Popular Cultures and Political Practices 9781442602861

Citation preview

Popular Cultures and Political Practices

This page intentionally left blank

Popular Cultures and Political Practices Richard B. Gruneau, editor

Garamond Press Toronto, Ontario

Copyright © 1988 Richard Gruneau All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except for a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. A publication of Garamond Press Garamond Press 67A Portland Street Toronto, Ontario M5V 2M9 Cover design: Peter McArthur Printed and bound in Canada This book was published with the support and cooperation of: The Centre for Sport and Leisure Studies Queen's University Kingston, Ontario Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Popular cultures and political practices ISBN 0-920059-56-2 1. Popular culture - Political aspects. I. Gruneau, Richard S., 1948HM101.P66 1988 306'.1 C88-093472-9

Contents Contributors

7

Preface and Acknowledgements

9

Introduction: Notes on Popular Cultures and Political Practices. Richard Gruneau

11

'What the Hell': Or Some Comments on Class Formation and Cultural Reproduction. Bryan Palmer

33

The Politics of Feeling Good: Reflections on Marxism and Cultural Production. Philip Corrigan

43

Women, Fantasy and Popular Culture: The Wonderful World of Harlequin Romances. Geraldine Finn

51

Sport as a Site for 'Popular' Resistance. Peter Donnelly

69

Remembering the Audience: Notes on Control, Ideology and Oppositional Strategies in the News Media. Robert Hackett

83

This page intentionally left blank

Contributors PHILIP CORRIGAN teaches Sociology and Cultural Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. He is author and editor of numerous books and papers on socialist theory and practice and cultural studies including: (with H. Ramsay and D. Sayer) For Mao; Capitalism, State Formation and Marxist Theory; (with D. Sayer) The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution; and (with Michele Barrett, Annette Kuhn and Janet Wolff) Ideology and Cultural Production. PETER DONNELLY teaches in the School of Physical Education and Department of Sociology at McMaster University. He has written widely in journals devoted to leisure studies and the sociology of sport and is co-editor (with Nancy Theberge) of Sport and the Sociological Imagination. GERALDINE FINN teaches philosophy and humanities at the CGEP de TOutaouis. She has written numerous papers on socialist and feminist theory, culture, and pornography and is co-editor (with Angela Myles) of Feminism in Canada: From Pressure to Politics. RICHARD GRUNEAU teaches in the Department of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He is author/editor of numerous books and articles on leisure, sport, popular culture, and the media, including: (with Han Cantelon) Sport, Culture and the Modern State\ and Class, Sports and Social Development. BOB HACKETT is SSHRCC Research Fellow in the Department of Communication at Simon Fraser University. His numerous articles on politics, the media, and cultural studies theory have been included in such journals as Critical Studies in Mass Communications, the Canadian Journal of Communication, and Studies in Political Economy. He is currently completing a book on cold war ideology, disarmament, and the media in Canada. BRYAN PALMER teaches in the History Department at Queen's University. His many publications have ranged widely across the fields of labour history, socialist political strategy, and cultural studies. His books include: A Culture in Conflict; Working Class Experience; The Making ofEP. Thompson', and (with G. Keeley) Dreaming of What Might Be.

This page intentionally left blank

Preface and Acknowledgements The papers included in this volume were originally presented at a conference session on "Leisure, Ideology and Cultural Production" organized for the Society of Socialist Studies in the Spring of 1984. My purpose in organizing the session was two-fold. First, I wanted to bring together a set of presentations indicative of the growing interest in leisure and popular culture among socialist writers in Canada during the 1980s. In so doing, I deliberately sought out people whose work represented an attempt to work through the limitations inherent in economistic and class reductionist explorations of popular cultural forms and leisure practices in capitalist societies. My second objective was to insure that conference presenters represented a variety of disciplinary, theoretical and research backgrounds. I felt strongly that leisure and cultural studies research in Canada had been less successful in bringing such diverse traditions together than was the case in Britain and I hoped the conference session might begin to work towards a resolution of this tendency. The Centre for Sport and Leisure Studies at Queen's University has been committed to interdisciplinary and progressive work in leisure and cultural studies since the late 1970s and early drafts of most of the presentations made at the session were collected for circulation through the Centre's Working Papers series. The decision made by Garamond Press to publish a series of books based on Centre publications created the opportunity to work-up these early drafts into the present volume. Many people have been involved with this project in various ways and it will not be possible to thank everyone. However, I want to acknowledge first the contributions of the people directly responsible for the original conference session either in an organizational capacity or as a presenter or discussant. These include Jesse Vorst, Bryan Palmer, Geraldine Finn, Meg Luxton, Philip Corrigan, Peter Donnelly, Fred Stockholder and Bob Hackett. At the Queen's end of things, Hart Cantelon and Rob Beamish were responsible for administrative,

10 Popular Cultures and Political Practices financial and other matters. Peter Saunders and Errol Sharpe at Garamond should also be thanked for their patience and support. Finally, I want to acknowledge Bob Morford for financial assistance provided through the School of Physical and Health Education at the University of British Columbia, and Lucie Menkveld in the Department of Communication at Simon Fraser University for her assistance with the final manuscript preparation. My colleague, Martin Laba, offered editorial suggestions and, in a few instances, I have even followed his advice. Richaid Gruneau May 1988

Introduction: Notes on Popular Culture and Political Practice1 Richard Gruneau A Mend in graduate school used to remark that his one scholarly ambition was to write a book about the hobbies of major socialist theorists. On some occasions, this pronouncement led to collective speculation that carried the joy of pure silliness. Did Lukacs own a dog? Did Kautsky have a stamp collection? Was Luxembourg a soccer fan? The basis for the silliness, obviously, lay in the contrast between such pleasurable personal amusements and the seemingly higher earnestness of socialist theory and practice. Of course, the task of building socialism was a hard and serious business, my friend used to say, but why should the political right have all the laughs? I always felt this latter comment reproduced a somewhat unfair stereotype of socialists as all work and no play. I also recall being struck by the ease with which this stereotype could be readily adapted to the defense of capitalist consumer culture. It conjures up a whole cluster of tired and familiar arguments: Marxism's emphasis on social labour can never accommodate an adequate understanding of non-utilitarian activities; socialism is necessarily synonymous with a stifling and excessively puritanical utilitarianism; socialists are so incapable of understanding play for its own sake—and so lacking in self-deprecating humour—that they can never be in touch with the pulse of "popular" feeling. It is one thing to explore the ideological nature of these allegations and stereotypes.2 It is another thing to face up to whatever grains of truth might be contained within them. Undoubtedly, this means having to face up to the limitations and problems of "actually existing socialism" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. But it also means rethinking traditional socialist theory and practices in Western countries as well. For it seems clear, as Tony Bennett has recently argued, that a great many traditional left programs and positions really have canied the baggage of cultural assumptions which have limited the abilities of

12 Popular Cultures and Political Practices socialists to win over large segments of "the people." Focussing on the British situation, Bennett argues that socialist cultural initiatives in particular have lacked effectiveness: ...often straddled awkwardly between a modish avant-gardism and a "workerism" of yester-year—[socialist cultural initiatives] have remained largely peripheral to the lives of "the people," in any majoritarian sense of the term, throughout the greater part of the post-war period and certainly since the 1960s.3

Even more depressing, Bennett continues, is the extent to which a deeplyrooted and lingering "economism" has blinded people on the left to the fact that "there is a cultural battle to be fought, let alone won."4 When this battle has been recognized, the left's pursuit of strategic objectives has tended to be limited to a range of policy options centered around calls for democratizing the media by bringing them under public control. While such options are obviously indispensable for any socialist cultural strategy, Bennett concludes, they are likely to be "radically insufficient" unless coupled with strategies able to exploit various contradictions "within and between the various media as well as opening up new spaces for cultural activity outside them."5 There are parallels between these observations about socialist cultural initiatives in Britain and similar initiatives in Canada, particularly with respect to the concern for democratizing the media. Bob Hackett explores these parallels with respect to the media later in this volume. There are also important differences. The legacy of agrarian reform movements and struggles of primary producers has meant that Canadian socialist writing has been less dominated by the "industrial workerism" that Bennett describes as being so apparent in Britain. Furthermore, Canada's changing colonial position in the history of international capitalism has led to a significant engagement with nationalist issues in defining the left's cultural agenda. Nonetheless, it is clear that Canadian and British socialist theorists have shared a tendency to downplay or trivialize the analysis of popular cultural forms and practices until just recently. In these introductory notes I want to explore some of the reasons why this has occurred. Following this, I shall explore the change that occurred during the 1970s, when socialist theorists throughout Western societies increasingly acknowledged the importance of popular cultures as sites for the struggle over capitalist hegemony. A major redefinition of the concept of popular culture, and a renewed awareness of the oppositional politics of "the popular," have been major features of this change.

Socialist Silences and Set Positions How can one explain the limited ability of the left in Western capitalist societies to theorize popular cultural forms adequately and to link this theory to practice? I am persuaded by Tony Bennett's argument that economism has been a key player in all this. The strategic emphasis on labour politics and class struggle waged at the workplace has been one of the left's great contributions of the last

Introduction

13

century. However, this emphasis has too often reinforced the view of cultural struggles as secondary—merely epiphenomenal and super-structural dimensions of a class struggle centered on socializing the material means of production. An equally relevant factor in answering the question posed above lies in the paternalism and parochial intellectualism which traditionally found expressions in Communist Party doctrine on cultural production and the cultural habits of the working classes. Leninist strategic interventions in the cultural realm inevitably gave the Party the responsibility for producing a truly socialist popular culture from outside that culture itself. For example, the young Trotsky was prepared to acknowledge the cultural possibilities of film but, as C.L.R. James has noted, he felt that sports diverted workers from politics and he had little time for them.6 Faced with the Party's hectoring discourse on progressive versus reactionary forms of popular culture, it is not at all surprising that many people stopped listening altogether.7 Other traditions within Marxism were even more hostile to the available forms of popular cultural practices constituted within various capitalist social formations. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukacs viewed the essence of "the people" as something expressed only in an unrealized form of the popular which would emerge out of the proletariat's growing self-consciousness and realization of its historic mission.8 According to Bennett, the negative consequences of this particular view of "the people": ...came home to roost most clearly in the gloomy prognostications of the Frankfurt School, to some degree obliged to adopt the perspective of negativity because the proletariat in its empirical forms had proved unworthy of the immense philosophical and cultural burden Lukacs had placed on its shoulders.9

In this gloomy prognostication there was little in popular culture which might figure as something valuable in its own right The proletariat was deemed bought-off—deceived and manipulated by the media and capitalism's emerging culture industry. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer took the lead in arguing that capitalist culture could be understood as a "mass culture" which created and reproduced "false" needs and a "false" consciousness. Against this one could only assert the negative power of "autonomous art" and of "critical theory" itself. From this perspective "the people" took on the character of a passive mass of consumers desperately in need of the estrangement potentially offered by an artistic and philosophical avant-garde.10 Given this array of influences it is small wonder that for most of this century socialist writers have tended to downplay the majority of everyday cultural practices and products of "the people" or else have dismissed them with little accompanying analysis. Brecht's writing on popular literature and Gramsci's recognition of the importance of the cultural struggle over "common sense" are usually singled out as notable exceptions.11 Yet, however important these contributions may have been, they have long been overshadowed by other wellestablished socialist traditions.

14 Popular Cultures and Political Practices Even by the 1960s—when questions about "everyday life" and popular cultural practices filtered into socialist writing in new and provocative ways— the established traditions maintained a powerful influence, especially in Englishspeaking countries. For example, in the two long chapters devoted to the analysis of "legitimation" in Ralph Miliband's pioneering 1969 book, The State in Capitalist Society, the discussion of "popular" entertainment was relegated to a few perfunctory paragraphs.12 When Miliband did discuss "popular" entertainment he tended to rely rather uncritically upon arguments about the ideologically-conformist character and aesthetic impoverishment of capitalist mass culture that had been articulated earlier by Horkheimer, Adorno and their colleagues at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Miliband was too well-schooled in classical Marxism to accept Herbert Marcuse's argument that contemporary mass culture heralded the arrival of a fully-homogenized and "one dimensional" society. On the contrary, he cautioned against any interpretation which underestimated the "profoundly destabilizing forces at work in capitalist society" or its capacity to cope with such forces. The "realistic perspective" in advanced capitalist societies, he concluded, was "not of attunement and stability, but of crisis and challenge."13 Nonetheless, in the absence of any thorough and adequate discussion of such challenges in the cultural realm, Miliband's book did little to dislodge the pessimism and static character of radical mass culture criticism. Key elements of the Adorno/ Horkheimer version of the power of capitalism's culture industry remained implicit throughout his brief discussion. The assumptions that popular culture was equivalent to mass culture, and that mass culture was merely a form of deception, passification, and diversion, were widely accepted by people committed to radical political positions in Canadian, British and American universities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Socialist activists and researchers who did not accept these views in their entirety nonetheless tended to maintain an equally pessimistic view of popular culture as a sphere of life largely absorbed by capitalism's dominant ideology. There were numerous variations of these latter dominant ideology theories, but most emphasized how the underclasses in capitalist society—exposed to bourgeois ideology on every front—had become greatly incorporated into the culture and lifestyles of the dominant class.14 Inevitably, the implied solution to such problems took the classic form of socialization of the material means of production. Following the argument put forward by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, it was tacitly assumed that if the bourgeoisie no longer controlled the means of material production, they would no longer control the means of mental production. In this context, popular culture could only be seen either as politically irredeemable or as strategically irrelevant.

Introduction

15

Anglo-Canadian Perspectives on Popular Cultures and the Politics of "the Popular" In Canada, the debate surrounding the National Questions of the 1960s and 1970s placed "Culture" on the socialist agenda in ways that threatened to disrupt the tendencies described above. Nationalist movements in Quebec and widespread concern in the rest of Canada about the threat posed by American economic and cultural power carried the potential for a radical rethinking of socialist perspectives on popular cultures and the politics of "the popular." However, this rethinking never developed as fully as one might have expected.15 Within the Anglo-Canadian left, in particular, the range of debate on politics, popular cultures and nationalism was limited from the outset by several problematic tendencies. One of the most important tendencies centered upon the language and critical assumptions through which matters pertaining to the National Questions had come to be popularized in English-speaking Canada. From the outset, discussions about the nature of Canadian culture were framed well outside the terms of any socialist discourse. Culture was not widely understood with respect to its many determinations in the Canadian social formation; rather it was discussed in an abstract and idealist fashion. In this way Canadian culture could be represented readily as an organic "lived tradition" facing extinction at the hands of a commercially-produced and technologically-dominated American mass culture.16 Typically, such representations echoed politically conservative fears about cultural decline in the face of liberalism, industrial technology and the homogenizing pressures of rampant commercialism. Arthur Kroker has drawn our attention to ways in which the fears noted above have dominated Anglo-Canadian intellectual life. His analysis claims to uncover a powerful tradition in Canadian writing on technology and culture which expresses "a searing lament for that which has been suppressed by the modern technical order."17 This Canadian discourse, Kroker argues, can be understood as a "way of seeking to recover a voice by which to articulate a different historical possibility against the present closure of the technological order" arising primarily from the impact of American mass communications.18 The problem, however, lies in the limited vision of "different historical possibilities" articulated within the tradition Kroker describes. Anglophone critics of American mass culture have tended to express these possibilities through a highly romanticized, almost mystical, yearning for an "identity" variously rooted in regional popular cultures or in abstract conceptions of a civilized European "Western tradition." Furthermore, such abstract and romanticized concepts of culture have often been linked to a condemnation and rejection of those material and technological developments in communication which would be prerequisites for any truly universal culture—a popular culture which recognizes human differences and provides the resources, opportunities, and forms of empowerment necessary for the widest possible realization and

16 Popular Cultures and Political Practices expansion of human capacities. Ironically, Kroker's own analysis, written in 1984, continues to be trapped by many of the limited conceptions of the authors whose work he describes. As a result, it simply devolves into yet another form of pessimistic mass culture theory. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, socialist thinkers were actively caught up in the National Question debates and searched for ways in which nationalist and socialist projects might be harmonized I think it fair to say that most people on the Anglo-Canadian left were painfully aware of the power of conservative traditions in these debates and understood the difficulty of adapting abstract and romantic notions of "Canadian Culture" to socialist political imperatives. Yet, given the extent to which nationalist sentiment had become a popular and seemingly oppositional cultural force in Canada, it became impossible to ignore. The problem was to articulate a distinctly socialist intervention. Unfortunately, in many instances, this merely meant substituting a left-wing version of an Anti-American mass culture theory for those more commonly employed in public discourse. The most visible left-wing versions of Anti-American mass culture theory were often expressed through a radical populism. It was assumed that Canadian culture was not yet a capitalist mass culture, even though large sections of it were fast becoming dominated by a continental culture industry. For this reason, it was necessary to defend local popular cultural forms and other indigenous cultural initiatives against the homogenizing commercial forces centred south of the 49th parallel. In some instances, these arguments were also extended to include the defense of local cultural initiatives in the regions against the centralizing tendencies of the Canadian State.19 A somewhat different orientation was more closely tied to traditional Marxist categories. Stanley Ryerson had written a number of important works from the 1940s through the 1960s which analyzed national-democratic movements in Canada in terms of resistance to the expansion of American capital.20 Libbie and Frank Park offered an even more influential analysis in the 1960s of the ways in which alliances of the Canadian dominant class had come to see "the path of profit and class stability in collaboration with foreign capital, not in opposition to it."21 As a result, the Parks argued, protection of the right and capacity to make decisions "in the national interest" was contingent on a widespread nationalization of Canadian industry. The effect of these arguments was to locate the problem of American domination of Canada within a framework of dependency and underdevelopment. Key fractions of the Canadian capitalist class pursued their own interests in a continentalist fashion which worked toward economic and cultural underdevelopment throughout the country.22 Socialist responses to the accompanying patterns of dependency and undeidevelopment appeared to require a two-stage strategy. The first stage would involve the mobilization of nationalist sentiment in the struggle against American control of the economy and culture. Only with

Introduction

17

that victory won would it be possible to turn to the creation of a truly socialist "popular" in Canada. The Anglo-Canadian perspectives discussed thus far—cultural conservative, radical populist, and political economic—have not always been clearly differentiated. For example, Harold Innis' and George Grant's views on Canadian culture can be located firmly in the first of these traditions, yet Grant's arguments about the necessity of defending local cultures has provided inspiration for radical populism, and Innis' writing on economic history has been influential in Canadian political economy. My point is that longstanding socialist silences and set positions on culture created a ready opportunity for ahistorical and romantic definitions to find their way into the left's discourse on the National Questions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The alternative was to view national-popular movements only in relation to the more established themes of dominant ideology theory or to a theory of false consciousness. I am not suggesting for a minute that the mobilization of popular sentiment around the National Question debates did not have a number of obvious nonsocialist dimensions. Nonetheless, representations of Nation were fundamental to the social and cultural struggles of the 1960s and 1970s and were sometimes articulated in surprisingly progressive ways. For that reason, it is striking that so little theoretical work was done on the "national-popular^ and its role in the negotiation of hegemony.23 This paucity of work on nationalism as a constitutive element of popular cultures, popular movements and hegemony was matched by a similar disregard for other areas of popular life and everyday cultural practice such as sport, pulp fiction, television comedy or popular music.24 During the 1970s, socialist writing on culture of any kind in Canada remained underdeveloped. When it was undertaken it tended to be focussed on problems of ideology or dependency in the areas of broadcasting, publishing, literature and art. Much of the best work on these latter areas of Canadian culture was generated from a political economy perspective. Throughout the 1970s, political economists made an immense contribution to understanding connections between economics, public policy (including the cultural realm), regional underdevelopment, and Canada's position in international capitalism. By the late 1970s, the focus on dependency and underdevelopment which had initially emerged as the core of the Anglo-Canadian political economy tradition shifted to include more self-consciously Marxist analyses of relations of production and accumulation, the labour-process, and the functioning of the Canadian state.25 A widespread concern over the limitations of class, reductionism and over problematic conceptions of culture and ideology accompanied this shift. Yet, large segments of Canadian life have continued to be left out of account, or have been inadequately theorized, within the Anglo-Canadian political economy tradition. Over the last decade political economy theory in Canada has broadened a great deal—primarily in response to feminism. However, the marginalization of research on popular cultural forms and practices, and the

18 Popular Cultures and Political Practices failure to pay sufficient attention to the politics of "the popular," remains an ongoing tendency. In this context, the most notable critical work on popular cultures and political practices has been undertaken by labour historians, communications, and cultural studies researchers struggling to develop new perspectives on working class cultures, audiences, and the importance of the use values of cultural goods.26

The Rediscovery of Popular Cultures and Popular Resistance In recent years, dismissive and overly pessimistic views of popular cultural forms and practices have become less evident on the left in Canada, Britain and the United States. To be sure, the legacy of the old silences and set positions has not been put to rest However, there has been a greater willingness on the part of the left to face up to the limitations of economism, Leninism, and avant-gandist theories of mass culture. A growing awareness of the theoretical and strategic importance of popular cultures, and a retreat from intellectual parochialism and socialist asceticism have been recognizable features of this movement The reasons for the transformation described above are too complex to chronicle in these introductory remarks. Stuart Hall has drawn our attention to the dynamics of political protest and social control variously experienced by student radicals, feminists, youth subcultures, and other groups during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s.27 Instead of a society based on consensus, these groups come to understand the power of agencies of control, which they countered with a wide variety of strategies of resistance. Marcuse's work provided an initially appealing framework for theorizing such apparently nonclass "popular" protests, but the Marcusian model as a whole proved to be inadequate.28 Much of oppositional political practice of the 1960s and 1970s was generated directly out of the very mass culture that Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer had long viewed as a zone of mass deception and passification. Tania Modleski argues a variation of this point in a useful discussion of the manner in which popular cultural forms and practices come to be reconceptualized by the left during the 1970s and 1980s. She notes that a new generation of left-wing cultural analysts "grew up on mass culture—literally danced to the kind of 'standardized' music which so alarmed Theodor Adomo that he pondered how to turn jitter-bugging 'insects' back into men and women."29 Modleski goes on to emphasize that this new generation of critics rejected the "oversimplification" of the "Frankfurt School Critical Theory" which, in her view, had previously dominated socialist understandings of capitalist/mass cultural forms and practices. Most important was a growing criticism of "the emphasis on the way mass culture 'manipulates' its consumers, imposing on them 'false needs' and 'false desires' and preventing them from coming to understand their own best interests."30 The argument shifted instead to the sources of gratification implicit in mass cultural forms and to the uses of those

