work of art. (2009: 521)

DiMaggio differs from Levine and McConachie in his insistence that although there is clearly a ‘shift in opera’s social constituency during the nineteenth century . . . issues of opera’s definition, sponsorship, merit, and legitimacy were [not] resolved by the turn of the century’ (1992: 49). He argues that it is only in the 1930s, when opera adopts ‘the non-profit educational form’ [‘trustee-governed nonprofit organisations’], that opera’s ‘legitimacy’ as high culture is finally secured (1992: 40, 37). He cites the head of classical repertoire at RCA Victor, who wrote in 1936: ‘While in former years [opera] generally attracted large audiences primarily as a form of entertainment, today opera is commanding the attention of both layman and serious musician as an important and significant art form’ (quoted in DiMaggio 1992: 37).

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McConachie, Levine and DiMaggio do not claim that before the establishment of opera as high culture there had not existed a visible connection between cultural taste and social class. What had changed – and what I mean by the invention of opera as high culture – was the institutionalisation of this connection. Removing opera from the heterogeneous demands of the market ensured that differences in taste could be marked by, and be indicative of, clear social boundaries. As DiMaggio makes clear: [A]s long as cultural boundaries were indistinct, ‘fashionable taste’, far from embodying cultural authority, was suspect as snobbish, trivial, and undemocratic. Only when elite taste was harnessed to a clearly articulated ideology embodied in the exhibitions and performances of organisations that selected and presented art in a manner distinct from that of commercial entrepreneurs . . . did an understanding of culture as hierarchical become both legitimate and widespread. (1992: 22)

These elite strategies of cultural appropriation did not go unnoticed by contemporary media. For example, on the opening night (22 October 1883) of the New York Metropolitan Opera House a local newspaper estimated that the boxes were occupied by people whose combined wealth was in the region of $540,000,000 (Kolodin 1936: 5). The following evening the New York Evening Post commented: ‘From an artistic and musical point of view, the large boxes in the Metropolitan is a decided mistake. But as the house was avowedly built for social purposes rather than artistic, it is useless to complain about this’ (quoted in Kolodin 1936: 12). In 1916 the Atlantic Monthly carried an article which made clear the new dispensation: opera is controlled by a few rich men . . . It does not exist for the good of the whole city, but rather for those with plethoric purses . . . [Opera houses] surround themselves with an exotic atmosphere in which the normal person finds difficulty in breathing . . . they are too little related to the community’. (quoted in Levine 1988: 101)

Opera as ‘high culture’ is, therefore, not a universal given, unfolding from its moment of intellectual birth, it is a historically specific category institutionalised (depending on which cultural historian you find most convincing) by the 1860s, 1900s or 1930s. Although these accounts may differ in terms of periodisation, what each demonstrates is how elite social groups in the major American cities began the process of constructing a separate social space in which opera could be self-evidently high culture. Similarly, as Janet Wolff argues:

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A parallel process of differentiation had also been occurring in England, where the pre-industrial cultural pursuits, enjoyed on a cross-class basis, were gradually replaced by a class-specific culture, the high arts of music, theatre and literature being the province of the upper-middle and middle classes, and the popular cultural forms of music hall, organised sport and popular literature providing the entertainment of the lower classes. (1989: 5–6)

The key thing to understand historically about opera, then, is that it did not become unpopular, rather it was made unpopular. That is, it was actively appropriated from its popular audience by elite social groups determined to situate it as the crowning glory of their culture – that is, socalled ‘high culture’. In short, opera was transformed from entertainment enjoyed by the many into Culture to be appreciated by the few.6 As Levine points out, well-meaning arguments [made in the 1980s and 1990s] that opera might ‘finally be extended to the masses for the first time, betray a lack of historical memory or understanding of the contours of culture in nineteenth-century America [and most of Europe]’ (1988: 241).

‘Opera Homework’ for the New Audience The active removal of opera from the world of popular entertainment was not just an organisational accomplishment, it also involved the introduction of a particular way of seeing opera – what Pierre Bourdieu calls the ‘aesthetic gaze’ (Bourdieu 1984, 1993). Moreover, to redefine opera as art ‘is tantamount to saying that a certain education is necessary to understand it at all: which is a convenient way of policing culture, and making sure it is kept as the property of an elite’ (Tambling 1987: 108). Although opera once again attracts a popular audience, it now confronts this audience as art that can be entertaining. In order to unlock the entertainment in the art, the new popular audience must do its ‘opera homework’. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that the re-emergence of the possibility of opera as popular entertainment has been accompanied (and no doubt promoted) by the many introductory textbooks (see Figure 8.3) which have been published in the 1990s offering to ‘educate’ the reader in what is required in order to be able to appreciate opera (even as entertainment). The fact these books have to exist at all speaks volumes about the success of the project to invent opera as high culture. In order to reintroduce opera into the everyday world of popular entertainment, all the introductory textbooks I have read deploy three discursive strategies: a welcoming humour; an insistence that opera is a special kind of entertainment called art; and a tactical anti-elitism.7

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How to be Tremendously Tuned into Opera When the Fat Lady Sings: Opera History as it Ought to Be Taught An Invitation to Opera Get into Opera: A Beginner’s Guide A Beginner’s Guide to Opera Harry Enfield’s Guide to Opera Opera 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Opera The Penguin Opera Guide Who’s Afraid of Opera? A Highly Opinionated, Informative and Entertaining Guide The Good Opera Guide Opera for Dummies Teach Yourself Opera Collins Opera and Operetta Opera (Crash Course Series) Opera: A Crash Course Opera: The Rough Guide Getting Opera: A Guide for the Cultured but Confused Figure 8.3 (Re)Introducing opera

Welcoming Humour The cover blurb of Opera – A Crash Course, asks, ‘Is the word opera always preceded by the word soap to you? Have you an uneasy suspicion that ‘La Donna e Mobile’ does not really mean “my girl’s got a cellphone”? . . . Opera – A Crash Course is for you’ (Pettitt, 1998). Similarly, the cover blurb of Opera for Dummies asks ‘Do you have trouble telling the difference between a tenor and soprano or a mezzo and mozzarella?’ Under a section called ‘Who You Are’, they observe, ‘For starters, you’re an intelligent person. We can sense it, and we’re never wrong about these things. After all, you picked up this book, didn’t you?’ (Pogue and Speck 1997: 1). Entertainment that is Art Opera – A Crash Course alerts readers to the difficulties ahead: One word of warning. Don’t expect opera simply – or always – to entertain you. Opera, like all art, should provide a way into the human spirit. If a work seems difficult and long, try your damnedest not to walk out. Tell yourself that someone out there – the composer – has agonized long and hard about how to say something. Try to enter this world, a world that is also an important corner of yours. (Pettitt 1998: 9)

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Teach Yourself Opera suggests that ‘An opera is rather like a beautiful painting. Each time you return, you should find something new to enjoy’ (Sutherland 1997: xii). Getting Opera: A Guide for the Cultured but Confused declares: It takes work to appreciate an opera – work that many aren’t willing to put in given the fact that watching TV or going to a movie is so easy. Well, this book is intended to give you all the workout you need to start getting opera . . . You don’t need a degree in musicology to appreciate opera. All you need is to do the basic groundwork. (Dobkin 2000: 8–9)

Tactical Anti-Elitism Opera: The Rough Guide is aware that ‘opera remains off-putting for too many people. Partly this is due to the social exclusivity cultivated by many opera houses’ (Boyden 1999: ix). The cover blurb of Opera – A Crash Course promises ‘to help you penetrate the miasma of social snobbery that envelops opera everywhere except Italy’. It also reassures the reader: ‘And you will find out how to comport yourself in an opera house.’ According to the cover blurb, ‘Teach Yourself Opera opens the door allowing everyone to step through and follow the fascinating path leading from 1600 to the present day.’ Inside the reader is told, ‘This is not intended to be an exhaustive, or an exhausting study, but a tasty appetizer that leads you confidently into the world of opera’ (Sutherland 1997: ix). The cover blurb of Opera for Dummies promises ‘Attend a live opera in style with tips for sitting in the right place, wearing the right clothes, and more!’ The writers acknowledge that opera can be ‘intimidating’ and make people feel ‘insecure’ (Pogue and Speck 1997: 7). To illustrate the point, they offer the following scenario, ‘You’re at the opera house. You open the program book, or you’re listening to opera snobs talk – foreign words are flying like bullets. Quick, what do they mean?’ (1997: 7). Opera for Dummies will help secure the reader against such intimidation. But more than this, the book challenges the reader to refuse to be excluded: ‘In fact, plenty of opera snobs are perfectly happy that you don’t understand. They’d love opera to be an exclusive club, an elite corps, a sacred order. They’re glad that opera strikes many as the world’s most obscure art form’ (1997: 1). They know that opera has not always been the exclusive preserve of high culture. But they insist that it is not opera that changed but how people used opera socially: ‘Opera is just as entertaining as it ever was. But these days, it has become much less familiar. That’s all. After you become familiar with this art form, you’ll be amazed at how entertaining it becomes’ (1997: 9). The cover blurb on Getting Opera: A Guide for the Cultured but Confused

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also speaks of potential consumers of opera being ‘a little intimidated’. To overcome this problem the book promises that it ‘brings the elusive concepts down to earth, making it accessible to [enable] . . . the opera-shy reader . . . to embark on a thoroughly delightful and instructive operatic journey’. Inside the author elaborates: My point is, essentially, screw the whole struggle between high and low. And certainly don’t be afraid of opera because some force has foolishly built it up as the ultimate in refinement. Opera has historically been a popular art form that aimed to entertain ordinary people. Don’t let that bother you, and don’t let some uptight classical geek tell you any different (Dobkin 2000: 17).

Some of the books also offer advice on recorded opera. In the Collins Opera and Operetta each entry includes a recommended recording. Opera: The Rough Guide is aware that looking through a CD catalogue of recorded opera can be very ‘perplexing’. It therefore presents itself as ‘the essential guide through this mass of music’, offering ‘definitive surveys of the recordings’ (Boyden 1999: ix). Similarly, Teach Yourself Opera also provides recommended recordings. The cover blurb of Opera for Dummies promises to help you ‘build a great collection of opera recordings’. The cover blurb on Getting Opera: A Guide for the Cultured but Confused also promises information on ‘where to begin your CD collection’. There are also available a number of CD collections explicitly aimed at the newcomer to opera (see Figure 8.4). Their titles, and how they are advertised, on television and on billboards, is indistinguishable from the

The Only Opera Album You’ll Ever Need The Best Opera Album in the World Opera Album 2002 Opera Hits Opera Favourites The Ultimate Opera Collection The Ultimate Opera Collection 2 Simply the Best Night at the Opera Simply the Best of Italian Opera The A-Z of Opera 50 Great Moments in Opera The Greatest Opera Show on Earth Essential Opera Figure 8.4 Introductory Compilations

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The Essential Pavarotti I The Essential Pavarotti II The Greatest Pavarotti Album Ever! The Greatest Puccini Album Ever! The Greatest Puccini Show on Earth! Puccini’s Heroines: The Power of Love Figure 8.5 ‘Pop marketing’ of opera composers/performers

marketing techniques used to sell pop music. Similarly, singers and composers are increasingly marketed in much the same way as pop stars (for some examples, see Figure 8.5). Luciano Pavarotti is only the most obvious example. Another interesting development is the way in which performances of opera (in venues other than opera houses) are beginning to be promoted in a manner similar to how they would have been promoted before the institutionalisation of opera as high culture. Figure 8.6 shows a fragment of a poster advertising a performance of Weber’s Der Freischutz. Notice how it prepares an audience by providing a map of the narrative of the opera. After the institutionalisation of opera as art, posters increasingly contain minimal detail, expecting an audience to be already familiar with the opera being advertised. Figure 8.7 is an example of recent promotional material. Although it is not yet as detailed as one finds in nineteenth-century posters, it is certainly moving in that direction.

Resistance to Opera as Inclusive Culture The re-emergence of the possibility of opera as an inclusive form of entertainment has certainly not gone unresisted. There are those, like Canadian tenor Jon Vickers, who claim that opera is being invaded by those techniques that are corrupting our society – big PR, the personality cult, techniques which create hysteria but do not elevate man. They degrade our art . . . We cannot compromise . . . We mustn’t smear the line between art and entertainment . . . You cannot bring art to the masses . . . You never will. (quoted in Levine 1988: 255)

British baritone Sir Thomas Allen has made similar remarks. In a speech delivered at the 13th Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards at London’s Dorchester Hotel, he claimed that opera was becoming increasingly ‘moneygrabbing’ and ‘PR-led’. He also made clear his opposition to inclusivity: ‘We

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Figure 8.6 Mapping the narrative

kow-tow more and more to mass appeal . . . I am sick and tired of hearing of those performers who talk of it as their life’s work to bring culture and the classics to a wider public’ (Allen 2002).8 According to Allen, attempts at inclusivity are symptomatic of declining standards: ‘We have undoubtedly become a civilisation in rapid cultural decline’ (BBC News 2002).

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Figure 8.7 Carmen: lust/power/murder/superstition

Luciano Pavarotti’s popularity and commercial success made him a prime target for the resisters to opera as inclusive culture. In 1990 Pavarotti’s recording of ‘Nessun Dorma’ was used as ‘The Official BBC Grandstand World Cup Theme’. As a consequence, it became a number one hit in the British music charts. Pavarotti had similar success with two albums, The Essential Pavarotti I and The Essential Pavarotti II. The night before the World Cup Finals in 1990, Pavarotti, José Carreras and Placido Domingo gave their first ‘Three Tenors’ concert. They performed before a live audience of 6,000 people and a television audience of 800 million. In the context of this success, Pavarotti gave a free concert in Hyde Park, London, on 30 July 1991. These were 250,000 people expected, but due

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to heavy rain the number who actually attended was around 100,000. The obvious popularity of the event would appear to threaten the class exclusivity of opera as high culture. It is therefore interesting to note the way in which the event was reported in the media. All the British tabloids carried news of the event on their front pages. The Daily Mirror, for instance, had five pages devoted to the concert. What the tabloid coverage reveals is a clear attempt to define the event for an inclusive culture. The Sun quoted a woman who said, ‘I can’t afford to go to posh opera houses with toffs and fork out £100 a seat’. The Daily Mirror ran an editorial in which it claimed that Pavarotti’s performance ‘wasn’t for the rich [it was] for the thousands . . . who could never normally afford a night with an operatic star’. When the event was reported on television news programmes the following lunchtime, the tabloid coverage was included as part of the general meaning of the event. Both the BBC’s ‘One O’Clock News’ and ITV’s ‘12.30 News’, referred to the way in which the tabloids had covered the concert, and moreover, the extent to which they had covered it. The news programmes also covered the ‘resistance’ to the event – the attempt to introduce the ‘traditional’ cultural certainties: ‘Some critics said that a park is no place for opera’ (‘One O’Clock News’); ‘Some opera enthusiasts might think it all a bit vulgar’ (‘12.30 News’). Although such comments invoked the spectre of high-culture exclusivity, they seemed strangely at a loss to offer any real purchase on the event. The apparently obvious cultural division between elite and popular culture no longer seemed so obvious. It suddenly seemed that the cultural had been replaced by the economic, revealing a division between ‘the rich’ and ‘the thousands’. It was the event’s very popularity that forced the television news to confront, and, ultimately, to find wanting, the old cultural certainties. An editorial in the UK magazine Opera (October 1991) wondered out loud: ‘Is Pavarotti the greatest known ambassador for opera, bringing untold thousands to its heady delights, or is he just a slightly unconventional but decidedly cuddly pop star?’ This uncertainty about Pavarotti’s status was not shared by a reader’s letter published in the same issue of the magazine: I had the misfortune to attend Pavarotti’s concert in Hyde Park . . . I moved to various spots searching for a place from which he could be heard to best advantage. In every place the majority reaction of the audience was the same – they talked, joked and laughed and occasionally jumped up and down to see if they could see Pavarotti on the stage, pausing only to produce thunderous applause at the end of each aria. It became clear from all this that a Pavarotti event has very little to do with opera as such, but everything to do with Pavarotti as a phenomenon. Through continuous hype, he has now

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become so famous that it is imperative to see him when he appears, much as one visits Madame Tussaud’s on coming to London, or goes to see the three-handed man at the fairground . . . The argument that Pavarotti is a man of the people bringing opera to the masses is a load of tosh, since the masses at Hyde Park showed little interest in listening. At the end he was vociferously applauded. Clearly the audience loved him; whether they like opera is something else again (quoted in Evans 1999: 355).

Situating Pavarotti in the company of waxwork figures and unusual fairground exhibits is to threaten to undo what was done so successfully in the late nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century – the institutionalisation of opera as high culture. The very thought that an audience might have talked, joked and laughed and occasionally jumped up and down at the performance of one of the great tenors of the twentieth century would be enough to make the elite of Boston and elsewhere turn despairingly in their graves. Something similar, telling much the same story, happened three years later at Glyndebourne. According to Kate Saunders, writing in the Sunday Times, Last Sunday [10 July 1994], when Deborah Warner took her bow as director at Glyndebourne on the first night of her provocative new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, certain sections of the audience erupted in boos and catcalls . . . This is not the kind of behaviour one expects at Glyndebourne, the rarefied musical hothouse set in a manicured picnic-park of Sussex downland . . . Sunday’s incident was only the latest manifestation of [such behaviour]. . . . The common thread that unites these incidents is a fear of innovation. . . . [articulated by] an element of toffee-nosed, conservative stick-in-the-muds who are terrified that innovation will somehow tarnish the glittery snob value of the Glyndebourne experience (1994: 4).

It appears that fear of innovation is only the surface expression of a much deeper, more troubling fear that cannot quite speak its name. As Saunders explains, The explosion of popular interest in opera in the 1980s worried people who were attracted by its elitist aura. These are the types who threw away their CDs of Turandot and complained when they heard the plumber whistling ‘Nessun Dorma’. I cannot help suspecting that the booers at Glyndebourne were also objecting to the cheap standby seats now available in the gleaming new theatre . . . [It is the people in] the most expensive seats that cause the trouble. They can moan about daring directors and designers, but their real grievance, I suspect, is the increasing democratisation of an art form reserved for the rich (1994: 4, 6).

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The people identified by Saunders in the 1990s as throwing away their CDs of Turandot and complaining when they heard the plumber whistling ‘Nessun Dorma’, stand in an interesting historical relationship with the people identified by American Consul George Makepeace Towle in the 1860s as taking delight in the idea of street boys whistling arias from Lucretia Borgia, Faust, The Barber of Seville and Don Giovanni (see Chapter 10 in this volume). The distinction between the two responses (exclusion and inclusion) captures perfectly the historically-shifting status of opera; and how it is possible to live in different ways the social life of opera.

Back to the Future: Learning From History Sociologist David Evans makes an interesting distinction ‘between opera (commodified cultural artefact in performance) and “opera” (commodified entertainment fragments outside the opera house)’ (1999: 236). In this way, Evans seeks to indicate a difference between opera in the opera house and opera as experienced in TV commercials, film soundtracks, sporting events, CD compilations, celebrity concerts by opera ‘superstars’, opera holidays and so on. Although I think this is an interesting distinction, it seems to me to carry with it a certain essentialism – an uncritical residual distinction between art and entertainment. I am not convinced that it is really possible to sustain such a distinction. Perhaps a more productive way to understand what is happening to opera is not to see it in terms of commodities but in terms of social practices of consumption.9 In other words, it is not the ‘content’ of opera that makes it ‘high culture’ but how and by whom it is consumed. This is because the difference between what counts as elite and popular culture is never simply a question of the material qualities of particular commodities. What counts as popular culture in one historical period can become elite culture in another (and vice versa). What really matters are ‘the forces and relations which sustain the distinction, the difference . . . the relations of power which are constantly punctuating and dividing the domain of culture into . . . dominant and subordinate formations’ (Hall 2009b: 514). Opera has become once again what it was for most of the nineteenth century – a cultural practice that is understood as both art and entertainment – an integral part of a shared public culture, but one which can be articulated to different pleasures and for different social purposes. In the nineteenth century, whether it was art or entertainment depended on who was consuming it and in what context. As Levine perceptively observes, [O]pera was an art form that was simultaneously popular and elite. That is, it was attended both by large numbers of people who derived pleasure from it

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in the context of their normal everyday culture, and by smaller socially and economically elite groups who derived both pleasure and social confirmation from it. (1988: 86)

To see opera as a cultural form (consisting of many different texts and practices) that is simultaneously inclusive and exclusive, it seems to me, is an accurate description of contemporary articulations of opera. What I think is happening with regard to the popularity of opera is therefore almost like a return to the cultural relations of nineteenth-century Europe and the USA. However, there is one crucial difference between then and now. Although most of what now counts as opera – and it is a much broader range of texts and practices than existed in the nineteenth century – is an integral part of a shared public culture, there is one key part that is still as socially exclusive as it was intended to be when opera was first institutionalised as high culture – opera in the opera house. Take as an example the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London. Since 1946, when opera in the UK first received government support (via Arts Council subsidies), the Royal Opera House has talked about reducing seat prices in order to make opera more accessible to a broader social mix. In 1983 the then chairman of the Royal Opera House, Sir Charles Moser, claimed that ‘we are desperately trying to widen access’ (quoted in Evans 1999: 191); and ‘if we get more money [government/ Arts Council funding], we will reduce seat prices. That’s our top priority at the moment, and to widen access’ (1999: 200). In 1995, Sir Angus Stirling, chairman of the Royal Opera House, repeated the aim to make opera more accessible, claiming that ‘we are doing everything we can to bring seat prices down’ (1999: 140). In 1998, the new chair Sir Colin Southgate made once again the same claim: ‘We have been asked to make the ROH less elitist and to bring ticket prices down. We want to do this, but we can’t without money. It’s a circle we cannot square’ (quoted in Lebrecht 2001: 458). The repeated mantra of access for funding makes one wonder if the Royal Opera House is really committed to access, or whether its ‘commitment to access’ is really a strategy for attracting funding. According to Norman Lebrecht, commenting on the rebuilding of the Royal Opera House (funded by a Lottery grant of £78.5 million), The Met [Metropolitan Opera, New York] and the Bastille [Opéra Bastille, Paris] kept tickets affordable by building new houses with four thousand seats. Covent Garden kept them exclusive by rebuilding with just 2,141 seats. This cardinal misjudgement alone will prevent the ROH from ever becoming a popular venue (2001: 490).

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Similarly, listening to what the management at the Royal Opera House have to say about those who might enter the opera house as a result of increased access makes one doubt their commitment to genuine access. In 1998, when asked to expand on his commitment to access, Sir Colin Southgate explained, ‘We mustn’t downgrade the opera house. I don’t want to sit next to somebody in a singlet, a pair of shorts and a smelly pair of trainers. I’m a relaxed individual, but I’m passionate about standards of behaviour’ (quoted in Lebrecht 2001: 445). In 1995, Arts Council Chairman Lord Gowrie (defending the funding of opera) also articulated a rather restricted notion of the audience that access was intended to encourage: ‘Opera audiences I have seen around the country are very often struggling professionals. They are middle class people – not very rich toffs’ (quoted in Lebrecht 2001: 392). A letter published in The Guardian in December 1999, written by a self-declared supporter of opera, openly doubted the Royal Opera House’s commitment to access. The letter was an open letter to the then chief executive of the Royal Opera House, Michael Kaiser: All this talk of access is bullshit. Access doesn’t just mean opening foyers to the public, the odd free concert, the cheap seats that you wouldn’t dream of suffering . . . It means enabling people of modest means who love opera to attend performances in the house their taxes pay for.

Rather than going down, seat prices in the UK have actually increased.10 Throughout the 1980s opera houses saw a huge increase in box office income; an increase massively disproportionate to the small increase in attendance. For example, opera attendance in the UK increased from 1.475 million in 1981 to 1.515 million in 1990. During the same period, however, box office receipts rose from £8.3 million to £22.3 million.11 Moreover, as a correspondent to the magazine Opera (December 1990) observed: ‘[In 1962] as an articled clerk on £17 a week, I could afford, and sat regularly in the balcony stall sides [in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden] at 10/6d [about 52p]. Today at £48, such a seat would require a gross salary of £80,820. Some articled clerk!’ (quoted in Evans 1999: 139). It is not surprising, then, that in a survey, carried out in 1990 by the British Market Research Bureau, in which people were asked to rank their consumption of opera in order of frequency of mode of access, attending an opera in an opera house is only placed fourth.12 Moreover, between 1986 and 2000 between 5 per cent and 7 per cent of the UK population aged 15 and over attended the opera (within this figure professional, employers and managers outnumber unskilled manual by almost nine to one).13

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Therefore, although it is true that there is an increasingly shared public culture of opera, which includes opera on CD, on video and DVD, on television, in advertising, in films, on radio and in books, together with other forms of popular culture with which there is considerable overlap (opera stars performing with pop stars; opera stars hosting variety shows; opera stars performing at the opening of major sporting events), significantly – and running counter to all this – there is little sign of growth in the audience for opera as it is experienced in the opera houses in most of Europe and the USA.14 Therefore, to return to the question with which I began this chapter: it seems to me that to describe opera as an inclusive culture is to identify only part of what has been happening to it in recent years. I think to see the whole picture is to see that opera is now, as it was for most of the nineteenth century, available for consumption as both exclusive and inclusive culture.

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C HA PT E R 9

The Culture of Globalisation

As my title suggests, it is the culture of globalisation that is the primary focus of this chapter. Within this general focus I want to challenge the view that globalisation is the same as Americanisation. Moreover, and fundamental to the Americanisation thesis, I want also to challenge the idea that commodities are the same as culture.