Introduction

19

forms by particular audiences. She then cites the "Birmingham School of Cultural Theory" as a group of left-leaning analysts "best known" for studies of "audience resistance to the homogenizing forces of mass culture." This juxtaposition of the "Frankfurt School," with its implied theory of audiences as "cultural dopes," and a new generation of audience-sensitive left cultural analysts, exemplified by the "Birmingham School of Cultural Theory," makes for a neat contrast However, it is so crudely schematic that it misleads more than illuminates. David Held has alerted us to the difficulty of identifying a coherent school of thought within the body of writing produced at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research from the 1920s through the 1950s. To the degree that such a school of thought exists, one can speak of it only with reference to Horkheimer, Adomo, Marcuse, Friedrich Pollack and Leo Lowenthal.31 It is essential to make a similar observation about research undertaken at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (cccs) from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. There was a great diversity of theoretical and empirical issues debated at Birmingham during this time and the Centre's work has often been seen to be far more unified than it really was. Identification of a "Birmingham School" runs the risk of losing the richness of the divergent positions and shifting theoretical "problematics" (very much a Birmingham word) characteristic of the cccs intellectual journey. The issue of audience resistance to the homogenizing forces of mass culture as a central cccs problematic is a case in point From its inception in the mid1960s' cccs work on resistance has downplayed the word "audience," choosing instead to speak more specifically about class, subcultural and, later, gender and racially-based practices. Furthermore, the focus on resistance in this work was effectively balanced (some would say overshadowed) by a parallel concern for ways in which dominant social relations were reproduced. At the risk of immense simplification, it is important to emphasize how the development of this joint concern for resistance and reproduction followed a distinct historical trajectory. It began with discussions of culture located in what Stuart Hall refers to as a "Humanities tradition." Culture was understood in "literary-moral" terms and cultural criticism was undertaken in relation to debates formed out of the literary theory of F.R. Leavis, the early work of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart32 Williams' The Long Revolution played a formative role in shifting the ground of debate from a literary-moral to a more anthropological understanding of culture as a "whole way of life." E.P. Thompson's criticisms of The Long Revolution and his own project of recovering the "making" of working class life in Britain provided a valuable critical counterpoint and drew the discussion of working class cultures at cccs more directly into a Marxian tradition.33 Thompson's definition of culture was tied to the collective experiences of people actively involved in remaking the conditions of their own lives. In this way, Hall reminds us, Thompson insisted:

20 Popular Cultures and Political Practices ...on the historical specificity of culture, on its plural—not singular definition— "cultures," not "Culture": above all, on the necessary struggle, tension and conflict between cultures and their links to class cultures, class formations and class struggles—the struggles between "ways of life" rather than evolution of "a way of life."34

Hall points to other factors also responsible for defining early cccs work on various cultures and their relations to the dominant "Culture." Increased reliance on anthropological and sociological, rather than literary, frames of reference paralleled the growing influence of Marxism at the Centre. Yet, much of the cccs concern for resistance throughout the 1970s continued to be cast within what Richard Johnson has called a "culturalist" orientation.35 Empathetic descriptions of working class and youth subcultural forms and practices undertaken at the Centre emphasized 'lived experience' as the genesis of consciousness and cultural expression. To the extent that such forms and practices represented the real or even imaginary interests and values of subordinate groups in their attempts to "win space" from the dominant "Culture," the argument often ran, they could be understood as forms of resistance. The New Left critique of the Labour Party—and of the alleged parochialism of English Marxism—provided an additional set of influences which strengthened an alternative cccs problematic during the early 1970s. There was ongoing concern about reconciling the tensions between economistic and idealist conceptions of culture and of finding more adequate means to theorize relationships between history, culture and ideology. To what extent could it be argued that cultural forms and practices maintained a degree of autonomy from changing economic and class determinants? To what extent was it possible to develop a materialist, yet non-reductionist, theory of culture? Structuralism became increasingly relevant in the early 1970s as a new way of addressing such questions and of working through the apparent limitations of earlier research. "Culturalist" perspectives were criticized for being excessively romantic and for viewing culture as an expressive and symbolic totality: a whole way of life seen as the product of consciousness and intention. The work of LeviStrauss, Barthes and Althusser provided inspiration for a countering perspective. Culture ought not to be seen as the symbolic product of consciousness and intention shaped by changing historical circumstances; rather it should be understood as an irreducible system of signification that produced consciousness and intention through the logic of its codes and categories.36 Althusser came to figure prominently in cccs debates about history, culture and ideology because his work offered a framework within which the analysis of underlying semiological or discursive structures could be reconciled with more traditional Marxist conceptions.37 As a first point, Althusser's analysis of the issues of determinancy and ideology in Marxist theory appeared to resolve long-standing problems of economism and class reductionism. According to Althusser "determinancy" did not simply emanate from "one level of the social

Introduction

21

totality"—the economic, technical and class base of capitalist society; rather, the unity of capitalist formations was "over-determined" through a complex set of distinctions and differences. Ideology operated on a "relatively autonomous" level as a system of representation having material form in practices elaborated through specific state apparatuses (e.g., the media, education). The key, however, was that the "relative autonomy" of ideology (culture) was always "articulated" to the reproduction of capitalist social relations (e.g., the surplus value relation).38 Richard Johnson has noted that a wide-ranging culturalist-structuralist debate at cccs was reflected in research emphases running from ethnographic/ historical traditions on the one hand, to various text-centered and formalist theoretical traditions on the other.39 And, while it may be too much to argue that the entire Centre fell under the spell of the orthodox Althusserian theoretical system, it is necessary to acknowledge the great extent to which this system influenced cccs research on media, ideology and popular cultural forms. Ultimately, however, the inadequacies of the Althusserian system became as obvious as the apparent weaknesses of earlier culturalist perspectives. Structuralist analysis in general was criticized for its insensitivity to human agency and for its tendency to ignore the conditions regulating the production and reception of cultural forms. Furthermore, in many instances, structuralist analysis seemed to operate at a level of abstraction that led more to taxonomic excess than to any meaningful understanding of "lived experience." Althusser's Marxist structuralism seemed especially guilty of this latter problem. In addition to downplaying the contradictory nature of capitalist life, it also lacked an ability to theorize cultural struggles adequately. The "relative autonomy" of ideology was linked to a mechanistic functionalism: ideology was understood only with respect to domination and the "relative autonomy" of ideology existed only as a functional prerequisite of capitalism's "need" for social reproduction.40 The most promising avenues for working through these problems eventually led back to Gramsci. Notably, Gramsci's work appeared to open new possibilities for resolving tensions between culturalist and structuralist tendencies in cultural studies. Popular cultural forms and practices could be viewed neither as an unambiguous site for class-based ways of life nor as the ideological supports of capitalist relations of production. Rather, such forms and practices could be analyzed as a force field of historical relations shaped by a complex and often contradictory set of limits and pressures.41 The Gramscian argument emphasized that dominant social relations and alliances in capitalist liberal democracies were inherently unstable and contradictory. Popular cultural forms and practices were part of the process whereby dominant groups were forced to renegotiate continually the terms upon which consent for their rule could be sustained. The effect of this argument could be measured in a unique mixing of the style and language of analysis preferred at cccs. The static Althusserian language of "relative autonomy" and "reproduc-

22 Popular Cultures and Political Practices tion" was blended with the more active culturalist emphasis on resistance and struggle through Gramsci's conception of "hegemony." While this was occurring, an internal set of debates at the Centre placed gender and racially-based struggles on the research agenda in addition to the more established concerns with class and male youth subcultures. Ultimately, the need to rethink questions of power, culture and resistance along these broader lines reinforced a Gramscian turn at cccs.42 It may well be that a common experience with the products of youth-oriented capitalist cultural production figured prominently in the varied debates characterizing the cccs's intellectual journey from the late 1960s through the 1970s. I suspect, however, that the path taken by cccs researchers during this time was more influenced by a number of more distinctly political agenda-forming issues. Particularly notable in this regard were Thatcherism, massive youth unemployment, feminism and racial unrest Mass culture and dominant ideology theories simply appeared ridiculous in the face of a Britain coming apart at the seams and witnessing a renewed set of reactionary initiatives on the part of the State.

Hegemony, Cultural Struggle and the Redefinition of Popular Cultures The Gramscian turn at cccs reflected a more widespread recovery and rehabilitation of Gramsci throughout Western societies during the late 1970s. The impact that this movement has had on theorizing 'the popular' has been striking. One of its most important contributions has been to reveal the limits of static and ahistorical definitions of concepts such as "mass culture," "the people," or even "popular culture." The key point has been to recognize how the uses of such concepts have themselves been caught up in various struggles of definition. Which senses of "the masses," "the people," or "the popular" will carry what implications politically with respect to abilities "to organize different social forces into an active political alliance?"43 These questions have been a central feature of the work on popular culture recently conducted at the Open University by the OU Popular Culture course team. Tony Bennett has reiterated Stuart Hall's well known argument that the term "popular" and "even more, the collective subject to which it must refer— 'the people'—is highly problematic."44 This is so for two reasons. First, "the people" exist only as an historical abstraction that can easily have a fetishized character, that is, "the people" can be represented as a conceptual thing having seemingly objective properties that mask real relations of class, gender and race. Second, "the people" can also be employed as an abstraction designed to mobilize individuals by positioning them historically in reactionary ways. A particularly graphic example of this occurred in Canada in 1983, when Premier Bennett of British Columbia repeatedly justified his assault on public institutions by saying: "We have to practice restraint because that is what the people want." Stuart Hall has noted how Mrs. Thatcher employed the same language in her

Introduction

23

repeated claims about "the people" in Britain wanting to limit the power of trade unions.45 It is possible to avoid these problems by emphasizing that the contents of popular culture and the fixed subjects of that culture can only be understood historica//y against the background of various social struggles, negotiations and compromises. In this formulation, popular cultures consist: ...of those cultural forms and practices—varying in content from one historical period to another—which constitute the terrain on which dominant, subordinate and oppositional cultural values and ideologies meet and intermingle, in different mixes and permutations, vying with one another in their attempts to secure the spaces within which they can become influential in framing and organising popular experience and consciousness.46

At stake in popular culture is nothing less than a struggle over the social production of common sense and what Geraldine Finn refers to elsewhere in this volume as "the power of naming." From this perspective, popular cultural forms and practices can be viewed as having their roots in the everyday life experiences, tastes, perceptions, aspirations and desires of individuals located in various social groupings. But it is the "relations which define 'popular culture* in a continuing tension (relationship, influence and antagonism) to the dominant culture" that are particularly relevant47 Hall reminds us that class cultures are a major element in all this, but it is to the complete range of "excluded classes" and, more specifically, to an understanding of particular group alliances that the term "popular" most refers. Opposite to "the popular" is the side with the cultural power to decide what is labelled "popular" and what is not—another alliance, "not 'the people' and not the 'popular classes,' but the culture of the power bloc."48 This line of argument has been widely accepted in recent years and for good reason. It takes us far beyond the various silences and set positions which have so effectively limited socialist analyses of popular cultural forms and practices and related questions of socialist strategy. Three contributions seem particularly notable in this regard. Most important in my view is the emphasis on historical rather than abstract definitions of the concepts of popular cultures and "the popular." The hegemony framework historicizes such definitions in a way that insures their effective separation from the condescension and pessimism of either mass cultural criticism or dominant ideology theory. Tony Bennett sums up this point aptly: A cultural practice does not carry its politics with it, as if written upon its brow forever and a day; rather its political functioning depends on the network of social and ideological relations in which it is inscribed as a consequence of the ways in which, in a particular conjunctive, it is articulated to other practices.49

In other words, the political and ideological dimensions of most cultural forms and practices are inherently movable: forms closely identified with dominant class practices at one historical conjuncture might be uncoupled from

24 Popular Cultures and Political Practices these practices and reconnected to socialist struggles in another. As Philip Corrigan notes later in this volume, such cultural struggles in contemporary media-dominated societies will necessarily involve a struggle over signification. What matters is the way in which different social interests might conduct an ideological struggle to separate particular signifiers from any preferred or dominant meaning system and rearticulate them in an oppositional fashion.50 This implies substantial revisions to the ways socialists have traditionally understood relationships between culture, ideology and social reproduction. A related issue here is the challenge made by the hegemony framework to various forms of essentialism—the view where cultural practices are said to reflect the essence of various classes or of men and women—or dominant ideology theory. A hegemonic historical bloc can only assume moral, cultural and intellectual leadership in a social formation by virtue of its capacity to be responsive to some of the demands of social and cultural opposition. Hegemony is not domination in any direct sense; rather it is an ongoing process of accommodation and apparent compromise. For this reason, "the people" never experience dominant ideologies in some abstract pure form. On the contrary, in Bennett's words: "ideology is encountered only in the compromised forms it must take in order to provide some accommodation" to oppositional interests.51 Yet, the social and cultural resources differentially brought to the negotiating process by the respective parties is rarely equal. For this reason hegemonic compromise and accommodation tends to occur only by virtue of negotiating out the most dangerous political dimensions of oppositional practices. In other work, I have provided an example of such a process with respect to the struggles surrounding the creation of a dominant hegemonic definition of sport in Canada in the 1870s and 1880s based on the ideological principles of class conciliation, rational recreation and Victorian amateur athletics.52 Similar arguments have been made in recent years in many other areas of popular cultural practices. I want to highlight one final contribution often attributed to the hegemony framework. It has been frequently noted that Gramsci's work has created a space on the left from which to theorize cultural struggle in much broader terms than the traditional standpoint of class politics.53 It is easy to make too much of this, and I am less optimistic than many people about Gramsci providing a common ground, for example, between socialist and feminist politics. Nonetheless, I think Tony Bennett is largely correct in his assessment that: ...the Gramscian critique of class essentialist conceptions of culture and ideology and the associated principles of class reductionism enables due account to be taken of the relative separation of different regions of cultural struggle (class, race, gender) as well as of the complex and changing ways in which these may be overlapped on to one another in different historical circumstances.54

In this sense, the framework does create a consistent point of departure for debating the various agendas of diverse forms of cultural politics and, possibly, for working out a coherent strategy of counter-hegemonic alliances and strategies.

Introduction 25 25 All of this is not to say that the Gramscian contribution to socialist theorizing on the politics of popular cultures is without problems. There are important debates over the many interpretations of Gramsci which have become fashionable during the 1980s. Richard Johnson has suggested, for example, that Gramsci's implicit Leninism on many points of socialist strategy has been largely overlooked in many streams of critical cultural studies research.55 Furthermore, the concept of hegemony appears to have been used as much for rhetorical effect in some studies as for any demonstrable analytic purpose. In other cases, the concept has been stretched to embrace forms of so-called "oppositionaT cultural practice that are far removed from any easily recognizable progressive politics. This latter problem is not merely a question of people undertaking different readings of Gramsci and working through their respective implications in markedly different ways. On the contrary, the problem seems more closely related to the particular historical conjuncture within which Gramsci's work has been given its most extreme populist inflections, and to the left's own longstanding myopia about the analysis of play, pleasure and the politics of popular cultures. Yet, if earlier socialist writing chronically ignored and trivialized popular culture—or emphasized its incorporation into dominant ideology or the consciousness industry—some recent writers have focussed upon popular culture to the exclusion of everything else and seem to have discovered resistance virtually everywhere in capitalist consumer cultures. The historical coincidence of this later tendency with the successes of Thatcherism and Reaganism in the 1980s is discomforting. It is almost as if a number of researchers and activists identifying with the left have been desperate to uncover cultural victories in the face of major economic and political defeats and the ongoing concentration of wealth and power. This is the context in which the phrase "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" (wrongly attributed to Gramsci, according to Ralph Miliband) has been bandied about with such regularity. Certainly, economism and the old radical pessimism about the irredeemable and strategically irrelevant features of popular cultures in consumer capitalism are still powerful tendencies on the left But their antitheses— expressed through a celebratory optimism about the autonomous nature and oppositional possibilities of almost all forms of "pleasurable" popular cultural practices—have also carved a niche in certain branches of critical cultural studies. This tendency is undoubtedly one of the most problematic elements in what Ralph Miliband has recently called "the new revisionism" in socialist writing. Miliband notes the importance of the overwhelming critique of class reductionism, statism and vanguardism in recent socialist writing, but warns against "excesses" associated with a complete rejection of the traditional anchorage of socialist theory. There are dangers associated with advancements in socialist theory that proceed only from a set of negative identifications. In much recent socialist theory, Miliband argues:

26 Popular Cultures and Political Practices ...class politics is identified with a "reductionist" dissolution of diversity, with a narrow "economism," often with male chauvinism. Organization is identified with bureaucracy, leadership with elitism, fundamental commitments with "fundamentalist" myopia. In other words, real vices and deformations which are part of the story, are often treated as if they were the whole of it, and pretty well ineradicable. This is profoundly destructive.56

One need not accept every aspect of this defense of the core principles and perspectives of classical socialist politics. Nonetheless, Miliband's polemic contains an important warning. There is a significant danger that critical studies designed to seek out and analyze the wide variety of apparent popular cultural forms of resistance to hegemony will be drawn into a theoretical position that loses sight of the importance of political economy and capitalism's powerful forces of containment It is also extremely easy to exaggerate or misrepresent the oppositional character of any set of cultural forms and practices and to examine these forms and practices without due regard either to questions of morality or the likelihood of any long-term counter-hegemonic consequences actually occurring. The moment of resistance always needs to be understood both in the ways it opposes hegemony and is often contained by it Tania Modleski has argued convincingly that some recent studies of the politics of popular cultural forms have actually become little more than apologies for practices that are extremely difficult to articulate to any fundamental transformations of capitalist relations and forces of production. Recent arguments about the "empowering" features of rock-and-roll, for example, have occasionally been pushed to a point where they resemble pluralist defenses of consumer sovereignty.57 In such cases, oppositional politics can too easily become understood as a politics of expressive individualism based heavily on style and image—precisely the ideological articulation which best defines Reagan's America58 The emphasis on style and image in studies of popular culture has been given additional impetus in recent years by various "postmodern" theories which emphasize the fragmented character of capitalist consumer cultures and their reliance upon the images made available through the mass media. There are countless versions of "postmodern" theory but one of the most widely-shared arguments emphasizes how hegemonic conventional relations between signifiers and signifieds in the media have been so radically disarticulated that cultural reality itself has come to embody a virtual free play of signifiers. In this context, signs can be repossessed and expressed in ways which open up new channels for the expression of play and desire.59 It is undoubtedly possible to link up key aspects of such arguments with the hegemony framework. But too often they take us far beyond any sense of a truly engaged response to relations of power anchored in a specific historical bloc.60 We are left either with an inflated sense of the autonomy and political power of play in culture, or a cultural politics which spurns socialism as just another of the

Introduction

27

stiffling "master narratives" of modernism. In both cases, visions of oppositional politics can once again devolve into mere hedonism or the pleasures of expressive individualism articulated through consumption.

End Notes: About the Papers in this Book This is not the place to explore in detail the strengths and weaknesses of current uses of Gramsti in the study of popular culture, the compatibilities of the hegemony framework with various "postmodernisms," or the ideological inflections of recent fashions in cultural studies theory. There are signficant points for debate in all these areas that socialist writers have only begun to address. Other issues are equally pressing. To what extent, for example, is the language of cultural struggle associated with the Gramscian turn in cultural studies overly tied to an aggressive masculinism rooted in the left's historical emphasis on male industrial labour. If so, what implications would this have for questions of combining socialist and feminist cultural strategies? What specific programs and strategies might be built out of a new awareness of audiences and various struggles over popular cultures? Where and how might such struggles be conducted and with what support? To what extent will it be possible or appropriate to co-ordinate such struggles into effective counter-hegemonic strategies? How will socialists combine a sensitivity to the politics of popular cultural forms and practices without becoming fully compromised by the ideological routines of media professionals and capitalism's great machinery of desire?61 My purpose in these introductory notes has been simply to raise these and other issues as a framework for introducing the papers collected in this volume and a stimulus for broader debate on the politics of popular cultures in Canada. All of the papers which follow reflect a sensitivity to the Gramscian turn in the analysis of popular cultural forms and practices. They break fundamentally from the traditions of mass culture and dominant ideology theory and they maintain a cautious optimism about the oppositional features of class and gender-based 'popular' cultural forms and practices. At the same time, the theoretical emphases and arguments developed by each author differ considerably. To be sure, there is nothing approaching a coherent theory of popular cultures and political practices contained within these various papers. But they provide the kind of groundwork upon which such a theory might eventually be elaborated and productively debated.

28 Popular Cultures and Political Practices

Notes 1.

I want to thank Alison Beale, Shelley Bentley, Martin Laba, Marg MacNeill and Liora Salter for their comments and criticisms on various sections of this essay.

2.

I have attempted this in an earlier analysis of ideological uses of the concept of "play" by anti-Marxist philosophers and historians. See the discussion of Huizinga and Novak in my Class, Sports and Social Development (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1983). Also see John Hoberman's discussion of socialist and right-wing writing on the "non-rational," the "labour/leisure dialectic," and the ideological uses of sporting imagery in Sport and Political Ideology (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1984), chapters 2-4.

3.

Tony Bennett, "The Politics of 'the Popular' and Popular Culture," in Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott (eds.), Popular Culture and Social Relations (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), p. 6.

4.

Bennett, "The Politics of 'the Popular' and Popular Culture," p. 6.

5.

Bennett, "The Politics of 'the Popular' and Popular Culture," p. 7.

6.

C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983 [1963]), p. 151. Also see Alan Swingewood's discussion of Trotsky in The Myth of Mass Culture (London: Macmillan, 1977).

7.

Tony Bennett makes this point in a slightly different context in "The Politics of 'the Popular' and Popular Culture," p. 12.

8.

Georg Lukacs, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," in History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1968 [1922]).

9.

Tony Bennett, "The Politics of 'the Popular' and Popular Culture," p. 14.

10.

See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Seabury, 1977 [1944]); The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, "Sociology of Art and Music," in Aspects of Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1973); and David Held's "The Culture Industry: Critical Theory and Aesthetics," in Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980).

11.

See Bertold Brecht, "Against Georg Lukacs," in Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, Bertold Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adomo, Aesthetics and Politics (London: New Left Books, 1977); and Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (eds.), Selections From the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971).

12.

Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Quartet Books, 1979), pp. 198-203.

13.

Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); and Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society, p. 236.

Introduction

29

14.

See Alan Swingewood's discussion of theories of incorporation in The Myth of Mass Culture (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 30-39; and the overview provided in Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan Turner, The Dominant Thesis (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980). Note the way in which hegemony is equated in the latter case with domination. Many treatments of Gramsci have argued that "hegemony theory" is simply dominant ideology theory by another name. In my view, this is profoundly mistaken.

15.

On this point, Daniel Drache has noted that writing on nationalism in EnglishCanada has been less well developed than in Quebec. As examples, Drache points to the work of Gilles Bourque, Nicole Laurin-Frenette, Leon Dion and even Pierre Trudeau. See Daniel Drache, "English-Canadian Nationalism," in Daniel Drache and Wallace Clement (eds.), The New Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1985), p. 162.

16.

Note, for example, George Grant's argument about the necessity of defending local cultures in Lament for a Nation (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965); and Harold Innis' views on culture in "The Strategy of Culture" (1952), in Eli Mandel (ed.), Contexts of Canadian Criticism (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1971).

17.

Arthur Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1984), p. 7.

18.

Arthur Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind, p. 12.

19.

This argument is best exemplified by Susan Crean, Who's Afraid of Canadian Culture? (Don Mills: General Publishing, 1976).

20.

Stanley Ryerson, The Founding of Canada (Toronto: Progress Books, 1972), and Unequal Union (Toronto: Progress Books, 1973).

21.

Libbie and Frank Park, Autonomy of Big Business (Toronto: James Lewis and Samuel, 1962), p. XIII.

22.

Ultimately, these arguments were given additional theoretical support— although in markedly different ways—by some of the existing work in Canadian economic history on the extraction of colonial staples (e.g., Harold Innis' work on the fur trade) and by adapting ideas from the Latin American literature on dependency and underdevelopment.

23.

I agree with Daniel Drache's argument that most of the writing on EnglishCanadian Nationalism tended to be narrowly-defined and issue-oriented. For an exception, see Philip Resnick, The Land of Cain: Class and Nationalism in English Canada, 1945-1975 (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1977). A recent political economy approach to problems of culture and nationalism can be found in Susan Crean and Marcel Rioux, Two Nations: An Essay on the Culture and Politics of Canada and Quebec in a World of American Pre-eminence (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1983).

24.

Bruce Kidd's (rather romanticized) writing on Canadian hockey in Ian Lumsden (ed.), Close to the Forty-Ninth Parallel, Etc.: The Americanization of Canada

30 Popular Cultures and Political Practices (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1970), and (with John Macfarlane) The Death of Hockey (Toronto: New Press, 1972) stands out as one of the few exceptions to this tendency. 25.

See the Special Issue on "Rethinking Canadian Political Economy," in Studies in Political Economy, 6 (Autumn 1981); and Daniel Drache and Wallace Clement, "Introduction: Canadian Political Economy Comes of Age," in The New Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy.

26.

See Bryan Palmer, A Culture in Conflict: Skilled Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Hamilton, Ontario, 1860-1914 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press, 1979); Dallas Smythe, Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness and Canada (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1981); Liora Salter (ed.), Communication Studies in Canada (Toronto: Butterworths, 1981); William Leiss, The Limits to Satisfaction (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976).

27.

Stuart Hall, "The Rediscovery of 'Ideology': Return of the Repressed in Media Studies," in Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran and Janet Woollacott (eds.), Culture, Society and the Media (London: Methuen, 1982).

28.

See Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

29.

Tania Modleski, "Introduction," in Tania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986), p. X.

30.

Tania Modleski, "Introduction," p. X.

31.

David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, p. 15.

32.

See Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some Problematics and Problems," in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (eds.), Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson, 1980).

33.

Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Penguin, 1965); E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 1968); and Thompson's critique of Williams in New Left Review, Nos. 9 and 10.

34.

Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies and the Centre," p. 20.

35.

Richard Johnson, "Histories of Culture/Theories of Ideology: Notes on an Impasse," in M. Barrett, Philip Corrigan, Annette Kuhn and Janet Wolff (eds.), Ideology and Cultural Production (London: Croom Helm, 1979).

36.

See Richard Johnson, "Histories of Culture/Theories of Ideology," and Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies and the Centre."

37.

Hall, "Cultural Studies and the Centre," pp. 31-34.

38.

See Hall, "Cultural Studies and the Centre," pp. 31-34; and Louis Althusser, "Contradiction and Overdetermination," in For Marx (London: Penguin, 1969), and "Ideology and the State," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971).

39.

Johnson, "Histories of Culture/Theories of Ideology," and "What is Cultural Studies Anyway?," Anglistica, XXVI (1-2/ 1983).

Introduction

31

40.

Hall, "Cultural Studies and the Centre," pp. 34-35.

41.

Hall, "Cultural Studies and the Centre," pp. 35-36.

42.

Since the early 1980s, theoretical work at the centre has continued to undergo reformations and modifications very much influenced by Richard Johnson who took over from Stuart Hall as the Centre's director at the end of the 1970s. Johnson attempted to synthesize the preferred cccs approach to "Cultural Studies" in a long Centre Working Paper, "What is Cultural Studies Anyway?" later published in the Italian journal, Anglistica. Johnson's essay elaborates a "circuit" of cultural production (involving "moments" of Production, Texts, Readings and Lived Cultures) which is then taken as a critical point of departure for going beyond the older "culturalisms" and "structuralisms."

43.

Tony Bennett, "The Politics of 'the Popular' and Popular Culture," p. 8.

44.

Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'," in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People's History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 238.

45.

Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'," pp. 238-239.

46.

Bennett, "The Politics of 'the Popular' and Popular Culture," p. 19.

47.

Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'," p. 235.

48.

Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'," p. 238.

49.

Bennett, "Introduction: 'The Turn to Gramsci'," in Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott (eds.), Popular Culture and Social Relations, p. XVI.

50.

See Hall, "The Rediscovery of 'Ideology': Return of the Repressed in Media Studies," p. 80; and Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: New Left Books, 1977).

51.

Bennett, "Introduction: 'The Turn to Gramsci'," p. XV.

52.

Richard Gruneau, "Modernization or Hegemony? Two Views on Sport and Social Development," in Jean Harvey and Hart Cantelon (eds.), Not Just a Game (Ottawa: Univ. of Ottawa Press, 1988); and Class, Sports and Social Development.

53.

See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: New Left Books, 1985).

54.

Bennett, "Introduction: 'The Turn to Gramsci'," p. XVI.

55.

Johnson, "What is Cultural Studies Anyway?," p. 43. Johnson also goes on to criticize what he takes to be the Gramscian over- emphasis on "production."

56.

Miliband, "The New Revisionism in Britain," New Left Review, 150 (March/ April 1985), p. 24.

57.

Modleski, "Introduction," pp. XI-XII; and Lawrence Grossberg, "I'd Rather Feel Bad Than Not Feel Anything at All: Rock and Roll, Pleasure and Power," Enclitic VIII, 1-2 (Spring/Fall 1984).

32 Popular Cultures and Political Practices 58.

I am grateful to Graham Murdock for alerting me (in personal communication) to this connection.

59.

See, for example, Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Post-Modern Conditions: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 7182.

60.

For example, I think this is a fundamental problem with Iain Chambers' analysis in Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience (London: Methuen, 1986).

61.

Some of these concerns are discussed in a very tentative way by Colin MacCabe and John Caughie in Colin MacCabe (ed.), High Theory/Low Culture: Analyzing Popular Television and Film (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986).

What the Hell: or Some Comments on Class Formation and Cultural Reproduction Bryan Palmer My point of departure comes from Russell Jacoby's fine critique of contemporary psychology, Social Amnesia. There we read: Theoretically, in Marxism, the proletariat was never composed of bourgeois individuals; this was a luxury reserved for the wealthier. However, again, the very problem is that the form of individuality that prevails in the bourgeoisie is not confined to the bourgeoisie; rather it seeps into the proletariat and cripples the process of the proletariat which seeks to constitute itself as the historical subject...A proletariat that is partially composed of bourgeois individuals is undoubtedly a contradiction, but it is a contradiction of reality, not of concepts.1

I want to endorse Jacoby's statement and to qualify it. My endorsement flows from a conviction that Jacoby is essentially right, and inasmuch as he is right, labour historians like myself, who have studied working-class culture and experience as resistance have been far too one-sided2 The cultural, like the psyche, is site of both struggle and the repression of struggle. It is two-sided.3 But I cannot simply embrace Jacoby's formulation because it needs refinement and deepening. The reproduction of bourgeois practice and ideology within working-class experience is never simply bourgeois. It is mediated by proletarian experience, by the realities of class as a lived process of exploitation and subordination. This process reveals itself across vast separations. East and west, past and present, workers have an intuitive grasp of the fundamental lack of concern for labour that guides authority's every step in capitalist societies and "actually existing socialism" alike. "Believe me," one worker told Hungarian dissident, Miklos Haraszti, during the latter's exploration of piece work and its impact on

34 Popular Cultures and Political Practices factory workers in the Soviet bloc, "they don't give a damn about what happens to you."4 Immigrant workers in American steel mills in the 1920s were no less acute in their understanding of the social relations of production: "Dees company wanta only beega money....Aw, what the hell!"5 Canadian workers, like their international counterparts, have a comparable, if often incoherent and inarticulate, conception of their place in the hierarchical ordering of output They have known, from at least the 1880s, that capital has valued them in only the most limited of ways. But because they have not always appreciated the necessity of challenging those limitations to assert the possibility of new and more humane structures of work their understanding has at times been expressed haphazardly. Ritualized skirmishes at the workplace, economistic clashes over the wage, individualistic flight from the oppressions of alienating labour, or an expectation that organization, in and of itself, will temper the "excesses" of exploitation, have often guided their determined actions of resistance. Away from work, especially in political life, the unambiguous appreciation of class grievance has been slow to mature, but has found expression in socialist, Independent Labor Party, communist, and social democratic electoral victories. Only rarely, however, among a militant minority, has the state been seen as an instrument to be seized and wielded, rather than solicited or seduced.6 This political economy is often seen as the field-of-force within which labour takes its tumbles, for better or for worse. And, to be sure, it is the determined ground upon which all class actions take place, where workers battle the impersonal logic of capitalist accumulation, confront the conscious challenge of individual employers, and run into the initiatives and interventions of state power. From contexts established by political and economic structures, however, workers have led lives of labour removed, superficially, from the point of production and the ballot box. Strategies for survival have been struck, collective destinies debated, and the discontents and debasements of one decade after another dealt with in informal, if temporary, ways. This is often the realm of culture. For all of its problematic characteristics, it is not easily denied.

Culture and Working Class Experience We can perhaps call this "a common style of proletarian life," as Eric Hobsbawm does in his 1978 essay, "The Forward March of Labour Halted?." Hobsbawm sees a range of economic, political, and cultural factors combining, in the 1880s and 1890s, to establish a working-class presence and influence in British life that persisted until the early 1950s, when the pace of labour's "Magnificent Journey" was finally slowed, if not stalled. Among the unique constellation of forces that Hobsbawm locates in this late 19th century conjuncture were: (1) the economic consolidation of Britain as the "workshop of the world," a phenomenon that transformed the majority of its population into wage earners for the first time, and that, through skill dilution, stimulated industrial unionism and the radicalization

What the Hell'

35

of the old labour aristocracy; (2) the political upheavals associated with the birth of the socialist movement and the rise of the Labour Party; and (3) the "remaking" of class experience along cultural lines that included the proletarianization of certain mass sports (football) and leisure activities (dance halls) as well as the emergence of identifiable patterns of working-class behaviour (the cloth cap or the fish-and-chip shop).7 Canada, of course, is not Britain. Its working class lacks both the geographical concentration and peculiarities of historical formation associated with the British experience. But what is remarkable is that the 1880s, in Canada, also seem to mark a significant and new stage in the history of the working class. Although by no means a majority, non-agricultural workers and their families had come to occupy a pivotal place in Canadian society, where economic change and statebuilding transformed the nature of daily life between the 1860s and the close of the century. Craft gave way to industrial organization as the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor championed an all-inclusive unionization of workers that embraced the respectable skilled craftsman, the newly proletarianized woman factory operative, and the casual labourer. For the first time, the percentage of the non-agricultural workforce organized reached meaningful levels, perhaps more than 10% across the industrialized heartland of Ontario, and upwards of 50% in individual communities. Paternalistic manipulation of the working class gave way before militant confrontation. More strikes were being fought out in the 1880s than in any two, probably three, previous decades. In the political arena the 1880s saw the first of labour's many challenges to the established political culture of Grit and Tory voiced in a number of campaigns orchestrated by the Knights and politically active trade unionists. A Royal Commission, once again the first of many, was struck to inquire into the relations of labour and capital. Giving expression to all of this was a plethora of labour institutions, from regional-based bodies like the Provincial Workmen's Association, to local city centrals, to the Toronto-dominated but nationally oriented Trades and Labour Congress of Canada. Culturally, the presence of the working class was visible in the proliferation of labour picnics, parades, demonstrations, newspapers, songs, and co-operative societies, as well as in the first attempts to depict workers' lives in Canadian fiction and to cultivate a homegrown poetry of rebelliousness. Here was a freely germinating and eclectic radicalism that expressed its antagonism to capital as it gestured toward new possibilities and alternatives.8 To claim that this represented "a common style of proletarian life" is to court the dismissal of those who know better. They assert with confidence that Canada, unlike Britain, has never had such a "common style," a culture of class experience. Other countries may have their working class, but we, in Canada, apparently occupy less favoured terrain. It may be possible to record defeats of workers (electoral and economic), to chronicle the worsening lot of labouring men and women (in times of boom and bust), or to chart the progressive evolution

36 Popular Cultures and Political Practices of the labour movement (and all that it has won for the worker). All of this is to the good, the proper subject of doctoral theses, scholarly monographs and saleable if simplistic texts. But when one ventures on to the shifting and ambiguous ground of culture, trying all the while to maintain an analytic balance, it is difficult not to be diverted by the accusatory finger pointed in condemnation or distracted by the shrieks of laughter.9 "What the hell!" Why not discuss something else? Why not indeed? There are important reasons why we must begin to explore seriously the cultural context of workers' lives, and they relate directly to the political needs of the moment These reasons do not, of course, negate or understate the necessity of coming to grips with the structural transformations in working-class experience bred of economic change and the shifting contours of productive, institutional, and political life. Rather, they should, in being explored materially, in conjunction with the above, reinforce an appreciation of the ways in which capitalist imperatives as well as working-class processes of resistance embrace a totality of the economic, the political, and the cultural. Cultures, like the capitalist structures they exist within in our society, are in constant motion. They grow, change, are transformed; a reminder that the active processes of human existence are never static and stationary. But the 'cultural' itself is not an homogeneous mass. Rather it is an eclectic gathering together of distinct forms and particular components that cross over into subcultures and specific parts of a general context of lived experience. Because of this diversity of the 'cultural', it is possible to speak of a workingclass culture only in the broadest of senses, and even here there is unlikely to be agreement Within the class as a whole, different experiences—rooted in gender, ethnicity, the character of work performed, and region—will manifest themselves in divergent ways. The material realities of structured inequality and the reproduction of labour power, however, insure that among those defined by their relation to the wage there exists a shared experience, encompassing collective perspectives and responses. Let us consider some of the forms that such perspectives and responses take, trying, at the same time, to capture something of their meaning and two-sidedness. One component of the cultural experience of labouring people emerging out of class formation is centered in the historical legacies of class conflict and collectivity that are a constant source of renewal of the workers' movement's capacity to challenge capital and the state. Over the course of the last century, Canadian workers have fought and refought a series of battles in the economic and political realms. The legacy of these battles has not been lost, and a cultural 'memory' has a persistent place in the labour movement's rare moments of selfassessment as well as in its episodic struggles. Bill White, communist leader of the Vancouver boilermakers in the 1940s, has recently recalled the strength of the Knights of Labor, as did Gordon Bishop, a Gananoque steelworker, in the 1930s.10 Labour's 1976 "Day of Protest" recalled the General Strike of 1919,

What the Hell'

37

just as the November 1981 CLC Parliament Hill protest drew trainloads of Western workers who rode the rails in the "Spirit of '35" trekking on-to-Ottawa like their counterparts of the Great Depression. But as should be obvious to all, the limitations of this facet of the experience of Canadian labour are tangible. Alongside the recurrence of conflict is the continuity of the inadequacy of labour's response, of the haphazard manner in which the working class has expressed its understanding of the oppressions it faces at work and away from the job, of the current crisis of leadership that threatens to disarm the labour movement at the very moment that armed struggle, figuratively, is so clearly on the agenda. However momentous and exhilarating, labour's most episodic and celebrated confrontations have indeed often ended in victories for employers and the state. To change this scenario, and reverse the relations of power, requires that new challenges be raised and subsequent victories be won. This would be to take one part of the experience of subordination and, through economic and political action, transform it into an active and expanding process of resistance. Making this leap from past to present, however, cannot proceed simply from an appreciation of the conflict so central in the history of class formation. For lurking behind the historical peaks of dissidence and confrontation lie the connective tissues of cultural life. In families, pubs, neighbourhoods, associations, youth groups, ethnic enclaves, and a host of leisure activities, the working class has, for one hundred years and more, lived the experience of subordination. And while there is a heroic side of resistance buried in this cultural realm, it too, like political and economic struggle, is circumscribed and limited Into every corner of working-class life, for instance, reaches a profound sense of alienation that is "handled" culturally in a dual way. On the one hand, as I have argued above, workers reject authority and oppose individual bosses with much of the strength that comprises their being. On the other hand, in an active if not autonomous sense, they create forms of interaction and consciousness that reproduce the directives of a larger and impersonal system of oppression and exploitation. In the words of Wilhelm Reich, "The exploited person affirms the economic order which guarantees his exploitation."11 Thus the "cultural" is complex. If we can accept that one part of a generalized working-class culture reaches back into the past to renew and reproduce the processes of resistance, there is another cultural moment as well. Here collective memory gives way to a masochistic binding of the class to its forms of subordination. Reinforced by the impositions of a sadistic capital, this moment is a totality composed of parts forced down the working-class throat as well as other components that are cooked and consumed in labour's own kitchen, whatever its limitations. In this we glimpse something of the dialectics of culture. This two-sidedness of the culture of labouring people is itself rooted in the single most essential feature of capitalist society, commodity fetishism. "The product," as Marx noted, "governs the producers."12 In this context, objectifica-

38 Popular Cultures and Political Practices tion and depersonalization is also reproduced within the cultural arena of everyday life: racism, sexism, reverence for patriarchy, and the assertion of "maleness." These are cultural moments of power and authority that take root in a working-class flight from its own objectification. They leave the larger and causal structures of degradation untouched, and in reproducing them in other forms actually renew and continue them. Culture, in short, reproduces capital's order, but this never happens in exactly the way that capital would dictate.