What is Globalisation? First of all, globalisation refers to the creation of a ‘world society’. We can see this in the establishment of a capitalist world economy in which national borders seem to be becoming less and less important; this feature of globalisation can be experienced by simply walking down the ‘local’ high street, where ‘local’ goods in ‘local’ shops are displayed alongside ‘global’ goods in ‘global’ shops. It is this that makes most high streets in most cities look very similar. This aspect of globalisation is also there in what German sociologist Ulrick Beck calls a ‘world risk society’. As he explains, ‘Threats create society, and global threats create global society . . . . [a] world risk society’ (2000: 38). Such global risks would include climate change, AIDs, terrorism, financial crises: each demanding a ‘global’ response. Globalisation also refers to what I will call global contraction; that is, the way in which the world appears to be shrinking. It can be said to be getting smaller in two ways. First, the increased speed and range of travel, and the fact that more people travel than ever before, makes the world seem smaller. Second, the impact of new electronic media produces similar effects. For instance, being near or being distant no longer dictates with whom we communicate. Electronic media such as mobile phones, email, msn, Skype, for example, give each of us access to a world well beyond our ‘local’ community. Similarly, television news provides us with images and information about events that are taking place thousands of miles away

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from where we live. Unless we watch the ‘local’ news or read the ‘local’ newspaper, it is likely that we will be better informed about ‘global’ events than we are about ‘local’ events. We may in fact recognise ‘global’ celebrities, like Nelson Mandela or David Beckham or Paris Hilton, more easily than we recognise people who live in our own neighbourhoods. In addition, global contraction may lead to social relationships becoming disembedded; that is, they may no longer depend on sharing a particular geographical or regional space. As a consequence we may communicate more with people in China, Australia, Germany, South Africa, via email, for example, than we do with neighbours who live within two hundred metres of where we live. Instead of being based on regional or geographic location, social relationships may become based on shared objectives, producing communities of desire. We might think, for example, of global fan clubs for football teams or global fan clubs for actors and musicians. Another example is international internet dating in which people seek love in distant parts of the world; rather than seek Mr or Ms Right in their ‘local’ area, their search instead becomes ‘global’. As these examples make clear, the ‘global’ may be for some people more local than the ‘local’. Globalisation also refers to the increasing global mobility of people. It may result from the search for love or more mundanely, it may result from workers forced to travel thousands of miles in search of work. Think of something as everyday as English Premier League football: over the last decade or so the league has featured professional players from around the world. When I was at school foreign players were from Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Now they come from all parts of the world. Some Premiership teams have even fielded teams that have contained no or very few English players. These changes are a direct expression of the process of globalisation. Professional footballers who travel the globe in search of work are certainly the glamorous and wealthy end of labour migrancy, but they are, nevertheless, a sign of a global economy in which people travel the globe in search of work. Perhaps an even more striking example of the global movement of people is the fact that 25 per cent of children born in England and Wales in 2007 were to women born outside the UK.1

Globalisation as Americanisation One dominant view of globalisation, especially in discussions of globalisation and culture, is to see it as the reduction of the world to an American ‘global village’: a global village in which everyone speaks English with an American accent, wears Levi jeans and Wrangler shirts, drinks CocaCola, eats at McDonalds, surfs the net on a computer overflowing with

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Figure 9.1 Coca-Cola people

Microsoft software, listens to rock or country music, watches a mixture of MTV, CNN news broadcasts, Hollywood movies and reruns of Dallas, and then discusses the prophetically named World Series, while drinking a bottle of Budweiser or Miller and smoking Marlboro cigarettes. According to this scenario, globalisation is the supposed successful imposition of American culture around the globe, in which the economic success of US capitalism is underpinned by the cultural work that its commodities supposedly do in effectively destroying indigenous cultures and imposing an American way of life on ‘local’ populations. John Street, for example, claims, ‘The culture being touted across the globe often emerges from one bit of the world – America – and carries with it American experiences and perspectives’ (2000: 102). Similarly, according to Beck, globalisation is producing a ‘single commodity world’, in which local cultures are replaced by ‘symbols from the publicity and image departments of multinational corporations . . . [who] plant the carefully devised glitter of white America in the hearts of people all around the world’ (2000: 43). When I was in Qingdao, China, in 2005, I saw the sculpture I photographed in Figure 9.1. As you can see, it shows ordinary Chinese citizens entering a ‘Coca-Cola house’ and emerging as little ‘Coca-Cola people’. The argument is clear: the globalisation of American commodities Americanises the globe. I think there are at least three problems with this view of globalisation.

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The ‘economic’ and the ‘cultural’ The first problem with globalisation as cultural Americanisation is that it operates with a very reductive concept of culture: it assumes that ‘economic’ success is the same as ‘cultural’ imposition. In other words, the recognition of the obvious success of US companies in placing products in most of the markets of the world is understood as self-evidently and unproblematically as ‘cultural’ success. For example, American sociologist Herbert Schiller claims that the ability of American companies to unload successfully commodities around the globe is producing an American global capitalist culture. The role of media corporations, he claims, is to make programmes which ‘provide in their imagery and messagery, the beliefs and perspectives that create and reinforce their audiences’ attachments to the way things are in the system overall’ (1979: 30). There are two overlapping problems with this position. First, it is simply assumed that commodities are the same as culture; establish the presence of the former and you can predict the details of the latter. But as John Tomlinson points out, ‘[I]f we assume that the sheer global presence of these goods is in itself token of a convergence towards a capitalist monoculture, we are probably utilising a rather impoverished concept of culture – one that reduces culture to its material goods’ (1999: 83). It may be the case that certain commodities are used, made meaningful and valued in ways that promote American capitalism as a way of life, but this is not something which can be established by simply assuming that market penetration is the same as cultural compliance. This is not to deny that American capitalism is working – selling goods, making profits – but it is to deny that economic success is the same as cultural success. The second problem with this position is that it is an argument that depends on the claim that commodities have inherent values and singular meanings, which can be imposed on passive consumers. In other words, this argument operates with a very discredited account of the flow of influence. It simply assumes that the dominant globalising culture will be successfully injected into the weaker ‘local’ culture. That is, it is assumed that people are the passive consumers of the cultural meanings which supposedly flow directly and straightforwardly from the commodities they consume. If this is true, what are we to make of the global success of ‘hip hop’? Are South African, Turkish or Chinese youth, for example, the duped victims of American cultural imperialism? A more interesting approach would be to look at how South African, Turkish or Chinese youth, for example, have appropriated hip hop to meet their ‘local’ needs and desires. In other words, look at what they do with it, rather than what

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it supposedly does to them; examine how it is made (or not made) part of their own ‘local’ culture. To think that economic success is the same as cultural success is to work under the influence of what I will call ‘mode of production determinism’. That is, the argument that how something is made, or where it is made, determines what it means or what it is worth (it is Hollywood, etcetera, what do you expect?). Such analysis always seems to want to suggest that ‘agency’ is always overwhelmed by ‘structure’; that consumption is a mere shadow of production; that consumer negotiations are fictions, merely illusory moves in a game of economic power. Moreover, ‘mode of production determinism’ is a way of thinking that seeks to present itself as a form of radical cultural politics. But all too often this is a politics in which attacks on power are rarely little more than self-serving revelations about how ‘other people’ are always ‘cultural dupes’. Although we should recognise that the American culture industries, for example, are a major site of cultural production, constructing powerful images, descriptions, definitions and frames of reference for understanding the world, we should reject the view that to consume these productions is automatically to become the hopeless victim of ‘false consciousness’, whether capitalist, imperialist, patriarchal or heteronormative. Although we should never lose sight of the manipulative powers of capital and the authoring structures of production, we must insist on the active complexity and situated agency of consumption. Moreover, making culture is complex and contradictory and cannot be explained by simple and simplistic notions of determination and manipulation. What is required is not just an understanding of, say, how, American companies produce a repertoire of commodities for consumption but also an understanding of the many ways in which people select, appropriate and use these commodities and make them into culture in the lived practices of everyday life. Moreover, while it is clearly important to locate the commodities people consume within the field of the economic conditions of their existence, it is clearly insufficient to do this and think you have also already analysed important questions of appropriation, meaning and use. It is simplistic, and it is analytically disabling, to assume that practices of consumption are dictated by the intentions of production. To explore the extent of the influence of American companies requires specific and detailed focus on consumption as it is actually lived and practised in particular social contexts and not as it should be experienced as already determined in a prior analysis of the relations of production and economic conditions. Moreover, I think it is important to distinguish between the power of American companies and the power of their influence. Too often the two

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national

class ethnicity gender generation ‘race’ sexuality, etc.

Figure 9.2 The ‘foreign’

are conflated but they are not necessarily the same. The trouble with ‘mode of production determinism’ is that too often it is assumed that they are the same. This is not to say that consumption is always empowering and resistant. To deny the total passivity of consumption is not to deny that sometimes consumption is passive. To deny that the consumers of the commodities produced by American companies are cultural dupes is not to deny that American companies seek to manipulate, but it is an evasion of complexity to see the ‘local’ cultures of everyday life as little more than degraded landscapes of commercial and cultural manipulation, imposed from above in order to make profit and secure passive communities of consumption. The foreign A second problem with globalisation as cultural Americanisation is that it operates with a very limited concept of the ‘foreign’. First of all, it works with the assumption that what is foreign is always a question of national difference. But what is foreign can equally be a question of social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, generation or any other marker of social difference (see Figure 9.2). Moreover, what is foreign in terms of being imported from another country may be less foreign than differences already established by, say, social class or generation. Furthermore, the imported foreign may be used against the prevailing power relations of the ‘local’. This is probably what is happening with the export of hip hop. What is consumed as American culture is worked on, it is used to make space within what is perceived as the dominant national culture. Another problem with this very limited notion of the foreign is that it is always assumed that the ‘local’ is the same as the national. But within the national there may well be many ‘locals’. Moreover, there may be considerable conflict between them and between them and the dominant culture (i.e. ‘the national’). As Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi explains: National agendas are not coincidental with truly ‘local’ agendas, and real concerns arise as to whether ‘national’ media cultures adequately represent

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ethnic, religious, political and other kinds of diversity. In international relations, the ‘national’ is itself a site of struggle, with a variety of ‘local’ identities and voices in contention. (1991: 129)

Globalisation can therefore both help confirm or help undo ‘local’ cultures; it can keep one in place and it can make one suddenly feel out of place. For example, in 1946, addressing a conference of Spanish clerics, the Archbishop of Toledo wondered ‘how to tackle’, what he called woman’s growing demoralization – caused largely by American customs introduced by the cinematograph [cinema], making the young woman independent, breaking up the family, disabling and discrediting the future consort and mother with exotic practices that make her less womanly and destabilize the home. (quoted in Tomlinson 1997: 123)

Spanish women may have taken a different view. American culture is not monolithic A third problem with the model of globalisation as cultural Americanisation is that it assumes that American culture is monolithic. It operates with the working assumption that all national cultures are monolithic, essentially one thing, supposedly hermetically sealed from other cultures. Even in the more cautious accounts of globalisation it is assumed that we can identify something essential and singular called American culture. George Ritzer, for example, makes this claim, ‘while we will continue to see global diversity, many, most, perhaps eventually all of those cultures will be effected by American exports: America will become virtually everyone’s “second culture”’ (1999: 89). To recognise that this is not the case is to recognise that all national cultures, even powerful cultures like that of the USA, are never essential and monolithic. As Edward Said observes: [A]ll cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic . . . Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly exclusively, White, or Black, or Western, or Oriental (1993: 407–8)

In other words, human history is a history of human mixing: sometimes freely, sometimes by force. I have used hip hop as an example of American culture, but as Paul Gilroy points out: ‘Hip hop was not ethnically pure or a particularly African-American product but rather the mutant result of a

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fusion and intermixture with Caribbean cultures from Jamaica and Puerto Rico’ (1993: 10). Globalisation as cultural Americanisation assumes that cultures can be lined up as distinct monolithic entities, hermetically sealed from one another until the fatal moment of the globalising injection. Against such a view, Jan Nederveen Pieterse argues that globalisation is better understood ‘as a process of hybridization which gives rise to a global mélange’ (1995: 45). He points to ‘phenomena such as Thai boxing by Moroccan girls in Amsterdam, Asian rap in London, Irish bagels, Chinese tacos and Mardi Gras Indians in the United States, or Mexican schoolgirls dressed in Greek togas dancing in the style of Isidora Duncan’ (1995: 53). To see globalisation as simply a process of the export of sameness is to miss so much of what is going on. It [globalisation as homogenisation] overlooks the countercurrents – the impact non-Western cultures have been making on the West. It downplays the ambivalence of the globalising momentum and ignores the role of local reception of Western culture – for example the indigenization of Western elements. It fails to see the influence non-Western cultures have been exercising on one another. It has no room for crossover culture – as in the development of ‘third cultures’ such as world music. It overrates the homogeneity of Western culture and overlooks the fact that many of the standards exported by the West and its cultural industries themselves turn out to be of culturally mixed character if we examine their cultural lineages. (1995: 53)

Those who work with the assumption that US culture is monolithic often work with the further assumption that the US culture that is exported is a middle-class, white culture. Remember Beck’s claim: ‘[S]ymbols from the publicity and image departments of multinational corporations . . . plant the carefully devised glitter of white America in the hearts of people all around the world’ (2000: 43). But the idea of globalisation as ‘white’ Americanisation looks very different when we consider the fact that the USA has the third largest Hispanic population in the world. Moreover, it is estimated that by 2076, the tricentennial of the American Revolution, people of Native American, African, Asian or Latin descent will make up the majority of its population. Stuart Hall has written that postmodernism ‘is about how the world dreams itself to be American’ (1996: 132). If this is the case, we may all be dreaming of many different Americas, depending on which bits of America we choose to consume. For example, if the material for our dreams is gathered from American popular music, the geography and geometry, the values, images, myths, styles, will be different depending

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on whether, for example, it is blues, country, dance, folk, heavy metal, jazz, rap, rock ‘n’ roll, rock or soul. At the very least, each genre of music would produce different political articulations, in terms of class, gender, ‘race’, ethnicity, sexuality, generation. To recognise this is to recognise that cultures, even powerful cultures like that of the United States, are never monolithic. Sreberny-Mohammadi asks, commenting on Jeremy Tunstall’s The Media Are American (1978), in which he argues that the imposition of American commodities will destroy authentic indigenous culture or at least produce hybrid concoctions: But we must ask what is the pristine image of culture that lurks behind this argument? Human history is a history of cultural contact, influence and recombination, as is evidenced in language, music, visual arts, philosophical systems; perhaps media flows merely reinforce our mongrel statuses. (1991: 129)

Globalisation is much more complex and contradictory than the simple imposition of, say, American culture; although it is certainly true that we can travel around the world and never be too far from signs of American commodities. What is not true, however, is that commodities equal culture.

Hegemony and Globalisation Globalisation involves the ebb and flow of both homogenising and heterogenising forces; the meeting and mingling of the ‘local’ and the ‘global’. It is a complex process, producing contradictory effects, in changing relations of culture and power. One way to understand the processes of globalisation is in terms of Gramsci’s (1971) concept of hegemony. From the perspective of the cultural studies appropriation of hegemony, cultures are neither something ‘authentic’ (spontaneously emerging from ‘below’), nor are they something which is simply imposed from ‘above’, but always a ‘compromise equilibrium’ (Gramsci 1971: 161) between the two; a contradictory mix of forces from both ‘below’ and ‘above’; both ‘commercial’ and ‘authentic’; both ‘local’ and ‘global’; marked by both ‘resistance’ and ‘incorporation’, involving both ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. Globalisation can also be seen in this way. As Hall observes: [W]hat we usually call the global, far from being something which, in a systematic fashion, rolls over everything, creating similarity, in fact works through particularity, negotiates particular spaces, particular ethnicities, works through mobilizing particular identities and so on. So there is always a dialectic, between the local and the global. (1991: 62)

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Hegemony is a complex and contradictory process; it is not the same as injecting people with ‘false consciousness’. It is certainly not explained by the adoption of the assumption, here ridiculed by Liebes and Katz, that ‘hegemony is prepackaged in Los Angeles, shipped out to the global village, and unwrapped in innocent minds’ (1993: xi). A better way to understand the processes of globalisation is one which takes seriously not just the power of ‘global’ forces but also those of the ‘local’. Another way to understand this is that what is exported always finds itself in the context of what already exists. That is, exports become imports, as they are incorporated into the indigenous culture. Roland Robertson (1995) uses the term ‘glocalization’ (borrowed from the language of Japanese business) to describe globalisation as the simultaneous interpenetration of the ‘global’ and the ‘local’. Ien Ang gives the example of the Cantonese Kung Fu movies that revitalised the declining Hong Kong film industry. The films are a mixture of ‘Western’ narratives and Cantonese values. As she explains: Culturally speaking, it is hard to distinguish here between the ‘foreign’ and the ‘indigenous’, the ‘imperialist’ and the ‘authentic’: what has emerged is a highly distinctive and economically viable hybrid cultural form in which the global and the local are inextricably intertwined, in turn leading to the modernized reinvigoration of a culture that continues to be labelled and widely experienced as ‘Cantonese’. In other words, what counts as ‘local’ and therefore ‘authentic’ is not a fixed content, but subject to change and modification as a result of the domestication of imported cultural goods. (1996: 154–55)

The interpenetration of the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ can take at least three forms. First, the ‘global’ is absorbed and ‘repurposed’ in the ‘local’. For example, in China, Coca-Cola is boiled with fresh ginger to make a ‘medicinal’ drink. In this way, the commodity sells but its meaning and use is repurposed in the context of ‘local’ expectations and desires. Similarly, Christmas is becoming an increasingly visible festival in major Chinese cities. But again, this is not Christmas as a Christian festival – the celebration of the Nativity. In China Christmas is a purely commercial event, drained entirely of its Christian associations. Second, the ‘global’ may be transformed to meet the traditions of the ‘local’. The emergence of Mecca-Cola, as a ‘Muslim’ alternative to CocaCola, is an example of a commodity that is not simply repurposed, but totally transformed. Importantly, though, we should not lose sight of the fact that this ‘local’ product would not exist but for the existence of the rival ‘global’ product. Similarly, in response to the mostly ‘underground’

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popularity of Sex and the City, An Hui Television produced its own version of the American drama called Waiting For My Love (see Figure 9.3). The characters and the basic narrative structure is the same in both programmes; but, whereas Waiting For My Love is recognisable as a Chinese version of the American drama, it is, nevertheless, fundamentally transformed to meet what are perceived as the traditions of the ‘local’ community – activity is replaced by passivity and sex is replaced by romance. There are also Chinese versions of other Western television programmes, including Do You Want To Be A Millionaire? (Happy Dictionary), The X-Factor (Super Girl), Wife Swap (Metamorphosis), The Apprentice (Happy Hero) and Strictly Come Dancing (The Magic of Dance). Third, rather than repurposing or transformation, the ‘global’ can also be rejected by the ‘local’. Globalisation may be making the world smaller, generating new forms of cultural hybridity, but it is also bringing into collision and conflict different ways of making the world mean. While some people may celebrate the opening up of new global ‘routes’, other people may resist globalisation in the name of local ‘roots’. Resistance in the form of a reassertion of the ‘local’ against the flow of the ‘global’ can be seen in the increase in religious fundamentalism (Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism) and the re-emergence of nationalism, most recently in the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia.2 To understand the processes of globalisation as the simultaneous interpenetration of the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ (a ‘compromise equilibrium’) is not to deny matters of culture and power. But it is to insist that a politics in which ‘local’ people are seen as mute and passive victims of processes they can never hope to understand, a politics that denies agency to the vast majority, is a politics that can exist without causing too much trouble to the prevailing structures of global power. However, to celebrate hybridity and forget about global power relations would be to miss even more than those who see globalisation as homogenisation. Hybridity is not without its relations of power; we must always consider the nature and conditions of the mix. But it is certainly the case that we will not understand the relations between culture and power, entangled in the complex processes of globalisation, if we fix our critical gaze on globalisation and see only structure and imposition, manipulation and ‘false consciousness, and the cultural Americanisation of the world.

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Figure 9.3 Waiting For My Love, the Chinese version of Sex and the City

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C HA PT E R 10

Inventing Opera as Art in NineteenthCentury Manchester

In Chapter 8 I detailed the changing cultural status and increasing social visibility of opera in the 1990s and beyond, and I suggested there that I did not think these changes were entirely new but more like a return to an earlier cultural and social formation of opera. In this chapter I want to substantiate this claim by a critical examination of the cultural meanings and the shifting social significance of opera and opera-going in nineteenth-century Manchester. To explore these changes in the culture1 of opera in the nineteenth century, I will track the development of a particular discourse on opera; a discourse that enabled, constrained and constituted the meaning of opera and opera-going in nineteenth-century Manchester.2 The establishment of this new network of meanings, through which opera was made to make sense, is probably still for most people the ‘common sense’ of opera and opera-going. What happened in Manchester, I will argue, amounted to a successful middle-class cultural revolution. It was a revolution that also happened elsewhere, but I think we can learn a great deal about this revolution by focusing on the particular case of Manchester. As I pointed out in Chapter 8, by the nineteenth century opera had become established as a widely available form of popular entertainment consumed by people of all social classes. To turn opera into ‘high culture’ it had to be withdrawn from the everyday world of popular entertainment. The question, therefore, that guided my research on opera in nineteenthcentury Manchester was this: how did opera change from being an inclusive form of commercial entertainment to become an exclusive aspect of ‘high culture’? This is the middle-class cultural revolution I will speak of shortly, but first I want to say something about opera as entertainment (that is, opera before the revolution).3 Dr Samuel Johnson famously called opera ‘an exotic and irrational entertainment’ (quoted in Sadie 1980: 546). Whether or not it is exotic and irrational, it was certainly in Manchester regarded as entertainment. Until the

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middle of the nineteenth century, opera is seen almost exclusively as entertainment. For example, in a review of Carl Maria Weber’s Der Freischutz at the Theatre Royal, we are told, ‘A really good opera, well performed, is always attractive in Manchester’ (Manchester Guardian, 6 May 1843). There is no notion here that opera is art: if it is good and well performed, audiences will find it entertaining. This is even more explicit in a preview of Gaetano Donizetti’s La Figlia del Reggimento at the Theatre Royal: ‘We anticipate a high musical entertainment’ (Advertiser and Chronicle, 20 May 1848). A similar assumption is in place in a review of a season of Italian opera at the Theatre Royal, when what is on offer is described as ‘high-class entertainments’ (Manchester Guardian, 25 August 1849). For the would-be opera middle-class revolutionaries, a key problem with opera as entertainment was that it attracted and encouraged the wrong kind of audience. Until the nineteenth century, the opera house (although socially mixed) was dominated by the aristocracy. The aristocracy tended to treat opera and opera-going as a means to socialise and as an opportunity for social display. In other words, they viewed it as a social event rather than, as the middle-class revolutionaries increasingly demanded, a rewarding aesthetic experience. The aristocracy would arrive late and leave early; they would eat and drink and talk loudly during performances. Moreover, they looked at other members of the audience as much as they looked at what was going on on the stage. As James H. Johnson points out, with regard to the aristocratic experience of opera: Few complained about the noise and bustle . . . the opera was more social event than aesthetic encounter. In fact, [before the nineteenth century] audiences considered music little more than an agreeable ornament to a magnificent spectacle, in which they themselves played the principal part. (Sadie 1980: 10)

The world of opera dominated by the aristocracy was disrupted by the expansion of the audience for opera in the early part of the nineteenth century. Like theatre generally, opera became entertainment for new middle- and working-class audiences. Part of the opera revolution in Manchester was the attempt by an influential middle class section of the new audience to silence the aristocracy; to insist on silence and attention; to insist that opera is art and not just another means to socialise or an occasion for social display. Many reviews complain about the noise in the opera house. For example, we are told in a review of Weber’s Der Freischutz at the Theatre Royal, that enjoyment of the opera is only possible ‘when the noise among the audience will permit it to be heard’ (Manchester Guardian, 8 April 1843). Moreover, the reviews are very specific about the location from

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1790: ‘a new opera’ 1802: ‘a comic opera’ 1815: ‘musical entertainment’ 1817: ‘musical farce’ 1845: ‘an operetta’ 1857: ‘a musical farce’ 1870: ‘a musical entertainment’ Figure 10.1 The changing classifications of No Song No Supper

where the noise emanates: ‘It gave occasion for the rude and noisy mirth of some persons in the dress circle, whose fitter locality would have been the gallery – or rather, the street. Such unseemly exhibitions, by no means infrequent, are a great annoyance’ (review of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore at the Theatre Royal; Manchester Guardian, 20 June 1849). In the middleclass imagination the gallery and the street were the natural habitat of the new urban and industrial working class. Another review complains, We regret that the effect of this chorale upon a great portion of the audience in the centre of the dress circle was marred by a rude, unmannerly knocking at the doors of the boxes . . . There were eight or nine of these noisy intruders, and the uproar could not be quelled without the presence of the police. (review of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots at the Theatre Royal; Manchester Guardian, 29 October 1853).

To begin the transformation of opera from entertainment to art it was first necessary to determine the limits of the genre. Throughout the nineteenth century there is a clear struggle over classification; that is, a struggle over what counts as opera and what does not count as opera. For example, Charles Dibdin’s No Song No Supper is described in different ways at different times in its stage career (see Figure 10.1). After 1870 the struggle is over: it simply disappears from the repertoire at the Theatre Royal. A much more significant classification struggle is that which takes place over German and Italian opera. In the nineteenth century there is an increasing tendency (within musical circles) to make an evaluative distinction between Italian opera and German instrumental music: the first being seen as ‘entertainment’, the second as ‘art’ (Dahlaus 1989, Weber 1975). As Carl Dahlaus explains: Beethoven, virtually in one fell swoop, claimed for music the strong concept of art, without which music would be unable to stand on par with literature and

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Rossini Italian opera performance text entertainment popular aristocratic

Beethoven German opera work art high middle class

Figure 10.2 Opera as performance, opera as text the visual arts; Rossini, however, preserving in the nineteenth century a residue of the eighteenth-century spirit, was completely oblivious of this concept . . . Beethoven’s symphonies represent inviolable musical ‘texts’ whose meaning is to be deciphered with ‘exegetical’ interpretations; a Rossini score, on the other hand, is a mere recipe for a performance . . . Rossini’s musical thought hinged on the performance as an event, not on the work as a text (1989: 9).