Cultural Ambiguity and Cultural Reproduction Those who have been socialized to produce commodities, but have no control over them, take the depersonalization that engulfs them and create other forms of objectification, forms more stark, ugly, and open than those which capital sustains daily in ways as reprehensible as they are respectable. Workers thus take their cues from capital, but they are also capable of extending its imperatives in acts of reproduction over which they themselves have some control. This is where the cultural displays its dialectical character: for in the self-creation of ideologies and relationships that reproduce capital's needs but also establish a style and a "turf distinctively theirs, elements of the working class act out their resistance to authority at the same time that they reinforce it In a whole series of behaviours and attitudes that must be, on their own level, condemned and challenged, there lurk submerged meanings of potential in the working class's yet to be realized project of social emancipation. Racism, for instance, regardless of its origins, now perpetuates divisions within the working class, materially and politically. Its role in the creation of an underclass from which super profits can be gleaned is unmistakable, as is its place in the stocking of the reserve army of labour. It proves an indispensable tool of discipline wielded against the working class in its moments of upsurge. Racism is thus capital's ally, and a potent one at that. Yet it thrives in the working class (as well as in other classes, where it may take a more benign, but farreaching form). While this is deplorable, it is perhaps time to look past a superficial stance of indignation. Racism finds a receptive home in some quarters of the white working class because it reasserts, among those demoralized and demeaned by commodity fetishism, the limits which the class will tolerate. From the 1840s to the present— when blacks, the Irish, Orientals, native peoples, "Dagoes, Hunkies, and Polacks," and East Indians have all been subjected to the institutionalized racism of the state, the self-interested racism of the employers, and the animosity and racialist assault of the white working class—Canadian labour has often voiced an exclusionary contempt for those who will work below "a white man's wage." Racism, historically and in the present, mediates the degradation of work experienced by white workers and challenges the progressive deterioration of the wage by asserting that certain kinds of labour are suitable only for "them," "the Other." Moreover, in opposition to the state, working-class racism at its collec-

What the Hell' 39 tive heights has posed the threat of the "dangerous classes" and their unsettling habit of defying law and order through acts of riot and large-scale intimidation that have occasionally reached (as in the 1880s) toward a critique of state policy. In their violence, in their defiant refusals, working-class racists go beyond the base needs of capital and struggle to resecure some of the territory lost to an adversary they no longer see, all the while digging themselves deeper into a hole which will only isolate themselves from co-workers and further obscure thenvision of the main enemy. This process has a long and tangled history, stretching back, at least, into the 19th century. "A manly wage" separated out the skilled from the unskilled, the peoples of colour from "real" Canadians or Americans, and, even more obviously, the man from the woman. Behind its assertions of respectability stood divisions of critical importance in the perpetuation of capitalist rule. But "the manly wage" was also the precipitating factor in a series of hard fought battles between capital and labour,13 an expression of pride in craft and an announcement that the highly skilled, often unionized, sector of the workforce demanded a measure of autonomy on the shopfloor. It thus articulated combativity as well as a conscious sectionalism, a muffled racism, and an explicit commitment to patriarchal authority, vested in the family. Although managerial initiatives and technological change have eroded much of the meaning of this 19th century notion of "the manly wage," the divisions submerged beneath it have persisted. We have touched on how race enters into this and sexism and patriarchy are there as well. Like racism, they need to be scrutinized in ways that reveal not only the objectification of "the Other," as troubling as that may be, but the class impulses that can be marshalled and preserved in struggles that speak to the social needs of humankind. Sexism and patriarchy walk hand-in-hand, providing capital with a saleable commodity and a captive market. If one objectifies half of humanity, the other reproduces labour power in a context tyrannized by gender-based forms of behaviour established in the dominant culture and appropriated within the lived experience of the working class. Both proclaim the differences in value associated with the "male" and "female" domains, and thus reinforce notions of appropriate sexual "spheres." Like racism, sexism and patriarchy reinforce basic divisions within the working class and rationalize labour market segmentation and the persistence of job ghettoes. And they, too, have an historical life within the working class that articulates the ambiguity of culture. Here, the two-sidedness of culture leaves a profound mark upon class experience. Sexist and patriarchal attachments and commitments have helped to perpetuate an exclusiveness that inhibits women's involvement in the labour movement, and restricts materially the capacity for solidarity. In bodies like PSAC, where 43% of the membership is female, none of the Executive Officers are women. Turn-of-the-century craft unions were often guilty of erecting barriers to women's entry into the labour movement. But the processes feeding into such

40

Popular Cultures and Political Practices

contemporary and historical developments have also been turned back upon capital. They have, for instance, been utilized to demand "acceptable" conditions and wages for women workers or "respectable" wages for men. On occasion, as with the Knights of Labor in the 1880s, an original chivalrous intent gave way, during struggle, to a class cohesiveness that united men and women against capital.14 What of male workers themselves? They live caught in the economically and culturally formed web of sexism and patriarchy. Many see women simultaneously as objects and as domestic providers. Out of this schizophrenic context emerges a defiant and robust masculinity,15 through which some male workers convey a style of challenging machismo. Quick to tell authority where to "get off," adept at completing the physical task, "available" when on the loose, but very obviously the breadwinner for the family, workers who adopt this posture balance their self-esteem precariously on a ledge shored up by their access to wage labour and their ability to bluff or blast their way out of any situation. Within the family, such machismo can run amuck with a patriarchical brutality; outside of the domestic unit it can lead toward violence, objectification, and selfdestruction of the worst order. But the masculinity that so often turns in these directions has other sides. At the workplace it manifests itself in an irksome tendency to rebel. In its forms of consumption, it will often express an implicit disdain for the orderly accumulation of property, attached instead to those items that provide an immediate and visible, if suspect, gratification. Finally, in its definition of the male and female spheres it lives out a sense of superiority that provides it with a much-needed sense of its own self-worth. Erected on the back of the "other," the feminine, it can transcend this gender-based distinction: manual labour, intrinsically valued in comparison to "sissified" mental labour, draws the line between productive workers and those parasitic elements that live off the labour of others. Such people lack the skills to cope in the real world of cars and bars. Robust masculinity, then, like some aspects of racism and reverence for patriarchy, does indeed shore up capital's foundations. All of these aspects of working-class experience deepen those fragmentations that divide the working class and enrich the process of capital accumulation. They reproduce the social order. But within all of these cultural forms there may well be spaces, before they open up into capital's needs, that can be transformed and marshalled in struggles of resistance. For cultures do change. Their own components, bound together in an essential two-sidedness, shift and new balances are struck. This view of certain specific cultural forms implies that we must recognize that although culture develops and emerges in the context of particular political economies, it is something more than a simple reflection of those structured social formations. Other phenomena, from sport and fashion to popular music, could have been explored to make the same point. Regardless of where we look it is clear that culture is determined and reproduced within a set of limits that

"What the Hell'

41

cannot help, in liberal democracies, but allow the working class a small measure of self-creation. As Paul Willis argues: Too often it is assumed that capitalism implies thoroughly effective domination of the subordinate class. Far from this, capitalism, in its modern, liberal democratic forms is permanent struggle. What is accommodating in working class culture is also what is resistant so that capitalism is never secure. It can never be a dynasty. Insofar as it has a stability it is the dynamic one of risking instability by yielding relative freedoms to circles of unintention in the hope of receiving back a minimum consent for rule. There is thus a deep uncertainty and changing balance of ever-heightening contradictions at the heart of capitalism.16

Until now, of course, these contradictions have only rarely produced sufficient instability to threaten capital. The particular forms of culture sustained by the working class, mediated by its material realities and resentments, have shored up the social order. The class has policed itself. It has lived those divisions and limitations so useful to the dominant culture, taking those "freedoms" capital offers up to its wage slaves as the reward for reproducing a part of their own degradation and turning them against itself. But this is not an irreversible process. The dialectics of culture move within a delicate balance of forces that renew long-established challenges subversive of capital's capacity to dominate the life of the labourer. Yet, they also consolidate authority and reinforce working-class incapacities. The balance needs to be tipped in the direction of active resistance, addressing the potential at the heart of the cultural more political and political more cultural. If we cannot do that, we might as well just mutter "What the hell!," retreating into that which capital conceives the cultural to be: a rhetoric of mere survival. For, as Goethe has written: This is the final wisdom, ever true: He only earns his freedom and his life who daily conquers them anew!17

Notes 1.

Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology from Adler to Laing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), pp. 81-82.

2.

See especially Bryan D. Palmer, A Culture in Conflict: Skilled Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Hamilton, Ontario, 1860-1914 (Montreal: McGillQueen's, 1979).

3.

This paper draws on two previous speculative pieces: Palmer, "A spanner in the works: working-class culture," Canadian Dimension, 17 (March 1983), 30-33;

42 Popular Cultures and Political Practices Palmer, "Sociability and Subordination: Workers' Culture, the Dominant Culture, and the Two-Sidedness of Working-Class Experience," forthcoming in translation in Bulletin des Sciences de L'homme (Paris). 4.

Miklos Haraszti, A Worker in a Worker's State (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 21.

5.

Whiting Williams, What's On the Worker's Mind, by One Who Put on Overalls to Find Out (New York: Scribner's, 1921), p. 20.

6.

For an overview, see Palmer, Working-Class Experience: The Rise and Reconstitution of Canadian Labour, 1800-1980 (Toronto: Butterworth's, 1983).

7.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Forward March of Labour Halted (London: Verso, 1981), Cf., Hobsbawm, Workers: Worlds of Labor (New York: Pantheon, 1984), esp. pp. 176-213.

8.

Note Gregory S. Kealey and Bryan D. Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

9.

See, for instance, Kenneth McNaught, "E.P. Thompson vs. Harold Logan: Writing About Labour and the Left in the 1970s," Canadian Historical Review, 42 (June 1981), 141-168.

10.

Howard White, ed., A Hard Man to Beat: The Story of Bill White, Labour Leader, Historian, Shipyard Worker, Raconteur (Vancouver: Pulp Press, 1983), p. 212; Kealey and Palmer, Dreaming, pp. 397-398.

11.

Quoted in Jacoby, Social Amnesia, p. 92.

12.

Engels, "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," in Marx-Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1968), p. 421.

13.

Note David Montgomery, "Workers' control of machine production in the nineteenth century," in Workers' Control in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 9-31.

14.

Karen Dubinsky, "'The Modern Chilvalry': Women and the Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880-1891," M.A. Thesis, Carleton University, 1985.

15.

See Paul Willis, "Shop-floor culture, masculinity and the wage form," in John Clarke, Chas. Critcher and Richard Johnson (eds.), Working Class Culture (London: Hutchinson, 1979), pp. 185-198.

16.

Willis, Learning to Labour: How working-class kids get working-class jobs (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1977), p. 175.

17.

Note the discussion in Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 37-86.

The Politics of Feeling Good: Reflections on Marxism and Cultural Production1 Philip Corrigan2 Because it is always useful to know where one's thinking has come from, one strategy for this paper would be to give a chronological account of how Marxism (itself to be periodized and explicated) has come to terms with the cultural. This would require a presentation far too lengthy for the volume at hand, so it seems something else is required. Another strategy is simply to focus on the contemporary—that specific sense of the contemporary which is so central to what I shall call my Marxism, making thereby no claims to legitimation from this or that text What is at issue in such a Marxism is always the unique discussion of history with a future sense. Therefore, the sense of the contemporary is always tense with a future possibility, tensed also with a past, a remembering that what surrounds us, and is within us, is historical, social, specific, and above all constructed, in whatever tight corners and bitter conditions. To look at the present situation is always to orient oneself to the past and future. On the question of the future I believe it appropriate to talk optimistically in these very dismal times. It is necessary now more than ever to hold on to that hope which is the real energy for any socialism worth its name. One sign for that optimism is precisely, and perversely, that "we" (differently)3 in Canada and North America are better equipped now to understand what is happening politically. However, at the same time, what is happening is frightful, terrifying, and the cause of extensive despair. Sartre said, in 1947, it is always a revolutionary act to be able to understand clearly and communicate a problem even in the darkest times. We are better equipped today because there have been major gains in our understanding, in the resources, knowledge and methods, made in the last fifteen or twenty years. Crudely, but importantly, there are now more of us, and we can communicate. And, of course, we argue, we are caught up in institutions,

44 Popular Cultures and Political Practices hierarchies, competition and the rest, but we can communicate. There is some set of theoretical approaches, even if as weak as a general orientation, which are shared That is a tremendous gain. A considerable part of this gain has been made precisely because of the mistakes and errors of the recent past, most clarified by those groups and individuals who suffered the negative features of the struggles, or who were wounded, during the last decade of rabid idealism and the terrorism of theory. In addition we have seen the growth of new forms of organization—that so central a concept for any form of oppositional politics—and new understandings. Finally, and here the balance sheet is much more gloomy, the very radical nature of the current forms of bourgeois rule (seen most graphically in Thatcherism, Reaganism, etc.) has placed on the agenda, often out of the mouths of the bourgeoisie itself, a perspective that had previously been quite difficult to establish from "below." I noticed, around 1970 or so, how it had suddenly become commonplace to name what was taking place in a welcome social vocabulary from "above." I remember one Times of London headline shouting, "We live in a capitalist society!" Well, that recognition was welcome news. So I want to begin with a stress upon optimism, joining Raymond Williams' recent call for making hope practical, rather than despair convincing? In so doing I want to argue that the much written crises of Marxism must be seen as containing definite gains and potentials for change, placing questions on the agenda in the place of certainties, doubts in the place of dogmatism. There is one kind of analysis, although I doubt if the word is accurately used, of the present which I seek to avoid for good Marxist reasons. This kind of analysis seizes on some forms of what are presented as "the new" and declares them, or declares that it finds in them, a totalizing difference. This is what I call cultural history by snapshots, except there is more pleasure in the photograph than in these highly schematic versions of theoretical terrorism. Certain signs of the new—whether technology, or particular shifts in cultural relations, changes in patterns of production transmission or reception—are declared to be The New Thing. Depending on the gastric juices of the theorist, these signs of the new are seen to be a Bad or sometimes a Very Bad Thing, or, less often (fatalistic pessimism is all the rage), a GoodThing, sometimes a Very Good Thing. Yet, this focus upon things is a neification and an idealism—reification because it takes the outward and immediate appearance of a phenomenon to read off a meaning ("Whose meaning?" is of course the unaskable question); idealistic because it constructs upon this metaphor a totalizing theory of the way the world is and visits back this interpretation of thing-meaning-metaphor and consequence back upon the heads of the world's population. Marxists have always had problems with misreading descriptions as prescriptions, but in the cultural realm this seems a rampant practice. "As" becomes "is." One accurate, and thoroughgoing Marxist response to this is to ask the question, "What's new?" Go back and read Daniel Defoe saying servant girls are dressing like their gentlewomen mistresses before you talk too quickly about the

The Politics of Feeling Good 45 immediacy of universal fashions in the present day. Consider the crisis that the advent of printing created for traditional manuscript producers. They called printing quotes "a poor substitute." By the same token, as Raymond Williams suggests, look how the novel as a form was discussed in the early 18th century as a degenerative form. And so on. But behind this necessary "what's new" question—itself a correct orientation to historical contexts and continuities in relation to cultural relations—there is something else which also needs identifying. This, then, will be the main theme of my discussion.

Human Capacities, Social Forms, and Cultural Struggles My Marxism offers a central conception for analyzing the history of human beings! That central conception is the contrast between human capacities and socialforms. The latter are always sites of struggle in relation to the differentiated human capacities which they in/form. There is always a moral question about these forms and it seems necessary now to discuss morality, a topic Marxists have avoided for too long. As a result the semi-religious moral language of monetarism has come to occupy that space, as though only the monetarists had morality on their side. The moral question about social forms implies no essentialism about human capacities; these are always in a tendency of becoming. Instead, the moral question asks simply does this or that form encourage, make possible, enable, differentiated human capacities to be realized, to be practiced, or does this or that form disable, cripple, deny, dilute, distort those differentiated capacities? By social forms I mean simply the ways that social actions have to be done, the regulated pattern of the normal, expected and obvious, the precisely taken-forgranted dominant features of a given type of society. This also includes categories of thought and emotion regarding social action, beliefs about means and ends and so on. Forms are not perfect sets of action or categories, it is crucial to grasp that they have different effects. Thus, if we were to discuss the standardized form of the family, we cannot then remain silent about the consequences of the form for different genders and different ages, but neither can we isolate that form from its context of regulation. What happens there is linked to what happens in schools, in workplaces, in forms of cultural communication and so on. At the heart of any analysis of social and cultural relations there are always contradictions and, consequently, a history of struggles. I refer here to generic struggles concerning nothing less than the realization of human capacities— being more alive, more happy, less threatened, insecure, and so on—and the blocks that operate on those realizations. Conventionally this history has had an evolutionary character, until more recent times when "Great Men" and their inventions take the stage. Most recently there has been an incorporation of Great Men as the movers of history into Great Corporations that give us better and better goods, spectacles, enjoyment.... But these general shifts have to be rewritten to give the credit to the subordinated majority; that is to write the history

46 Popular Cultures and Political Practices of human capacities as the activity of labour, of differentiated majorities whose activity and suffering is the secular Hell for the frequently religiously presented miracles of the modem era. It is within the history and understanding of struggle that analyses of cultural relations here and now have to be located I am speaking here of a kind of Marxism which features a three-part form of analysis and action.4 The first, operating with the motivated morality I have described, invokes what Lenin called a militant negativism, echoing Marx's famous slogan "Doubt everything." Within this negativism is a focus upon identifying the forms of power and control in social life, what they are and, above all, how they operate. We have so much woik to do on how social forms come into being, change, operate, stabilize, and switch meanings. These "how" questions are inextricably a part of thick description, getting clear the texture of social relations. The second element in the Marxism I am prescribing includes a judgement (what we umeconstructed Maoists call a sum-up) of the forms in the current moment. This sum-up is undertaken in relation to how social forms impact, or restrain, how they are contradictory, and what work can be done within and without them. I believe this phase of understanding involves being positively negative. Criticism of how social forms operate needs to be present but there should be no slippage into dismal dismissal, the wearisome reflex of the tired intellectual who wants to change people in order to find a new society and who dismisses them all when they fail to take much notice of him. Instead it is more important to see social forms as sites of struggle. Finally, having analyzed the forms, analyzed then their features and effects, there comes that most important of all stages of analysis and understanding, that of affirmation. Marxism without affirmation is not something I have to describe. It is what we lived through or know of historically. It is that Marxism of the tragic and tragedy that Raymond Williams again has analyzed. What affirmation does is to recognize that within the resources of the differentially subordinated there are means to turn, deflect, rework in and against the dominating social forms, to thereby find a language, a collective symbology, that registers what those forms deny. I am speaking of a language that registers forms of knowledge and cultural production which operate below the level of visibility of the dominant discourses. The mirror image of the ordered hierarchy of bourgeois and patriarchal knowledge can be found within subordinated groups. Yet, these groups have found fragmentary forms, traces, hints, suggestions of oppositional resistance. Much of this is left unsaid. It is shown in actions, forms of cultural association and so on: "Actions speak louder than words."5 I think we have to take the fundamental insights of work since the 1950s in cultural relations—that culture is both a set of forces, relations and productions, and cultural relations constituting a way of life—and partly unscramble and rescramble them. Otherwise we tend to have popular cultural forms radically split between two types of analyses. On the one hand are the doom laden technocratic analyses that point, correctly (but again, what's new?) to the

The Politics of Feeling Good 47 commodification of communication patterns and then transfix the audiences for and within those products and patterns as cultural dopes. On the other hand are analyses which examine the cultural field in terms of a sociology, showing what people bring to the cultural productions they relate to, rather than what those cultural messages do to those people and what those people do to the messages. This, I now see, separates forms and capacities. Insofar as the latter are recognized at all in audience studies they become only what people bring to a given cultural product; that is, the already existing resources which they can employ to make "sense" from it. This is but one form and formation in terms of a historical materialism of production, and a passive sociological rendering of reception and, rarely, response.6

Cultural Productions,History, and the Politics of the Sign Instead of this split between the types of analyses noted above, I want to suggest that cultural struggle must be seen to be around the sign. As such, it lies within and beyond the form that articulates, makes possible, one use of the signifying system being examined (e.g., television or recorded music or radio or poetry). In the last year or so I have quite suddenly come to see how cultural productions, and particularly the most commodified, most popular, can be seen to be productive of questions rather than readily prescribed answers.7 Despite massive efforts to anchor and stabilize their meanings in advance, cultural productions are only made meaningful in specific contexts of use and I think we need to be extremely wary of assigning prescribed meanings to such differentially worked upon presentations and differently used products. Consider the two forms upon which I have done my most detailed work— Hollywood and other films and ordinary photography, snaps for the family album. It is commonly said that these forms, for example, melodrama in Hollywood films, work more by raising questions then manufacturing answers—solutions, which restore the viewers to normalcy outside the camera. This, it seems to me, makes too many assumptions. First, it assumes that the audiences in their normalcy (i.e., before they go to the cinema) are unproblematic. Second, there is a serious neglect in this argument of exactly why it is that the contrived, often magical (i.e., unreal) solutions of endings register more strongly, stay in the mind, and have implications for conduct, whereas the questions, issues shared by the viewers, often recognizably real, are not supposed to so register. By seeing cultural relations as patterns of struggle, we have to see those struggles to pervade all the moments of cultural production and not reproduce in our analyses the image of activity in a minority of producers and passivity in a majority of audiences. At issue in cultural production is the struggle between content and form, within forms and concerning norms of culture, the forms through which cultural products are made public, and struggles about the meaning of cultural products. Often the value system in Marxism separates out some cultural objects and some ways of life as the best, or the normal, or at least

48

Popular Cultures and Political Practices

worthy of analysis and attention. Other cultural objects and ways of life are viewed simply as pacification for the masses. Yet, clearly, this reproduces a problematic dualism that is destructive for emancipatory change. Some forms of culture are put into boxes, for example, options in academic curricula, special programs within broadcasting systems, special sections in theatre programs, in bookshops, etc.—what Jody Berland has called the seeming "boundless hospitality" of modern cultural media.8 These boxes mark those practices, theories, and ways of life with the sign of 'interesting' in the anthropological sense that has rendered whole cultures as simply "native" or "folk" forms. That is why I have ceased to use the contrasting terms of culture and subcultures, preferring to try and register divergent contrasting and different cultural forms. We are always discussing cultures! I want to conclude by repeating that a Marxist analysis of capitalist social formations is always motivated toward action for transformation and bears a moral message of working for a set of social forms where people will be more than they are, and being more would have more.9 Yet, within this analysis we have to expand our understanding of production, generally, and in relation to culture. In so doing, our task is to find the social forms that are dominant in production, made public, and made meaningful. Secondly, we have to take the notion of struggle around the sign seriously across this expanded understanding of cultural production—an understanding which includes struggles over cultural meaning—which entail theory and pleasure, cognitive and emotional features for making meaningful what dominant forms attempt to deny or else supply in a counterfeit manner. Above all this means taking seriously the uses made of cultural presentations and how meanings are actually made, rather than believing that we can read them off from the analysis of the object itself.10 All of this involves a constant attention to history—a focus upon where official institutions come from, and how they are used This demands an analysis which goes beyond the rhetorical reasons and claimed neutrality for establishing such cultural institutions as the school, the public library, etc., as legitimate, through such practices as the licensing of some forms and the marginalization or sometimes criminalization of others. But it seems to me that the turning of the official rhetoric is best pursued by recognizing what that rhetoric is directed against. Contrary to the claims that cultural institutions or commodity provision of cultural objects are provisions into a vacuum, or effects of technological progress, they are always motivated against oppositional forms, or motivated on behalf of some other set of reasons. Peter Donnelly's discussion elsewhere in this volume of struggles over the "legitimate" social definition of sport and "appropriate" uses of time and the body provides an example of such motivations and responses to it. On a somewhat different note, Dallas Smythe has demonstrated how, official rhetoric about audience use or program quality to the contrary, commercial television is designed primarily to deliver audiences to advertisers.11

The Politics of Feeling Good 49 Yet, my point is that whatever the apparent success story of dominant cultural institutions and commodified forms we have no a priori reason to view that success as a necessary pacification of the audiences and users concerned Such institutional or commodity forms have themselves to be contextualized in terms of a fundamental contradiction between forms of signifying practice (forms, norms, language systems, kinds of making public, etc.) and the experiences, socially produced, of which that practice cannot speak directly. Speaking in telegrammar, because of space limits and my own uncertainty, it now seems to me that all dominant social forms of cultural production founder around that contradiction. Either they do not succeed in moralizing the masses in the intended direction, the public library is the best example of this, or indeed they import the old contradiction previously evident in the struggle between opposing forms so that the contradictions are now at work within the dominant forms. This is true both of shared sites of struggle such as schools, work or domestic space, and in terms of how meanings are made from provided cultural products. In a hackneyed but relevant phrase, hegemonic control is always a project, always underway, always attempted, a day-by-day activity rather than something "accomplished" once and for all. Hegemonic struggle is always in relation to counter-hegemonic struggle—all the way from the important passive resistance of silence and so called apathy, to organized practices of oppositional forms. Differentiated audiences are caught up in such struggles, trying to make meaningful not only cultural products, but their circumstances, capacities and selves.

Notes 1.