In Manchester this distinction was narrowed to become German opera versus Italian opera. It is this distinction that frames much of the cultural revolution to redefine opera as art (see Figure 10.2). We can find this distinction in many of the reviews from the 1850s onwards. In a review of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Theatre Royal, for example: ‘We were sorry to find again a very small assemblage in the dress circle . . . [I]s it that popular taste once diverted into Italian channels, cannot appreciate the higher and richer beauties of the German school?’ (Manchester Guardian, 30 October 1850).4 In the 1880s, the reviews become increasingly confident that the argument has been won. Two examples, using more or less the same vocabulary, make this clear. First: ‘[T]here are indications that the taste for the Italian opera of the school of Bellini and Donizetti has seen its day’ (review of Herman Gotz’s Taming of the Shrew and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor; Manchester Guardian, 1 May 1880). Second: ‘[T]here are indications that the old prejudice in favour of Italian opera is beginning to give way’ (review of Julius Benedict’s Lily of Killarney at the Theatre Royal; Manchester Guardian, 8 December 1881). In fact, the taste for Italian opera never gave way. Italian opera is still at the core of the classical repertoire.5 But perhaps the struggle was not really between Italian and German opera? William Weber argues that beneath the distinction between Italian and German music is the working out of a distinction between popular and high culture. Conflict between the German classical style [Mozart, Beethoven, Weber] and its two competitors [Italian opera and the virtuoso instrumental playing

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of Franz Liszt and others] permeated all concert life during the first half of the [nineteenth] century. The episode had a broader meaning than a simple rivalry between musical styles, for it amounted to an unusually strong dispute between forms of high culture and popular culture. Before the turn of the century European music had had little division between the two kinds of art such as was so strong in literature and the fine arts. The vast majority of composers had written . . . with little sense that they wrote in a ‘high’ form for which their listeners needed some special training. (1975: 19)

In the struggle to establish clear boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, the content of the categories may be less important than the division between the two. What really matters are ‘the forces and relations which sustain the difference . . . the relations of power which are constantly punctuating and dividing the domain of culture into . . . dominant and subordinate formations’ (Hall 2009b: 514).6 The middle-class advocacy of German opera and its dismissal of Italian opera can, therefore, be seen as symptomatic of a class struggle between the middle class and the aristocracy. Rachel Cowgill, referring specifically to opera-going in London, observes how ‘an increasing faction of self-made City men . . . appropriated Mozart not by hanging on to the coat-tails of the aristocracy, but deliberately, self-consciously, and on their own terms. And in doing so, they invaded a traditional bastion of aristocratic musical taste’ (2000: 64). This was an invasion that eventually proved successful; an invasion intended to unseat (literally and metaphorically) the aristocracy. In other words, the dispute over musical taste is really a class struggle over who will control the opera house. The dispute between German and Italian opera is also a conflict over the classification of opera itself; in particular, the insistence that opera as art is a ‘work’ rather than a performance text.7 Seeing opera as a ‘work’ rather than a performance text was not just a change in terminology, it was an evaluative imperative; an insistence that opera was art, not entertainment. From 1865 onwards, ‘work’ enters for the first time the critical lexicon when writing about opera in Manchester. ‘Work’ is used in reviews of performances at the Theatre Royal to describe Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio (Manchester Guardian, 15 April 1865), Meyerbeer’s Dinorah (Manchester Guardian, 13 June 1865), Beethoven’s Fidelio (Manchester Guardian, 18 March 1868), Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (Manchester Guardian, 22 March 1868), Meyerbeer’s Dinorah (Manchester Guardian, 13 October 1869), Weber’s Der Freischutz (Manchester Guardian, 18 October 1869), Meyerbeer’s Robert la Diavolo (Manchester Guardian, 21 October 1869); Mozart’s Don Giovanni (Manchester Guardian, 25 October 1869), and Mozart’s Don Giovanni (Manchester Guardian, 18 October 1870).

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From 1864 onwards, and for the first time, ‘work’ is often expanded to become ‘work of art’, which of course is what ‘work’ is really intended to signify. ‘Work of musical art’ or simply ‘art’ are the terms used in reviews of performances at the Theatre Royal to describe Charles Gounod’s Mirella (Manchester Guardian, 20 September 1864), Beethoven’s Fidelio (Manchester Guardian, 15 April 1865), Gounod’s Faust (Manchester Guardian, September 12, 1865), Beethoven’s Fidelio (Manchester Guardian, 18 March 1868), Weber’s Der Freischutz (Manchester Guardian, 5 April 1876), Gounod’s Irene (Manchester Guardian, 23 April 1880), Benedict’s Lily of Killarney (Manchester Guardian, 8 December 1881) and Gounod’s Faust (Manchester Guardian, 12 December 1881). It is perhaps worth noting that, with the exception of Gounod (who is French), all the composers here are German.8 Moreover, Gounod is often praised for composing in the German style. Another form of classification is the separation of opera from other forms of entertainment. To watch opera in Manchester until the 1860s was always to watch it alongside other forms of entertainment on an often crowded bill. Figure 10.3 shows a night’s entertainment at the Theatre Royal (24 April 1827) which includes Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro together with Jocko; the Brazilian Ape or, the Monkey and the Dandy. In the playbill for performances on 9 June 1827 (see Figure 10.4), The Marriage of Figaro is included alongside The Celebrated Herr Cline’s Extraordinary Performance on The Tight Rope and a ‘dog’ melodrama, Forest of Bondy; or, The Dog of Montargis. Such cultural hybridity, the mixing of art and entertainment, was very much seen as an aspect of a regrettable history by the 1860s, when opera was now the sole item on the bill (see Figure 10.8). The redefinition of opera as art required that opera be seen aesthetically. The term ‘aesthetic’ is first used in a review in 1865. Commenting on one of the arias in a performance of Vincent Wallace’s Maritana at the Theatre Royal, the reviewer complains that it exhibits ‘another blunder on the part of the composer in an aesthetic point of view’ (Manchester Guardian, 9 June 1865). There are a number of features of this new way of seeing opera. First, there is the insistence that the value of the work is intrinsic to the work itself. From 1865, terms such as ‘intrinsic’ and ‘inherent’ become for the first time part of the critical lexicon when discussing opera. For example, Gounod’s Faust is praised for its ‘intrinsic merits’ (Manchester Guardian, 4 April 1865); Michael Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl ‘has inherent beauty’ (Manchester Guardian, 19 April 1878); Benedict’s Lily of Killarney has ‘intrinsic beauty’ (Manchester Guardian, 8 December 1881). Second, again from 1865 onwards, there is the insistence on the unity of the work of art:

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Figure 10.3 Opera and stage melodrama In the music of ‘Fidelio’ there are no special arias written for the purpose of exhibiting the peculiar qualities of some particular singer, no tour de force, no brilliant fiorituri, no exceptional notes above or below the ordinary register, introduced with utter disregard to the feeling of the poetry, but a perfected work of art, in which every part is made to conspire in the realisation of one given idea, in the establishment of entire unity of design. (Review of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Theatre Royal; Manchester Guardian, 15 April 1865)

Ten years later, the language is even more explicit: ‘There is perfect homogeneity throughout – no weak places here and there, but well-balanced

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Figure 10.4 Opera and tight-rope walking

symmetry which characterises the highest productions of art in every form’ (Review of Gounod’s Faust at the Theatre Royal; Manchester Guardian, 19 November 1875). As art, opera must be performed in complete versions. Throughout the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, it was common practice to shorten operas to make them fit into an often very crowded evening’s entertainment (see Figures 10.3 and 10.4). But from the 1830s onwards, the reviews become increasingly critical of this practice. In a review of Gioacchino Rossini’s Tancredi at the Theatre Royal the reviewer complains that the opera has been ‘mutilated, by the necessity of shortening the performance of the evening’ (Manchester Guardian, 23 May 1835). A performance of Vincenzo Bellini’s La Sonnambula at the Theatre Royal is also described as having been ‘mutilated’ (Manchester Guardian, 27 January 1844). The need to perform complete operas is continually encouraged by the reviews. A review of a season of Italian opera at the Theatre Royal informs its readers that they are ‘indebted’ to the management of the visiting opera company ‘for the enjoyment of operas given

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with a degree of completeness rarely, if ever, excelled in the provinces’ (Manchester Guardian, 29 August 1859). Two decades later we are told, in a review praising the completeness of a performance: ‘This request for detail extends even to small matters which a less scrupulous conductor would unhesitatingly disregard – secure in the consciousness that few amongst his audience would detect the neglect’ (Manchester Guardian, 27 April 1880). In other words, the completeness of a work is important even if most in the audience are unaware of it. The insistence on the unity of the work of art, and the insistence that an opera must be performed in its entirety, had to struggle against another common feature of opera: the inclusion of arias from one opera into another opera. Up until the 1860s it was not unusual for a star performer to insert an aria into an opera because the aria suited his or her particular voice. As Stanley Sadie explains, ‘Of the operas performed in the 18th century, particularly in public (as opposed to court) opera houses, the number containing music by several composers comfortably exceeds those by a single composer. All these procedures continued well into the 19th century’ (1980: 546). Figure 10.5 illustrates this point, where we see advertised the fact that Miss Paton will introduce two songs into a performance of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. From the 1840s this practice was increasingly challenged. A review in the Manchester Times (18 March 1843) of Bellini’s La Sonnambula at the Theatre Royal made this very clear: ‘The introduction of songs into an opera is always bad.’ The Manchester Examiner and Times (20 June 1849) was even more forthright in its condemnation of the actions of a particular soprano: ‘Her last scene would have been almost without blemish, had she not descended to the very unpardonable practice of introducing the aria of another composer.’ Opera as art insists that composers must be artists. From the 1870s onwards it is increasingly common for composers to be given the ultimate aesthetic accolade of the artist: being described as a genius. Gounod is the first composer in Manchester to receive this honour. A review of Faust at the Theatre Royal refers to ‘Gounod’s . . . genius’ (Manchester Guardian, 23 March 1876). Two weeks later, Weber is described in the same terms: ‘art . . . enlarged by a genius’ (Review of Weber’s Der Freischutz at the Theatre Royal; Manchester Guardian, 5 April 1876). The composer as artist must have absolute control over the work of musical art. From the 1860s onwards there is a growing tendency to refer to the composer’s intentions to support how the reviewers think the ‘work’ should be performed; in other words, the insistence that the meaning of the work is guaranteed by the composer’s intentions. For example, phrases

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Figure 10.5 Adding songs to opera

such as the following begin to appear in reviews of opera at the Theatre Royal: ‘not the intention . . . of the composer’ (Gounod’s Mock Doctor; Manchester Guardian, 28 June 1865); ‘as . . . the composer intended’ (Weber’s Der Freischutz; Manchester Guardian, 12 April 1867); ‘the true meaning of the composer’ (Mozart’s Don Giovanni; Manchester Guardian, 24 October 1874); ‘as the composer himself conceived it’ (Benedict’s Lily of Killarney; Manchester Guardian, 11 December 1876). Performing opera as art requires ‘artists’ rather than ‘artistes’. What is at stake in this distinction is captured wonderfully in a review of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Theatre Royal: Such being the character of this great work, it may readily be imagined that it is no special favourite with the singers who think of themselves first and of truth afterwards, although to a genuine artist there is no opera that affords greater scope for the exhibition of those higher powers of

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emotional expression without which vocal art is no better than rope dancing. (Manchester Guardian, 15 April 1865)

To establish opera as art also requires that it engage in a struggle against four uses of opera outside the opera house. First, there is the struggle against the demands of the market, usually described as the fetters of the music shop. The problem with the market is that it both commodifies and declassifies artistic goods. That is, it makes opera, say, available to any person who can pay the price, and in so doing it has the potential to undo any sense of aesthetic quality and class-belonging. As the Manchester journal Free Lance objected, if artistic goods are simply made available by the market, consumers would not know ‘whether the thing introduced be good or bad, beautiful or ugly, high or low’ (23 November 1867).9 The market also tempts artists to leave the path of the higher calling in search of financial reward. A review in the Manchester Guardian (3 September 1873) of Wallace’s Maritana at the Theatre Royal complains of ‘the fact that native composers have been compelled rather to write for the music shop than the stage’. A review of Wallace’s Lurline at the Theatre Royal is even more explicit about the pull of the market: ‘If he has failed to make it a grand opera, it is because he was unable to free himself entirely from the fetters of the music shop’ (Manchester Guardian, 7 November 1878). The second location outside the opera house that has a detrimental effect on opera as art is the concert room. A review of Bellini’s Norma at the Theatre Royal complains that ‘it has a few celebrated pieces in it, which, however, by transplanting to the concert room, have lost much of their freshness, and dramatic property’ (Manchester Guardian, 22 October 1853). Similarly, when commenting on Mdlle Tietjens performance of a particular aria from Weber’s Der Freischutz at the Theatre Royal, a review makes the point that ‘It is only necessary to hear this great artist sing it on the stage to learn how much is lost when it is transplanted to the concertroom’ (Manchester Guardian, 12 April 1867). The drawing room is the third location outside the opera house that impacts negatively on opera as art. Like the music shop, it tempts composers to write for popularity rather than art. This point is made very clear, and given a specific gender inflection, in a review of Wallace’s Maritana at the Theatre Royal: ‘[N]ative composers have been compelled . . . to write down to the capacity of the drawing-room misses’ (Manchester Guardian, 3 September 1873). In a review of Wallace’s Lurline at the Theatre Royal the connection between music shop and drawing room is explicitly made:

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They [British composers] . . . had to . . . write such works . . . with such a proportion of sentimental songs and ballads suitable for the drawing-room as would induce the music seller to purchase the copyright of the whole work . . . No wonder, therefore, that every opera produced under such conditions has an unreal and conventional character. (Manchester Guardian, 7 November 1878).

Opera available in the streets of towns and cities is the fourth location that supposedly interferes with the appreciation of opera as art. Here the concern was that opera was being accessed in the wrong way and by the wrong people. In a review of William Michael Rooke’s Amilie at the Theatre Royal the drawing room and the streets are presented as existing on a continuum of cultural decline: On the whole, we think, the music of this opera is likely to grow in public favour, though there are, perhaps, few of those arias that can be transplanted to the drawing-room, and thence, in process of time, to the streets, to be ground into a wider popularity on barrel organs, and whistled out of fashion by the butchers’ boys. (Manchester Guardian, 19 January 1839; italics in original)10

In a review of Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore at the Theatre Royal it is the concert room and the streets that are this time linked in a continuum of cultural decline: ‘[A]ll the principal pieces almost as familiar as household words to those, eschewing the Theatre, nevertheless find enjoyment in the concert-room; and street organs are everlastingly being made to grind forth’ (Manchester Guardian, 30 August 1859). Although opera can still be enjoyed, something is supposedly lost when opera is heard on the streets: ‘The freshness of the melodies still makes them enjoyable, though they have had to undergo the ordeal of being ground on all the barrel organs of Europe for the last quarter of a century’ (Review of Bellini’s La Sonnambula at the Theatre Royal; Manchester Guardian, 20 October 1869).11 Translation does not really become a major issue until the 1870s. In 1839, for example, it is commented on, but not too critically: ‘The first performance of this splendid opera (though in its English dress) in the provinces, is in itself a sort of era in the annals of our musical history’ (Review of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Theatre Royal; Manchester Guardian, 30 January 1839). However, in the 1870s the tone changes quite dramatically. In a review of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia at the Theatre Royal we are informed, without ambiguity, that ‘The best rendering of the original text that could possibly be adopted would still suffer from the disadvantages which necessarily attend all translations’ (Manchester Guardian, 3

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September 1873). Similarly, we are authoritatively told that Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Theatre Royal was ‘heard under great disadvantages through the medium of a translation’ (Manchester Guardian, 24 October 1874). By the 1870s this had become the standard way of responding to opera in translation: ‘[It] can hardly be represented by even the best translation’ (Review of Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber’s Fra Diavolo at the Theatre Royal; Manchester Guardian, 28 October 1874); ‘[W]e can hardly listen to the opera in our language without a feeling that the work is being travestied’ (Review of Verdi’s Il Trovatore at the Theatre Royal; Manchester Guardian, 8 April 1879). Opera as art demanded an audience that was prepared to listen in attentive silence, while restraining any temptation to respond physically to what it witnessed; an audience that would not just enjoy but also understand. What Simon Gunn says about attendance at Hallé concerts was also true for opera-going in Manchester: The capacity for restraint not only demonstrated the self-discipline of the individual listener, but announced the respectability of the audience as a whole. It was precisely that which, in bourgeois eyes, differentiated attendance at the Hallé from the vulgar experience of the music hall or melodrama, where audience participation and self-expression were an accepted – indeed essential – part of the performance. (1997: 219)

From the late 1840s, the new desired audience begins to appear. In a review of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Seviglia at the Theatre Royal the reviewer is pleasingly surprised at the behaviour of some of the audience: A pleasant feature of the performance . . . was to find so many of the audience making use of the score, through the medium of the recent publication of ‘The Standard Lyric Drama’. Formerly none but those of lofty fortunes could indulge in such a luxury, now it is placed within reach of much larger numbers, – an opportunity we were glad to see appreciated. (Manchester Examiner and Times, 16 June 1849)

Similarly, the audience is acknowledged to be learning to allow the drama of an opera to flow unimpeded by interruptions: ‘Several of the principal pieces were most favourably received; attempts to encore them being only surpressed by the more considerate portion of the audience’ (review of Weber’s Der Freischutz at the Theatre Royal; Manchester Guardian, 11 October 1853). By the 1870s the audience (or at least a significant proportion of it) is being praised for its descrimination: ‘Several times she was most warmly applauded by an audience who showed a capacity for

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discriminating in the distribution of their favours’ (review of Wallace’s Maritana; Manchester Guardian, 3 September 1873); ‘the work . . . found many admirers amongst a discriminating audience’ (review of Wallace’s Maritana at the Theatre Royal; Manchester Guardian, 24 November 1875). The new audience is more or less in place when Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman first appears in Manchester in 1877: No more remarkable proof of the genuineness of the impression this music creates can be given than is afforded night after night by the absorbed attention of the audiences. Nothing in our recollection is more remarkable than this. Scarcely an attempt at applause is heard during the course of a whole act, but as soon as it closes the enthusiasm of the listeners breaks forth, and the principal performers are usually called before the curtains. (Manchester Guardian, 20 March 1877)

The story of the emergence of opera’s new audience can also be told visually. In the eighteenth century opera, like eighteenth-century drama, was advertised to a ‘knowing’ audience, who were simply told what was to be performed (see Figure 10.6). Nineteenth-century opera in Manchester, however, like nineteenth-century drama, had to be advertised in order to appeal to a new middle- and working-class audience, emerging in a rapidly urbanising and industrialising Manchester. Opera playbills had to tell this new audience not just what was on but about what was on (see Figure 10.7). From the 1860s onwards, opera, like drama generally, had once again returned to simply informing its ‘knowing’ audience about what was on the bill. No longer is there any need to explain; all that is necessary is to inform (see Figure 10.8). Now reclassified as art, opera (like all good art) can only be fully appreciated by repetition of consumption. This is the introduction of one of the commonplaces of aesthetic judgment: the work gets better (as do we) with every experience of it. Again, it is the 1860s when this idea first appears in the reviews: ‘It is one of those works which it is utterly impossible to estimate at its true value without repeatedly hearing it’ (Review of Meyerbeer’s Dinorah at the Theatre Royal; Manchester Guardian, 13 June 1865); ‘[I]t does not tire by repetition. On the contrary, as is the case with every true work of art, new beauties reveal themselves by more familiar acquaintance’ (Review of Gounod’s Faust at the Theatre Royal; Manchester Guardian, 12 September 1865). Another reason why repeated consumption is beneficial is captured perfectly in a review of 1877. What is made clear is that opera as art requires intellectual effort: ‘The magnificent intellectual conceptions which constantly pass before us in this work . . . make it more and more fascinating;

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Figure 10.6 Advertising theatre to a ‘knowing’ audience

and familiarity, instead of producing its proverbial effect, only increases our estimate of what is undoubtedly Gounod’s masterpiece’ (review of Gounod’s Faust at the Prince’s Theatre; Manchester Guardian, 13 November 1877; my italics). Really to appreciate opera as art it was now necessary to have the time, the money and the education available mostly to the new urban middle class. By the 1870s the reviews begin to acknowledge success in Manchester’s

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Figure 10.7 Mapping the narrative

version of opera’s cultural revolution: ‘As we listen to “Lurline” after an interval of eleven or ten years during which it has not been publicly given, we are strikingly reminded of the changes that have occurred in public taste during that time’ (review of Wallace’s Lurline at the Theatre Royal; Manchester Guardian, 7 November 1878). The reviews I have considered do not just publicise opera, they seek to generate what Michel Foucault (1979, 2002) calls a ‘regime of truth’. As he explains, ‘We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power

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Figure 10.8 Advertising opera to a ‘knowing’audience

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in negative terms: it “excludes”, it “represses”, it “censors”, it “abstracts”, it “masks”, it “conceals”. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth’ (1979: 194). Descriptions and interpretations are rarely far from judgment. It is these judgments, both social and aesthetic, that generate a new discourse on opera and opera-going – a new regime of truth. In other words, the reviews are not simply descriptive accounts of performances, they are critical interventions in the cultural politics of opera; they seek to construct a discourse that enables, constrains and constitutes the possible meanings of opera and opera-going. The important point to understand historically about opera and operagoing in Manchester, then, is that it did not become unpopular, rather it was actively made unpopular. In short, opera was transformed from entertainment enjoyed by the many, into Culture to be appreciated by the few. By the end of the nineteenth century a successful cultural revolution had taken place in Manchester. Going to the opera had been transformed from somewhere to socialise – the aristocratic experience; it had been transformed from being just another form of entertainment – the early middle and working-class experience; the opera had become where one went to consume conspicuously and to be consumed by great works of musical art – the middle-class social and aesthetic experience.12

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C HA PT E R 11

The Invention of the English Christmas

The ‘traditional’ English Christmas was invented between the 1830s and 1880s. Its invention was directly connected to the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation and only indirectly connected to religion. To claim that the English Christmas was invented in the nineteenth century is immediately to raise the objection that the Nativity was by then almost two thousand years old. Although the Nativity may have been two thousand years old, it and Christmas are not really the same thing. Moreover, its invention in the nineteenth century had more to do with the winning of hegemony, than it had to do with the celebration of the birth of a saviour. Constantine the Great, Roman Emperor between AD 285 and 337, established Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire in 325. In 336 the new Christian Church of Rome established 25 December as the date of the Nativity, the central event in the developing Christian calendar. There is absolutely no scriptural evidence for this date. Moreover, ‘historical’ evidence suggested other dates, including 1 January, 6 January, 21, 28 and 29 March, 9, 19 and 20 April, 20 May, 29 September, 18 November (Harrison 1951: 15; Restad 1995: 4). So why 25 December? The answer is a rival religion called Mithraism. At the centre of this religion is Mithras, the God of Light, whose birthday, the Day of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun (‘Dies Solis Invicti Nati’) is 25 December. Mithraism, like Christianity, spread throughout the Roman Empire in the first three centuries AD and competed with Christianity as a potential state religion. As Payam Nabarz explains: The Roman Mithraic practice was one of the greatest rivals to early Christianity for many reasons. As well as being a popular pagan religion practised by the Roman Army, it had many similarities to Christianity. These similarities frightened the Christian forefathers, as it meant that years before the arrival of Christ, all the Christian mysteries were already known. To combat this, certain Christian writers said that the Devil, knowing of the

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coming of Christ in advance, had imitated them before they existed in order to denigrate them. As Christianity gained in strength and became the formal religion of the Roman Empire, the cult of Mithras was one of the first pagan cults to come under attack (2005: 12–3).

The attack on Mithraism launched by the Christian Church consisted of three strategies. First, it sought to separate itself from the rival religion. When this strategy did not work, they adopted a second. As Manfred Clauss observes, ‘When such evasions seemed impossible, they effected a take-over, as in the case of the observance of Sunday and the festival of the god’s birth on 25 December’ (2000: 169). An account from the fourth century makes clear the reason for the fixing of the Nativity as 25 December: ‘But when the teachers of the Church realised that Christians were allowing themselves to take part [in the celebrations of the Day of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun], they decided to observe the Feast of the true Birth on the same day’ (quoted in Clauss 2000: 66). Therefore, it seems quite clear that the intention of the early Christian Church was to overlay Mithraic rituals and ceremonies with Christian significance. This became a common strategy. In the sixth century Augustine was sent as a missionary to Britain. During the course of his work he received a letter from Pope Gregory advising him to ‘accommodate the ceremonies of the Christian worship as much as possible to those of the heathen, that the people might not be much startled at the change’ (quoted in Harrison 1951: 28). The third strategy was bloody persecution; what Clauss calls ‘the Christians’ fanatical intolerance’ (2000: 170). As Nabarz points out, ‘In the fifth century of the Common Era, temples of Mithras – like most other pagan temples – were destroyed, and in some places churches were built on top of them’ (2005: 13). A letter written around the year AD 400 provides an example: ‘Did not your kinsman Gracchus . . . destroy a cave of Mithras a few years ago when he was Prefect of Rome? Did he not break up and burn all the monstrous images there? . . . Did he not send them before him as hostages, and gain for himself a baptism in Christ?’ (quoted in Clauss 2000: 170). Although it is clear that 25 December is not the actual date of the Nativity, it is possible to acknowledge this and to claim that it does not matter, as the date was chosen to celebrate the Nativity without any corresponding claim that this is the factual date of Christ’s birth. In other words, we do not know when he was born, but we have chosen a date to celebrate his birth. But whatever the argument, the fact remains that the fixing of the Nativity by the Roman state was as much a political act as a theological one.