This paper is based on a taped transcript of the talk I gave in the session on "Leisure, Ideology and Cultural Production," at the Learned Societies Meetings in Guelph, May 1984. Since that time the paper has undergone minor editing and revision. I have left the paper more or less as I spoke the words in May 1984, except for one significant footnote and supplying references (largely advertisements for myself) through which particular examples of the politics being sketched can be examined. As I signify these words and their politics in a dedication to the importance of Jody Berland and her writings for my understandings then as now, (February 1986), I would also wish to affirm the importance of Roland Barthes, more distinctly, more diffusedly, for my textuality. All of my writing since 1979 has, in different ways, been a conversation with the writings of Barthes. See P. Corrigan, X/S: For Roland (forthcoming).

2

Dedicated, sentimentally, to the political poetics of Jody Berland's musical socialist theory and practice.

50 Popular Cultures and Political Practices 3.

R. Williams, Towards 2000 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1982).

4.

See P. Corrigan, "Doing Mythologies," Border/lines, 1 (1984); J. Berland and P. Corrigan, "Introduction to BOOMIST texts," Shades (February 1984); P. Corrigan, "My Body/My Self: Trying to See my masculine eyes," Resources for Feminist Research, 13 (1984).

5.

See P. Corrigan and P. Willis, "Cultural Forms and Class Mediations," Media, Culture and Society, 2 (1980); P. Willis and P. Corrigan, "The Orders of Experience," Social Text, 8 (1983); A. Willener, The Action-Image of Society (London: Tavistock, 1970).

6.

This point was discussed more thoroughly in my paper "Raymond Williams and Popular Cultural Forms," presented at the Canadian Journal for Political and Social Theory seminar, Learned Society Meetings, Guelph, 1984.

7.

P. Corrigan, "In/formation," Photocommunique (Fall 1985); read with "Spadina: A Photohistory," Parachute, 33 (1984); "What is the subject of (a) cultural production?," Undercut, 3-4 (1982); "Into-textuality," Sociological Review (November 1983); "Did I bark, or was I just imagining," C Magazine (December 1985).

8.

J. Berland, "Contradicting Media: Towards a Political Phenomenology of Listening," Border/lines, 1 (1984); J. Berland and N. Komprides, "Disciplining the 'popular': music and pedagogy," Border/lines, 4 (1986); J. Berland, "Sound, Image and Social Reconstruction," Parachute, 41 (1986).

9.

See P. Corrigan, H. Ramsay, D. Sayer, For Mao (London: Macmillan, 1979), Part 1; P. Corrigan, "Embodying Ethnicity Educationally," in J. Young (ed.), Breaking the Mosaic (Toronto: Garamond, 1986); P. Corrigan, "Towards a Celebration of Difference(s)," in D. Robins, et al. (eds.), Rethinking Social Inequality (London: Gower Press, 1982); P. Corrigan and D. Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1985); P. Corrigan and D. Sayer, Organizing the Subject (forthcoming).

10.

Now a reactionary/elitist/patriarchal form of criticism is trying to restore Professional Art Traditions, Authority and God to "proper" culture. See P. Corrigan, "Against Biological Aesthetics," Banff Letters (Spring 1983), and "Fuller's Earth," Vanguard (March 1984).

11.

See D. Smythe, Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness and Canada (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1981).

Women, Fantasy and Popular Culture: The Wonderful World of Harlequin Romance Geraldine Finn Over the last several years feminists in the United States and Britain have begun to pay attention to popular culture forms which address themselves specifically to women as women: to day-time TV, for example, talk shows and soap operas, women's magazines and girls' comics, "women's" movies and selected (teenybopper) pop music, advertising, and, of course, gothic and romantic novels.1 Most of the research focusses on the content and ideology of these various cultural products to show how their form and message work together to reproduce and reinforce current ideals of femininity, and to reconcile women to them: domesticity, motherhood, sexuality, economic dependency, subordination, self-sacrifice, and so forth.2 These "entertainments" command women's allegiance because they address real contradictions in women's lives and in the feminine ideal we expect ourselves to fulfill and be fulfilled by. They also offer solutions to these contradictions, albeit imaginary, false and momentary ones: how to find and hold a husband, for example, without appearing to be thus engaged; how to be sexy without being cheap, submissive without being servile, competent without being threatening, economically and socially dependent without being emotionally dependent, loving without being smothering, encouraging without demanding; how to be mother, mistress, maid and wife at once and feel honoured, gratified and fulfilled in being so privileged; how to be responsible for the personal happiness and success of others without the political, economic or social power that makes it possible; how to love and nurture without being loved and nurtured in return; how to be 50 and look 35, a terrific and constant cook and wear size ten; how to be interesting, "alive" and "aware" when you spend the better part of every waking day in the company of small children (or in a female job ghetto) doing routine tasks which must be repeated every day, every hour, even every

52 Popular Cultures and Political Practices minute, every week and every year, how to feel like a member of a human community when you are isolated in your nuclear home (or on a conveyor belt); how to transform three meals a day, the family wash, the agony of birthdays, annual "family" holidays and Christmas into "fun" for you too! Soap operas, romantic novels, women's magazines variously and differently address these very real contradictions and conflicts which structure the everyday lives of everyday women—though they seldom name the problems they explore as directly as I have done above. In fact, they carefully isolate and separate the various issues from the larger context of women's lives precisely to obscure the contradictions involved in following all the prescriptions for femininity and fulfillment. Most notable, for example, is the separation of sex from motherhood. For instance, in women's magazines sexual and romantic concerns are contained within the parameters of fiction or the letters page (Dear Abby, or Dear Dr. X). Similarly, in the "traditional" Harlequin Romance (economic competition has spawned new variations) the narrative always ends with marriage, children are never mentioned (not even in romantic anticipation) let alone featured in the story, and all family connections and responsibilities are kept to the absolute minimum. In addition the heroine is often an orphan and living in some strange and unfamiliar environment and the family connections of the hero are always remote.

The solutions these various cultural products offer women are imaginary, false and fantastic. While the problems and the pain they address are collective and rooted in the general social structural conditions which determine the personal possibilities of particular women the solutions offered are always individual. All these cultural forms personalize the political in this way and in the long-run, therefore, only add to the burden of femininity which they may momentarily alleviate. They perpetuate the myth that female failure is personal and accidental and not intrinsic to the social system itself. In this sense they fail to direct women to the real causes of their pain: the economic and political organization of production and reproduction which co-operate to guarantee the division of labour between the sexes and the structural domination of one over the other. Research into the mode of production of popular culture aimed at women suggests the same structure of male dominance and female subordination in the forces and relations of cultural production, distribution and consumption as in Western societies more generally.3 Yet, the most important aspect of the popular culture industry, from the point of view of those of us trying to develop revolutionary cultural theory and praxis, continues to be the least researched aspect of the field; that is, how these cultural products are actually used and considered by the people who participate in them. None of us is a passive consumer of culture, and no cultural object has meaning-in-itself , neither Hamlet nor Dynasty nor Harlequin's. In every case, cultural meaning is constituted historically and individually, in action and in relationships with others.

Women, Fantasy and Popular Culture 53 We arc all doing something when we listen to a record, turn on the radio or television, read a book—whatever. However, we may not all be doing the same thing. I went to soccer games on Saturday afternoons to "hang out"; my father probably went to watch the match. Nevertheless, in one respect we were doing the same thing; we were both engaged in the practice of winning meaning and creating space for ourselves from and within the social and cultural environment which to some extent we shared Because all of us are differentially situated in that environment according to specificities of gender, race and class, the meanings and space we seek and require from and within it will be different We cannot presume to know a priori what others differently placed from ourselves make of the same cultural phenomenon. To someone who does not read Harlequin Romances self-indulgently for pleasure, for example, they may all seem alike and equally boring and pointless, because the characters are all types which are both predictable and unchanging and, until recently, all the stories have tended to have similar endings (more on this in a moment). Conversations with women who read them—sometimes as many as nine a week—however, reveal that plot and character development are not so important to them as "the unreal, fantastic shape of the story itself," which gives pleasure by providing an "escape," both literally and figuratively, from the "pressures" and "tensions" they experience in their daily lives. As Janice Radway notes: The act of reading them literally draws the women away from their present surrounding. Because they must produce the meaning of the story by attending closely to the words on the page, they find that their attention is withdrawn from concerns that plague them in reality. One woman remarked with a note of triumph in her voice: "My body may be in that room, but I'm not'*4

The women interviewed by Radway explain that they feel "refreshed and strengthened" by their vicarious participation in the romantic fantasy: "where the heroine is frequently treated as they themselves would most like to be loved." The fact that many, and certainly the best, of the romance writers are drawn from the ranks of their readers is also politically relevant and an important consideration in any evaluation of the emancipatory potential of these kind of novels. For it means that here, in this particular cultural form, women address women as equals, speak to each other's shared pains and desires, and nurture each other through their collective participation in the production of a fantasy which consoles and strengthens at the same time as it provides a brief respite from the constant demands and contradictions of female being. It was tempting in preparing this paper to review the current research on Harlequin Romances in greater detail, some of which has been schematically indicated above, and to engage with some of the controversies which this research has generated—to convey the richness, complexity, specificity and importance of this particular cultural phenomenon which reaches so many women and is both widely enjoyed and heavily criticized. There are, for example,

54 ar Cultures and Political Practices women who argue that Harlequin Romances are pornography ana, depending on their sexual politics, deplore or applaud them on that account Others emphasize the continuity and similarity between Harlequins and "serious" literature, like the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, or Margaret Atwood. Some emphasize the expressive, independent, rebellious and, therefore, emancipatory tendency in the novels; others their usual recuperation of the heroine within the structure of withdrawal from the public world to the private domestic space circumscribed by one man. I decided to resist this temptation and add fat to the fire by trying to situate Harlequin Romances within the discourse of Culture in general, and literary and popular culture in particular. In so doing I want to emphasize three general truths about our Culture and our concepts which my own research into the recent literature on popular culture, leisure and ideology thrust upon me: i) the specificity of women's cultural experience as a structured absence rather than a presence; ii) the specificity, therefore, of women's struggle for meaning, space and self-respect within the confines of that cultural space; and iii) the resulting inadequacy and partiality of the concepts, categories and meanings produced to understand that Culture in our absence. I am certainly not the first to observe that Culture is not neutral; but we need to be reminded, it seems, that the category "Culture" is not a neutral category either. Cultural production serves someone's interests, and so does the discourse of Culture. Culture, like Science, is not an innocent category, but rather one of exclusion, passification and mystification.5 Of course, I cannot pretent to defend these claims adequately here, in the preamble to a brief discussion of Harlequin Romances. I can only indicate how I would argue the case were I called upon to do so.

Culture and Exclusion Like Art, Science, Reason, and Sex, Culture is a normative and not a descriptive category. It tells us how to behave towards a particular practice, people or product (with some kind of reverence or respect), but not much about that which is selectively included in its category. Culture always designates that which distinguishes Man from Nature, for example; but not all men and not all human beings and human activity are included. Women and women's praxis have always been defined and produced as Culture's Other—a part of Nature to which Culture is traditionally opposed and which Culture attempts to tame, domesticate, conceal, control or annihilate in its professed project of "human" development, emancipation, self-creation or expression. In the discourse of Culture, as in the discourses of Science, Art and Sex, men are its agents or subjects, and women their objects, the raw material of an essentially male cultural praxis: artifacts, mediators. In fact, if Levi-Strauss is to be believed, women are the very medium of exchange between groups of men by and in which Culture itself is at once constituted and instituted.6

Women, Fantasy and Popular Culture 55 Not surprisingly, the way women win meaning for themselves, as subjects, within Culture has no or very little cultural presence, and even less recognition as Culture. This is as true of popular culture and alternative and dissenting culture as it is of mainstream or official "high" Culture. Even women artists, novelists, musicians and intellectuals in our own time, who explicitly attempt to address women as women in their work must also produce for men and include them in their address. For it is men who mediate women's cultural presence, men who are the watchdogs of Culture. They control the norms of Culture—what is to count as art, literature, music, as well as the means and methods of its production. (The same is true, of course, of Science and Sex). Women's magazines and women's pages in men's newspapers are two of the few examples of cultural production where women address women—but they do so only through the mediation of men. In both cases, the words usually must first be approved by men to get published at all, and the words have a public presence which makes them easily accessible to men for their approval or censure. Not surprisingly then, in both cases, women tend to address women in their ideologically correct political relationship to men and economic and cultural production; that is, as wives, mothers and domestic (and sometimes sexual) labourers.

Culture and Passification (a deliberate play on the word pacify to emphasize how in this case Culture's peaceful appropriation of the activity of others, transforms possible subjects into passive objects of Cultural manipulation.)

Culture only designates that which is safe, and therefore safe to "respect" Is it not a given of Cultural discourse that we respect other Cultures? But we were only exhorted to respect them once they had ceased to threaten or challenge the ruling hegemony of imperialism, and once the world had been safely carved up between the rival State powers. Culture includes within its category only those activities and products which have been appropriated by the dominant social group and no longer challenge its hegemonic control. In fact, the very act of conferring the tide of "Culture" is itself a mode of appropriation and passification. An activity like break-dancing in Harlem, for example, or Inuit throat-singing closer to home, is designated as Cultural by those who hold the power of naming. Yet, this designation only occurs when the activity ceases to serve the interests of those who initiated and practice it and enters the political economy of the State as a commodity whose production and consumption has been alienated from its original agents and assimilated into the service and control of the ruling social order. Similarly, explicit forms of struggle, protest and dissent within a particular Culture—like Rock, Reggae, Surrealism, or homosexuality and feminism these days—are transformed from praxis to product within and by means of the magic wand of Culture, losing their political sting and their power to disturb as they are

5C

Popular Cultures and Political Practices

assimilated into Culture's rich pattern and the discourse of "Lifestyles." This is one of the important ways contemporary Culture maintains its hegemony. At the same time, however, technology, the creation of nuclear bombs and life in laboratories—very much living examples of the cultural activity of those who actually exercise social power—is rarely designated as Culture, and therefore unstudied and unregarded by social scientists and psychologists, precisely because it is alive and active and politically effective in maintaining and reproducing the status quo. Present technology is treated more like environment than praxis. Like Sex, it is naturalized and thus insulated from critical inspection and social evaluation. "Primitive" technology, on the other hand, the technology of native Canadians for example, is unhesitatingly included within Culture's category, now that it has no viable function or future in the lives of those who developed it It can now take its place as "Canadian" Culture in the museums and craft shops of those who orchestrated its extinction.

Culture and Mystification Finally, Culture mystifies the exercise of political power by obfuscating it even as it articulates it more thoroughly into the nooks and crannies of everybody's life. The prescription to "respect other cultures," for example, is essentially selfserving. It insulates dominant Cultures from criticism, but not subordinated cultures from assimilation and appropriation. For it implies that there is nothing to choose between Cultures per se—their differences just a matter of personal whimsy and historical happenstance. Furthermore, the "respect other cultures" prescription tends to collapse every kind of economic and political praxis into a neutral category: as if there were no morally significant difference between clitorectomy and face painting, or systems of collective and private property. Internal criticism of the dominant Culture can be invalidated, under this prescription to "respect," as deviancy, delinquency, maladjustment, insanity or "role-conflict"; or accommodated as "sub-culture"; or as a last resort exorcised as "unpatriotic" and traitorous. External criticism is even more easily dismissed For if all Cultures are discrete and self-contained, and if we must respect all Cultures equally, then no one outside a particular Culture is ever qualified to judge it (a justification, for example, inevitably employed by defenders of South African apartheid). So, while the rational critique of Culture is excluded by Culture's pretensions to "neutrality," the forceful appropriation and assimilation of the "weak" by the "strong" (i.e., those who do not need to colonize others by those who do) is legitimized as part of the "natural" order of things. Thus is Culture reified and mystified, and its mode of production and agents of control securely concealed beneath its category and its false appearances of neutrality.

Harlequin Romances as Popular Cultural Forms Our own Culture is dominated by a capitalist and masculine hegemony. Harlequin Romances, like every other popular cultural form, both express and

Women, Fantasy and Popular Culture S7 reproduce this order of dominance. Harlequins, however, are somewhat unique. Because they escape the scrutiny of the public, they engage much more directly and exclusively with the realities of women's personal experience than any other cultural product I know. Women address women's private pains and passions privately in Harlequins, in ways that more public forums like television shows, records and movies could never do. Harlequins (and similar pocketbook romances) do not need to seek men's collective approval or assuage their collective vanities as do these other more public forms. The market-segmented logic that is the basis of their commodity form opens up a unique space for women in thenprivate cultural use. Like all novels, Harlequins can take certain liberties because they are produced and consumed alone, away from the peering and judgemental eyes of others; and this in fact, is one of their biggest selling points. The fantasy world of Harlequin Romance is a world into which the reader can disappear and mercifully escape the relentless destiny of women, which is to be always the site of other people's wills and determinations not one's own, as well as the permanent sight/site of male objectification, manipulation and exploitation. Women in their roles as wives and mothers have little private life in the real world: they exist for others, not for themselves. In the world of romance novels they can imagine, however, that they have a rich self-existence. Because such novels do not seek legitimation as "literature," they are even freer to engage more directly, more fancifully and more exclusively with women's subjective experience than other novels which must include male subjectivity in their address if they want to be published or critically acclaimed. The largely male entrepreneurs who mediate Harlequins, by contrast, are not concerned with "standards," but with sales. They do not care what women are saying to women, or how they are saying it, just so long as women continue to buy their product. Such romances, therefore, are uniquely placed to tell us something which other cultural products can't about how women experience our Culture and attempt to win space and meaning for themselves within it; about how they reconcile themselves to its contradictions so they can live out their lives with some semblance (or illusion) of coherence, control, integrity, dignity, purpose and pleasure. The fact that there are so many women who read these romances and read so many of them, often compulsively and obsessively, testifies to the enormity and extent of women's personal needs and frustrations, as well as to the difficulty women must experience in meeting them and wrestling an acceptable meaning for themselves from and within their everyday lives.7 For every day the effort must be ritually renewed, just as faith in God is renewed through daily prayer. In my opinion, though this would not be shared by all researchers, the principle contradiction which Harlequin romances have traditionally attempted to resolve (magically, as we shall see) is that of loving a feared and hateful man

55 Popular Cultures and Political Practices who has control over you and upon whom you are ultimately dependent Others have argued that the central task of such romances is to enable women to enjoy sex, without assuming responsibility for it; to show them how they can get a husband without appearing to want one; to resolve "the fundamental contradiction in women's lives: the conflict between intimacy and power in any female/ male relationship."81 think all these are true characterizations of the Harlequin experience, but they could all be subsumed under the central problematic described above: that of loving a feared and hateful man who has control over you and upon whom you are ultimately dependent. Surely this is the central prescription of contemporary femininity, the particulars of which may change according to historical, economic and ideological circumstances. The representation of sex, for example, is a relatively new feature in these romances, corresponding to the "trickle-down" of the sexual orthodoxy of the 1960s and 1970s, prescribing frequent and varied sexual activity for "healthy" couples and sexual pleasure for women as well as men. Women have to learn these new tricks which have been thrust upon them as part and parcel of their femininity, and are expected of them by their husbands. The substitution of sexual passion for romantic love in some Harlequins of the 1980s caters to this new demand on women by showing them how to "re-read" thenown responses to others as an explicitly sexual response indicative of sexual need and sexual passion, where before they would have "read" only tenderness and selfless love. Until just recently all Harlequins have generally had the same plot structure.9 A plucky, independent, young heroine meets an older, rich, powerful and at first hated hero. The bulk of the novel consists in tracing the struggle between these two: their mutual misunderstandings and conflicts, and his eventual victory over her determination to resist him and his taunts and temptations. She finally realizes that he loved her all the time and that his strange and often hostile behaviour was an expression of his fear that his love would not be reciprocated or of his hurt after a previous love affair. The story always ends with the promise of marriage and the heroine tenderly wrapped in the hero's gentle and careful embrace—regardless of any sexual passion which may have preceded it The reader, of course, knows what will follow the marriage: dependency, domesticity, motherhood—the very things she turns to Harlequins to escape from. But reading the romance allows her to re-read and reconstruct the circumstances which brought her to this point in her life, without at the same time forcing her to confront its betrayal of her dreams. Although all Harlequin Romances are alike in this respect (and in others as we shall see), they are also very different and their readers are often highly discriminating about authors and characters, just as habitual readers of science fiction profess to be. In fact, the plots of Harlequin Romances are no more repetitive, predictable, fantastic or politically reactionary than are the plots of Dr. Who or Star Trek—fantasies which address men specifically as men and for that

Women, Fantasy and Popular Culture 59 reason alone command greater respect and recognition in our cultural calculus of value. This is reflected in the massive public and private expenditure and sophisticated technology which these productions entail and in the fact that men and women alike, conservatives, liberals and revolutionaries, are not ashamed to admit to enjoying them and celebrating them publicly in ritual displays of their support and satisfaction. By contrast, Harlequin Romances, and by association those who read them (or perhaps the determining relation is really vice versa?), are often dismissed with contempt and regarded as pariahs; a status reflected in their contrasting economic relations of production and consumption. They are extremely cheap and consumed in private, uncelebrated by public recognition, left behind in laundromats and bus stations, given free in packets of soap powder and readily discarded in garbage cans and rummage sales. I would like to exploit this contrast—between the Star Trek/Dr. Who phenomenon and Harlequin Romances, between male and female popular fantasies, and elaborate upon it further. Ernst Bloch once made an important distinction between myths and fairy tales.10 He suggested that whereas myths reflect the warrior-class and the priesthood, fairy tales are the narrative expression of the poorer classes. The acquisition of honour and glory is central to myth; access to material wealth is central to the fairy tale.11 If we acknowledge the male as the site of coincidence between patriarchal and capitalist relations, i.e., as the site for women to gain access to social and cultural presence and power, then Harlequins can be seen as fairy tales: the narrative expression of the culturally dispossessed. Among other things this expression magically transforms women from a prior condition of social and cultural exile and impoverishment into meaning, Culture and social wealth through their association with a particular man. Fantasies, like Star Trek and Dr. Who which are addressed to men's hegemonic masculinity can then be seen as equivalent to myths, within which men compete against other men for glory and honour, secure in the knowledge of their inherent Cultural control and the legitimacy of their Cultural presence. In both cases men and women differentially win meaning for themselves as individuals from the contradictions and struggles specific to their daily lives. Harlequin Romances share the following features with fairy tales: they are to all intents and purposes anonymous and they are fantastic. Yet, their anonymity and fantasy are radically different from those associated with traditional fairy tales addressed to a subjectivity which is for the most part presumed to be male. This point requires clarification. Consider, first, the question of anonymity. Harlequin Romances are characterized by anonymity of both character and author. Although they are novels, they are not like novels of the "male-stream" Culture where invention and authorship are considered important and rewarded accordingly, though they do have named authors who have distinctive styles and followings. In this respect, Harlequins are more like collective tales than individual narrations: more like