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The circumstances of its origins have made it a problematic festival for some Christians. The Puritans, for example, the ideological engine behind the defeat of the army of Charles I, were literal readers of the Bible. Finding no evidence there for Christmas Day, they argued for its removal from the Christian calendar. Following the conclusion of the English Civil War, which established the Commonwealth or English Republic, Christmas was banned by Act of Parliament on 3 July 1647. On 24 December 1652, Parliament proclaimed, perhaps in the face of some ongoing resistance, that ‘no observance shall be had of the five and twentieth of December, commonly called Christmas day; nor any solemnity used or exercised in churches upon that day in respect thereof’ (quoted in Hearn 2004: 15). Parliament sat on Christmas Day, churches remained closed and soldiers were instructed to ensure that shops were open. Christmas was decriminalised as a religious holiday with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, but it did not return as a popular festival. As Michael Harrison observes: Christmas came back . . . but he came back wearing something of the sober manner of the men who had temporarily driven him out. Old Christmas, in the twenty years [sic] that he had been officially outlawed, had lost much of his former jauntiness. It was a quieter Christmas who came back. (1951: 146)

By the first decades of the nineteenth century, what is now the UK’s major holiday and a successful international export, had almost disappeared. As Golby and Purdue point out: Christmas, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, was neither a major event in the Christian calendar nor a popular festival. Few magazines or newspapers referred to the festal day in any detail and many ignored it completely. In 1790 the leader writer in The Times had asserted that, ‘within the half century this annual time of festivity has lost much of its original mirth and hospitality’ and that newspaper’s attention to the festival over the next half century bears witness to its general decline; in twenty of the years between 1790 and 1835 The Times did not mention Christmas at all, and for the remaining years its reports were extremely brief and uninformative. (2000: 40)

On 26 December 1826 The Times carried the following report: ‘The due observance of Christmas-day was strictly enforced in the City yesterday, the Lord Mayor having given positive orders to the city officers, not to permit any shops to be open for the transaction of business . . .

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The order was strictly complied with in general.’ The fact that the Lord Mayor of London felt obliged to enforce due observance clearly suggests that Christmas was not really being observed. Further evidence of its decline is provided by responses to the Factory Act of 1833, which granted workers eight and a half days unpaid holiday a year, plus Good Friday and Christmas Day. More enlightened factory owners allowed workers to vote on which days they might have as holidays. Here is an example of the outcome of one such vote in 1833: [T]hey put it to the vote who were for Good Friday and who were for Easter Monday . . . the same with regard to Christmas-Day; in our part of the country Christmas-Day is not esteemed a workman’s holiday, but New Year’s day is, and the same process has been gone through of informing them that they were entitled to a holiday on Christmas-Day, and they have uniformly expressed a desire to take New Year’s day in lieu of it. (quoted in Cunningham 1980: 61–2)

The Bolton Chronicle reports a very similar attitude almost twenty years later in 1851: Not long ago the natal day of the Redeemer was pretty generally disregarded in this town, and a holiday was generally observed on New Year’s Day. Now, though a holiday takes place on Christmas Day, the beginning of the New Year is looked upon as the Christmas season, and the inhabitants betake themselves to their festivities accordingly. (quoted in Hudson 1997: 115)

In some rural areas it took even longer for the new invention to take hold. As late as 1867, a book on Lancashire folklore observed: ‘In some rural parts of Lancashire it [Christmas Day] is now little regarded, and many of its customs are observed a week later – on the eve and day of the New Year’ (quoted in Golby and Purdue 1981: 16).

Inventing Christmas Conspicuous consumption Christmas was invented first and foremost as a commercial event. Everything that was revived or invented – decorations, cards, crackers, collections of carols, going to a pantomime, visiting Father Christmas/ Santa Claus and buying presents – all had one thing in common: they could be sold for profit. Therefore, it does not make historical sense to bemoan the fact that Christmas is too commercial: it was invented as a commercial festival. It was commercial from the very start: part of what

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was being celebrated were the achievements of industrial capitalism – conspicuous consumption in a market economy. Carol singing, for example, has a long history but it is only in the 1830s and 1840s that collections are made of old songs and new songs written with a specific focus on Christmas. Significant collections include William Sandys’ Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern (1833) and H.R. Bramley and John Stainer’s Christmas Carols Old and New (1871). In these, and other collections, recently composed carols easily outnumber the ancient or the old. Although the Christmas tree had been introduced into England by German migrants in the late eighteenth century, it is generally accepted that it was the London Illustrated News’s depiction of Queen Victoria’s tree in December 1848 which popularised the practice. The first Christmas card was produced in 1843. Within forty years, helped by the introduction half penny postage stamp, Christmas cards were in mass circulation. As The Times made clear in 1883, and applicable to the invention as a whole: This wholesome custom has been . . . frequently the happy means of ending strifes, cementing broken friendships and strengthening family and neighbourhood ties in all conditions of life. In this respect the Christmas card undoubtedly fulfils a high end, for cheap postage has constituted it almost exclusively the modern method of conveying Christmas wishes, and the increasing popularity of the custom is for this reason, if no other, a matter for congratulations. (quoted in Golby and Purdue 2000: 70)

By the 1890s the Post Office was already finding it difficult to deal with the annual increase in mail. Significantly, like the first Christmas card, most cards ignored the Nativity and depicted instead evergreens, snowscapes, children playing, Father Christmas/Santa Claus and Robin Redbreasts, providing further evidence of the decentred position of Christianity in the new Christmas celebrations. Christmas crackers were invented by Tom Smith in 1846. Around the same period the pantomime first became associated with Christmas, its narrative now being derived from nursery tales. By the 1870s music hall stars were beginning to play the leading roles, anticipating the practice of contemporary pantomimes featuring pop and soap stars. Again, it was in the 1840s that Christmas presents were first given at Christmas rather than at New Year. It is also at around this time that giving Christmas presents began to lose its links to patronage: that is, giving as a confirmation of social status; giving without expectation of reciprocation. What is gradually established instead is an economy of giving amongst equals. Father Christmas/Santa Claus is a late comer to the new festivities. Significantly, he does not feature in the key ideological text of the new

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invention, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). He gradually emerges, mostly from the USA, between the 1860s and 1930s, most significantly in the drawings of Thomas Nast and the illustrations of Haddon H. Sundblom. The evolution of his image finally stops with Sundblom’s Coca-Cola advertisements, which first appeared in 1931. Before then he might appear dressed in green, purple, blue or white. Moreover, he might appear human or as an elf. Although Coca-Cola did not invent Father Christmas/Santa Claus, they can claim to have finally fixed his identity. By the 1880s his presence is an important addition to the new department stores, where it is now possible to buy a variety of Christmas decorations. By the 1880s Christmas shopping, undoubtedly the central event in the new invention, is taking place a month to six weeks before Christmas Day. Two accounts from 1885 make this very clear: The presentation of ‘boxes’ and souvenirs is the same in America as in England . . . everybody expects to give and receive. A month before the event the fancy stores are crowded all day long with old and young in search of suitable presents, and every object is purchased . . . If the weather is fine, the principal streets are thronged. (quoted in Miall and Miall 1978: 11) The note of preparation for the great festival . . . was sounded early in November when the windows of the stationers, the bookshops, and the railway stalls became suddenly gay with the coloured plates of Christmas numbers innumerable (1978: 12).

What the new urban middle class invented was a Christmas with a firm emphasis on commercialism. Its central organising figure was Father Christmas/Santa Claus and not Jesus Christ. If a nativity was being celebrated, it was the birth of a market economy underpinned by the new power of industrialisation. The profoundly commercial-secular nature of the invention has made possible its incredible international success. Even the People’s Republic of China, an officially atheist society, has no difficulty in embracing the festival. ‘God Bless Us, Every One’: The Politics of Charity Charity is central to the Christmas invented by the new urban middle class. If what was invented was commercial out of instinct, it was charitable out of a sense of fear and guilt. The 1840s in England were known as the ‘hungry forties’, a period of economic slump, political unrest and intense suffering and misery among the working class (see Cole and Postgate 1961). The first Christmas card, commissioned by Sir Henry Cole and

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designed by J. C. Horsley, has at its centre not the Nativity but a representation of a typical middle-class family sitting down to Christmas dinner. On one side of the card we see the poor being given food, while on the other side they are being given clothes. The implication is quite clear: the celebration of the middle-class Christmas must include a consideration of the less fortunate. This argument is even more explicit in the text which is at the very heart of the invention of Christmas as an event organised around charity, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, first published on 19 December 1843. The enormous popularity of the story of Scrooge’s social redemption, not just as a novel (in its tenth edition by December 1844) but in theatre productions and public readings, made this the central text in the invention of Christmas. But to be clear, A Christmas Carol did not invent Christmas, as has been claimed by the Sunday Telegraph (18 December 1988), when it described Dickens as ‘the man who invented Christmas’. His most recent biographer has made the same claim in slightly more guarded phrasing: ‘Dickens can be said to have almost singlehandedly created the modern idea of Christmas’ (Ackroyd 1990: 34). But what Dickens did do was to popularise what was being invented; in particular, he made material its organising ideology of charity. As Golby and Purdue say of Dickens’s novel, ‘[I]n it Christmas becomes a bridge between the world as it is and the world as it should be’; it points ‘to the social problems of the present and anxieties about the future’ (2000: 45). When Dickens gave a reading of the novel in Boston on Christmas Eve 1867, it produced, among his American audience, what we might call the novel’s ideal reader: Among the multitude that surged out of the building came a Mr and Mrs Fairbanks (the former was the head of a large-scale factory), who had journeyed from Johnsburg, Vermont, for the occasion. Returning to their apartments in Boston, Mrs Fairbanks observed that her husband was particularly silent and absorbed in thought, while his face bore an expression of unusual seriousness. She ventured some remark which he did not appear to notice. Later, as he continued to gaze into the fire, she inquired the cause of his reverie, to which he replied: ‘I feel that after listening to Mr Dickens’s reading of A Christmas Carol tonight I should break the custom we have hitherto observed of opening the works on Christmas Day’. Upon the morrow they were closed. The following year a further custom was established, when not only were the works closed on Christmas Day, but each and every factory hand received the gift of a turkey. (quoted in Golby and Purdue 2000: 48)

The story of Scrooge is a warning to the new urban middle class. Scrooge is continually presented as a representative of his class. When he

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is asked to give money for the poor at Christmas, he asks ‘Are there no prisons [or] Union workhouses? . . . I help support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there’ (Dickens 1985: 51). A letter to the Manchester Guardian, written in the same year as the novel’s publication, reveals the representativeness of Scrooge’s response: Mr Editor, – For some time past our main streets are haunted by swarms of beggars, who try to awaken the pity of the passers-by in a most shameless and annoying manner, by exposing their tattered clothing, sickly aspect, and disgusting wounds and deformities. I should think that when one pays the poor-rate, but also contributes largely to the charitable institutions, one had done enough to earn a right to be spared such disagreeable and impertinent molestations. And why else do we pay such high rates for the maintenance of the municipal police, if they do not even protect us so far as to make it possible to go to or out of town in peace? I hope the publication of these lines in your widely-circulated paper may induce the authorities to remove this nuisance; and I remain, – Your obedient servant, A Lady. (quoted in Engels 1969: 303)

Above all Scrooge is a typical middle-class businessman. His fault is not his meanness, as often depicted in film and television versions of the nove, but his obsessive and typical focus on business. He appears to believe honestly what he says to the charity workers: ‘It’s not my business . . . It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!’ (Dickens 1985: 51). His attitude is so similar to that of the bourgeois gentlemen Friedrich Engels encountered in Manchester in 1844: Ultimately it is self-interest, and especially money gain, which alone determines them. I once went into Manchester with a . . . bourgeois [gentleman], and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful condition of the working people’s quarters, and asserted that I had never seen so ill built a city. The man listened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we parted: ‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here: good morning, sir’ (Engels 1969: 304)

Scrooge has to learn what his former partner Marley had learned too late, ‘The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!’ (Dickens 1985: 62). Scrooge is, to use a phrase from Matthew Arnold, ‘drugged with business’ (Super, V: 19). As if speaking directly to Scrooge, Arnold argued:

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Money-making is not enough by itself. Industry is not enough by itself. . . . The need in man for intellect and knowledge, his desire for beauty, his instinct for society, and for pleasurable and graceful forms of society, require to have their stimulus felt also, felt and satisfied. (Super, X: 83)

Like Dickens, Arnold, in his desire for middle-class hegemony, was seeking to convert ‘a middle class, narrow, ungenial, and unattractive’ into ‘a cultured, liberalised, ennobled, transformed middle class’, one to whom the working class ‘may with joy direct its aspirations’ (1954: 343).1 The central idea of the novel is therefore the need for charity. Just like the middle-class family in the first Christmas card, Scrooge must share his prosperity. If he does not he will be destroyed; the implication being that Scrooge’s class must share its prosperity or it too will be destroyed. This is made absolutely clear in perhaps the most dramatic part of the story, Scrooge’s encounter with Ignorance and Want: ‘Spirit! are they yours?’ Scrooge could say no more. ‘They are Man’s,’ said the Spirit, Looking down upon them. ‘. . . This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!’ cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. (Dickens 1985: 108)

Ignorance and Want instead of Exploitation and Oppression. This is an act of political displacement on Dickens’s part: education and charity rather than fundamental social change. Charity allows us to congratulate ourselves on the fact that we give. Although it relieves suffering, it does not change the causes of suffering. Charity is a temporary redistribution of wealth that does not disturb the hierarchies of wealth; in fact it safeguards them. The economic system that produced the suffering shown to Scrooge remains unchallenged. His ‘conversion’ to charity presents absolutely no challenge to the economic system that produces the need for charity. By embracing it Scrooge will protect himself and his class from more fundamental social change. This is the conversion that he experiences: selfinterest taking a more sustainable form. By learning to share a little, a great deal more will remain secure. It is not that Dickens (and others like him) did not desire a better society, one with less squalor, less poverty, less ignorance and so on, but that a better society could never be envisaged as other than a better middle-class society. Scrooge’s nephew Fred unwittingly acknowledges the limits of what Dickens’ called the ‘Carol philosophy’ (quoted in Hearn 2004: 33) when he describes Christmas as

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a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. (Dickens 1985: 49)

According to Ruth Glancy, ‘the story’s strong social message’ is an ‘appeal to the people of England to lead less selfish lives, and the rich especially to take seriously their duty of care to those less fortunate’ (1998: x). This perfectly encapsulates the ideology of charity, the belief that all that is required is for the rich to share a little with the poor, as if these were natural orders of humanity, little related to exploitation, injustice and oppression. Writing in 1848, five years after the publication of the novel, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party reached a very different conclusion about Scrooge and his class: [T]he bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery . . . What the bourgeoisie therefore produces . . . are its own grave-diggers (1998: 23–4).

In the Manifesto version the boy and girl are reconfigured, not as Ignorance and Want, but as the capitalist system’s ‘grave-diggers’. As George Orwell observed, ‘It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change in spirit rather than a change in structure’ (quoted in Hearn 2004: 64). But Dickens was very clear about the consequences of doing nothing. As he expressed it in a letter written less than three months before the publication of A Christmas Carol, ‘[I]n that prodigious misery and ignorance of the swarming masses of mankind in England, the seeds of its certain ruin are sown’ (quoted in Hearn 2004: 124). Whether the metaphor is grave digging or an unwanted harvest, the message is the same: if social relations between classes do not change, society itself will undergo dramatic and revolutionary change. Marx and Engels wanted this; Dickens wanted to prevent it. Both despair at the current situation. But whereas Marx and Engels see revolution as the only means to justice; Dickens places his hope in reform. We see here the playing out of a conflict between ‘the Ghost of an Idea’ (Dickens 1985: 41) and the ‘spectre [that] is haunting Europe’ (Marx and Engels 1998: 3).

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Utopian Nostalgia The invention of Christmas was driven by a utopian nostalgia: an attempt to recreate an imaginary past. Central to the urban middle class’s invention of Christmas is the claim that they are simply reviving a ‘tradition’. In their discussions of Christmas they look back longingly to ‘Merrie England’, a supposed lost golden age in which rich and poor lived in a glorious harmony of deference and subordination. The promise of Christmas was a temporary return to this golden age: The working man looked forward to Christmas as the portion of the year which repaid his former toils. (William Sandys, Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern, 1833; quoted in Connelly 1999: 24) The sports and festivities of the season were everywhere taken under the protection of the lord of the soil; and all classes of his dependants had a customary claim upon the hospitalities which he prepared for the occasion . . . The mirth of the humble and uneducated man received no check, from the assumption of an unseasonable gravity, or ungenerous reserve, on the part of those with whom fortune had dealt more kindly, and to whom knowledge had opened her stores. The moral effect of all of this was of the most valuable kind. Nothing so promotes a reciprocal kindliness of feeling as a community of enjoyment: and the bond of goodwill was thus drawn tighter between the remotest classes, whose differences of privilege, of education, and of pursuit, are perpetually operating to loosen it, and threatening to dissolve it altogether. (Thomas K. Hervey, The Book of Christmas, 1836; quoted in Hervey 2000: 50) Time was . . . when all were full of gladness and both serf and squire, baron and retainer, did their very best to keep their companions happy. All classes gave themselves up to frolic and revelry, with a thoroughness of spirit. (Christmas in the Olden Times, 1859; quoted in Golby and Purdue 2000: 53) It is hard to picture a more pleasant scene than that of Old English Christmas . . . Rich and poor discarded for a time all class distinctions and joined equally in merry-making. (The West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser, 1900; quoted in Connelly 1999: 24)

These claims, and others like them, offered an imaginary past intended as a remedy for a dangerous present and an even more dangerous future. The utopian promise of Christmas is captured perfectly by Thomas K. Hervey, writing in 1836: [It] proclaimed peace on earth and goodwill towards all men, making no exclusions, and dividing them into no classes, rises [sic] up a dormant sense

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of universal brotherhood in the heart . . . At no other period of the year are the feeling of universal benevolence and sense of common Adam so widely awakened; at no season is the predominant spirit of selfishness so effectually rebuked; never are the circles of love so largely widened. (2000: 88)

We should not take these writings as serious historical accounts of the past but as nostalgic fantasies intended to promote in the present what had never before existed. Middle-class nostalgia for Christmas past is a nostalgia for the feudal power relations of the past. What Christmas promised was a return to feudal social relations in the new context of industrialisation and urbanisation. It was a utopia in which the working class would once again embrace what Matthew Arnold, writing in 1867, had feared that they had lost, ‘the strong feudal habits of subordination and deference’ (1960a: 76). Steve Roud summarises perfectly this aspect of the invention: In particular, Victorians had an uncanny knack of clothing their inventions and remodelled traditions in an aura which implied that they were traditional and ancient. They conjured up a curiously timeless Merrie England in which the people were poor, but content, and were looked after by a benevolent local baron or lord of the manor and equally benevolent clergy. Everyone knew their place, and social hierarchies were not questioned. Such a time never existed, but in rewriting the history of our major festivals and traditions, it was this mythical Golden Age, which formed the backbone of the Victorian world-view, to which they aspired, and to which they returned again and again for ideas, ideals and legitimisation (2000: 12).

Not only did the new urban middle class invent the English Christmas in the nineteenth century they also invented the ‘tradition’ that they claimed only to be reviving. The Christmas the new urban middle class invented was both a celebration of the achievements of industrial capitalism and a temporary negation of industrial capitalism, in which goodwill replaces competition, harmony replaces conflict, abundance replaces scarcity, and desire replaces denial. What was invented was a utopian version of industrial capitalism: a temporal and social space in which economic competition and exploitation is softened by the temporary articulation of feudal relations of power. The promise of Christmas is a middle-class utopia in which exploitation and oppression can exist in harmony with deference and ‘goodwill to all men’. Instead of social equality and the redistribution of wealth, it articulates the mutual obligations of rich and poor permanently bound together in the best of all possible worlds; a sentiment embodied in the final words of A Christmas Carol, ‘God bless Us, Every One!’ (Dickens 1985: 134).

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C HA PT E R 12

‘The Spoiled Adopted Child of Great Britain and Even of the Empire’: A Symptomatic Reading of Heart of Darkness

My intention in this chapter is to use Louis Althusser’s concept of ‘the problematic’, and the method of ‘symptomatic reading’, as developed by Althusser and Pierre Macherey, to present a critical analysis of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. My claim here will be that at its most fundamental Conrad’s novel is a political narrative about imperialism. There is a long tradition of denying that the novel is about imperialism. According to Raymond Williams, ‘It is . . . astonishing that a whole school of criticism has succeeded in emptying Heart of Darkness of its social and historical content’ (1970: 145). As Williams indicates, reading through the critical work on the novel one quickly encounters a whole range of claims that deny the centrality of imperialism. In these readings of the novel the geographical space of Africa is rendered symbolic and psychological, and thus the brutal materialities of imperialism are put outside the legitimate boundaries of critical discussion – to include these is regarded as crude and reductive. Chinua Achebe’s response to this is very telling. As he observes about the novel, with reference to what we might call imperial narcissism, Africa as a setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? (2006: 343–4).1

There is of course another tradition, in which it is taken for granted that the novel is about imperialism. According to this tradition what is in question is whether or not the novel is pro- or anti-imperialist.2 Contrary to the tradition of having to decide one against the other, I want to argue that the novel is both. In other words, Heart of Darkness is a profoundly contradictory text, both supportive and critical of imperialism. In my

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view, the work of Althusser and Macherey provides us with the necessary conceptual tools to understand this contradiction. According to Althusser a problematic consists of the assumptions, motivations, underlying ideas and so on, from which a text (say, a novel) is made. In this way, it is argued, a text is structured as much by what is absent (what is not said), as by what is present (what is said). This formulation is remarkably similar to what we are told about Marlow’s method of story telling: the yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical . . . to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze. (Conrad 2006a: 5)

In other words, the meaning of Marlow’s narrative is both inside and outside, both absent and present. Althusser argues that if we are to understand fully the meaning of a text, we have to be aware not only of what is in the text but also of the assumptions that inform what is in the text. These may not appear in the text in any straightforward way but exist only in the text’s problematic. One way in which a text’s problematic is revealed is in the way a text may appear to answer questions that it has not formally asked. Such questions, it is argued, exist in the text’s problematic. The task of an Althusserian critical practice is, therefore, to deconstruct the text to reveal the problematic: to perform what Althusser calls a ‘symptomatic reading’. In a critique of Adam Smith’s influential Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Karl Marx draws attention to some of the contradictions and unacknowledged assumptions that form the basis of Smith’s approach to economics. In the words of Althusser, Marx’s method of reading Smith divulges the undivulged event in the text it reads, and in the same movement relates it to a different text, present as a necessary absence in the first. Like his first reading, Marx’s second reading presupposes the existence of two texts, and the measurement of the first against the second. But what distinguishes this new reading from the old is the fact that in the new one the second text is articulated with the lapses in the first text. (Althusser and Balibar 1979: 67)

In other words, Marx reads Smith’s text and through this text he constructs a second text, consisting of the contradictions and unacknowledged

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assumptions in the first. As Marx himself made clear, ‘Adam Smith’s contradictions are of significance because they contain problems which it is true he does not resolve, but which he reveals by contradicting himself’ (1951: 146). To read a text symptomatically, therefore, is to perform a double reading: reading first the text, and then the problematic of the text. For example, in a number of recent car advertisements in the UK, vehicles are presented as isolated in nature. This mode of advertising, I would argue, is a response to the growing body of negative publicity that car ownership has attracted, especially in terms of pollution and road congestion. To prevent this publicity having an adverse effect on car sales, these criticisms have to be countered. To confront them in a direct way would always run the risk of allowing the criticisms to come between the car being advertised and any potential buyer. Therefore, showing cars in both nature (unpolluted) and space (uncongested) confronts the claims without the risk of giving them a dangerous and unnecessary visibility. In this way, the criticisms are answered without the questions themselves having been formally posed. The emphasis placed on nature and space is, therefore, a response to the twin questions, which remain unasked in the advertisement itself but exist in the text’s ‘problematic’: does buying a car increase both pollution and road congestion? Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production is undoubtedly the most sustained attempt to apply the technique of Althusserian symptomatic reading to texts. Macherey rejects what he calls ‘the interpretative fallacy’ – the view that a text has a single meaning that it is the task of criticism to uncover. For him a text is not a puzzle that conceals a meaning, it is a construction with a multiplicity of meanings: This conflict is not the sign of an imperfection; it reveals the inscription of an otherness in the work, through which it maintains a relationship with that which it is not, that which happens at its margins. To explain the work is to show that, contrary to appearances, it is not independent, but bears in its material substance the imprint of a determinate absence which is also the principle of its identity. The book is furrowed by the allusive presence of those other books against which it is elaborated . . . The book is not the extension of a meaning; it is generated from the incompatibility of several meanings, the strongest bond by which it is attached to reality. (1978: 79–80)

According to Macherey, texts always operate at two levels: the ‘ideological project’ (what is said) and the ‘realisation’ (what is shown). Therefore, in order to understand a text we need to understand both its ‘ideological project’ (that is, what it is saying) and its ‘realisation’ (that is, what it is

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not saying but showing in some direct or indirect way). The difference (‘discord’) between the two levels, between ‘ideological project’ and ‘realisation’, reveals the ‘unconscious of the text’ (Macherey’s term for the ‘problematic’). It is the text’s unconscious (that is, its ‘problematic’) that connects it to ‘the conditions of its possibility’ (1978: 164), its historical moment of production. All narratives, according to Macherey, contain an ideological project; that is, they promise to tell the ‘truth’ about something. Information is initially withheld on the promise that it will be revealed. Narrative, therefore, constitutes a movement towards disclosure; it begins with a truth promised and ends with a truth revealed. The ideological project of Heart of Darkness, I would argue, is to tell the truth about exploration and conquest. The framing narrator’s naive assumptions are to be replaced by Marlow’s own understanding of the truth, supposedly guaranteed by his experiences in Africa. When the framing narrator tells us of the past glories of exploration and conquest, he eulogises about ‘[t]he dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires’, and asks rhetorically: ‘What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river [the Thames] into the mystery of an unknown earth’ (Conrad 2006a: 5). Marlow’s response (whose story is the novel’s main narrative) is to point out that ‘this also has been one of the dark places of the earth’ (2006a: 5). He explains that he is thinking of ‘when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago’ (2006a: 5). He asks his listeners to imagine a decent young citizen in a toga [who would] land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery. The utter savagery had closed round him – all the mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible which is also detestable. And it has a fascination too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination – you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender – the hate (2006a: 6).