60 Popular Cultures and Political Practices langue than parole. Their focus is likewise more synchronic than diachronic: concerned with affirmation, confirmation and accommodation rather than with exploration, development or explanation, as we would expect from an "ordinaiy" novel. In addition, there is a complete lack of specificity in the Harlequin Romance, of context as well as of character. The heroine likely has no history (no past or future), experiences no maturation, never has children and rarely has parents. The tale merely requires that she be young, pretty and alone, separated from her family and thrown into an unfamiliar situation in which she must fend for herself, both materially (for survival) and socially (for emotional support). Likewise, the hero, who appears from nowhere, is mysteriously wealthy and mysteriously interested in intruding himself upon the heroine's consciousness and heart In the Morphology of the Folk Tale, Vladimir Propp argued that characters in folk tales have only three attributes: a name and external appearance, particularities of introduction into the story, and a dwelling place.12 It is precisely the same in Harlequins. Both hero and heroine apparently fall in love with physical appearance alone, for they learn nothing of each others' history or personality. All they know about the other is what particular detail brought them to the exotic place where they meet and ultimately fall in love. But, surprisingly, much is made of houses and dwelling places, especially interiors which are often described in loving and careful detail. The hero always has some large house somewhere, which is surprisingly well appointed with domestic and homely attributes—and he can usually cook. Commentators have suggested that this house signifies to the heroine (and the reader) the place which she will eventually presume in his life, the promise of marriage and mutual domestication. It is always a high spot of the story when the heroine discovers the home behind the man. Now consider the question of fantasy. Harlequin Romances are fantastic in two precise ways: (1) they rely on the intervention of magic for the resolution of the initial situation of lack—lack of legitimacy, sense (sens/direction), love; and (2) they have the form, not of a story or an anecdote, but of wish-fulfillment, for the end is given in the beginning and what interests us, as readers, is the how rather than the what of its achievement We know that the heroine will many the hero, and that his apparent brutality, indifference and contempt will be ultimately revealed as manifestations of love. We also know that her corresponding plucky resistance to his authority will finally be undermined by that knowledge. What we are interested in is the how of this transformation. For, if it can be done in fiction, maybe it can be done in fact too? Maybe our own experience of intimidation and confusion in response to a dominant man, and his cold and cruel indifference to us, could also be transformed into an expression of mutual "love?" Fantasy is, after all, precisely what reality can be confused with. It is through fantasy that our conviction of the worth of reality is established."13 The fantasy in Harlequins is not so much in the point of departure—the confrontation

Women, Fantasy and Popular Culture 61 of innocence with a cold, authoritative, scornful, older, richer man; but in the mode of resolution; in the interpretation of this dynamic as love and/or sexual desire. The magic intervenes on two levels: on him and on her. And in both cases the magical agent is the same: love and/or sexual desire; which appearing without apparent rhyme or reason or personal choice, magically transforms the meaning of the couple's struggle into Romance and its sense (sens/direction) into Marriage. In spite of the heroine's wilful and determined resistance to this hateful and domineering stranger who she did not invite into her life, she finds herself in mid-story quivering with excitement at the very idea of him or the thought of his presence. The fear and humiliation his scornful and taunting behaviour caused in her at first is subtly transformed into the thrill of love, or more recently, sexual desire; a crudely physical condition of extreme agitation which reduces her, without the intervention of her will, to a puppet of his will, to total selfeffacement (literally as well as figuratively as we will see) and total selfsacrifice. He, meanwhile, begins by being cool, condescending, bemused and even sometimes cruel and hostile towards the heroine and is transformed into a gentle, loving and nurturing mother/father figure about six pages from the end of the story. This magical transformation in the hero occurs in response to the heroine's ultimate loss of control. In her efforts to resist the hero and assert her independence from him she eventually oversteps herself and gets herself into a situation from which she must be rescued. Only then does the hero give any indication of his secret love for her: when she is helpless, dependent on him, and most importantly, temporarily unconscious—of him, her effect on him and his response to her. She may literally leave the conflict situation and move to some other place and some other interest, or, as is often the case, she has some kind of accident which leaves her unwell or unconscious. In her absence the world of struggle is transformed—as if by magic, for her action has nothing to do with it—from one in which she was alone, confused and embattled into one in which she is wanted, loved and nurtured. And she returns, or reawakens, to find herself cradled in the warm and safe embrace of the very same man who had previously caused her so much grief. The reader's pleasure in the transformation of the heroine's world is presumably enhanced by her own "disappearing" act which reading Harlequin Romances offers her. Temporarily absent from the "stresses" and "tensions" of her life she can imagine that it too will have been magically transformed when she returns to it Significantly, the hero's love is usually expressed in terms of the heroine's irresistible appearances—when she is defeated, dependent and hardly conscious, remember—and never in terms of her personality or competence. It is her body eviscerated of mind which he cradles so lovingly in his arms at the end of the story. When the heroine was assertive, competent and independent, he scorned and mocked her, when she is immobilized, passive and dependent, he

62 Popular Cultures and Political Practices loves her—indeed, desires her passionately. It is this near-necrophily, this sadomasochistic message of traditional Harlequin Romances which has led some feminists to regard them as pornography. It is interesting to note the transformations and reversals which occur in the standard fairy tale formula when the tale is addressed to women, and the specificity and demands of our social reality (as opposed to men's), which is taken as the "cultural" norm. According to Frederic Jameson, the hero in the beginning of a folk tale is never "strong enough to conquer by himself." He "suffers from some initial lack of being" (the realistic point of departure) which the intervention of a donor and a magical agent remedies by fantastic means.14 In Harlequin Romances, by contrast, the heroine in the beginning is not -weak enough and suffers from an initial surfeit of being for a woman, whose social and cultural destiny is subordination to Man in general and economic and social dependence on one man in particular in marriage. The plot in her case, therefore, is constituted by her inevitable loss of control and she wins (recognition, a husband, love, meaning, sens/direction) only by losing (consciousness, self, strength, independence). In the traditional folk tale there are several welldistinguished dramatis personae: the hero, the villain, the donor of the magic agent, the dragon, the false hero and the princess—the hero's reward. The appropriate behaviour of the hero towards each one is clearly delineated. He complies with and is deceived by the villain; tested and then assisted by the donor, struggles and defeats the dragon; discloses the false hero and wins and weds the princess. Things, needless to say, are more complicated in the usual Harlequin Romance where winning is losing and victory is defeat and we are looking at life and the production of meanings from the point of view of the would-be princess and not the man that marries her. Here the politics is personal not public and the oppressor localized in the home and family (in father, husband, brother or son). For women, men cannot be so easily differentiated into friends and foes, nor evils objectified in dragons. It is often immediate, particular, familiar men who oppress, control and terrify us, not a distant patriarch or an identifiable elite. It is quite appropriate, therefore, that the male hero in women's tales should play all these parts simultaneously. Although he is the hero, the good guy, he is also the villain. For at the beginning of the story he deceives the heroine, teasing, cajoling, lying, and challenging her into dealing with him, and making her believe that he despises and dislikes her. And it is his contradictory and confusing behaviour towards the heroine that motivates the narrative and the series of trials which are ultimately "resolved" in marriage. He is also the donor, the one who possesses the magic agent and passes it on to the heroine, enabling her success: that is, sex or love, which makes all meaningful and at the same time brings her to a place of submission before him and thus to "success" as a woman. He is also the dragon against which the heroine must struggle and lose, in order to win her place beside this Prince in marriage. (Her own strength and spirit of independ-

Women, Fantasy and Popular Culture 63 ence could also'be seen as the dragon which she must conquer to be fulfilled as a woman: her struggle with the hero is thus the means to that end). The hero is, at the same time, the false hero. For, at first, she mistakes his overt scorn and dismissal for indifference or hostility (silly, foolish woman!), until her moment of helplessness and submission, whereupon he shows his "true" self and reveals himself as her Prince, her reward and her saviour. Little wonder the heroine is confused about the appropriate response to make to this man, and by implication all men, and keeps making mistakes in her efforts to assume the correct behaviour in his presence. And no wonder, she must lose consciousness as her end in marriage approaches—how else could life with such a man be tolerated? Some Harlequins actually begin with maniage, but it is a maniage in name only. Hero and heroine scarcely know each other, appear never to have consummated their sexual relationship, have no children, do not live together and are socially, geographically and emotionally estranged. Apart from this wrinkle, however, these stories have the same plot structure as other Harlequin Romances: the independence of the heroine and the indifference of the hero are gradually revealed as mere appearances and the struggle between them finally resolves in their reunion in a loving and, therefore, "real," marriage. It is once again the how and not the what of this transformation that interests the reader: how a lonely, sterile and loveless maniage can be changed into the passionate and "true" union of husband and wife. And it is love once again that is introduced as the magical agent of this transformation. Harlequin Romances are neither shallow nor simple; rather, they are as complex, contradictory and challenging as the lives of the women who read them and regularly tax their imaginations and intellects in their efforts to construct acceptable meanings from unacceptable facts. Although the resolutions in these romances are unreal, the central contradiction they address is real enough for many women: how to love a loveless, fearsome and authoritarian man upon whom you are dependent That they are written and read in such quantities testifies to the fact that women are not entirely defeated by their circumstances, nor entirely reconciled to their fate, nor entirely convinced by the white-wash of male-stream ideology which attempts to naturalize it For the most part, Harlequins have never presented men in a very good light Until the magic moment of his transformation, the hero is consistently hateful and hated, brutal and feared. He frequently incites the heroine to anger and rage and she is never afraid to confront him with her criticisms. The reader's sympathies are always with the heroine at these times and her outbursts against him clearly permit women to express and enjoy their own rage against men vicariously, without the enormous risk that this would entail were they to attempt to do so in their own lives. On the other hand, the heroines are always presented in a very good light, at least until the very end. They are independent, self-sufficient, uncomplaining,

64 Popular Cultures and Political Practices intelligent, competent, if naive, young women, with adequate jobs and income, and no apparent desire or need for a man. They hold their own in arguments against the hero, never cry, never feel sorry for themselves or whine, and explicitly chastize themselves when they do begin to weaken and have to confess to themselves their mysterious attraction to this magnetic man. They are brought to their knees through a series of accidents and coincidences which are more a consequence of destiny than design, and to which they finally succumb as they succumb to the hero's embrace at the end of the story. What the romance provides is an acceptable interpretation of how we women get from there to here: from the independence, innocence and freedom of girlhood, to the jaded subordination of marriage, without our appearing to have collaborated in the process. These romances also provide us with an objectlesson in rereading the loveless behaviour of many men so that it conforms more closely to the romantic ideology of marriage and our own frustrated dreams therein. Like pornography, however, Harlequin Romances largely mistake the problem for the solution, and exacerbate the initial condition by recommending more of the same. Pornography gives men a diet of exaggerated masculinity to alleviate the intolerable and contradictory existential problems which masculinity itself produces. Harlequin Romances offer women a diet of femininity to solve the problems femininity generates. But it is too simple to say of Harlequins that they produce false consciousness, for they mix the true with the false, the emancipatory with the mystifying. Unlike pornography, for example, Harlequins announce themselves as fantasy and the women who read them do not confuse the world of Harlequin with the real world in which they must negotiate their real relationships with men. They turn to Harlequins for escape and comfort from that world, not for exemplary practices they can bring back to it. The professed fantasy of pornography, on the other hand, is implicitly denied by the reality of the "models" used in its production, by the biographical and documentary mode of its narrative, by the concrete and immediate sexual response it explicitly calls forth in its clientele and by the material circumstances and context of its modes of production, distribution and reception (in magazines with "features" and advertising, for example). And men do confuse the pornographic world with the real world and do use pornographic practices as examples in their real relationships with others. Harlequin Romances are one of the few popular cultural forms that address women as women and as subjects. For not only is the heroine self-defined and self-determined, but the woman who reads about her must also participate actively and personally in the production of the story's meaning. By excluding the family from the story, Harlequins also, uniquely I would say, constitute both heroine and reader as female beings for themselves rather than as beings for others, and provide women with one of their rare opportunities for taking time out for themselves and by themselves to devote themselves self-indulgently to

Women, Fantasy and Popular Culture 65 pursuing their own pleasure. Harlequins are also one of the few non-feminist cultural forms, and perhaps the only popular one, that speaks to women's rage against men and provides women with a space and a place within which their rebellion against male dominance and the cultural expectation of female subordination and passivity can be safely expressed. Thus, there is much more to Harlequin Romances than romance. Although their resolutions are fantastic and their heroines ultimately recuperated into traditional marriages, the bulk of the tale concentrates on the struggle against this inevitable destiny. The fact that so many women take pleasure in reliving this struggle—over and over again—should give us cause for hope rather than despair. For it means they have not been defeated by their pain, nor anaesthetized against it As Tania Modleski has noted, "It is not high art alone which keeps alive the desire for a world different from the one in which we live."15 Nor is it high art alone which expresses our desire for freedom and our freedom for desire.

Notes 1.

See, for example, Nina Baym, "Hawthorne's Women: The Tyranny of Social Myth," Centennial Review, Vol. 15 (1971) and Women's Fiction (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978); Muriel Cantor (with Suzanne Pingree), The Soap Opera (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1983); Dorothy Hobson, Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera (Eyre: Methuen, 1982); Clair Johnston, Notes on Women's Cinema (London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973); Ann Kaplan, Women and Film (Methuen, 1983); Annette Kuhn, Women's Pictures (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), and "Women's Genres," Screen, Vol. 25, No. 1 (January-February 1984); Tania Modleski, 'The Disappearing Act: A Study of Harlequin Romances," Signs, Journal of Women and Culture in Society, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Spring 1980), and Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982); Joanna Russ, "Somebody is Trying to Kill Me and I Think it is My Husband: The Modern Gothic," Journal of Popular Culture, 4 (September 1973).

2.

In addition to the writers noted above, see Ann Douglas, "Soft Porn Culture," New Republic (August 1980); Dorothy Hobson, "Housewives: Isolation and Oppression," in Women Take Issue (cccs Series, Hutchinson, 1978), and "Housewives and the Mass Media," in Culture, Media and Language (cccs Series, Hutchinson, 1980); Angela McRobbie, "Girls and Subcultures: An Exploration," in Resistance Through Rituals (cccs Series, Hutchinson, 1976), "Working Class Girls and the Culture of Femininity," in Women Take Issue (cccs Series, Hutchinson, 1978), "Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Critique," Screen, 37 (April 1980), and (with Trisha McCabe),

66

Popular Cultures and Political Practices Feminism For Girls: An Adventure Story (Routledge, 1981); Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen, 16(3) (Autumn 1975), and "Afterthoughts on * Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'," Framework, 15/16/ 17 (1981); Lillian Robinson, Sex, Class and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); Anita Burr Snitow, "Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different," Radical History Review, 20 (Spring/ Summer 1979); Janet Winship, "A Women's World: 'Woman'—An Ideology of Femininity," in Women Take Issue (cccs Series, Hutchinson, 1978), and "Sexuality for Sale," in Culture, Media and Language (cccs Series, Hutchinson, 1980).

3.

For a discussion of Harlequin books in this regard, see Margaret Jensen, Love's Sweet Return: The Harlequin Story (Toronto: The Women's Press, 1984).

4.

Janice Radway, "Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context," Feminist Studies, 9(1) (Spring 1983), p. 58. Also see Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

5.

See Geraldine Finn, "Women and the Ideology of Science," Our Generation, 15(1) (1982).

6.

Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

7.

For example, Harlequin alone sold 168 million new copies in 1979, translates its writers into 16 languages, and as of this writing, runs a subscription service offering its readers six new romances a month at the 1982 price of $1.50 each. In addition, Harlequins are recycled several times through second-hand book outlets and exchanges.

8.

See Janet Patterson, "Consuming Passion," Fireweed, 11 (1981).

9.

I am indebted to Harlequin author, Claire Harrison for pointing out recent changes in the Harlequin "formula." In personal communication she has noted that my version of the traditional Harlequin plot: ...certainly was the standard plot of the pre-1980 Harlequin, and I'm sure that you will still find some on the shelves, but many books now don't conform to that "formula" and, therefore, don't fit into your philosophy. In my books, heroines are older, heroes are younger and rarely "feared and hateful." The story is, of course, the boy meets girl plot—that is after all the essence of romance, but there is a wide variety of stories within the basic framework. And, contrary to what you have stated, there are any number of books that include children, and the marriage-in-name-only plot is now a very rarely used device. And, if you follow the genre closely, you will find authors who do not ignore a heroine's past, rarely make her an orphan, and allow her to develop in maturity as the story progresses. And, as for the heroine reverting to a submissive child from an independent woman, I could argue about that for hours, but perhaps my best evidence is that I recently sold a

Women. Fantasv and Ponular Culture 67 Harlequin Presents to my editor in which the hero is forced to give up his career in order to be with the heroine who is a pediatrician and will not leave her practice to be with him. Claire Harrison does not offer any suggestions about causes for recent revisions to the long-standing Harlequin "formula," and there is every reason to believe that the elements of anonymity and fantasy outlined in the paper at hand continue to play a prominent role in Harlequin books. It is likely that most of the changes which have occurred in the Harlequin formula have been a response to increased economic competition in the romance fiction market in the 1980s. This competition has led to a reconsideration of the romance fiction audience as a cluster of slightly differing market "segments" rather than a homogeneous block of female readers. Set in this context, the "traditional" formula has been adapted in keeping with marketing strategies designed to identify and target specific segments (e.g., young professional women, adolescent girls, middleaged wives and mothers). 10.

Cited in Frederic Jameson, The Prison House of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 69.

11.

Thanks to Eleanor Shapiro, Earlham College, Indiana, for pointing this out to me (in personal conversation).

12.

Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (American Folklore Society, 1968).

13.

Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Harvard University Press, 1979).

14.

Frederic Jameson, The Prison House of Language.

15.

Tania Modleski, "The Disappearing Act: A Study of Harlequin Romances," Signs: Journal of Women and Culture and Society, 5(3) (Spring 1980).

This page intentionally left blank

Sport as a Site for "Popular" Resistance Peter Donnelly Recent research in cultural studies has begun to view sport less as a totally incorporated aspect*of popular culture (serving to reproduce the values of capitalist or state socialist systems), and more as an area in which values, ideologies and meanings may be contested.1 That is, sport is now being examined as part of a much more widespread analysis of the processes of cultural production, reproduction and transformation. This work is grounded in the Gramscian interpretation of hegemony in which, as Williams has noted, hegemony "has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not all its own."2 Pierre Bourdieu anticipated this shift in the analysis of sport as a cultural form when he wrote that: ...sport, like any other practice, is the object of struggles between the fractions of the dominant class and also between the social classes...the social definition of sport is an object of struggles...the field of sporting practice is the site of struggles in which what is at stake, inter alia, is the monopolistic capacity to impose the legitimate definition of sporting practice and of the legitimate function of sporting activity.3

Such struggles may concern the form that sport should take, the emphasis of some activities while others are de-emphasized or even not supported, and the form of participation (e.g., elite/ mass participation, amateur/professional, participant/spectator sport). Moreover, as Butsch (a little patronizingly) has suggested, "the shaping of leisure...may be an important aspect of ideological hegemony, since it defines the personal everyday existence of the working class. It therefore is not as easily resisted as 'alien' forms, such as education, art or literature."4 By viewing sport as contested terrain, several aspects of the sport/culture relationship, previously considered to be problematic, now become more ame-

70

Popular Cultures and Political Practices

nable to interpretation. It is now possible to identify the paradoxical nature of sport as an element of popular culture, and the contradictions inherent in sporting practice. Earlier critical interpretations often portrayed sport primarily as an "opiate" (derived from the concept of "false consciousness") for the working classes. From this perspective, sport was seen as an ideological tool of the ruling class and capitalist state employed to distract workers from more meaningful political activity.5 Yet, over the past several years this approach has been criticized for its "deterministic," "static" and "ahistorical" character. As John Hargreaves has suggested, such an approach contains "no sense in which people might quite consciously value sports as meaningful and beneficial aspects of their lives, while at the same time being aware that ruling groups attempt to use sport as an instrument of control."6 More recent critical analysts have argued that the popularity of sport among the working class must be seen both as a meaningful element in cultural production that may frequently oppose the dominant culture, and as an element of cultural reproduction through which individuals frequently contribute to their own domination. Most of the recent work which has examined sport's links to various forms of resistance has focussed upon class relations and cultural production in capitalist societies. However, it seems no less important to explore such issues in other areas such as gender, race, and cross-cultural relations. This paper examines ways in which sport has been employed as a site for "popular" resistance in the broadest sense and provides a review of several areas of sport and leisure practice in which cultural struggles are currently underway.

Sport and Popular Resistance7 There is a long history associated with dominant groups in societies attempting to determine what is appropriate, and for whom it is appropriate, in the realm of sporting practice. Consider the following examples from social historical writing on 19th century Britain and North America:8 i) There were numerous bans on pit sports (cock and dog fighting, and various forms of baiting and ratting) in early 19th century England, while forms of hunting in which dogs tore other animals to pieces and riders occasionally rode their horses to death were both promoted and defended The former sports were largely supported by the working class, although frequently in company with young men of the aristocracy and gentry, while the latter were exclusively the province of the upper and upper middle classes. ii) Bare-knuckle boxing (prize fighting) was also banned at this time, while the practice of "hacking"—kicking an opponent on the shins, often with heavy iron bars attached to the boots—was being encouraged to produce manliness among the sons of the wealthy at British public schools as a part of the game of football. Again, the class differences in what is acceptable bodily practice is evident. iii) While it was quite acceptable for working class women in the late 19th century to engage in heavy domestic or factory labour, dire medical conse-

Snort as a Site for 'Popular' Resistance 7} quences were predicted by the medical establishment for middle class women who engaged in any form of vigorous exercise. The latter examples provide ample support for Charles Korr's view concerning the "two social values so common to Victorian England, the necessity for each class to know its place and the ability of the middle class to act with consummate hypocrisy when self-initiated regulations stood in the way of their pleasure."9 But these examples should not be thought of as manifestations of a completely one-sided assertion of power. Richard Gruneau has emphasized the capacity of sport to develop oppositional tendencies within a given hegemony, and it is through the use of a range of counter-hegemonic or oppositional practices that subordinate groups and classes are sometimes able to negotiate their cultural integrity, and to "win space."101 have reviewed a large number of examples of this type of resistance through sport, and arranged them into a preliminary set of three (often related) categories. All three categories may be seen, to a greater or lesser extent as representing forms of resistance in which sport is used, or not used, in order to make a political statement about events not directly related to sport. The first category includes most forms of self-consciously "political" protests. The second category may be termed colonial, in which sport becomes a mode of expressing opposition to a dominant culture, or is employed as a vehicle for maintaining some degree of cultural integrity in the face of attempts, either deliberate or unintended, by the dominant culture to assimilate the subordinate culture. The third category may be termed cultural resistance, in which forms of sport may be seen as resistance to the dominant culture, and the values that are reflected by that culture.

1. Self-Consciously Political Protests The widespread media attention and mass audience for international sports festivals has resulted in self-conscious attempts to use these events as a forum for political protests. An example would be the "Black Power" demonstration at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, and the "Munich Massacre" at the 1972 Olympics. Boycotting such events is also employed as a form of political opposition. In recent years, boycotts have been directed primarily at the "superpowers," and at South Africa's apartheid policies. Other examples of the use of sport as a forum for self-consciously political opposition might include demonstrations and riotous behaviour by spectators at sports events designed to prevent the event from occurring (e.g., anti-apartheid demonstrations at cricket and rugby matches, or groups protesting against cruelty to animals at a fox hunt), or may result from various sources of social discontent amongst the spectators. Finally, we may find sports events that are planned as a direct response to certain domestic state policies. For example, Malcolmson documents a number of folk football games that were played in England during the 17th and 18th centuries in order to deliberately break down the newly erected fences and dykes of the enclosure movement11

72 Popular Cultures and Political Practices

2. Opposition to Colonial Rule

One clearly identifiable aspect of colonization is the attempt, usually deliberate, to impose the cultural forms of the colonizing nation on the inhabitants of the colonized nation.12 In the vanguard are the missionaries who, along with their religion, frequently interfere with established moral codes, forms of dress, music and dance, language and education, and forms of sport Colonization is completed by armed forces, colonial administrators and settlers who may introduce new forms of government and law, or new methods of farming and manufacturing. The imposition of the new cultural forms has the effect of weakening resistance to the colonizers by minimizing the cultural solidarity of the original inhabitants. When resistance does appear it frequently takes the form of reviving the old cultural ways and/or, if as is often the case, the old ways have been forgotten or are no longer feasible, transforming the new ways into something that has exclusive meaning for the original inhabitants. The examples of resistance fall into four distinct categories. The first is the continuation of various sporting activities despite attempts by authorities to ban them. For example, Clifford Geertz suggested that the cockfight in Balinese culture came to symbolize village resistance to the externally imposed authority of the colonial Dutch and subsequently the Indonesian government who saw "cockfighting as 'primitive,' 'backward,' 'unprogressive,' and generally unbecoming an ambitious nation."13 Similarly, in the examples noted previously of government bans on pit sports, and prize fighting, the sports persisted long after the attempts to eradicate them. Modern boxing has become highly regulated through various attempts to "civilize" its practice, yet it remains an adaptation of rougher earlier forms. Bans against cock and dog fights have been more enduring, yet such activities continue to be a notable element of local cultures in various parts of Europe and North America. A second type of colonial resistance can be found in the transformation of activities introduced by the colonists into activities meaningful to the colonized. Examples here include Inca bullfighting which parodies the bullfighting of the Spanish colonists and reasserts the superiority of the condor as the national symbol14 And cricket, as it is now played by the Trobriand Islanders, represents a hybrid of the game introduced by the missionaries and a number of pre-colonial tribal activities. In both cases, the transformation of style and meaning in the sporting activities may not always appear self-consciously political. Yet, the meaning for the participants nonetheless carries with it some sense of opposition to the dominant culture introduced by the colonizing nation. A third type of colonial resistance is the more direct expression of nationalism through sport Both Frank Manning and Orlando Patterson have shown how cricket, perhaps the major symbol of white British colonialism, has become related to nationalistic feeling in the West Indies.15 Similarly, cricket served to ensure the success of the Australian Federation and provided the former colonies with a sense of nationhood. Success over the "mother country" was particularly

Sport as a Site for 'Popular' Resistance

73

important in this process.16 By the same token, the expression of nationalism through sport as a source of colonial opposition has been even more notable in Ireland. The formation of the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1884, as the governing body for hurling and Gaelic football, was part of a much broader movement to revive Irish culture in music, language and literature.17 These aspects of Irish culture had been proscribed at various times under British rule, and their survival was closely tied to the growing independence movement in Ireland. Finally, it is necessary to consider modern pluralistic societies where colonization is far more advanced. Here it is possible to see more subtle forms of cultural hegemony and rear-guard attempts to retain or revive traditional cultural forms. David Whitson has recently examined the case of shinty in the Scottish highlands and found that, despite serious attempts to retain and revive the game, it is losing ground to more dominant sport forms such as organized soccer. The reasons include: the lack of teachers who know the game, either from their own childhood or as a result of their teacher training; the structure and organization of the sport that makes it difficult to qualify for government funding; and the predominance of rugby and soccer in terms of media coverage, leading children to believe that the game is old-fashioned and not worthwhile.18 A similar situation exists in native communities in northern Canada where traditional games have declined in the face of media exposure from, and teachers trained in, southern Canada.19 The power and subtlety of this type of hegemony is striking. Despite various forms of local resistance, and, in the case of Canada, a widespread recognition of multiculturalism, the process of cultural homogenization continues apace. Levi-Strauss has noted, however, that cultural development always contains contradictory tendencies: ...on the one hand towards homogenization and on the other towards new distinctions. The more a civilization becomes homogenized, the more internal lines of separation become apparent; and what is gained on one level is immediately lost on another. This is a personal feeling, in that I have no clear proof of the operation of this dialectic. But I don't see how mankind can really live without some internal diversity.20

The international homogenization of culture (sometimes referred to as "Americanization") may be in the ascendancy, and leads to an essential problem. Such standardization of cultural forms has carried with it a powerful tendency to naturalize the dominant values and social relations of capitalist consumer culture. With this naturalization comes a loss of choice and a loss of awareness of choices which may be available. Yet, some of the tendencies noted below may indicate that Levi-Strauss' dialectic is working.

74

Popular Cultures and Political Practices

3. Other Forms of Cultural Opposition There is often a close connection between anti-colonial and other forms of cultural resistance. In this case, in addition to reviving traditional cultural forms (not necessarily by subordinate groups), opposition often takes the form of creating or adopting new and alternative activities. Some of the recreational and sporting activities developed or practiced during the 1960s and 1970s in association with the various "counter-cultures" of the time provide a case in point These included activities such as surfing, frisbee, early "hot dog" skiing, and the various co-operative and "new" games (e.g., earth ball). The playful and expressive qualities of these activities were accentuated precisely because the dominant sport forms lacked such characteristics and seemed overly rationalized, technologized, and bureaucratized. Related to this, was a notable increase during the 1960s and 1970s in participation in high risk sports and recreational activities which also involved a low level of structure and organization, and allowed some thrill-seeking in what, for many, was a total care "smothering" environment.21 Eichberg has summarized a number of recent "alternatives" to the dominant sport culture by noting the increasing interest in reviving traditional, indigenous and folk games; the increasing involvement in non-competitive outdoor recreations; the development of various forms of expressive activities such as dance and musical-gymnastic performances; and, the increasing popularity of meditative exercises such as Tai Chi Oman.22 However, as Renson has argued, when examining the relationships between sport and culture, it is important to recognize that "because games are always forged in the workshop of culture, they vary from one culture to another, if not in their form (text), then in their cultural meaning (context)."23 Practices having "alternative" meanings in one culture may be fully incorporated into dominant social relations in another. Historical differences raise similar complexities. Raymond Williams has alerted us to the importance of searching for residual and emergent cultural practices which may exist alongside a dominant culture and offer alternatives to it.24 Not all of these "alternative" practices necessarily have an "oppositional" character insofar as the threat they may pose to the dominant cultural order. Furthermore, whatever oppositional content might be found in popular "alternative" practices can be quickly lost through incorporation. As Williams notes, such practices often become "re-interpreted, diluted, or put into forms which support or at least do not contradict other elements within the effective dominant culture."25 For example, surfing and freestyle skiing appeared to lose what little oppositional content they may have once had as they developed the trappings of modern rationalized sport (e.g., sponsorship, organized competitions, governing bodies, officials, prizes, media coverage, etc.).26 Along somewhat similar lines, it can be argued that traditional activities have generally lost their original cultural meaning when they have become incorporated as tourist activities (e.g., cliff diving in Acapulco; "running the bulls" in Pamplona; and, the Highland or

Sport as a Site for 'Popular' Resistance

75

Caledonian Games). Attempts to retain or revive aspects of "traditional" cultures frequently face this risk, either as a result of their profitability or because of their need to raise money in order to make the activity possible.

Ongoing Struggles over the Social Definitions and Meaning of Sport The catalogue of forms of "popular" resistance in sport noted above is by no means exhaustive. My point simply, has been to show some of the many ways sport can be understood as a contested cultural terrain. Such struggles over the legitimate uses of sport and the body, over times, spaces and opportunities for sporting practice, or over the social and political "meanings" to be articulated through such practices, are an ongoing feature of the social production of sport in contemporary life. In the passages which follow, I want to examine briefly three highly visible areas where such struggles are currently being waged. All three areas provide some marvelous examples of 19th century style hypocrisy on the part of dominant groups.

L Sport and the Issue of Recreational Land-Use The idea of parks is well established in the minds of most people in Canada and the United States. But it is an idea that should be seen in terms of the sociohistorical themes of containment and resistance. There is a substantial literature, for example, on the development of urban parks and playgrounds, and their place in various struggles over "rational recreation" and social control.27 Less serious scholarly attention has been paid to the formation of national parks, especially in Canada.28 National parks, and the various state/provincial parks and conservation areas can often be seen in one sense as spaces that have been "won" for public use often in the face of considerable opposition. Yet, they may also be seen as pockets of land to which there are certain controls on access, and in which there are very clear definitions on what is "appropriate" behaviour. Thus, what are often presented to the public as "public" parks or even "people's" parks, are actually well-policed areas in which there are precise limits on the form that leisure and recreational behaviour may take. Parks are areas for environmental conservation in which the norms of behaviour are quiet, non-intrusive, recreational (within limits) and educational. By forbidding the cutting of wood, the picking of flowers, the use of trail bikes and snowmobiles, beer drinking, noisy parties and loud music, the social definitions of appropriate use are ostensibly made in the general interest Yet, very often many of these prohibitions are manifestations of long-standing middle class cultural standards. Middle class standards tend to prevail by the use of rules that work against working class users. In addition, the range of behaviours precluded to park users are frequently available to the middle class on privately held land and at cottages, etc. Thus, the rules are created, not by the working class, but by the middle and

76 Popular Cultures and Political Practices upper classes who are able to avoid them in other settings and who, incidentally, are frequently the individuals who benefit most from the noisy, intrusive and commercial exploitation (clear-cut logging and strip mining) of the vast tracts of land that have not been defined as parks.29 But perhaps the greatest hypocrisy lies in the noisy, smelly and intrusive use that is made of national park wilderness areas by the wealthy for heli-skiing, heli-hunting, and that latest abomination, heli-hiking. 2. Boxing The attack on boxing in recent years, while generally couched in medical terms, may be seen to have social and cultural sources. Stimulated by several recent and highly publicized ring deaths (e.g., Willy Classen in 1979, Cleveland Denny in 1980, and Duk Koo Kim in 1982), the attack has been launched in numerous newspaper and news magazine articles, radio and television news, and current affairs programs. It represents the most sustained assault on boxing since moral reformers in the mid-19th century were able to rule prize fighting illegal and has resulted in the first rule changes since the turn of the century in several places (e.g., thumbless gloves, and the reduction of tide fights from 15 to 12 rounds). The attack on boxing in the 1980s has taken three basic forms—medical (being hit in the head is not good for you); paternal (boxers are exploited by unscrupulous managers and promoters); and cultural (boxing is "uncivilized"; it brutalizes and degrades both the fighters and their audience). The attack becomes sociologically significant if we ask, "why boxing?," and, why at this particular time in history? It is far too simple to put current opposition to boxing down to some abstract and impersonal process of cultural change. For as Stuart Hall has suggested, "cultural change" is merely a "polite" euphemism for the process by which some cultural forms and practices are driven out of the centre of popular life, [and] actively marginalised."30 At the conclusion of the 19th century attack on prize fighting, the sport did not disappear. It was appropriated in a more regulated form by the middle class as "boxing," inserted into the private educational system of the public schools, and re-defined as a "civilized" activity that would promote manliness, morality and patriotism—a part of the "muscular Christianity" movement that, through trade and Empire, spread around the world. A new set of rules were devised by John Chambers in 1867, sponsored by the Marquess of Queensbury, and have changed little to the present day. As part of the "gentlemanly art of self-defence," the teaching of boxing was extremely widespread.31 In Canada, boxing was practiced at camps, and in playgrounds, schools and universities. It became an Olympic sport in 1904, and in the 1920s, an Ontario Board of Education circular advised high schools to teach it Boxing reached its height of participation during the Depression of the 1930s, but there was ongoing criticism of the sport. By the 1950s, revelations about fixed fights and links with organized crime, together with growing medical concerns, were notable elements in a major decline in the sport. It was dropped

Sport as a Site for 'Popular' Resistance 77 by the Canadian YMCA in 1954, the Canadian armed forces in 1955, and by most Canadian universities during the 1960s. A major feature of the recent attack on boxing has been the redefinition of the sport as both "uncivilized" and dangerous. The question of danger is usually posed in terms of accumulated medical evidence. Yet, on this point, one cannot help be struck by the arbitrary manner in which boxing is singled out as a dangerous sporting activity. Boxing invariably ranks quite low in all reviews of death and injury rates in sports. Obviously, progressive neurological damage is a major concern and may not show up in injury rates. But when this is compared with a one in ten chance of not getting off a Himalayan mountain alive, or the fact that 25% of the individuals who drove in the Indianapolis 500 (and 30% of the winners) died in race cars, boxing seems rather mild. In fact, medical evidence has been available for at least 50 years showing that progressive neurological damage is sometimes associated with boxing. Current and sophisticated evidence derived from brain scans and the like has merely reinforced previously existing knowledge. If boxing is less dangerous than a number of other sports, and if there is no new medical evidence of the danger of boxing, then the attack may be seen to have social and cultural roots. As the "gentlemanly art of self-defence" was abandoned by the middle and upper classes and in educational systems during the 1950s and 1960s, boxing was progressively marginalized. It once more became the almost exclusive domain of the male underclass, and particularly of racial minorities. And it is in this form that the sport has increasingly come to be defined as "uncivilized" and inappropriate. Viewed in this way, recent critiques of boxing have often carried with them either a subtle racism (e.g., there are few white professional champions and the sport's most visible participants are often implied to represent the less civilized elements or "problem" groups in society), or a deeply-rooted paternalism (e.g., minority group members are not aware of their best interests or else are susceptible to exploitation and must be protected by the state). In addition, and as a corollary to the tendencies noted above, the current attack on boxing has typically denied the existence of strategy and defense. Boxing has been deskilled through an emphasis in the media on images of fighters beating each other senseless before a crowd that is baying for blood.32 There are, of course, other cultural struggles that have had an impact over current perceptions of the legitimacy of boxing. Masculinity and manliness, for example, have gradually come to be redefined, especially for middle class males, such that it has no longer become necessary to "prove" one's sex in combat. Also, there has been a growing anti-hitting movement in Western societies expressed most graphically in women's struggles against male violence and in the growing concern over child abuse. Set against this background, one can begin to appreciate the broad range of forces leading to the redefinition of boxing as culturally inappropriate. The attack may be couched in medical terms, but its roots lie in a complex set of class, racial, gender and state relations.

78 Popular Cultures and Political Practices

3. Women and Exercise The ways in which men have defined appropriate sporting and recreational practices for men and women are too numerous to mention. I will just concentrate on two modern cases here: exercise programs and body building. Women's exercise programs were originally a clear assertion of strength and independence, women taking charge of the health and fitness of their own bodies in the aftermath of such works as Our Bodies, Our Selves.33 In addition, it has been suggested that exercise classes provided women's space—sites in which women could interact in a supportive way in the absence of men. But the fitness movement for women has become effectively contained and re-defined in a number of important ways. First, there has been a redefinition of feminine beauty such that the "hourglass" figures and long blond hair of the 1950s and 1960s, and the "Twiggies" of the 1960s and 1970s, have now become the "Haidbodies" of the 1970s and 1980s. The fit female body has become the new sex object This is perhaps most evident in the television exercise programs, particularly the now infamous "20 Minute Workout" (and the equally popular with males, Jane Fonda video) that has become soft-core pornography with a range of camera angles that could only have been devised by men, and with panting exhortations to perform "lower," "faster" and "harder."34 Secondly, the movement has been exploited by the fashion industry. One recent observer of the fitness/fashion scene notes, for example, that: "Fitness fashions include expensive body suits with plunging necklines and rising thigh lines, enhanced by matching leg-warmers, designed to keep leg muscles warm but work fashionably sagging around the ankles."35 To these may be added such items as "aerobics shoes" that are now available in a range of colours to match outfits. This has resulted in a number of bizarre manifestations. Undergraduate students engaged in projects on this topic have noted a number of cases in which women at home with preschool daughters have dressed in fashionable outfits in order to participate in television exercise programs with their daughters who were dressed in matching outfits. Similar contradictions are evident in the case of women's body building. First, the sport is completely controlled by the male-dominated International Federation of Bodybuilding (IFBB), and almost totally defined by male impressions of what is appropriate. For example, the Federation imposes a ban on steroid use for women, but not for men. But, perhaps most significant is the fact that women have not won the "right" to build as much muscle as they can, and expect to win contests. In addition to muscularity, drama, co-ordination, dance and "sex appeal" are all a part of the scoring for women's body building. The difference in social definition between men's and women's body building is most evident in the following quote from the President of the IFBB, Ben Weiden "For women there is a limit to how much muscle will be accepted but for men there is no limit"36 Because the most muscular women have been marked down

Sport as a Site for 'Popular' Resistance 79 in contests, competitors, ironically, have taken to training in ways that emphasize aspects of traditional femininity. This paper has provided only a superficial exploration of some of the ways sport has provided a site for popular resistance of various types and has been the object of cultural struggles between dominant and subordinate groups in society. It should be noted, that the terms "dominant" and "subordinate" should not be thought of solely in class, race or gender terms. As Stuart Hall has suggested, "the side with the cultural power to decide what belongs and what does not—is, by definition, not another 'whole' class, but that other alliance of classes, strata and social forces which constitute what is not 'the people' and not the 'popular classes': the culture of the power-bloc."37 There are all kinds of shifting alliances and interest groups engaged in cultural struggles (e.g., the coalition of feminists and fundamentalists against pornography, who are opposed by a coalition of feminists, artists and pornographers against censorship). In the case of boxing, those in support may include some, but by no means all, of the underclasses who are mostly involved as participants, a range of individuals in the disciplinary and social welfare professions (e.g., armed forces, police, prison service and social work) who may see boxing as a character builder, or at least a useful occupation that may prevent delinquency, older individuals who may themselves have boxed at school or in university, and individuals who may have a bureaucratic or financial stake in maintaining the sport. On the other hand, the abolitionists may include the medical establishment (the Canadian, British and American Medical Associations have each called for a ban on boxing), many educators, clergy, and the media. The coalition of abolitionists comprises a significant minority: "on April 4, 1983, the Toronto Star reported that 36 per cent of Canadians interviewed by the Gallup poll (and a majority of women and persons over fifty) said they wanted professional boxing abolished."38 Resistance to attempts to abolish boxing will continue while there are profits to be made from boxing, but also while it remains culturally appropriate behaviour for many males, especially within the working class, and while it provides any kind of outlet from poverty and unemployment. Resistance is also apparent in the other examples presented. Many women are refusing the redefinition of "sex-object," protesting against the soft-core pornography of television exercise programs, and, in at least one case (London, Ontario) have founded a feminist fitness club. Also, while it is too much to argue that every "party" in a provincial park, or every trail bike and snowmobile that is ridden in a prohibited area is an example of resistance to cultural domination, there are undoubtedly cases where such instances demonstrate the clash of cultures. While it may seem "natural and normal" (the object of successful hegemony) to ban boxing on medical grounds, or to maintain exclusively quiet, nonintrusive and conservationist use of parks, it is the function of critical studies of leisure and sport in popular cultures to deconstruct the ideology, seek out the

80 Popular Cultures and Political Practices vested interests, and challenge established myths. The principal task is to achieve an understanding of the ways in which popular culture is made, not simply imposed from above.

Notes 1.

See, for example, R. Gruneau, "Sport and the Debate on the State," in H. Cantelon and R. Gruneau (eds.), Sport, Culture and the Modern State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), and Class, Sports and Social Development (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983); J. Hargreaves, "Sport and Hegemony: Some Theoretical Problems," in Cantelon and Gruneau, Sport, Culture and the Modern State, "Sport, Culture and Ideology," in J. Hargreaves (ed.), Sport, Culture and Ideology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), Sport, Power and Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986).

2.

R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 112.

3.

P. Bourdieu, "Sport and Social Class," Social Science Information, 17 (1978), p. 826.

4.

R. Butsch, "The Commodification of Leisure: The Case of the Model Airplane Hobby Industry," Qualitative Sociology, 1 (1984), p. 232.

5.

See, for example, P. Hoch, Rip Off the Big Game (New York: Doubleday, 1972); and Jean Marie Brohm, Sport: A Prison of Measured Time (London: Ink Links, 1978).

6.

J. Hargreaves, "Sport, Culture and Ideology," p. 43.

7.

Much of the material included in this subsection is drawn from P. Donnelly, "Resistance Through Sports: Sports and Cultural Hegemony," in Sports et Socie'te's Contemporaines (Paris: Socie*t6 frangaise de Sociology du Sport, 1983).