He then corrects the worrying relativism of this claim (that is, what it might be suggesting about British imperialism), by adding, Mind, none of us [Marlow and his British listeners on board The Nellie] would feel exactly like this. What saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were . . . no colonists . . . They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force – nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of the

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others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale . . . The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it, not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea (2006a: 6).

And as Marlow was changed by his encounter with Kurtz and Africa, so listening to Marlow’s story of that encounter changes the framing narrator. As a result of listening to Marlow’s story, the River Thames, that he had previously considered the starting point for glorious voyages of exploration and conquest, now becomes a passageway ‘into the heart of an immense darkness’ (2006a: 77). The truth that had changed Marlow has changed the framing narrator. But what is this truth? The novel promises the truth about exploration and conquest, but what in fact are we given? The truth the novel seeks to place before the reader is that exploration and conquest reveal an inherent frailty in ‘human nature’. According to the logic of this claim, Africa is viewed as a darkness that slowly dissolves the pretensions of European civilisation to reveal it in all its essential darkness. Goodness (Kurtz’s idealism is the novel’s main example), it is suggested, is a frail thing that disintegrates when confronted by the primitive darkness of Africa. Once in the African jungle, no longer ‘stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums’ (2006a: 49), but instead having to face the darkness ‘without a policeman . . . [and] when no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion’ (2006a: 49), it is then that an essential ‘human nature’ appears that the novel suggests is a condition of primitive savagery. In other words, without the constraints placed upon them by the police and public opinion, they would all behave like savages. In order to sustain an argument about the supposed unchanging darkness of human nature, it is necessary to deny historical change. The novel attempts this by introducing history as an ahistorical reality. The best example of this is the comparison I have already mentioned, between the Romans in Britain and the Europeans in Africa. Two characters are foregrounded in Marlow’s comments on the Roman colonisation of Britain: first, we are told of a commander of a trireme ordered suddenly to the north, who would afterwards ‘brag of what he had done’, the second is ‘a decent young citizen in a toga’, who, as we have already noted, would ‘in some inland post feel the savagery’ (2006a: 6) close in around him. These are clearly presentations of Marlow and Kurtz in earlier ‘timeless’ incarnations. History, it is suggested, consists of a series of repetitions; the

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darkness is never overcome, it merely changes location, guaranteed always by the darkness in the human heart. ‘We live in a flicker’ (2006a: 6), threatened on all sides by darkness. According to this argument, darkness exists not only in time and space but in the hearts and minds of men and women. There is a traitor within (‘the heart of darkness’): an inheritance that threatens the gains of European civilisation. All that is required is the right environment. Africa, as Conrad wants to suggest, supposedly provides this environment: Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world . . . We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness . . . We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth . . . We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance . . . Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you – you so remote from the night of first ages – could comprehend (2006a: 35).

Kurtz’s ‘tragedy’ is supposedly to have succumbed to the heart of darkness: [T]he wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude – and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core . . . [T]he heavy mute spell of the wilderness . . . seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions (2006a: 65).

So when Kurtz famously says ‘the horror, the horror’ (2006a: 69), it is a profound recognition of the darkness within: the ‘primitive’ in Africa has released the primitive within himself. Without the constraints placed upon him by European civilisation, he has been stripped to primitive savagery. Kurtz’s dying words are a warning to all colonisers. The novel’s critique of what Marlow remembers as a child calling ‘the glories of exploration’ (2006a: 8)3 is, therefore, constructed around its presentation of the decline of Kurtz. The problem, however, for any radical understanding of the novel, is that his decline appears to be as a result of ‘going native’ (with all the racist assumptions signified by this term). Conrad did not invent the discourse of ‘colonial atavism’. The idea of a reversion to a more primitive state of being, supposedly activated by

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exposure to the colonial environment was, following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), a fairly common concern in nineteenthcentury Britain. Darwin’s theory of evolution, with its ideas of progress, implied for many Victorians something darker: if human beings evolved, was it not logical that they might also degenerate? As E. Ray Linklater, a zoologist writing in 1880, explains: With regard to ourselves, the white races of Europe, the possibility of degeneration seems to be worth some consideration. In accordance with a tacit assumption of universal progress – an unreasoning optimism – we are accustomed to regard ourselves as necessarily progressing, as necessarily having arrived at a higher and more elaborated condition than that which our ancestors reached, and as destined to progress still further. On the other hand, it is well to remember that we are subject to the general laws of evolution, and are as likely to degenerate as to progress (1880: 59–60).

Reading the novel as the staging of colonial atavism has become a commonplace in Conrad criticism. It was a feature of the very first reviews of the novel. For example, one contemporary anonymous reviewer described it as a sombre study of the Congo . . . the power of the wilderness, of contact with barbarism and elemental man . . . the demoralisation of the white man is conveyed with marvellous force. The denationalisation of the European, the ‘going Fantee’ of civilized man has been often enough treated in fiction . . . but never has the ‘why of it’ been appreciated by any other author . . . and never . . . has any writer till now succeeded in bringing the reason, and the ghastly unreason of it all home to sheltered folk (quoted in Griffith 1995: 125–6).

Now it may be true, as John Griffith observes that, ‘Kurtz is the apogee of the notion of a European who abandons himself utterly to a state of unbounded desire’ (1995: 226) but this is only part of the truth. To understand fully the nature of the desire he pursues we have to situate him as a colonialist, engaged in a bloody and sordid imperial adventure. The problem with the claims that he simply ‘goes native’, is that they fail to take seriously why he is there. In other words, the logic of the claim is that we are asked to accept that the real horror of imperialism is that it forces imperialists to behave like the ‘savages’ they have supposedly arrived to ‘civilise’. This is hardly a radical critique of imperialism. However, I want to argue that in order to tell the story of colonial atavism, Conrad is compelled to tell another story of imperialism. It is this other story that takes us to what Macherey would call the unconscious of the text.

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It is well known that part of Conrad’s purpose in the novel was to attack Belgian imperialism. In a letter to William Blackwood, owner and editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, where Heart of Darkness was first serialised, he makes this perfectly clear. As he explained to Blackwood, referring to Belgian imperialism, the motivation of the novel is ‘The criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilizing work in Africa is a justifiable idea’ (31 December 1898; quoted in Levinson 1991: 38). Conrad later famously described Belgian activities in the Congo as ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration’ (Conrad 2006b: 278). In a letter to Roger Casement, British Consul to the Congo, again referring to Belgian imperialism, he wrote, ‘It is in every respect an enormous and atrocious lie in action’ (17 December 1903; quoted in Armstrong 2006: 270). According to his friend, and later co-author, Ford Madox Ford, ‘whilst writing “Heart of Darkness”, Conrad would declaim passionately about the gloomy imbecility and cruelty of the Belgians in the Congo Free State’ (2006: 316). Belgian rule in the Congo was certainly brutal; somewhere between two and ten million Africans were killed during the twenty-three years of King Leopold’s rule (Hawkins 2006: 375). The specificity of the novel’s condemnation of Belgian imperialism, that is, the idea that only Belgian imperialism is attacked, is noted very clearly in the Manchester Guardian’s review of the novel in 1902: It must not be supposed that Mr Conrad makes attack upon colonisation, expansion, even upon imperialism. In no one is the essence of the adventurous spirit more instinctive. But cheap ideals, platitudes of civilisation are shrivelled up in the heat of such experiences (quoted in Armstrong 2006: 309).

Sometimes Conrad’s response to Belgium imperialism is a curious mixture of moral outrage and commercial concern. For example, in another letter to Roger Casement (21 December 1903), he says of Belgian imperialism: ‘It is as if the moral clock had been put back many hours’ (Armstrong 2006: 270). He then goes on to complain, It is an extraordinary thing that the conscience of Europe which seventy years ago put down the slave trade on humanitarian grounds tolerates the Congo State to day . . . What makes it more remarkable is this: the slave trade was an old established form of commercial activity; it was not the monopoly of one small country established to the disadvantage of the rest of the civilised world (2006: 270–71).

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He follows this by the extraordinary suggestion that England, for no other reason than to protect its own commercial interests, should intervene against Belgian activities in the Congo: ‘But what of our commercial interests? They suffer greatly’ (2006: 271). Conrad’s attitude to British imperialism is very different. Referring to the Blackwood’s pro-imperialist readership Conrad wrote: ‘One was in decent company there and a good sort of public. There isn’t a single club and messroom and man-of-war in the British Seas and Dominions which hasn’t its copy of Maga’ (quoted in Griffith 1995: 105). Moreover, there can be no doubt that Conrad, the Polish aristocrat, fully embraced his new homeland: ‘Both at sea and on land my point of view is English’ (1995: 15). In various letters, Conrad described his relationship to his new homeland in similar terms; for example, describing himself as ‘a Polish nobleman, cased in British tar!’ (1890; quoted in Armstrong 2006: 247). Similarly, ‘[L]iberty can only be found under the English flag all over the world’ (25 December 1899; quoted in Parry 1983: 12). In the Preface to Youth, he describes himself as ‘the spoiled adopted child of Great Britain and even of the Empire’ (Conrad 2006c: 289). For these reasons, I think Conrad tries very hard not to include British imperialism in the novel’s critique of what is happening in Africa.4 However, although it is made clear that the imperialism that Marlow encounters and finds wanting is Belgian, all the special pleading for British imperialism has the effect of slowly drawing it into the focus of the novel’s critical gaze. When Marlow is looking at the map in the Company’s office, he notices the ‘vast amounts of red’ (Conrad 2006a: 10), indicating British colonies, and reflects that it is ‘good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done there’ (2006a: 10). We are also told that British imperialism is different from other imperialisms, especially Roman and Belgian: ‘What saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency . . . What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; an unselfish belief in the idea’ (2006a: 6–7). Part of the reason, I think, why the novel is less obviously about British imperialism is that Conrad sets his story in a landscape of what we might call British imperial fantasy; a recognisable landscape of imperial ‘common sense’; that is, a landscape which draws heavily on the many travel books, ethnographic novels, anthropological studies, which had opened up the ‘Dark Continent’ to British interest and fascination. Therefore, I think we have to be cautious when reading Conrad’s later claim, made in the Preface to the 1923 edition of Youth, a collection including Heart of Darkness, that the narrative of the novel is ‘experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly

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legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers’ (Conrad 2006c: 290). Our caution should increase when we realise that there is none of this ‘experience’ to be found in his Congo Diary, written during his actual time in Africa. What I am suggesting is that Conrad’s imaginary encounter with Africa (through other texts) was more influential on the writing of Heart of Darkness than his actual journey to the Congo. In other words, what Macherey calls the conditions of possibility, the discursive construction of Africa inherited by Conrad, had an organising impact on the writing of the novel. Put simply, Conrad takes for granted certain assumptions about Africa. For example, Brodie Cruickshank, a colonial administrator, writing in 1853, offers this account of first seeing the coast of Africa: As the stranger . . . obtains the first hazy and indistinct view of its distant outline, it appears covered with a misty pall, and presents such a dream-like picture to the imagination, that little effort is needed to people these solitudes with beings of his creation. A dark impenetrable mystery seems to hang beneath the shades of those gloomy forests (quoted in Griffith 1995: 53).

The description in Heart of Darkness is very similar: The edge of the colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with the white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. The . . . land seemed to glisten and drip with steam . . . Nowhere did we stop long enough to get a particularized impression, but the general sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me (Conrad 2006a: 13).

In both extracts Africa lacks definition, it is vague and misty; it is dreamlike or invites one to dream. Moreover, what both passages share is the imposition of vagueness onto a continent that they see as their mission to define, literally to bring order to it. This is made absolutely clear when we compare their similar accounts of language: ‘the indistinct notes of the rude songs, or, more nearly, the wild jabber of an unintelligible tongue’ (Cruickshank; quoted in Griffith 1995: 54); ‘dying vibrations of one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean without any kind of sense’ (Conrad 2006a: 48). The novel draws not just from other accounts of Africa but also from other work worrying about the relationship between the British Empire and the decline of previous empires. An article published in Blackwood’s nine years before the novel was first serialised there in 1899, draws a comparison with the Roman Empire that is very similar to that outlined in Heart of Darkness:

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Where . . . is that Roman Empire now, which two thousand years ago planted the seeds of a high civilisation among the barbarians of Great Britain? It will scarcely, I think, be saying too much, if I say that the British Empire stands now very much where the Roman Empire stood then, and occupies a like dangerous place of breadth and prominence (Arthur Mitchell, 1890; quoted in Griffith 1995: 104).

I am not suggesting an unconscious plagiarism, rather that Conrad is drawing from a common stock of images about Africa and Africans; he is articulating the ‘common sense’ of imperial fantasy. Moreover, he has to do this in order for his novel to make sense to its pro-imperialist Blackwood readership. We have to remember that the magazine had a very particular type of reader. As Benita Parry explains, ‘Blackwood’s readership was an audience still secure in the conviction that they are members of an invincible imperial power and a superior race . . . those to whom colonial possessions appeared a natural extension of their own national boundaries’ (1983: 1). For similar reasons, I think the novel is often vague about the horrors of imperialism; constantly described in negatives, the novel presents imperialism as a dream, something beyond ordinary understanding. The following is a typical comment from Marlow: ‘The essentials of this affair lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond my power of meddling’ (Conrad 2006a: 38).5 But what is incomprehensible to Marlow does not, of course, have to be so for us. As Bertolt Brecht once suggested, referring to his play Mother Courage and Her Children: ‘[E]ven if Courage learns nothing . . . the audience can . . . learn something by observing her’ (1964: 229). The primary concern of Marlow’s tale, as we have noted, although absent for most of it, is Kurtz. He had arrived in Africa with good intentions and the belief that because of the technologically advanced nature of European civilisation, the white coloniser could ‘exert a power for good practically unbounded’ (Conrad 2006a: 50). Kurtz is almost a caricature. He begins by taking very seriously the cant of civilising the world, and ends by following the logic of imperialism to its most extreme and brutal conclusions. That is, he begins with the desire to civilise and ends by recommending genocide, as he scribbles on the last page of his report, ‘exterminate all the brutes’ (2006a: 50). The other imperialists condemn his behaviour on the grounds that it suggests an ‘unsound method’ (2006a: 62). His crime, according to them, is to have ruined a good trading district. The method he employed to extract large amounts of ivory from the area would ensure that no more ivory

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would be forthcoming for a very long time. As the Manager explained to Marlow, ‘He [Kurtz] did not see the time was not ripe for vigorous action’ (2006a: 61). The method was ‘unsound’, not because it revealed the potential barbarism of imperial capitalism but because it put at risk the Company’s profits (the logic of which does reveal the barbarism of capitalism in its imperial mode). Therefore, rather than ‘going native’, I think it is possible to argue that Kurtz’s behaviour demonstrates something that Karl Marx had noted some forty-nine years before Conrad’s novel was published: ‘The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation . . . turning from its home where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked’ (1973: 324). Kurtz represents the usually concealed logic of imperialism, the dark reality underpinning the rhetoric of light and progress. His decline is not the result of the stripping away of European civilisation by the Dark Continent; rather it is the result of the stripping away of the rhetoric of imperialism to reveal its engine of barbarity. In other words, what is revealed in Africa is not the supposed essential darkness of human nature but the dark underside of capitalism in its imperialist mode. It is surely significant that at the close of the novel the framing narrator no longer seems to view the River Thames as the starting point for glorious voyages of adventure and conquest. His mood is now much more uncertain: ‘The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness’ (Conrad 2006a: 77). Perhaps he has finally realised that the real darkness of imperialism emanates not from the colonies but from the metropolitan centres of empire? Conrad’s aim may have been to reassure Blackwood’s conservative and pro-imperialist readership that foreign imperialisms (especially Belgian) are bad and British imperialism is good. But the attempt to prize British imperialism from the novel’s general condemnation of imperialism just does not work because the image of imperialism that emerges is so damning that British imperialism cannot escape. Moreover, we are told that Kurtz is a ‘universal genius’ (2006a: 28), and that ‘all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’ (2006a: 49). He must, therefore, represent all European imperialisms, including British. Interestingly, as Conrad explained in one of his letters, ‘I took great care to give Kurtz a cosmopolitan origin’ (Conrad 1988: 94). More specifically, we are told in the novel that ‘Kurtz had been educated partly in England and – as he was good enough to say himself – his sympathies were in the right place. His mother was halfEnglish’ (Conrad 2006a: 49). The novel’s ‘ideological project’ may well have been to present a

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critique of Belgian imperialism through a staging of colonial atavism. But what we are shown in the novel’s ‘realisation’, which in turn reveals its unconscious, is the logic of all imperialisms, including British imperialism. What is shown is the gap that always exists between the rhetoric and the brutal realities of conquest and exploitation. Inevitably, and counter to the claims to the contrary, the critique, and its damning condemnation, also includes British imperialism. Now it may be the case that Conrad was concerned to condemn only the excesses of imperialism and not imperialism itself. Terry Eagleton, for example, argues that ‘while denouncing crudely unidealistic forms of imperialism, [Conrad is] ideologically constrained to discover in the British variant a saving idea’ (1978: 135). Nevertheless, regardless of what Conrad’s intentions might have been, imperialism does not escape from the novel as anything but ‘a vile scramble for loot’. If what redeems it is the notion of a civilising mission, it is false redemption; the saving idea is shown to be nothing more than a frail sham, that redeems only at the price of self-deception (the price paid most notably by Kurtz). For the idea, no matter how grand, does not fit the reality. Marlow’s lie to Kurtz’s Intended is symptomatic of all the lies on which imperialism sustains itself. The ‘redeeming idea’, that is supposed to lift British imperialism above the rest, is an illusion of the same order. It is perhaps significant that Conrad claimed, in a letter written to William Blackwood, after the novel’s publication, ‘[T]he last pages of Heart of Darkness where the interview of the man [Marlow] and the girl [the Intended] locks it in, as it were . . . and makes that story something quite on another plane than an anecdote of a man who went mad in the centre of Africa’ (quoted in Armstrong 2006: 299). The lie to the Intended demonstrates quite clearly that the idea can only survive protected by a lie. The concept of civilising the colonised is a deception, a device to enable the supposed ‘civilised’ to plunder the resources of the so-called ‘uncivilised’. Although not the conscious intention of the novel to say such things about imperialism, it is nevertheless ‘compelled’ to say them in order to say what it wants to say. According to Macherey, ‘[T]he unconscious [of the text] . . . is history, the play of history beyond its edges, encroaching on those edges: this is why it is possible to trace the path which leads from the haunted work to that which haunts it’ (1978: 94). In short, when read symptomatically, Heart of Darkness says more about imperialism than Conrad, the spoiled adopted child of Great Britain and even of the Empire, might have wanted to say. But of course it is the text produced and not the text imagined that should be the object of a critical discourse.

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Notes

Chapter 1 1. See Storey 2003 and 2009a. 2. Williams seems to be struggling towards a concept very similar to Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. It could be argued, counter to the argument I am making here, that Williams would have got to something like hegemony without ever reading Gramsci. 3. The Four Tops, ‘It’s the Same Old Song’, Four Tops Motown Greatest Hits, Motown Record Company. 4. For a discussion of the ways in which the ‘biological’ is always already cultural, see Butler 1999 and 2009. 5. For example, over the last decade I have been doing research on opera. Not opera as a body of texts and practices but opera as a shifting network of meanings (that is, the culture of opera); how in certain times and spaces opera is articulated as ‘popular culture’ and in others it is articulated as ‘high culture’. What I have tried to do (see Chapters 8 and 10 in this volume) is to track the development of opera as a signifying system: the construction of a particular discourse on opera, a discourse which enabled, constrained and constituted the meaning of opera and opera-going. Opera’s changing cultural status is obviously a question of culture and power. 6. What Williams actually says is this: ‘[W]e cannot think of communication as secondary. We cannot think of it as marginal; or as something that happens after reality has occurred. Because it is through the communication systems that the reality of ourselves, the reality of our society, forms and is interpreted’ (1989b: 22–3).

Chapter 2 1. ‘This means that, although one can speak of intellectuals, one cannot speak of non-intellectuals, because non-intellectuals do not exist’ (Gramsci 1971: 9). 2. Roger Simon (1982: 95–6) argues, I think correctly, that Gramsci’s distinction

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between traditional and organic intellectuals is a rather ‘unnecessary’ one. For example, the bourgeoisie quite clearly has its own organic intellectuals, and yet from the perspective of the working class these must appear traditional intellectuals. The term traditional seems therefore to add only confusion to an argument that is otherwise perfectly clear and valid. See Chapter 1 in this volume for a different explanation of Gramsci’s concept. Arnold’s own concern for the homogeneity of the middle class can be gleaned from his Schools and Universities on the Continent where he bemoaned ‘the spectacle of a middle class cut in two’ (Super IV: 309). Arnold felt so strongly about this point that he included it in the Introduction to On the Study of Celtic Literature (1868). See Super III: 391. Walter Houghton (1957) lists the following names: Prince Albert, Matthew Arnold, Baldwin Brown, Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Frederic Harrison, Bulwer Lytton, W. H. Mallock, Harriet Martineau, John Mill, John Morley, William Morris, Herbert Spencer, Hugh Stowell, J. A. Symonds, Tennyson and no doubt many others. The quotation is actually from a letter from Arnold to his mother (2 February 1864); it is his report of what he said to Cobden. What he actually said was this: ‘I am convinced that till its mind is a great deal more open, and its spirit a great deal freer and higher, it will never prevail against the aristocratic class’ (Armytage 1949: 252). George Odger (1820–77) singled out by Arnold earlier in Culture and Anarchy as representing ‘the beautiful and virtuous mean of our present working class’ (1960a: 94). Odger was in fact one of the founder members of the First International, the Rules and Address of which were drafted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Odger was actually a member of the General Council. But one should not be misled by this. Arnold’s praise alone should be enough to put Odger’s politics in perspective. He was a trade union bureaucrat who was soon to regret his membership of the General Council of the First International. On the fall of the Paris Commune, the International published Marx’s The Civil War in France. Rather than bearing Marx’s name alone, it carried the signatures of the whole General Council. As Cole and Postgate point out, ‘Men like . . . Odger found to their horror that they were signing a defence of an attempt by working men to destroy a government by violence. They resigned in indignation and severed their connection with the International’ (1961: 384). Arnold’s view of Jeremy Bentham was shared by Marx. He referred to Bentham as ‘the arch-philistine . . . that soberly pedantic and heavy-footed oracle of the “commonsense” of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie’ (1976: 758); adding, ‘[I]f I had the courage of my friend Heinrich Heine, I should call Mr Jeremy a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity’ (1976: 759). Edward Miall (1809-81), politician, Congregational minister, first editor of the Nonconformist, and founder, in 1844, of the British Anti-State Church

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Association. He was a favourite target for Arnold. He characterised ‘Miallism’ as ‘a subform of Hebraism, and itself a somewhat spurious and degenerate form’ (Super VI: 126). He considered ‘Millism’ (that is, the work of John Stuart Mill) as ‘the Hellenistic counterpart of Miallism’ (Super VI: 126). Arnold was also determined to deliver the middle class from its flatterers: ‘I cannot think that the middle class will be much longer insensible to its own evident interests. I cannot think that, for the pleasure of being complimented on their self-reliance by Lord Fortescue and The Times, they will much longer forego a course leading them to their own dignity instead of away from it’ (1973: 162). 11. For instance, in Culture and Anarchy Arnold made the following point: ‘That one in nineteen of our population is a pauper, and . . . this being so, trade and commerce can hardly be said to prove by their satisfactory working that it matters nothing whether the relations between labour and capital are understood or not’ (1960a: 89). 12. It is not my intention to suggest that Arnold was alone in his advocacy of such measures, although, to read only Arnold (and certain critics), one often gets this impression. For a general survey of the various controversies that surrounded education, religion, democracy and so on, see Houghton (1957).

Chapter 3 1. LSD or ‘acid’ (d-lysergic acid diethylamide) became widely available in San Francisco in 1965. One of the key things to understand about LSD is that it was not regarded as a recreational drug. Dropping acid was part of dropping out: drop acid and change yourself; change yourself and then change the world. As Timothy Leary explained, ‘The danger of LSD is not physical or psychological, but social-political. Make no mistake: the effect of consciousness-expanding drugs will be to transform our concepts of human nature, human potentialities, existence . . . Present social establishments had better be prepared for the change’ (1965: 57). 2. In addition to this, for most of the 1960s, 50 per cent of the population was under 25 years of age. The counterculture thus had a very large constituency to which to appeal. The ‘them’ and ‘us’ of its politics were ‘old’ and ‘young’. But it was a generational politics in which age was as much ontological as chronological. Bob Dylan captures this in his song My Back Pages (1964), ‘I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now’ (1974: 215–16). In other words, the countercultural slogan ‘Don’t trust anyone over 30’ is a more complex slogan than it seems. 3. Dylan material was the starting point for most of the West Coast musicians who electrified their instruments in the mid-1960s. His own anti-war songs – ‘Masters of War’, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, ‘With God on our Side’ and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ – undoubtedly encouraged the counterculture’s own attitude (see Dylan 1974). In short, it is very difficult to exaggerate Dylan’s influence.

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4. I use articulate here in its Gramscian sense, meaning both to express and join together. See Chapter 3. 5. According to Gramsci, social groups always produce their own organic intellectuals, men and women whose function is to provide ‘leadership of a cultural and general ideological nature’. See Antonio Gramsci (1971: 150) and Chapter 2 in this volume. 6. John Lennon’s ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ (The Beatles, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967). 7. ‘Its Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. This is the published version (Dylan, 1974: 287) and not the one recorded on Bringing It All Back Home (1965). 8. There is a vast amount of literature on Gramsci’s key concept. See Storey (2009a and 2009b) and Chapter 1 in this volume. 9. The Grateful Dead saw the festival as a ‘sell out’ of the counterculture’s values. They refused to attend, and instead played for free outside the festival. 10. The Quarterly Congressional Almanac explained the new system thus: Under the new induction system the period of prime draft eligibility is reduced from seven to one year. A registrant’s period of maximum eligibility begins on his nineteenth birthday and ends on his twentieth. Men not drafted during these twelve months are assigned a lower priority and would be called up only in an emergency.

11. Drug use also changed, as acid was joined by other very destructive drugs: heroin, speed, cocaine. Haight-Ashbury moved from being the psychedelic capital of the counterculture to a place of junkies and those seeking to exploit them.

Chapter 4 1. This was the usual run for a top-of-the-bill melodrama in Manchester in the early 1840s. 2. Haines’s political reworking of Dibdin’s song presents us with an interesting question. Did Haines change the story to cater for his predominantly working-class audience, or did he change it for reasons of personal political motivation? See Note 6. 3. I use ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’ not to identify textual qualities, but to distinguish (rather crudely) between two reading processes: a reading which interprets the play negatively as a hopelessly genre-heavy nautical melodrama, and the reading I am suggesting here, that derives its hermeneutic energy from location within a specific reading formation. 4. See, for example, Gilbert B. Cross (1977), Jim Davis (1988) and Frank Rahill (1967). 5. These points are of course informed by the reading formation I shall eventually outline.

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6. Haines’s reference to the workhouse is clearly to the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. This suggests a certain political awareness on Haines’s part, as the protests against the Act did not really get under way until attempts were made to introduce it into the industrial North in 1837. 7. She is speaking what Antonio Gramsci (1971) calls ‘common sense’ – the opposite of ‘good sense’. 8. See Gareth Stedman Jones (1982). 9. The six points of the Charter were: Manhood Suffrage, Annual Parliaments, Secret Ballots, Payment of MPs, Equal Electoral Districts and the Abolition of the Property Qualifications for MPs. 10. Population statistics from Briggs (1968); National Petition signatures from Donald Read (1967). 11. 1828 prices: boxes 3s, pit 2s, gallery 1s. 1829 prices: lower box 3s, upper box 2s 6d, pit 1s 6d, gallery 6d. Prices at the Theatre Royal during the same period: lower box 4s, upper box 3s, pit 2s, gallery 1s. During the Theatre Royal’s regular opera season prices would be increased; sometimes doubled, occasionally trebled. Prices at the Queen’s Theatre more or less remained stable until it closed down in March 1869. Its final price list reads: dress circle 3s, upper boxes 1s 6d, pit and stalls 1s, gallery 6d. 12. The poster was produced by J. Doherty, Printer. As well as a printer, Doherty owned the ‘Manchester Coffee and News-Room’. This extends Doherty’s connection with the theatre to over eight years. 13. G. E. Wewiora’s (1973) own researches in the Manchester Central Library Theatre Collection uncovered another three plays written by Haines. 14. ‘The play pre-dates all the “Factory” plays listed by Nicoll, and suggests to me that Haines possessed rather more originality than M. Willson Disher gives him credit for’ (Wewiora 1973: 93). I could not agree more. Haines in fact wrote the first factory melodrama to be performed at the Queen’s Theatre: The Factory Boy, first produced on 13 September 1841. 15. ‘Labour, the Genius of Industry’ seems to be a reference to the labour theory of value developed in the 1820s: Thomas Hodgskin, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (1825) and Popular Political Economy (1827); John Gray, Lecture on Human Happiness (1825); William Thompson, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most Conducive to Human Happiness (1824). If Haines is making a reference to the labour theory of value, this again suggests a certain political awareness, as the theory only really enters popular radical political discourse in the 1830s. See Hollis (1970). 16. On physical force Chartism, see Sykes 1985. 17. He worked as an actor-dramatist at the Theatre Royal and the Royal Minor Theatre between April 1828 and December 1829. Wewiora describes him as the Theatre Royal’s ‘best actor of melodrama’. See Wewiora (1973: 90). After 1829, Haines occasionally returned as a visiting or star performer. 18. I use articulated in the Gramscian sense to mean to express and join together. See Gramsci (1971), Hall (1996), and Chapter 7 in this volume.

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Chapter 5 1. I am using the concept of text as elaborated by John Frow and Meaghan Morris: there is a precise sense in which cultural studies uses the concept of text as its fundamental model. . . Rather than designating a place where meanings are constructed in a single level of inscription (writing, speech, film, dress . . .), it works as an interleaving of ‘levels’. If a shopping mall [for example] is conceived on the model of textuality, then this ‘text’ involves practices, institutional structures and the complex forms of agency they entail, legal, political, and financial conditions of existence, and particular flows of power and knowledge, as well as a particular multilayered semantic organisation; it is an ontologically mixed entity, and one for which there can be no privileged or ‘correct’ reading. It is this, more than anything else, that forces cultural studies’ attention to the diversity of audiences for or users of the structures of textuality it analyses – that is, to the open-ended social life of texts – and that forces it, thereby, to question the authority or finality of its own readings. (1996: 355–6).

2. E. Rooney (1996) and C. Nelson (1996) present arguments similar to that made by Giroux et al. 3. The logic of this is similar to Bob Dylan’s paradox: ‘There’s no success like failure’ (1974: 272). 4. Such a position seems to require that we see Richard Hoggart, the Centre’s founder and first director, as either advocate of cultural studies as politics by other means or as political dupe. Neither position is really convincing. As Colin Sparks (1996) points out, ‘Hoggart. . . was not, and never had been, a marxist. His only relation to marxism was one of dismissal’ (72). Moreover, Sparks maintains, I think correctly, that ‘It was not until 1970–1 that the engagement with Marx [at the CCCS] became central’ (81).

Chapter 6 1. In comparison, its immediate predecessor, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, made less than $10 million in its opening weekend in May 1997. Yet the film was still a major success, yielding $54 million on a budget of $16 million, while its American video release in America in April 1998 was an instant hit – the film staying in the Video Top 20 for sixty-two consecutive weeks, earning $47 million (Goldstein 1999). 2. Jameson is here drawing on Williams’s (1980) model of social formations consisting of dominant, emergent and residual cultures. 3. See Chapter 4, Note 1. 4. Pastiche should not be confused with parody; although both involve imitation and mimicry, parody always has an ‘ulterior motive’, to mock a divergence from convention or a norm. Pastiche, according to Jameson, is a ‘blank

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5. 6.

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parody’ or ‘empty copy’, which has no sense of the very possibility of there being a norm or a convention from which to diverge. For a more detailed discussion of this tradition, see Storey (2009a). Mike Featherstone detects a certain nostalgia in Jameson’s position: ‘[H]e is nostalgically bemoaning the loss of authority of the intellectual aristocracy over the population’ (1991: 9). In similar fashion, John Docker poses the question, ‘Is Fredric Jameson the F. R. Leavis of the postmodern world? Is “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” yet another rewriting, in the modernist palimpsest, of Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture?’ (1994: 128). The two Austin Powers films certainly have their predecessors. SFX Magazine (Floyd 1999: 80) lists fourteen films it calls ‘true sixties spoof spies’: The Silencers (1965), Our Man Flint (1965), Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965), Murderer’s Row (1966), Secret Agent Super Dragon (1966), Deadlier than the Male (1966), Dr Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (1966), The Ambushers (1967), In Like Flint (1967), Modesty Blaise (1966), The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World (1966), Operation Kid Brother (1967), The Wrecking Crew (1969) and Some Girls Do (1971). Xan Brooks, who notes the fact that Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me opens with Powers in bed relaxing watching the spy spoof In Like Flint (1967), describes Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me as ‘not so much a send-up of James Bond as a send up of the send-ups; a nineties re-branding of a bygone fad’ (Brooks 1999: 12), and adds another three spy spoofs to the list: The Pink Panther (1963), Carry On Spying (1966), Casino Royale (1967). We could add that there is also another form of nostalgia in Jameson’s argument; a nostalgia for ‘real’ history, uncontaminated by representations. Unfortunately, as Linda Hutcheon points out: [T]here is no directly and naturally accessible past ‘real’ for us today: we can only know – and construct – the past through its traces, its representations . . . they are our only means of access to the past. Jameson laments the loss of a sense of his particular definition of history, then, while dismissing as nostalgia the only kind of history we may be able to acknowledge: a contingent and inescapably intertextual history. (1997: 39)

9. Jameson’s argument is all about structure; the only sign of agency is his own. His mode of analysis leaves little room for consideration of how other people, from other backgrounds, might appropriate, make sense of, and use in lived cultures of everyday life the texts and practices that he identifies as postmodern (see Storey 1999). Mike Featherstone (1991) is surely correct to suggest that we cannot simply rely on ‘the readings of intellectuals. In effect we should focus upon the actual practices and changing power balances of those groups engaged in the production, classification, circulation and consumption of postmodern cultural goods’ (1991: 5). Docker notes how

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He [Jameson] tells us that when he was in the Bonaventure he didn’t actually see the hotel’s residential rooms, but ‘one understands’ that they ‘are in the worst of taste’ (Jameson 1984: 83). The modern ethnographer . . . can understand without seeing. And there also apparently exist absolute standards of aesthetic ‘taste’ which the magisterial modernist ever understands. I love that phrase: ‘One understands that the rooms are in the worst of taste’. Is this Modernist Prim? (Docker 1994: 121)

With a regret that perhaps goes beyond modernist prim, Jameson also complains about the failure of the hotel’s entrances to compare with ‘the sumptuous buildings of yesteryear [that] were wont to stage your passage from city street to the older interior’ (1984: 81; my italics). 10. In the main, pop music still tends to operate with an aesthetic that drifts between romanticism’s tortured genius and modernism’s avant-garde artist. Because of this, sampling is rarely, if ever, done as a form of pastiche (or even parody); samples are incorporated into the ‘organic whole’ in much the same way as occurs in T. S. Eliot’s classic monument to modernist poetic practice, The Waste Land (1922).

Chapter 7 1. On articulation see Chapters 1 and 4 in this volume. 2. Quoted in the Daily Telegraph, January 1991. The fact that Vietnam became a key issue in the build-up to the First Gulf War can be demonstrated by ‘A survey of 66,000 news stories that appeared in the US media between August 1990 and February 1991, [that] found 7,000 references to Vietnam, almost three times more than the next most frequently cited phrase – “human shields”’ (quoted in Roper 1995: 38). 3. Nixon did not coin the term, but he was a key player in giving it a particular political articulation. The Vietnam Syndrome began in the 1970s as a term to describe the psychological problems experienced by American Vietnam veterans (what also became known as ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome’). In the 1980s the term was articulated in revisionist accounts of the war: no longer a psychological problem, it was now used to indicate a reluctance on the part of successive US administrations to pursue ‘legitimate’ political and military policies out of a fear that they would lead to another Vietnam (see Haines 1995). General William Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, prefers the term ‘Vietnam psychosis’: Vietnam was a war that continues to have an impact on politics. I fear that one of the big losses, in fact, probably the most serious loss of the war, is what I refer to as the Vietnam psychosis. Any time anybody brings up the thought that military forces might be needed, you hear the old hue and cry ‘another Vietnam, another Vietnam’. That can be a real liability to us as we look to the future. (Quoted in Roper 1995: 33)

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Noam Chomsky’s gloss on the Vietnam syndrome is somewhat different: See, they make it sound like some kind of disease, a malady that has to be overcome. And the ‘malady’ in this case is that the population is still unwilling to tolerate aggression and violence. And that’s a change that took place as a result of the popular struggle against the war in Vietnam. (1992: 230–1)

4. It is a commonplace of Vietnam literature that Hollywood’s World War II films helped recruit the soldiers for America’s war in Vietnam. For example, Michael Herr refers to the war movies that the US soldiers carried with them into the war: I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good . . . [T]hey were actually making war movies in their heads, doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire; [driven by] movie-fed fantasies, [they were acting out] the lowest John Wayne wetdream. (1978: 169, 157, 24)

Similarly, Vietnam veteran Thomas Bird recalls: ‘It took me six months in Vietnam to wake up and turn all the World War II movies off in my mind’ (quoted in Sturken 1997: 95). 5. French historian Pierre Nora makes a similar point: Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image . . . The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs . . . It adds to life . . . a secondary memory, a prosthesis-memory. (1989: 13–14)

6. Also see David Cortright (1975), Rick Berg (1991) and the journal Vietnam Generation (2 (1), 1990), which contains essays on the anti-war movement in the US armed forces. 7. According to Marita Sturken the figure was 11,500 (civilians and nurses) and 265,000 women in the military (1997: 67). 8. Oliver North, often compared to Rambo, made a similar complaint when questioned by Congress (July 1987): ‘We didn’t lose the war in Vietnam, we lost the war right here’ (quoted in Webster 1988: 235). If Rambo and North had bothered to read Nixon they would have known that America had not in fact lost the war in Vietnam. Chapter 4 of Nixon’s book is entitled, ‘How We Won The War’. Nixon is astute enough to realise that this claim might require some defence: But win must be properly defined. We are a defensive power. We are not trying to conquer other countries. That is why we must have a policy in which we will fight limited wars if they are necessary to achieve limited goals. We win if we prevent the enemy from winning. (1986: 225).

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9. See H. Bruce Franklin and Elliott Gruner for excellent discussions of what Franklin calls the ‘near-religious fervor . . . [of] the POW/MIA fantasy’ (1993: xvi). Moreover, there can be little doubt, as Gruner observes, that the ‘POW stories . . . delivered a victory in a lost war’ (1993: 172). 10. Hollywood’s list of who was to blame for American defeat did not include those who are often blamed in the general discourse on the war – the US media. For example, at the conclusion of the First Gulf War, Ron Nessen, who had been White House Press Secretary during the Ford administration, claimed, ‘The Pentagon has won the last battle of the Vietnam War. It was fought on the sands of Saudia Arabia, and the defeated enemy was the news media . . . Never again should the press [and other news media] be allowed open coverage of America at war’ (quoted in Haines 1995: 41). 11. The Christ-like potential of the US soldier in Vietnam is also a feature of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, a statue depicting three uniformed women with a wounded male soldier, unveiled near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in November 1993. Described by the Washington Post (6 November 1993): ‘In spirit and pose the sculptor ambitiously invokes Michelangelo’s “Pieta”, the great Vatican marble of a grieving Mary holding the crucified body of Jesus’ (quoted in Sturken 1997: 69). 12. By ‘imperial narcissism’ I mean the way in which the country invaded and its inhabitants very quickly become the incidental background to a narrative about the invaders themselves. Like Narcissus, the imperialists see only themselves. Therefore, the imperial narcissism of Hollywood’s Vietnam is a feature of imperial fiction more generally. See Chapter 12 for a brief dicussion of it in relation to Heart of Darkness. 13. William J. Bennett, writing in the National Review, claimed that the war in the Gulf had allowed the US to ‘claim a victory on the magnitude of the Vietnam defeat’ (quoted in Haines 1995: 52). Similarly, Paul Shinoff wrote in The San Francisco Focus, ‘[O]n February 27, the war ended. The Vietnam War, that is’ (quoted in Haines 1995: 56). Against such triumphalism, Jon Roper claims that the Vietnam Syndrome had not been overcome; it had informed Bush’s decision not to pursue the war to its conclusion – defeat of Saddam Hussein. ‘The “Vietnam syndrome” still existed as a constraint that counseled caution’ (1995: 40). 14. I do not want to suggest that Hollywood’s Vietnam was or is unproblematically consumed by its American audiences. My claim is only that Hollywood produced a particular regime of truth. Film (like any other cultural text or practice) has to be made to mean. To really discover the extent to which Hollywood’s Vietnam has made its ‘truth’ tell requires a consideration of consumption. This will take us beyond a focus on the meaning of a text, to a focus on the meanings that can be made in the encounter between the discourses of the text and the discourses of the ‘reader’. That is, it is not a question of verifying (with an ‘audience’) the real meaning of, say, Platoon. The focus on consumption (understood as ‘production in use’) is to explore the

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political effectivity (or otherwise) of, say, Platoon. If a text is to become effective (politically or otherwise) it must be made to connect with people’s lives – become part of ‘lived cultures’. Formal analysis of Hollywood’s Vietnam may point to how it has articulated the war as an American tragedy of bravery and betrayal; George Bush senior’s comments (and the comments of others) may provide us with clues as to the circulation and effectivity of Hollywood’s articulation of the war; but these factors, however compelling they may be in themselves, do not provide conclusive proof that Hollywood’s account of the war has become hegemonic where it matters – in the lived practices of everyday life.

Chapter 8 1. Opera in Advertising: Bellini: Norma Delibes: Lakmé Delibes: Lakmé Delibes: Lakmé Delibes: Lakmé Delibes: Lakmé Gluck: Orfeo ed Euridice Handel: Serse Mascagni: Cavalleria Rusticana Mascagni: Cavalleria Rusticana Mascagni: Cavalleria Rusticana Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro Mozart: Così Fan Tutte Offenbach: Orpheus in the Underworld Offenbach: Tales of Hoffmann Puccini: Madama Butterfly Puccini: Madama Butterfly Puccini: Madama Butterfly Puccini: Gianni Schicchi Puccini: Gianni Schicchi Puccini: Turandot Puccini: La Bohème Puccini: Tosca Rossini: The Barber of Seville Rossini: The Barber of Seville Rossini: The Barber of Seville Verdi: Aida Verdi: Aida Verdi: Aida Verdi: Nabucco

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Ford Mondeo British Airways Kleenex Tissues Basmati Rice Ryvita IBM Computers Comfort Fabric Softener Rover Kleenex Tissues Stella Artois Baci Chocolates Citroën ZX Mercedes-Benz Bio Speed Weed Bailey’s Irish Cream Twinings Tea Del Monte Orange Juice Specsavers Opticians Phillips DCC McCain Oven Chips Benylin Cough Syrup Sony Walkman FreeServe Ragu Pasta Sauce Fiat Strada Braun Cordless Shavers Diet Pepsi Michelob Lager Egyptian Tourist Board British Airways

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no t e s Verdi: Il Trovatore Verdi: Rigoletto Verdi: Rigoletto Verdi: The Force of Destiny

171 Ragu Pasta Sauce Ragu Pasta Sauce Little Caesar’s Pizza Stella Artois

2. Opera in Film: Dividing films into three periods demonstrates quite clearly the increasing use of opera: used in ten films before 1980; thirty-one between 1980 and 1989; and one hundred between 1990 and 2001. Pre-1980 Verdi: Il Trovatore A Night at the Opera (1935) Ponchielli: La Gioconda Fantasia (1940) Mozart: Don Giovanni Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) Rossini: Barber of Seville Clockwork Orange (1971) Rossini: La Gazza Ladra Clockwork Orange (1971) Rossini: William Tell Clockwork Orange (1971) Mozart: Così Fan Tutte Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) Verdi: La Traviata The Godfather (1972) Gounod: Faust Age of Innocence (1977) Leoncavallo: I Pagliacci Moonraker (1979) Wagner: Die Walküre Apocalypse Now (1979) Flotow: Martha Breaking Away (1979) Post-1980 Mozart: Marriage of Figaro Hopscotch (1980) Rossini: Barber of Seville Hopscotch (1980) Wagner: Tristan und Isolde Raging Bull (1980) Bizet: The Pearl Fishers Gallipoli (1981) Wagner: Götterdämmerung Excalibur (1981) Wagner: Parsifal Excalibur (1981) Wagner: Tristan und Isolde Excalibur (1981) Lotow: Martha The Grey Fox (1982) Delibes: Lakmé The Hunger (1983) Verdi: Ernani Scarface (1983) Mozart: The Magic Flute Amadeus (1984) Puccini: Turandot The Killing Fields (1984) Handel: Judas Maccabaeus Out of Africa (1985) Wagner: Lohengrin Out of Africa (1985) Donizetti: L’Elisir d’Amore Prizzi’s Honour (1985) Verdi: Nabucco The Color of Money (1986) Puccini: Gianni Schicchi A Room with a View (1986) Puccini: La Rondine A Room with a View (1986) Puccini: Madama Butterfly Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) Puccini: Manon Lescaut Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) Wagner: Tristan und Isolde Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

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Puccini: Turandot Puccini: Madama Butterfly Wagner: Das Rheingold Delibes: Lakmé Mozart: Marriage of Figaro Catalini: La Wally Delibes: Lakmé Leoncavallo: I Pagliacci Puccini: Turandot Leoncavallo: I Pagliacci Wagner: Lohengrin Gluck: Iphigénie en Tauride Handel: Serse Puccini: La Bohème Verdi: Rigoletto Dvorak: Rusalka Verdi: Rigoletto Puccini: Turandot Mozart: Così Fan Tutte Post 1990 Puccini: La Bohème Verdi: Rigoletto Mascagni: Cavalleria Rusticana Verdi: La Traviata Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor Wagner: Lohengrin Wagner: Tannhäuser Puccini: Tosca Rossini: Barber of Seville Mozart: The Magic Flute Rossini: William Tell Puccini: Madama Butterfly Bellini: Casta Diva Bellini: Norma Donizetti: L’Elisir d’Amore Verdi: La Traviata Offenbach: Orphée aux Enfers Puccini: Madama Butterfly Wagner: Tristan und Isolde Puccini: La Bohème Puccini: Turandot Delibes: Lakmé Rossini: Il Viaggio a Reims

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Castaway (1987) Fatal Attraction (1987) Hope and Glory (1987) I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987) The Living Daylights (1987) Someone to Watch Over Me (1987) Someone to Watch Over Me (1987) The Untouchables (1987) The Witches of Eastwick (1987) Action Jackson (1988) Beaches (1988) Dangerous Liaisons (1988) Dangerous Liaisons (1988) Moonstruck (1988) The Burbs (1989) Driving Miss Daisy (1989) Hellgate (1989) New York Stories (1989) My Left Foot (1989) Awakenings (1990) Backstreet Dreams (1990) The Godfather III (1990) Pretty Woman (1990) Cape Fear (1991) Father of the Bride (1991) Meeting Venus (1991) Not Without My Daughter (1991) Oscar (1991) The Rocketeer (1991) Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1992) Jennifer 8 (1992) Lorenzo’s Oil (1992) Lorenzo’s Oil (1992) Lorenzo’s Oil (1992) Lorenzo’s Oil (1992) Peter’s Friends (1992) Peter’s Friends (1992) Shining Through (1992) Boxing Helena (1993) Boxing Helena (1993) Carlito’s Way (1993) Clear and Present Danger (1993)

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no t e s Verdi: Il Trovatore Puccini: Madama Butterfly Puccini: Tosca Verdi: La Traviata Mozart: Marriage of Figaro Rossini: Barber of Seville Catalini: La Wally Cilea: Adriana Lecouvreur Giordano: Andrea Chenier Spontini: La Vestale Mozart: Idomeneo Delibes: Lakmé Lehar: Giudetta Verdi: Il Trovatore Mozart: Abduction from the Seraglio Mozart: Don Giovanni Puccini: La Bohème Puccini: Madame Butterfly Puccini: Tosca Puccini: Madama Butterfly Berg: Wozzeck Verdi: The Force of Destiny Verdi: La Traviata Verdi: La Traviata Offenbach: Bagatelle Bellini: Casta Diva Verdi: Rigoletto Wagner: Lohengrin Mozart: Marriage of Figaro Puccini: Gianni Schicchi Bizet: Carmen Purcell: Dido and Aeneas Bellini: Casta Diva Saint-Saëns: Samson et Dalila Puccini: Tosca Rossini: Barber of Seville Catalini: La Wally Bizet: Carmen Verdi: La Trovatore Rossini: Barber of Seville Mozart: Don Giovanni Rossini: William Tell Puccini: Tosca Delibes: Lakmé

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Heart and Souls (1993) Household Saints (1993) Household Saints (1993) In the Line of Fire (1993) Last Action Hero (1993) Mrs Doubtfire (1993) Philadelphia (1993) Philadelphia (1993) Philadelphia (1993) Philadelphia (1993) Philadelphia (1993) True Romance (1993) Schindler’s List (1993) D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994) Guarding Tess (1994) Guarding Tess (1994) Heavenly Creatures (1994) Heavenly Creatures (1994) Heavenly Creatures (1994) Natural Born Killers (1994) Natural Born Killers (1994) Only You (1994) Only You (1994) Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) Prêt-à-Porter (1994) The Road to Wellville (1994) The Road to Wellville (1994) Safe Passage (1994) Shawshank Redemption (1994) Assassins (1995) Babe (1995) Before Sunrise (1995) The Bridges of Madison County (1995) The Bridges of Madison County (1995) Copycat (1995) Copycat (1995) Crimson Tide (1995) Dr Jekyll and Ms Hyde (1995) How to Make an American Quilt (1995) Jumanji (1995) Mad Love (1995) Brassed Off (1996) Faithful (1996) The Mirror has Two Faces (1996)

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Puccini: Turandot The Mirror has Two Faces (1996) Offenbach: Tales of Hoffmann Moll Flanders (1996) Puccini: Madama Butterfly One Fine Day (1996) Dvorak: Rusalka The People vs Larry Flint (1996) Mozart: Idomeneo The People vs Larry Flint (1996) Smetana: Dalibor The People vs Larry Flint (1996) Wagner: Tannhäuser The People vs Larry Flint (1996) Rossini: Barber of Seville Space Jam (1996) Bizet: Carmen Trainspotting (1996) Bellini: I Puritani 2 Days in the Valley (1996) Donizetti: La Figlia del Reggimento 2 Days in the Valley (1996) Verdi: Don Carlos Anaconda (1997) Verdi: Nabucco Donnie Brasco (1997) Rossini: William Tell Eight Days a Week (1997) Mozart: The Magic Flute Face/Off (1997) Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor The Fifth Element (1997) Puccini: Gianni Schicchi GI Jane (1997) Puccini: Tosca Hoodlum (1997) Puccini: La Bohème Mad City (1997) Rossini: Barber of Seville Out to Sea (1997) Puccini: Gianni Schicchi Speed 2 (1997) Mozart: The Magic Flute All the Wrong Places (1998) Rossini: William Tell Armageddon (1998) Rossini: Barber of Seville Babe Pig in the City (1998) Korngold: Die tote Stadt The Big Lebowski (1998) Wagner: Lohengrin Celebrity (1998) Puccini: La Bohème Deep Impact (1998) Wagner: Lohengrin The Object of My Affection (1998) Wagner: Die Walküre Small Soldiers (1998) Ponchielli: La Gioconda Sour Grapes (1998) Flotow: Martha Analyze This (1999) Verdi: Rigoletto Analyze This (1999) Verdi: Don Carlos Angela’s Ashes (1999) Puccini: Manon Lescaut Anywhere But Here (1999) Verdi: The Force of Destiny Being John Malkovich (1999) Dvorak: Rusalka Bicentennial Man (1999) Bizet: Carmen Entrapment (1999) Mozart: The Magic Flute The General’s Daughter (1999) Verdi: Rigoletto Gloria (1999) Bizet: Carmen Magnolia (1999) Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor Man on the Moon (1999) Smetana: The Bartered Bride Man on the Moon (1999) Verdi: Rigoletto My Favorite Martian (1999) Puccini: Gianni Schicchi Mystery Men (1999)

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Puccini: La Bohème Pushing Tin (1999) Mozart: Marriage of Figaro Runaway Bride (1999) Wagner: Lohengrin Runaway Bride (1999) Bellini: Casta Diva Breathtaking (2000) Verdi: Rigoletto Family Man (2000) Bizet: The Pearl Fishers The Man Who Cried (2000) Delibes: Lakmé Meet the Parents (2000) Wagner: Lohengrin Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) Puccini: Gianni Schicchi Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) Verdi: Rigoletto Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) Verdi: Il Trovatore Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) Wagner: Die Walküre Freddy Got Fingered (2001) Gluck: Orfeo ed Euridice Heartbreakers (2001) Mozart: Marriage of Figaro The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) Verdi: La Traviata Rat Race (2001) Bizet: Carmen Someone Like You (2001) There can be little doubt that Classic FM (both magazine and radio station) has played a major role in the changes I am describing. If our historical starting point is the classical repertoire performed in the vast majority of contemporary opera houses, it could be argued that opera begins with Mozart in 1786 (The Marriage of Figaro) and ends with Puccini in 1926 (Turandot). It is this way of seeing the history of opera that leads to the accusation that it is in effect a ‘museum culture’. Interestingly, the dates fit quite nicely with the idea that opera was really invented by the class who reaped the principal share of the rewards of nineteenth-century industrialisation. Opera gave them both pleasure and social identity – a sense of being a ‘class for themselves’ (Marx 1963: 195). It was common practice in the first half of the nineteenth century for a night’s entertainment at the theatre to include a mix of stage melodrama, farce and opera. The promiscuous mixing of forms of entertainment on the nineteenthcentury stage is very similar to what we have come to expect from contemporary television. There is another opera tradition (existing outside the opera house) that links the early nineteenth century with the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – the opera singer as concert and recording star. This is a tradition which begins with Jenny Lind (1820–87), and includes, for example, Dame Nellie Melba (1861–1931), Enrico Caruso (1873–1921), Maria Callas (1923–77), and Luciano Pavarotti (1936–2008). Significantly, it was the circus entrepreneur P. T. Barnum who, in 1852, organised, and successfully promoted, the first major concert tour across the US by the soprano – the socalled ‘Swedish Nightingale’ – Jenny Lind (opera’s first superstar). Equally significant is the fact that Enrico Caruso was the first performer to have a million-selling record, his recording (made in 1907) of ‘Vesti la Guibba’ (from Ruggero Leoncavallo’s opera I Pagliacci). During his lifetime Caruso

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received recording royalties of $1,825,000; after his death his estate received a further $2,000,000. There can be little doubt that record companies and phonograph manufacturers used the prestige of opera to sell these new inventions. But whatever their intentions, they kept alive the possibility of opera’s return as part of a shared public culture. 7. The anti-elitism is tactical rather than absolute so as not to alienate those who might be attracted to opera (and books about opera) because of its aura of social exclusivity. 8. Allen’s (2002) description of Russell Watson as a ‘pub tenor’ presents a perfect example of what Pierre Bourdieu observed about ‘aesthetic intolerance’: Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent . . . The most intolerable thing for those who regard themselves as the possessors of legitimate culture is the sacrilegious reuniting of tastes which taste dictates shall be separated. This means that the games of artists and aesthetes and their struggles for the monopoly of artistic legitimacy are less innocent than they seem. At stake in every struggle over art there is also the imposition of an art of living, that is, the transmutation of an arbitrary way of living into the legitimate way of life which casts every other way of living into arbitrariness. (1984: 57)

9. On different social practices of, and different theoretical approaches to, consumption, see Storey 1999. 10. Evans notes that ‘In 1984 a centre front stalls seat averaged £37, by 1994 £104, a 75 per cent rise taking inflation into account’ (1999: 139). 11. Figures quoted in The Guardian, 11 December 1990. 12. Survey results (quoted in Evans 1999: 403): 1. opera on CD and audio cassette; 2. opera on radio; 3. opera on TV and video; 4. opera at the opera house; 5. opera at the opera house while on holiday; 6. books on opera. 13. For most of the 1990s opera attendance stood at around 6 per cent of the UK population aged 15 and over. In 1997–8 it rose to 7 per cent, falling to 6.4 per cent in 1999–2000. 1986–7 – 5.3% 1987–8 – 5.4% 1988–9 – 6.2% 1989–90 – 6.0% 1990–1 – 6.0% 1991–2 – 5.9% 1992–3 – 6.3% 1993–4 – 6.6% 1994–5 – 6.5% 1995–6 – 6%

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1996–7 – 6% 1997–8 – 7% 1999–2000 – 6.4% Based on government reports Social Trends, 1990, 1998, 1999, 2000; Cultural Trends 1995 (Office for National Statistics)); Guardian, 3 September 2001. 14. There have been false dawns before. In 1936, in the ‘Foreword’ to Irving Kolodin’s history of the first fifty-two years of the Metropolitan Opera, W. J. Henderson refers to ‘the present efforts to democratise the institution [of opera] in order to keep it alive’ (1936: xii). Following the first television broadcast of a complete opera performance (the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Verdi’s Otello on 29 November 1948), the New York Times wondered, ‘What the acquisition of a mass following may mean for opera almost exceeds the bounds of the imagination in its challenging and provocative implications’ (quoted in Graf 1951: 222). Writing in 1951, Herbert Graf argued that opera in the cinema and on television has ‘social and economic implications of tremendous import. The privileges of wealth and education, formerly preponderant in the world of opera, are being negated by the new inventions’ (1951: 207). Instead of a performance reaching 3,000 it can now reach an audience of millions. Sir Claus Moser, former chairman of the Royal Opera House, described opera in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s as ‘very much an upper class activity, the icing on the cake of glamorous living’ (1983: 187). He then claimed that after World War II ‘the scene was totally transformed’ (1983: 187). More recently (1980s) there has taken place ‘a fantastic cultural transformation in this country, which has come from a gradual spreading of love for . . . opera throughout the population . . . . The great operatic stars have become pop names . . . they are seen and heard by millions’ (1983: 188).

Chapter 9 1. There were 146,956 births in England and Wales in 2006 to mothers born outside the United Kingdom, accounting for 22 per cent of all live births in England and Wales. This is the highest proportion since the collection of the parents’ country of birth at birth registration was introduced in 1969. The increase continues the marked rise seen over the last decade: the proportion of births to mothers born outside the United Kingdom has risen from 13 per cent in 1996. (UK Office for National Statistics, 2007)

www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_population/Births_update_web_ supplement.pdf 2. A more benign example of the insistence on ‘roots’ is the explosive growth in family history research in Europe and the USA. In all of these examples, globalisation may be driving the search for ‘roots’ in a more secure past in the hope of stabilising identities in the present.

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cult ure and po we r i n c u l t u r a l s t u di e s Chapter 10

1. I am using the concept of culture as developed in Chapter 1 in this volume. 2. The discourse is generated by the reviews produced in the Manchester Guardian. The reviewers (who speak with all the institutionalised authority of a successful newspaper) tend to present themselves as the advanced guard of a cultural revolution. Whether or not they are revolutionaries or mere chroniclers of the revolution, what is absolutely the case is that they are the main source of our knowledge of this revolution. 3. For an American version of this argument, see DiMaggio (1992, 2009), Levine (1988), McConachie (1988), and Chapter 8 in this volume. 4. It is interesting that popular, clearly meaning inferior, is used here to describe the taste of the aristocracy. 5. In the classical repertoire performed in the vast majority of contemporary opera houses, opera begins with Mozart in 1786 (The Marriage of Figaro) and ends with Puccini in 1926 (Turandot). It is this way of seeing the history of opera that leads to the accusation that it is in effect a ‘museum culture’. 6. Also see Bourdieu 1984, 1993, 1996 and Storey 2002. 7. Of course opera is the plural of ‘opus’ (Latin), meaning ‘work’. 8. Although born in Austria, Mozart was thought of as German. 9. Although opera has always been expensive to stage, there seems little evidence in the period under discussion that cost was used as a means to restrict the social class of the audience. Between November 1778 and May 1842 the cost of admission to the gallery at the Theatre Royal was 1s. From May 1842 until December 1875 the price was reduced to 6d. After December 1875, 1s was once again installed as the standard admission charge to the gallery. However, when opera was staged prices tended to increase. If there was any intention, consciously or not, of making the audience more exclusive, the price of admission to the gallery would have been a key site to police. The table below shows the variations in admission charges to the gallery. This indicates that prices were regularly increased for performances of opera during this period, especially for Italian opera, but it does not really provide clear evidence of a pricing regime being used to exclude. However, when the price was reduced to 6d in November 1857, the Examiner and Times made this comment: ‘The result of the experiment of reduced prices was an improved attendance’ (6 November 1857). Fluctuations in prices of admission to the gallery: 1842–75 August 1842: 1s 6d November 1842: 6d September 1845: 1s (Gallery) and 6d (Upper Gallery) August 1847: 5s September 1848: Gallery: 5s (Gallery) and 2s 6d (Upper Gallery) June 1849: 6d September 1854: 2s (Gallery) and 1s (Upper Gallery)

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August 1855: 1s August 1856: 6d September 1856: 2s 6d (Gallery) and 1s (Upper Gallery) September 1857: 1s November 1857: 6d August 1859: 1s August 1861: 2s 6d August 1862: 1s June 1865: 6d July 1865: 1s May 1868: 6d October 1868: 1s June 1870: 6d October 1870: 1s September 1873: 6d November 1875: 1s October 1876: 2s December 1876: 1s November 1887: 1s 6d 10. Kate Saunders, writing in the London Sunday Times, provides a more recent example of opera and the fear of whistling: ‘The explosion of popular interest in opera in the 1980s worried people who were attracted by its elitist aura. These are the types who threw away their CDs of Turandot and complained when they heard the plumber whistling “Nessun Dorma”’ (1994: 4). 11. The use of opera in advertising and on film soundtracks is a contemporary example of the use of opera outside the opera house. See Chapter 8 in this volume. 12. The term ‘conspicuous consumption’ was coined by Thorstein Veblen to describe the way dominant groups ‘communicate’ their dominance. See Veblen (1994) and Storey (1999).

Chapter 11 1. See Chapter 2 in this volume.

Chapter 12 1. This is a lesson not learned by Apocalypse Now, perhaps the best known retelling of Heart of Darkness. The film does exactly what Achebe complains of, only this time we are located in a different ‘symbolic’ space – America’s war in Vietnam. The ‘preposterous and perverse arrogance’, of which Achebe speaks, can be found in many other filmic representations of America’s war in Vietnam. It is expressed with numbing precision in Chris Taylor’s (Charlie Sheen) narration at the end of Platoon. In a wonderful piece of imperial narcissism (see

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2. 3.

4.

5.

Note 12, Chapter 7), Taylor looks back from the deck of a rising helicopter on the dead and dying of the battlefield below. Samuel Barber’s mournful and very beautiful Adagio for Strings seems to dictate the cadence and rhythm of his voice as he speaks these words of psycho-babble, about a war in which more than two million Vietnamese were killed: ‘I think now looking back, we did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves. The enemy was in us.’ See Chapter 7 in this volume. See articles in Armstrong 2006. Marlow also recalls how his impression of Africa had changed profoundly by the time he is telling his story: ‘It ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness’ (Conrad 2006a: 8). Of course how we understand the ‘darkness’ is the key to understanding the novel. This aspect of the novel is first announced in the distinction Marlow makes between the Roman and British empires: the former was supposedly built on conquest while the latter was based on colonisation (Conrad 2006a: 6). However, a serious understanding of history makes this a very difficult distinction to maintain. Again and again Marlow struggles to make clear the details of his narrative: It seems to me I am trying to tell a dream – making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams. (Conrad 2006a: 27)

We see something similar in Hollywood’s Vietnam, what Dittmar and Michaud call a ‘mystique of unintelligibility’ (1990: 13) – imperialist discourse in denial.

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Sykes, R. (1985), ‘Physical-Force Chartism: The Cotton District and the Chartist Crisis of 1839’, International Review of Social History 30 (2): 207–36. Tambling, J. (1987), Opera, Ideology and Film, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tambling, J. (1994), ‘Introduction: Opera in the Distraction Culture’, in J. Tambling (ed.), A Night at the Opera: Media Representations of Opera, London: John Libbey, pp. 3–23. Terry, W. (1984), Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans, New York: Ballantine. Thompson, E. P. (1980), The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tomlinson, J. (1997), ‘Internationalism, Globalization and Cultural Imperialism’, in K. Thompson (ed.), Media and Regulation, London: Sage, pp. 117–62. Tomlinson, J. (1999), Globalization and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press. Toplin, R. B. (1996), History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Trussler, S. (1971), ‘A Chronology of Early Melodrama’, Theatre Quarterly 1 (4): 19–21. Tunstall, J. (1978), The Media are American, London: Constable. Turner, B. S. (1987), ‘A Note on Nostalgia’, Theory, Culture and Society 4: 147–56. Veblen, T. (1994), The Theory of the Leisure Class, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Vlastos, S. (1991), ‘America’s “Enemy”: The Absent Presence on Revisionist Vietnam War History’, in J. C. Rowe and R. Berg (eds), The Vietnam War and American Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 52–74. Volosinov, V. (1973), Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, New York: Seminar Press. Weber, W. (1975), Music and the Middle Class, London: Croom Helm. Webster, D. (1988), Looka Yonder! The Imaginary America of Populist Culture, London: Routledge. Weiner, J. (1985), Come Together: John Lennon in his Time, London: Faber and Faber. Wewiora, G. E. (1973), ‘J. T. Haines in Manchester, 1828–29’, Theatre Notebook 27 (3): 89–94. Williams, R. (1961), The Long Revolution, London: Chatto and Windus. Williams, R. (1963), Culture and Society, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Williams, R. (1965), The Long Revolution, Harmondsworth: Pelican. Williams, R. (1968), Communications, 2nd edn, Harmondsworth: Pelican. Williams, R. (1970), The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, R. (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford: University Press. Williams, R. (1979), Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, London: Verso. Williams, R. (1980), ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, in Problems in Materialism and Culture, London: Verso, pp. 31–49.

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Index

Note: page numbers in italics denote illustrations or tables ABC distributors, 29 abolition of slavery, 37, 38, 39 Achebe, Chinua, 147, 179n1ti Ackroyd, P., 141 Adam Adamant Lives!, 60 Adams, William, 76 Advertiser and Chronicle, 118 advertising use of opera, 85, 170–1n1, 179n11 aesthetic gaze, 92 aesthetics, 122, 134, 167n9 Africa, 147, 151, 156, 180n3 African-Americans, 77–8 agency/structure see structure/agency Allardyce Nicoll, J. R., 47 Allen, Thomas, 96–7, 176n8 Alloway, Lawrence, 64 Altamont Speedway, 31 alternative newspapers, 77 alternative society, ix–x, 23, 24 Althusser, Louis, xiii, 147, 148 The Ambushers, 66 American Civil War, 38 American companies, 109–10 American culture, 111–13 American POWs, 80, 169n9 Americanisation, xii cultural, 108–10, 115 globalisation, 105, 106–13 Vietnam war, 81 Amilie (Rooke), 128 Anderson, Perry, 19 Ang, Ien, 56, 114 Angel Heart, 62 anti-abolition, 39 anti-capitalism, 28–9 Anti-Corn Law League, 41 anti-elitism, 92, 94–6, 176n7 anti-slavery, 37–8 anti-Vietnam war movement,

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ix–x, 26, 31–2, 77, 82, 168n6 anti-war demonstrations, 23, 31–2 anti-war songs, 25, 26, 27, 28, 32, 162n3 Apocalypse Now, 179–80n1 The Apprentice, 115 aristocracy, 15–16, 118, 134, 161n7, 178n4 Armstrong, P. B., 154, 159 Arnold, Matthew aristocracy, 15–16, 161n7 cultural politics, ix Culture and Anarchy, 14, 16–17, 19, 21–2, 161n8, 162n11 culture/anarchy, 1, 18 Equality, 16, 20 A French Eton, 14 Hebraism/Hellenism, 18–19 letters, 14–15, 19 mass culture, 63 middle class, 13, 15, 17–18, 143, 161n7 money-making, 142–3 My Countrymen, 15 as organic intellectual, 11, 14, 22 politics, 11 Schools and Universities on the Continent, 20, 161n4 working class, 146 art as entertainment, 92, 93–4, 101 articulation, 51–2, 69–70, 163n4, 164n18 artists/artistes, 126–7 Atlantic Monthly, 91 Auber, Daniel-FrançoisEsprit: Fra Diavolo, 129

audience for opera aristocracy, 118, 134 democratisation, 100–1 discrimination, 129–30 dress code, 88 figures, 176–7n13 homework, 92–6 in/out of opera house, 101, 104, 127–8 intellectual effort, 130–1 Manchester, xii, 117 middle class, 118–19, 134 restraint, 129 US, 88, 90 Venice, 87 working class, 36, 37, 43–4, 118–19, 134 Augustine, Saint, 136 Austin Powers, 59–60, 65, 66, 165[Ch6]n1, 166n7 The Avengers, 59 Bacharach, Burt, 60 Back to the Future I, II, and III, 62 Balfe, Michael: The Bohemian Girl, 122, 133 Balibar, E., 148 Balin, Marty, 31 Barber, Samuel, 82, 180n1 Il Barbiere di Seviglia (Rossini), 87, 129 Barnum, P. T., 175n6 Bartlett, Frederic, 75 BBC News, 97 The Beatles, 64 Beck, Ulrich, 105, 107, 112 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 119–20 Fidelio, 121, 122, 123, 126–7, 128

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Belgian imperialism, 154–5, 159 Bellini, Vincenzo Norma, 127 La Sonnambula, 124, 125 Benedict, Julius: Lily of Killarney, 120, 122, 126 Bennett, Tony, x, 33, 35, 57–8 Bennett, William J., 169n13 Bentham, Jeremy, 19, 161n9 Benthamites, 21–2 Berg, R., 72 Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee march, 25 Big Brother and The Holding Company, 25, 30 Bird, Thomas, 168n4 Bizet, Georges, 98 Blackwood, William, 154, 159 Blackwood’s Magazine, 154, 155, 156, 157 Blue Velvet, 62 blues revival, 68 The Bohemian Girl (Balfe), 122, 133 Bolton Chronicle, 138 Bond films, 60 Booth, Michael, 43–4 Born on the Fourth of July, 73, 80 Bourdieu, Pierre, 92, 176n8 Boyden, M., 94, 95 Bradburn, Samuel, 39 Braddock: Missing in Action III, 73, 79, 80, 81 Bramley, H.R., 139 Brecht, Bertolt, 157 bricolage, 67, 68–9 British imperialism, 150–1, 155, 156–7, 159, 180n4 British India Society, 42 British Market Research Bureau, 103 Brooker, Peter, 67 Brooker, Will, 67 Buffalo Springfield, 25, 27 Burgoyne, Robert, 73 Bush, George senior, xi, 71, 72–3, 80, 81, 83–4, 170n14 businessmen/charity, 142 The Byrds, 23, 25, 28, 29, 30 Callas, Maria, 175n6 Camerata, 85–6 capitalism, 28–32, 53, 60, 107 car advertisements, 149 Carmen (Bizet), 98 carol singing, 139 Caroline, Queen, 45 Carreras, José, 98 Cartland, Barbara, 69

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Caruso, Enrico, 175–6n6 Casement, Roger, 154 Castell, Luria, 25 Casualties of War, 73, 79, 80 CDs of opera, 95, 104 celebrity culture, 106 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 55 Chambers, Iain, 23, 63–4 Chaney, David, 65, 66 charity, 140–4 Charles I, 137 Chartism, 40–2, 45, 46, 48, 164n9, 164n16 Chartist and Republican Journal, 42 childbirth/nationality of mothers, 106 China Christmas, 114, 140 Coca-Cola plus ginger, 114 globalisation, 107 television programmes, 115, 116 Chomsky, Noam, 168n3 Christianity, 135–6 Christmas, xiii banned, 137 China, 114, 140 invention of, 138–46 observance of, 137–8 traditional, 135 utopian nostalgia, 145–6 Christmas bombings, Vietnam, 78 Christmas cards, 139, 140–1 Christmas crackers, 139 Christmas presents, 139 Christmas shopping, 140 Christmas trees, 139 cinema memory, 76 nostalgia, 62 use of opera, 85, 171–5n2, 179n11 see also Hollywood Clark, Michael, 83 Clarke, John, 54 class, 25, 87, 88, 91, 92, 121 see also aristocracy; middle class; working class Classic FM, 85, 86, 175n3 Clauss, Manfred, 136 Cobbett, William, 38 Cobden, Richard, 16, 19 Coca-Cola, 114, 140 Coca-Cola people, 107 coercion, 31–2 Cole, G. D. H., 45, 140, 161n8 Cole, Henry, 140–1 collective memory, 73–6 Collins, Jim, xi, 67, 68, 69

Collins Opera and Operetta, 95 Colman, Henry, 43 colonial atavism, 152–3 Columbia, 29 commerce, 138–9, 140 commodification, 31, 60–1 commodities, 105, 108, 113 common sense, 164n7 communication, 160n6 communities of interest, 106 compliance, cultural, 108 composers, 96, 125–6 compromise equilibrium, 14, 50, 51–2, 113 conditions of possibility, 156 Congo Free State, 154 connotative reading, 37, 39–40, 42–3, 48, 163n3 Conrad, Joseph Belgian imperialism, 159 British imperialism, 150–1, 155, 159 Congo Diary, 156 letters, 154 Youth preface, 155–6 see also Heart of Darkness consciousness-expansion, 162n1 Constantine the Great, 135 consumerism, 54 consumption agency/structure, 52 compromise equilibrium, 51–2 conspicuous, 138–9, 179n12 cultural dupes, 52, 109 Gramsci, 50 opera, 130 production, 51, 52–3, 55, 101 re-creative, 54 rituals of, 50 Vietnam war, 169–70n14 context/meaning-making, 9, 53 Cooke, T. P., 34 co-option narratives, 57 cotton workers, 38, 44–5 counterculture alternative society, 24 anti-Vietnam war movement, 26, 77 incorporation, 32 music, ix–x, 23, 29–30 population, 162n2 resistance, 32 countercurrents, 112 counter-disciplinary praxis, 55 Country Joe and The Fish, 23, 25, 30 Cowgill, Rachel, 121 critical thinking, 56

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inde x Crosby, David, 29–30, 31 Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, 24, 25, 30, 31, 32 Cross, Gilbert, 42 Cruickshank, Brodie, 156 cultural activation, 33 cultural dupes, 52, 109 cultural exports, 111 cultural myth, 62 cultural studies academic practice as politics, x–xi, 55–8 as counter-disciplinary praxis, 55 culture/power, 10 Gramsci, 53–4 hegemony, 50, 53–4 institutionalisation, 56, 57 meaning-making, 50–1 politics of academic practice, x–xi, 49–55 text, 165[Ch5]n1 culture Arnoldian/Leavisite, 1–2 commodification, 60–1 commodities, 105, 113 discourse, 8 dominant/emergent/ residual, 165[Ch6]n2 Hall, 4, 10 high/popular, 64, 90, 121 hybridity, 112, 113, 115, 122 making of, 109 middle class, 117 power, x–xi, xiii, 1, 10, 55, 71, 73, 115 signification, 2 Williams, ix, 1–4 see also popular culture culture industries, 49 culture shock, 4 Cutter’s Way, 72, 79, 80 Da Nang mutiny, 77 Dahlaus, Carl, 119–20 Daily Mirror, 99 Daily Telegraph, 81, 167n2 Darwin, Charles, 153 Davis, Jim, 42–3 debt imprisonment, 35 ‘Demokratic Death Convention’, 30 Denning, Michael, 52 denotative reading, 35, 39–40, 163n3 deserters, 77 desire/memory, 71 destructive updating, 75 dialectics, 63 Dibdin, Charles, 34–5, 119, 163n2

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Dickens, Charles: A Christmas Carol, 140, 141–3, 142, 143–4, 146 DiMaggio, Paul, 90, 91 Dinorah (Meyerbeer), 121, 130 disciplinarity resisted, 56 discourse of culture, 8 disembedding of relationships, 106 Disher, Maurice Willson, 46–7, 164n14 Dittmar, Linda, 81 Dobkin, M., 94, 95 Docker, John, 65, 166–7n9, 166n6 Doctor Strange dance, 25–6, 27 Doherty, J., 164n12 Doherty, John, 45 Domingo, Placido, 98 Don Giovanni (Mozart), 87, 100, 120, 121, 126, 129 Donizetti, Gaetano L’Elisir d’Amore, 119 La Figlia del Reggimento, 118 Lucia di Lammermoor, 120 Lucrezia Borgia, 87, 128–9 The Doors, 23, 25, 26, 27 double coding concept, 69 draft lottery, 31 draft refusers, 77 Drescher, S., 39 dress code, 88 drug use, 163n11 Dylan, Bob, 25, 64, 162n2, 162n3, 165[Ch5]n3 Eagleton, Terry, 3, 159 Eco, Umberto, 69 education, 22 Eisen, J., 25 electronic media, 105 Eliot, T. S., 167n10 L’Elisir d’Amore (Donizetti), 119 elite cultural appropriation, 91, 92 opera, 88, 179n10 Ellsberg, Daniel, 78 email, 106 Engels, Friedrich, 21, 36, 43, 44, 142 Manifesto of the Communist Party, 144 England and Wales childbirths, 106, 177n1 English Civil War, 137 entertainment/art, 92, 93–4, 101 ethnicity, 77–8

197 Evans, David, 101, 102, 103, 176n10 Examiner and Times, 34 experience/memory, 74–5 eyewitness testimony, 75 Factory Act, 138 factory melodrama, 47, 164n14 Factory Movement, 48 factory work/slavery, 38–9 false consciousness, 109, 115 family history research, 177n2 Father Christmas, 139–40 Faust (Gounod), 87, 122, 125, 130, 131 Featherstone, Mike, 166n6, 166n9 Fidelio (Beethoven), 121, 122, 123, 126–7, 128 ‘15 November Moratoriam Day’ rally, 24 La Figlia del Reggimento (Donizetti), 118 First Blood, 72, 79, 80 First Gulf War see Gulf War I The Flying Dutchman (Wagner), 130 folk heritage, 25, 68 football and opera singers, 98 Ford, Ford Madox, 154 foreign as concept, 110–11 forgotten things, 76, 77–8 Foucault, Michel French Resistance films, 73 power, xiii, 79 regime of truth, 71, 132, 134 The Four Tops, 9, 160n3 Fra Diavolo (Auber), 129 fraggings, 77 Frankfurt School, 49, 63 Franklin, H. Bruce, 169n9 Free Fire Zones, 78 Free Lance, 127 Der Freischutz (Weber), 96, 97, 118, 121, 122, 126, 127, 129, 132 French Resistance films, 73 French’s Acting Edition, 34 Freud, Sigmund, 73 Frow, John, 165[Ch5]n1 The Fugitive, 59 Gallagher, Catherine, 8 gender, 9–10, 77 George IV, 45 Getting Opera: A Guide for the Cultured but Confused, 94–5 Gillespie, Marie, 54 Gilroy, Paul, 111 Giroux, Henry A., 55, 56 Glancy, Ruth, 144

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Gleason, Ralph, 25–6, 27 globalisation, xii, 105–6 and Americanisation, 105, 106–13 countercurrents, 112 cultural/economic, 108–10 globalisation (cont.) hegemony, 113–15 local cultures, 111 glocalisation, 114 Glyndebourne, 100–1 Golby, J. M., 137, 138, 141, 145 Good Times, 31 Goodwin, Andrew, 68 Gotz, Herman: Taming of the Shrew, 120 Gounod, Charles Faust, 87, 122, 125, 130, 131 Irene, 122 Mirella, 122 Mock Doctor, 126 Gowrie, Lord, 103 Graf, Herbert, 177n14 Graham, Bill, 30–1 Gramsci, Antonio articulation, 163n4, 164n18 common sense, 164n7 compromise equilibrium, 14, 50, 113 consumption, 50 cultural studies, 53–4 hegemony, ix, 1, 6, 12–14, 20, 29, 49, 113–14 intellectuals, 5, 11–12, 27, 160[Ch2]n1, 160–1[Ch2] n2, 163[Ch3]n5 and Marx, 54 ruling/subordinate groups, 24 The Grateful Dead, 25, 163n9 The Great Society, 25 Green, Michael, 54 Griffith, John, 153, 156 Grossberg, Lawrence, 63 Gruner, Elliott, 169n9 Guardian, 103 Gulf War I Bennett on, 169n13 Bush, 81, 83–4 veterans, 83 and Vietnam, 71–3, 167n2, 169n10 Gunn, Simon, 129 Haines, H. W., 82 Haines, John Thomas, x, 34–5, 46–7, 163n2 see also My Poll and My Partner Joe Halbwachs, Maurice, 73–6 Hall, Stuart

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articulation, 51–2 CCCS, 55 culture, 4, 10 on hegemony, 54 intellectual modesty, 55–6 Laclau and Mouffe, 7 local/global, 113 postmodernism, 112 power relations, 101, 121 signification, 10 Hallé concerts, 129 Hammerstein, Oscar, 90 The Hanoi Hilton, 73 Harding, James, 46 Harker, D., 29 Harrison, Michael, 137 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), xiii Apocalypse Now, 179–80n1 critical discourse, 159 human nature, 151–2 ideological project, 150, 158–9 imperialism, 147, 150–1, 154–5 Kurtz, 151, 152, 153, 157–8 Marlow’s narrative, 148, 150 primitive, 152–3 Hebdige, Dick, 50, 61 Hebraism, 18–19, 162n10 hegemony coercion, 31–2 cultural studies, 50, 53–4 globalisation, 113–15 Gramsci, ix, 1, 6, 12–14, 20, 29, 49, 113–14 Hall on, 54 homogenisation, 12 local/global, xii middle class, 11, 13–14, 21, 22, 143 power, 54 resistance, 7 signification, viii Williams on, 6–7, 12, 160n2 Hellenism, 18–19, 162n10 Hell’s Angels, 31 Henderson, W. J., 88, 177n14 Hendrix, Jimi, 30 heritage sites, 75–6 Herr, Michael, 168n4 Hervey, Thomas K., 145–6 hip hop, localised, 108–9, 110–11, 111–12 Hispanic-Americans, 77–8, 112 historicism/history, 62 Hoffman, Abbie, 30 Hoggart, Richard, 54, 165[Ch5]n4 Hollywood, 76, 168n4

Hollywood’s Vietnam war and Bush, xi, 71, 72–3, 169–70n14 loss, 80 regime of truth, 169–70n14 rituals of truth, 79–83 homogenisation, 12 Honan, Park, 11 hooks, bell, 56 Horsley, J. C., 140–1 Houghton, Walther, 15 House of Lords, 16 Hudson, J., 138 Les Huguenots (Meyerbeer), 119 ‘The Human Be-In’,’ 29 human nature, 151–2 Hunter, Meredith, 31 Hutcheon, Linda, 166n8 Huyssen, Andreas, 64–5 hybridity, 112, 113, 115, 122 hyperconsciousness, 67–70 imperial narcissism, 81, 147, 169n12, 179–80n1 imperialist discourse, in denial, 180n5 impressment see press-gang incorporation resistance, 51, 53–4, 57 West Coast rock, 28–32 Independence Day, 62 indigenous culture, 112, 113, 114 industrial capitalism, xiii, 22, 41–2, 146 industrialisation, 135 institutionalisation, 56, 57–8, 91, 96, 100 intellectuals Gramsci, 5, 11–12, 27, 160[Ch2]n1, 160–1[Ch2] n2, 163[Ch3]n5 modesty, 55–6 organic, ix, 11–12, 14, 22 interdisciplinarity, 56–7 internet dating, 106 intertextuality, 62, 66, 67, 68 Ipswich Working Men’s College, 16 Irene (Gounod), 122 Italian opera, 118, 119–21 Jackson State University, 31 Jagger, Mick, 31 Jameson, Fredric nostalgia, 166n6, 166n8 pastiche, 62, 165–6[Ch6] n4–5 postmodernism, xi, 60–1 sampling, 68

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inde x social formations, 165[Ch6] n2 structure/agency, 166n9 Jefferson Airplane, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30 Jeffords, Susan, 80 Jencks, Charles, 69 Johnson, James H., 118 Johnson, Lyndon, 78 Johnson, Samuel, 117 Judge Dredd, 62 Kaiser, Michael, 103 Kantner, Paul, 26, 27 Katz, E., 114 Kent State University, 31 Klein, Michael, 77, 82 Kolodin, Irving, 177n14 Kung Fu films, 114 Laclau, Ernesto, 7–8 laissez faire economics, 18 Landsberg, Alison, 74–5 Leach, James, 41 Leary, Timothy, 162n1 Leavisite approach, 1, 63 Lebrecht, Norman, 102, 103 Leech, Samuel, 43 Leopold, King, 154 Levine, Lawrence W., 87, 88–9, 91, 92, 101–2 Liberation News Service, 30 Liebes, T., 114 Lily of Killarney (Benedict), 120, 122, 126 Lind, Jenny, 175n6 Linklater, E. Ray, 153 Lionel & Clarissa, 131 Liszt, Franz, 121 Liverpool University College, 20 living conditions, 43, 142 local cultures, 110–11, 113, 115 Loftus, Elisabeth, 75 London Bookbinders, 46 London Illustrated News, 139 LSD, 23, 30, 61, 162n1 Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti), 120 Lucrezia Borgia (Donizetti), 87, 128–9 Lurline (Wallace), 127, 132 McClary, Susan, 85–6 McConachie, Bruce A., 87, 90, 91 McDonald, Country Joe, 23, 25, 30 Macherey, Pierre conditions of possibility, 156

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ideological project/ realisation, 149–50 symptomatic reading, 147, 148, 159 A Theory of Literary Production, 149 unconscious of the text, 153 McNamara, Robert, 78 Madden, William, 14 Manchester cotton workers, 38 middle class, 117 opera-going, xii, 117 opposition to slavery, 37–8 Queen’s Theatre, 33, 45, 46, 89, 164n11 Royal Minor Theatre, 44–5 Theatre Royal, 34, 97, 118, 178–9n9 Manchester and Salford Advertiser, 40–1 Manchester Central Library Theatre Collection, 47 Manchester Courier,, 38 Manchester Examiner and Times, 125, 129 Manchester Guardian Chartism, 40 Cobbett, 38 on Cooke, 34 on Heart of Darkness, 154 letter to, 142 opera reviews, 118–32, 178n2 Manchester Political Union of the Working Classes, 40 Mandel, Ernest, 60 Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels), 144 Manson, Charles, 31 Maritana (Wallace), 122, 127, 130 market capitalism, 60 market penetration, 108 The Marriage of Figaro see Le Nozze di Figaro Martin, Dean, 66 Marx, Karl and Arnold, 16 The Civil War in France, 161n8 dialectics, 63 and Gramsci, 54 Manifesto of the Communist Party, 144 relationality, 4 on Smith, 148–9 working class, 38 masculinity, 9–10 mass culture, 63 mass media, 74–5, 76, 99

199 meaning-making articulation, 51–2 context, 9, 53 cultural studies, 50–1 culture, 4 memory, 75 multiplicity, 149 Williams, 5 working people, 6 Mecca-Cola, 114 media corporations, 108 Melba, Nellie, 175n6 melodrama, 42, 43, 44, 47–8, 122, 161n14 memory, 71, 73–6, 168n5 memory industries, 75–6, 83 Mercury, Freddie, 85 Metropolitan Opera, 88, 91, 102, 177n14 Meyerbeer, Giacomo Dinorah, 121, 130 Les Huguenots, 119 Robert la Diavolo, 121 MGM, 29 MIA cycle of films, 80 Miall, A., 140 Miall, Edward, 19–20, 161–2n10 Miall, P., 140 Michaud, Gene, 81 middle class aesthetics, 134 Arnold, 13, 15, 17–18, 143, 161n7 audience for opera, 118–19, 134 charity, 141–3 cultural revolution, 117 education, 22 Hebraism/Hellenism, 18–19 hegemony, 11, 13–14, 21, 22, 143 opera, 118 Philistinism, 15, 16–17 power, 16–17 Puritanism, 17, 21 rock music, 26 self-help, 36–7 urbanisation, 146 migrant communities, 54 Mill, John Stuart, 162n10 Mirella (Gounod), 122 Missing in Action, 72, 79, 80, 81 Missing in Action II, 72, 79, 80, 81 Mission Impossible, 59 Mitchell, Arthur, 157 Mitchell, Joni, 30 Mithraism, 135–6 mnemonic artefacts, 75

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mobility of people, 106 Mock Doctor (Gounod), 126 The Mod Squad, 59 mode of production determinism, 109–10 money-making, 142–3 monopoly capitalism, 60 Monserrat Caballé, 85, 86 Monterey Pop Festival, 29 Morning Advertiser, 40 Morris, Meaghan, 165[Ch5]n1 Morrison, Jim, 27 Moser, Charles, 102 Moser, Claus, 177n14 Mouffe, Chantal, 7–8 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 87 Don Giovanni, 100, 120, 121, 126, 129 Le Nozze di Figaro, 121, 123, 124, 125, 175n4 multi-accentuality of sign, 9, 51–2 Murderer’s Row, 66 music class mobilisation, 25 counterculture, ix–x, 23, 29–30 see also opera; rock music music industry, 28–32 music shops, 127 Muslim alternative Coca-Cola, 114 My Poll and My Partner Joe (Haines), x connotative reading, 37, 39–40, 42–3, 48 Cooke, 34 denotative reading, 35, 39–40 historical context, 39–42, 48 naval society, 42 reading formation, 47–8 slavery/industrial labour, 42 success, 33–4 working class audience, 43–4 ‘My Poll and My Partner Joe’ song, 34 Myers, Mike, 59–60, 65, 66, 70 mystique of unintelligibility, 81–2, 180n5 Nabarz, Payam, 135–6 Nast, Thomas, 140 National Association for the Protection of Labour (NAPL), 45 National Charter Association, 41 National Liberation Front, 81 nationalism, revived, 115

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Nativity, 135, 136 Nava, Mica, 54 naval society, 42 Neale, Jonathan, 42, 43 Nessen, Ron, 169n10 New Mexico University, 31 New York Evening Post, 91 New York State University, 31 New York Times, 80, 84, 88, 177n14 Newsweek, 71–3 Nixon, Richard, 31–2, 167n3, 168n8 Nora, Pierre, 75, 168n5 Norma (Bellini), 127 North, Oliver, 168n8 Northern Star, 41–2 nostalgia, 65–6, 145–6, 166n6, 166n8 nostalgia film, 62 Le Nozze di Figaro (Mozart), 121, 123, 124, 125, 175n4 Oastler, Richard, 38 Odger, George, 161n8 opera advertising, 85, 170–1n1, 179n11 aesthetics, 122 artists/artistes, 126–7 on CDs, 95, 104 cinema use, 85, 171–5n2, 179n11 commercial, 85–7 complete work performed, 124–5 in concert room, 127 consumption, 130 culture of, 117, 160n5 in drawing room, 127–8 elite, 88, 179n10 as entertainment, 101, 117–18, 122 familiarity, 94–5 foreign-language, 88 German/Italian, 118, 119–21 as high culture, xii, 85, 87–92, 91, 117 history of, 175n4 inclusive/exclusive, xii, 101, 104, 117 institutionalisation, 96, 100 in mixed entertainment bill, 122, 175n5 opera houses, 87, 94, 102–4 popular/elite, 92, 95, 101–2, 134 promotional material, 89, 96, 98 resistance to inclusivity, 96–101

seat prices, 164n11 self-help books, 92, 93 social visibility, 85, 91–2, 117 in streets, 128 translations, 129 in US, 87 as work, 121–3 see also audience for opera Opera, 99–100, 103 Opera: The Rough Guide, 94–6, 95 Opera – A Crash Course, 93, 94 Opéra Bastille, 102 Opera for Dummies, 93, 94 opera singers, 85, 96, 98, 175–6n6 Orwell, George, 144 Otello (Verdi), 177n14 Owen, Robert, 38, 45–6 pantomime, 139 parody, 165–6[Ch6]n4–5 Parry, Benita, 157 pastiche, 61, 62, 65–6, 67, 165–6[Ch6]n4–5, 167n10 Pavarotti, Luciano, 96, 98–100, 175n6 Peck, Abe, 24, 31 pedagogy, politics of, 56 Peggy Sue Got Married, 62 performativity of signification, 7 Pettit, S., 93 Philistinism, 15, 16–17 Phillips, Michael, 28–32 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 112 Platoon, 72, 76, 79, 80, 81–3, 169–70n14, 179n1 Pogue, D., 93, 94 politicians of Vietnam war, 79 politics of academic practice, x–xi, 49–55 Arnold, 11 of charity, 140–4 of cultural studies, 49 popular culture, 49 rejection of conventional, 23–4 of signification, viii Poor Law Amendment Act, 164n6 Poor Man’s Advocate, 38 Pop Art movement, 64 pop music, 112–13, 167n10 popular culture emerging from below, 49–50 and high culture, 64, 90, 121 modern, 65 nostalgia, 65–6

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Quarterly Congressional Almanac, 163n10 Queen’s Theatre, 33, 45, 46, 89, 164n11

remembering, 75 see also memory resistance counterculture as, 32 to globalisation, 115 to hegemony, 7 to inclusivity of opera, 96–101 and incorporation, 51, 53–4, 57 rock music as, 24–8 to Vietnam war, 77–8 Richards, Keith, 28–9 risk society, 105 ritual, 79–83, 89 Ritzer, George, 111 Robert la Diavolo (Meyerbeer), 121 Robertson, Roland, 114 Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, 62 rock music anti-capitalism, 28–9 commodification, 31 counterculture, 29–30 music industry, 28–32 resistance, 24–8 Roebuck, John, 21–2 Rolling Stone, 31 The Rolling Stones, 28–9, 31 Roman Empire, 135, 180n4 Rooke, William Michael: Amilie, 128 Roper, Jon, 169n13 Rossini, Gioacchino, 120 Il Barbiere di Seviglia, 87, 129 Tancredi, 124 Roszak, Theodore, 24 Rowe, J. C., 72 Royal Minor Theatre, 44–5 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 102, 103 Royle, E., 41 Rumble Fish, 62

radicalism, 44, 45, 46 Rahill, Frank, 42 Raiders of the Lost Ark, 62 Rambo: First Blood Part II, 72, 79, 80, 81 Raynor, Henry, 87 RCA, 29, 90 reading formation, 33, 35, 46–7, 47–8, 163[Ch4]n5 Reagan, Ronald, 71–2 reconstruction, 75 regime of truth, 71, 132, 134, 169–70n14 relationality, 4, 7 relationships, disembedded, 106

Sadie, Stanley, 118, 125 Said, Edward, 111 The Saint, 59 San Francisco Chronicle, 25–6 Sandys, William, 139, 145 Santa Claus, 139–40 Saunders, Kate, 100–1, 179n10 Schiller, Herbert, 108 self-help, 36–7 self-help books for opera, 92, 93 self-interest, 142 Sex and the City, 115, 116 Sheen, Charlie, 82, 179n1 Shinoff, Paul, 169n13

pastiche, 65, 66 politics of, 49 as structure, 49 structure/agency, 49, 50 Postgate, R., 45, 140, 161n8 postmodernism death of subject, 61 eclecticism, 68–9 Hall, 112 hyperconsciousness, 67–70 Jameson, 60–1 schizophrenic, 61 sixties in nineties, xi, 59–60, 69–70 structure/agency, 67 surface shallowness, 61–2 triviality, 63 post-structuralism, 49 POW: The Escape, 73, 80 power culture, x–xi, xiii, 1, 10, 55, 71, 73, 115 Foucault, 79 hegemony, 54 middle class, 16–17 negative, 134 signification, 5–6 power relations, 47–8, 101, 121 press-gangs, 34, 35, 37, 42 primitive, 152–3 production, 51, 52–3, 55, 101 see also mode of production determinism prosthetic memory, 74–5 Puccini, Giacomo: Turandot, 175n4 Purdue, A. W., 137, 138, 141, 145 Puritanism, 17, 21, 137

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201 signification culture, 2 Hall, 4, 10 hegemony, viii material world, 8–9 multi-accentuality, 9, 51–2 performativity, 7 politics of, viii power, 5–6 Williams, 1, 2–3, 4 The Silencers, 66 Sinclair, John, 30 sixties revisited, xi, 59–60, 69–70 slavery, 37–9 Slick, Grace, 27 Smith, Adam, 148 Smith, Tom, 139 social mobility, 36–7 social unrest, 19 social visibility, 85, 91–2, 117 socialism, democratic, 6 La Sonnambula (Bellini), 124, 125 Sontag, Susan, 64 Southgate, Colin, 102, 103 Spanish women/family, 111 Sparks, Colin, 165[Ch5]n4 Speck, S., 93, 94 The Spinner’s Dream, 47 ‘Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam’ march, 23 spy-spoof films, 166n7 Sreberny-Mohammadi, Annabelle, 110–11, 113 Stainer, John, 139 Stallone, Sylvester, 79 Star Wars trilogy, 62 Stars and Stripes, 77 Stills, Stephen, 24 Stirling, Angus, 102 Storey, John, 54, 64, 67, 176n9 Stratton, Jon, 56 Street, John, 107 Strictly Come Dancing, 115 structuralism, 49 structure/agency, 50, 52, 53–4, 55, 67, 69, 109, 166n9 student population, 24 Sturken, Marita, 76, 168n7 subject, death of, 61 Sun, 99 Sunday Telegraph, 141 Sunday Times, 100–1, 179n10 Sundblom, Haddon H., 140 Sutherland, S., 94 Sykes, R., 41 symptomatic reading, xiii, 147, 148, 159

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cult ure and po we r i n c u l t u r a l s t u di e s

tabloid newspapers, 99 Taming of the Shrew (Gotz), 120 The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare), 131 Tancredi (Rossini), 124 Tarantino, Quentin, 67 taste, 91, 92, 121, 167n9, 178n4 Te Kanawa, Kiri, 86 Teach Yourself Opera, 94, 95 teenage culture, 54 see also youth subcultures television news coverage, 99, 105–6 television programmes, Chinese versions, 115, 116 texts, 148–9, 153, 165[Ch5]n1 Theatre Royal, 34, 97, 118, 178–9n9 Thompson, E. P., 45 Time Magazine, 82 The Times, 137–8, 139 Toledo, Archbishop of, 111 Tomlinson, John, 108, 111 Toplin, Robert Brent, 73 Towle, George Makepeace, 87, 101 Townshend, Pete, 30 tradition, invented, 146 travel, 105 Trilling, Lionel, 11 Il Trovatore (Verdi), 128, 129 Tunstall, Jeremy, 113 Turandot (Puccini), 175n4 Turner, Bryan, 65 Twin Peaks, 68 Uncommon Valor, 72, 79, 80 unconscious, 73 unintelligibility, mystique of, 81–2, 180n5 Unknown Vietnam Soldier, 72 urbanisation, 135, 146 US Defense Department, 77 US Justice Department, 77 utilitarianism, 18, 19 utopian nostalgia, 145–6 Veblen, Thorstein, 179n12 Venice opera houses, 87 Verdi, Giuseppe Otello, 177n14 Il Trovatore, 128, 129

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Vickers, Jon, 96 Viet Cong, 81 Vietnam Syndrome, 71–2, 84, 167–8n3, 169n13 Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, 72, 78, 169n11 Vietnam war alternative society, ix–x, 77 Americanisation, 81 atrocities, 78 consumption, 169–70n14 forgotten things, 76, 77–8 and Gulf War I, 71–3, 167n2, 169n10 Hollywood, xi, 71, 72–3, 79–83 politicians, 79 revisionism, 71–3 rituals of truth, 80 US firepower, 78, 80–1 see also anti-Vietnam war movement; Hollywood’s Vietnam war Vietnam Women’s Memorial, 169n11 Vietnamese casualties, 78 Voice of the People, 45 Volosinov, Valentin, 9, 51 Wagner, Richard: The Flying Dutchman, 130 Waiting For My Love, 115, 116 Wallace, Vincent Lurline, 127, 132 Maritana, 122, 127, 130 The Warlocks, 25 Warner, Deborah, 100–1 Watson, Russell, 176n8 Wayne’s World, 60 wealth distribution, xiii Weber, Carl Maria Friedrich von: Der Freischutz, 96, 97, 118, 121, 122, 126, 127, 129, 132 Weber, William, 120–1 The West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser, 145 West Coast rock see rock music Westmoreland, William, 167n3 Wewiora, G. E., 164n13, 164n14, 164n17 Whannel, P., 54 The Who, 30

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, 115 Wife Swap, 115 Williams, Raymond ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, 6 communication, 160n6 ‘Communications and Community’, 5, 10 on Conrad, 147 culture, ix, 1–4 Culture, 6 ‘Culture is Ordinary’, 4–5 dominant/emergent/ residual cultures, 165[Ch6]n2 on hegemony, 6–7, 12, 160n2 ‘The Idea of a Common Culture’, 5 The Long Revolution, 4, 5–6 Marxism and Literature, 6 material world, 8–9 meaning-making, 5 signification, 1, 2–3, 4 Wilson, Elizabeth, 65–6 Wolff, Janet, 91–2 women Spanish families, 111 in Vietnam war, 77 Woodstock, 30–1 work of art, 122–3, 125 working class anti-slavery, 37–8 Arnold, 146 assimilation of, 19 audience for opera, 36, 37, 43–4, 118–19, 134 education, 22 living conditions, 43, 142 Marx, 38 meaning-making, 6 melodrama, 44 World War II films, 168n4 The Wrecking Crew, 66 The X-Factor, 115 Young, Neil, 32 youth subcultures, 50 Zelechow, Bernard, 87 Zelizer, B., 72

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