8.

For further discussion, see H. Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution (London: Croom Helm, 1983); R. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700-1850 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973); J. Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture', R. Rosenweig, "Middle Class Parks and Working Class Play," Radical History Review, 21 (1979); H. Lenskyj, "A Kind of Precipitate Waddle: Early Opposition to Women Running," in N. Theberge and P. Donnelly (eds.), Sport and the Sociological Imagination (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1984).

9.

C. Korr, "Review of Association Football and English Society, 1963-1915," Journal of Sport History, 7 (1980), p. 115.

Sport as a Site for 'Popular' Resistance 81 10. R. Gruneau, Class, Sports and Social Development. 11. R. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700-1850. 12. The term "colonization" might equally well be applied to class. When new class distinctions began to crystallize during the early part of the 19th century, the upper and middle classes attempted to "colonize" the lower classes with missionaries (evangelicalism), and in terms of "rational recreation" movements in the United Kingdom. One may also see a "re-colonization" of immigrants in their host societies (e.g., West Indians of Canada and the U.K.) where assimilation may lead to a further loss of the culture that survived, or developed as a result of, the initial colonization. This issue is treated briefly in the section on cultural resistance. Finally, it is evident that tourism may have almost as devastating an effect on surviving cultures as the original colonization. 13. C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 414. 14. In Inca bullfighting a condor is captured and tied to the back of a bull where it cannot be harmed, but is able to injure and torment the bull. The bull is continually tormented by firecrackers, and eventually sticks of dynamite until it is killed, at which point the condor is released. 15. See O. Patterson, "The Cricket Ritual in the West Indies," New Society, 26 (June 1969); F. Manning, "Celebrating Cricket: The Symbolic Construction of Caribbean Politics," American Ethnologist (1981). 16. See W. Mandle, "Cricket and Australian Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century," in T.D. Jacques and G.R. Pavia (eds.), Sport in Australia (Sydney: McGraw-Hill, 1976). 17. See W. Mandle, "The I.R.B. and the Beginnings of the Gaelic Athletic Association," Irish Historical Studies, 20 (1977). 18. D. Whitson, "Factors in the Survival of Local Games Against the Inroads of Metropolitan Culture," in B. Kidd (ed.), Proceedings of the Fifth Canadian Symposium on the History of Sport and Physical Education (Toronto: School of Physical Education, University of Toronto, 1982). 19. See V. Parashak, "The Heterotransplantation of Organized Sport: A Northwest Territories Case Study," in B. Kidd (ed.), op. cit. 20. C. Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning: Five Talks for Radio (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), p. 20. 21. On this point, see N. Elias and E. Dunning, "The Quest for Excitement in Unexciting Societies," in G. Luschen (ed.), The Cross-Cultural Analysis of Sport and Games (Champaign: Stipes Publishing, 1970); and P. Donnelly, "Vertigo in America: A Social Comment," Quest, 27 (1977). 22. H. Eichberg, "Olympic Sport: Neocolonization and Alternatives," International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 19 (1984).

82

Popular Cultures and Political Practices

23. R. Renson, "The 'Traditionalist' Renascence: The Revival of Traditional Forms of Sports, Games, Dance and Recreation Around the World," Keynote Address, 26th ICHPER World Congress (Wingate Institute, Israel, 1983), p. 4. 24. R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (op. cit.). 25. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), p. 39. 26. Even "frisbee," the archetypal playful activity of the late 1960s and 1970s, now has formal courses, teams, professionals and sponsors. 27. See Roy Rosenweig, "Middle Class Parks and Working Class Play." 28. For journalistic accounts, see E.J. Hart, The Selling of Canada: The CPR and the Beginnings of Canadian Tourism (Banff: Altitude Publishing, 1983); and S. Marty, A Grand and Fabulous Notion: The First Century of Canada's Parks (Toronto: N.C. Press, 1984). A more recent and more scholarly account can be found in Leslie Bella, Parks for Profit (Montreal: Harvester, 1986). 29. The actual definition of park is also subject to re-interpretation, as evidenced by several recent examples from the United States when commercially exploitable resources were discovered in park land. 30. Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'The Popular'," in R. Samuel (ed.), People's History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 227-228. 31. Much of the material in the following paragraph has been drawn from B. Kidd, F. Corner, and B. Stewart, For Amateur Boxing: The Report of the Amateur Boxing Review Committee (Toronto: Government of Ontario, 1983). 32. Thelma McCormack has noted in her article, "Hollywood's Prizefight Films: Violence or 'Jock' Appeal?," Journal of Sport and Social Issues (1984), that the image described here is more a Hollywood fantasy than a consistent reality. 33. Several of the ideas that follow are drawn from a symposium on "Gender, Leisure and Cultural Production," organized by the Queen's University Centre for Sport and Leisure Studies in 1983. 34. See Margaret MacNeill's recent analysis of women's television exercise programs in Jean Harvey and Hart Cantelon (eds.), Not Just a Game: Essays on the Sociology of Canadian Sport (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988). 35. C. Sudol, "We're Wasting 'Precious Time' in Fitness Pursuit," Burlington Post (11 April 1984), Cl. 36. Cited by A. Matheson, "Women are Muscling into Bodybuilding," Burlington Part (19 May 1984), p. 11. 37. Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'The Popular'," p. 238. 38. B. Kidd, F. Corner and B. Stewart, For Amateur Boxing, p. 20.

Remembering the Audience: Notes on Control, Ideology and Oppositional Strategies in the News Media Robert Hackett Recent cultural studies researchers have stressed that cultural practices and meanings can be implicated in modifying, reproducing, resisting and/or transforming social relations of power, domination and inequality. Notably, the sphere of popular culture has come to be seen as a key site for such struggles— the ground upon which the terms of capitalist hegemony are affirmed, contested and negotiated1 In this regard, studies of popular culture have demonstrated how the hegemonic process—the winning of mass consent to an established social order with its attendant definitions and understandings of the world—is never static, seamless, monolithic or non-contradictory. Rather, it is an ongoing struggle to modify and reproduce, through ideological institutions and practices, the meanings associated with dominant social relations. In late capitalist society, neither popular culture nor hegemony can be understood apart from the so-called media of mass communication. In contrast to previous eras, popular culture is now dominated by commodified images, mass produced and distributed by large oligopolistic corporate enterprises of national and international scope. More than most industries, mass media combine economic importance with ideological potency. Media produce not only profits, but also meanings. A number of characteristics render the media particularly effective and central hegemonic institutions. Media messages and images are available, indeed almost unavoidable, continuously and pervasively; Canadians spend about seven hours a day with mass media—more than any other activity except work and sleep. Media dominate leisure time, and partially satisfy popular entertainment needs, at the same time as they provide both information about the

84 Popular Cultures and Political Practices social and political world beyond our direct experience and the very categories with which to make sense of the world Just as hegemony is "a silent domination that is not experienced as domination at all,"2 the most ideologically laden media fare is often experienced as purportedly objective news or as mere entertainment Finally, under the appearance of a vast diversity of formats, genres, texts and channels, media recycle and amplify a relatively small number of themes and stereotypes—themes which tend to be consistent with hegemonic ideology.3 It is important for cultural studies research and, more generally, for people concerned with building counter-hegemonic political practices, to develop a clear position on the ownership, organization and hegemonic character of the mass media in Canada. How important is the issue of ownership and control to problems of ideology in the media? In what ways do the media play a hegemonic role in Canadian culture? What political strategies should be pursued in relation into the existing media and what alternative policies should be proposed and fought for? Such questions are by no means new, but the Anglo-Canadian left has only recently begun to debate them adequately. The essay at hand focusses on news media and represents a modest attempt to contribute to this debate.

Manipulating the Media: Radical Instrumentalism The attitudes of socialist critics of the media in Canada have long been strongly flavoured by what I shall call "radical instrumentalism"—that is, the view that social and cultural institutions are the instruments of those who occupy elite decision-making positions (corporate owners, State bureaucrats, senior politicians), and who manipulate them in their own narrow interests, at the expense of subordinate social groups.4 Thus, Canadian Dimension's brief to the 1970 Davey Committee's enquiry into the mass media stated that "Directly and indirectly, the ownership of the media serves as an ideological instrument to underwrite the social power of the owners, and of the social groupings to which they belong and give their sympathy."5 As an exemplar of a radical instrumentalist perspective on media ownership, however, I shall take Wallace Clement's 1975 study of the Canadian corporate elite.6 There are others, but Clement's is probably the best articulated and researched such statement in the Canadian context7 Following the lead of John Porter's The Vertical Mosaic, Clement examined bibliographic data on the Canadian media elite, which he defined as the executives and directors of the 15 largest-circulation private sector media complexes. He found that members of the media elite disproportionately came from a privileged upper-class background, and were highly integrated (through interlocking directorships, social interaction, and media dependence on advertising revenue) with the rest of the corporate elite. Due to such background and integration, Clement argued that the media elite were prone to accept an ideology favourable to capitalism and its structural inequalities. Along with other kinds of media content, news reports reflected this process. Clement noted that "through appointments and active

Remembering the Audience

85

participation in publication and broadcasting, the media elite are able to act as 'gatekeepers' to the management of news."8 It follows that "the content of the mass media as screened by these gatekeepers is also biased in favour of the existing arrangements of power."9 (Clement was forced to make this judgement on the basis of the scarce content evidence available in Canada at the time, a body of literature which has since expanded.)10 Finally, Clement inferred that the media, "through the ideology they present, reinforce the existing political and economic system," thus providing "one of the bases of legitimacy upon which the prevailing order of inequality is founded."11 It should be noted that leftist criticisms of media ownership and the legitimation of dominant ideology can be divided into at least two broad categories. First, there are those who perceive increasing concentration and conglomeration as the main threat to the diversity of political and cultural expression they would like to see in the media. Such a view problematically implies the existence of a previous golden age of informed publics communicating through diverse and competitive media. It seems to carry the implicit prescription of anti-trust action, breaking up chains and forcing conglomerates to divest themselves of either thenmedia or their non-media holdings in order to promote the local ownership of media outlets. A second, more radical variant regards capitalist ownership itself as the problem, and favours the alternative of State ownership, as with the CBC, or some form of workers' and/or community control. What sort of political program flows from radical instrumentalism? Clement provides some clues: ....the task of the media in contemporary industrial society is translating information to the public. If this is to be an objective undertaking, at least two factors must be present. (1) The media elite must be sufficiently autonomous from other elites in society to provide a detached perspective... and present a critical accounting of the policies and persuasions of these other elite.... (2) The media elite must contain within it representations from all major social groupings in proportion to their occurrence in the population at large; that is, equal access to decision making positions must prevail.12

I want to stress that radical instrumentalism represents an important advance over liberal myths of a pluralist press which simply reflects the interests of its readers, or neutrally disseminates information throughout a culture characterized by high levels of normative consensus. Yet, the analysis and political prescriptions of radical instrumentalism rest on some problematic assumptions.

1. Ownership Control of News Media? First, it is assumed that the media elite exercises real discretionary control over the selection and presentation of "information to the public," and uses that control deliberately to shape news in accordance with ownership's interests. Yet the available research suggests that apart from smaller-circulation "independent" newspapers, editorial intervention by owners is not the norm. Newsroom

86 Popular Cultures and Political Practices staff are routinely accorded a considerable degree of independence. Furthermore, with the rise of increasingly impersonal corporate ownership and the "social responsibility" ethic particularly strong in broadcast journalism during the past few decades, private news media are better viewed as profit-maximizing commercial enterprises rather than the propagandist^ tools of eccentric media barons.13 The Kent Royal Commission on Newspapers14 found almost no evidence that chain executives tried to impose a centralized editorial policy on its member newspapers to find their own particular market niche: "There is no economic incentive to produce anything more than the service that results from the relatively unhindered application of general news criteria."15 To be sure, Ralph Miliband may be correct that even without direct editorial intervention by owners: ...ideas do tend to "seep downwards," and provide an ideological and political framework which may well be broad but whose existence cannot be ignored by those who work for the commercial media. They may not be required to take tender care of the sacred cows that are to be found in the conservative stable. But it is at least expected that they will spare the conservative susceptibilities of the men whose employees they are and that they will take a proper attitude to free enterprise, conflicts between capital and labour, trade unions, left-wing parties and movements, the Cold War, revolutionary movements, the role of the United States in the world, and much else besides....16

But if the capitalist ownership of news media per se is the main determinant of a conservative slant to news content, one would expect a greater difference between crv and CBC news coverage than in fact appears to be the case.17 Moreover, radical instrumentalism cannot account for the presence and even prominence of news stories which are embarrassing to business interests, and for the pressure which capitalists outside the media have sometimes exerted on media (which are supposedly "theirs") to obtain more favourable treatment Examples include the aggressive advocacy advertising campaign launched by the oil industry in both the U.S. and Canada, and the organization of an "Ad Hoc Committee for Improved Business Reporting" to rap the knuckles of the CBC in 1980 over perceived anti-business bias.18 How can one explain the irruption of anti-business stories in the capitalist media? It would be possible to argue that the media, much like the State, need to be relatively autonomous from the business class, if they are to serve the longterm interests of that class. This autonomy will inevitably bring the media into conflict with particular segments of the business class at particular times. This explanation would be a "structuralist" one, at odds with the apparent instrumentalism of Clement and Miliband.19 But beyond the need for autonomy from particular fractions of capital, the media, like the State, must find ways to incorporate popular aspirations in order to maintain their own legitimacy and credibility. Response to popular tastes cannot simply be reduced to an expression of general capitalist interests. Such incorporation, and the consumerist ideology

Remembering the Audience

87

of news discussed below, help to explain why the capitalist media may sometimes appear to be "anti-business."

2. The Romanticism of Workers' Control and Open Access

One conclusion which can be drawn from the assumption that class-biased media owners control content, is that by changing the social composition of the media elite, a fundamentally different ideological orientation in the media would rapidly result. Such changes might include making the media elite more socially representative (as Clement suggested), or greatly increasing audience involvement in media production, or abolishing the elite altogether through a regime of workers' control. These steps may be a necessary precondition of a more democratic media system, but they would not in themselves be sufficient. With respect to workers' control, the example of newspapers produced by newsworkers on strike is instructive. Such newspapers may offer a different angle on labour news (especially the progress of their own strike). But they tend to accept, for example, conventional news values and categories for compartmentalizing stories. And why not? Why should we expect journalists immersed in their occupational culture suddenly to abandon their professional codes? Nor would increasing audience access or the social representativeness of editoridal decision-makers necessarily result in rapid change. The very existence of bourgeois ideological hegemony sets powerful limits on the capacities of subordinate social groups to spontaneously generate and give voice to their own counter-hegemonic definitions of social reality. The romantic vision of liberating the media through open access overlooks the deeply-entrenched codes of signification embedded in current media practice, codes which (with all their profoundly ideological consequences) are shared by audiences as well as by journalists. Consequently, as Gardner notes, it is futile to talk only about: ..."taking over" or "throwing open" the media in a way which really does beg all the questions about representation and ideology in the media which the semiologists have spent some time in elaborating. The media cannot be viewed just as abstract technical resources outside ideology.20

Furthermore, such proposals do not in themselves address the question of the financial basis of the commercial media and its consequences for media content

3. Audiences as Dupes?

Radical instrumentalism's emphasis on the gatekeeping role of media owners can lead it too promptly to nominate the audience for the task of smashing the media's ideological chains. However, since the counterpart of elites manipulating the media are the masses who are being manipulated, radical instrumentalism can also tend towards an opposite image of the audience as a collection of dupes passively swallowing propaganda. To be sure, without alternative sources for making sense of a situation in which they lack direct experience, audience members will in the long-term be pressured to adopt the media's agenda of

88

Popular Cultures and Political Practices

political issues, and even their criteria for evaluating them. Such acceptance may indeed outweigh audience skepticism of particular news accounts. But quite apart from the dubious assumption (discussed above) that media elites systematically and deliberately manipulate content, it is wrong to regard the audience as passive. Recent media theorists are building new conceptions of the audience which take us away from overly pessimistic assumptions about mass society, without leading to the ideological sanguinity of theories which regard the audience as independent or even sovereign. Briefly put, such new conceptions regard the social meanings that are derived from media content as the result of negotiation between the preferred readings on tap in media content, and the subcultural or class-specific frameworks which audience members bring to bear in their decoding of media messages.21 Viewing the audience as passive dupes carries at least two political dangers. First, it leads us to underestimate the possibilities for audience resistance. Second, it can imply contempt towards "the masses," and "their" popular cultural forms, thereby reinforcing a tendency towards elitist vanguardist politics.

4. Bias and Ideology Radical instrumentalism's conception of what constitutes capitalist ideology in media content tends to be limited. Clement, for example, fails to distinguish between "bias" in the narrow sense of favouritism towards a particular party or interest group (such as business), and "ideology" in the broader sense of a social and cultural force which helps to maintain (or challenge) dominant social relations. Consider the example of a hypothetical consumers' magazine. It might be consistently "biased," in the eyes of business executives, because it continually accuses them of corporate corruption and shoddy products. Yet at the same time, the magazine offers ways of making sense of the world and of locating ourselves within it which help to validate and perpetuate capitalist social relations, which in turn make inevitable the existence of big business. At the same time as the magazine encourages readers to be wary in their purchase of commodities, it invites them to define themselves as consumers of corporate products—rather than as exploited producers who share common interests with other workers. Consumerism may sometimes be a nuisance to business, but it helps the market to function. Thus, crudely put, the magazine's "bias" against business conceals its more important ideological support for capitalist consumer culture. I shall suggest below that by narrating the news from the assumed viewpoint of the "average consumer," the mainstream media work very much like this. I have argued elsewhere that "bias" and "objectivity" are inadequate for conceptualizing the ideological functioning of the mass media.22 Clement seems to exhort the media genuinely to fulfill their own ideals of objectivity, diversity and detachment, and to remove their bias in favour of capitalism. But the very routines by which journalists generate "objective" news accounts are part of the media's ideological functioning. These routines mean, inter alia, that journalists

Remembering the Audience 89 ground their reports in the statements of the accredited representatives of major social institutions, and present "both sides" of controversial issues. Such procedures have the effect of orienting media's senses of social reality (what counts as a noticeable and newsworthy event, or a credible and important fact) in the knowledge-generating routines and interests of the powerful—while at the same time creating the appearance of an open forum for public debate. Consequently, the left ought to ask itself whether to demand that the media live up to the ideal of objectivity—or whether, by contrast, it ought to be arguing for quite new editorial criteria. Similarly, ought we to argue for a genuinely pluralistic and diversified media, reflecting the different viewpoints in proportion to their empirical occurrence in society (as important an advance as this would be)? Or ought our ultimate goal to be a media system which is "structured in dominance" in favour of building a new kind of society? If so, how can this be achieved without the heavy hand of State censorship and "correct line-ism?" Whether the two objectives of diversity/representativeness and progressive orientation are equivalent, or even compatible, is a question that for too long has been ignored.

Media and the Audience Commodity All of the above shortcomings derive from regarding the media as instruments for manipulation by their corporate owners. To be sure, radical instrumentalism has some foundations within classical Marxist theory, most notably the formulation from The German Ideology that "The class which is the ruling material force is at the same time its ruling intellectual force...and has control over the means of mental production, so that, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it."23 However, I suggest that an even earlier assertion by Marx provides a more fruitful starting point for the analysis of the mass media in modern capitalist society: 'The first freedom of the press consists in it not being a trade."24 To focus on the commercial nature of the mass media draws our attention to the structural imperatives according to which they operate, rather than the (marginal) discretionary control over them which may be exercised by the media elite. Dallas Smythe in particular has developed the critique of commercialism into a fullscale theory of media, as part of the Consciousness Industry, in advanced capitalist society. This is not the place for even a rudimentary elaboration of his theory. Suffice it to note that for Smythe, historical materialism must begin with the key question, namely, what is the principal product of the mass media?25 His answer: audiences, whose services are sold to advertisers. Audience-power is a form of work, in which audience members both market goods to themselves and reproduce their labour power. The emergence of audiences as commodities is associated historically with the transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism, the development of mass disposable income during the 19th century, and the need to predict and manage demand through the marketing of brand name products.

90

Popular Cultures and Political Practices

Smythe argues that the failure to identify the audience commodity, and the misidentification of "ideology" (or "propaganda," "messages," "information" or "entertainment") as the media's principal product, has been a characteristic "blindspot" of Western Marxist as well as bourgeois media analysis. Certainly, this perspective is evident in Clement's work. For example, he asserts that the "major activity" of media organizations is "the dissemination and reinforcement of ideologies and values," and "the task of the media in contemporary industrial society is translating information to the public."26 For Smythe, such a starting point is problematic because it leads to "idealism" and "subjectivism." Several important implications—and problems—follow from regarding the media as institutions which help to produce and sell audiences to advertisers.

1. The Market as Censor The systematic pressure to produce profitable audiences has acted historically as a de facto form of political censorship, militating against the survival of radical newspapers. Quran has argued this case persuasively in his overview of the development of the British press during the 19th century.27 The cost of establishing and operating newspapers rose sharply during the latter part of the century, due to technological development, expanding circulation, and declining street prices. Meanwhile, a market was emerging for mass-produced consumer goods. Accordingly, the financial basis of newspapers shifted from readership sales and political subsidies to advertising by the producers of brand-name products. By the 1920s, the primary transaction was no longer the reader's purchase of a newspaper copy, but rather the newspaper's sale of space-cwm-audience attention to advertisers. Advertisers were interested in audiences of two kinds: the affluent, who had sufficient disposable income to purchase luxury products; and the mass audience, whose relative lack of purchasing power as individuals was compensated by its huge size. Because advertisers were prepared to pay more for each affluent reader than for each mass reader, newspapers reaching well-heeled audiences could survive with smaller circulations than could journals with mainly working-class readers. Affluent readers have, as it were, a disproportionate "vote" in determining the type of media that survive. Obviously, the political orientation of the newspaper tends to be congruent with that of the readership which it seeks. A "popular*' tabloid seeking a heterogeneous mass audience will likely adopt, at best, a populist style and middle-of-the-road reformist politics. An elite "quality" newspaper will cater to the conservative dispositions of its affluent readership. During the early 19th century, radical papers had reached working-class readerships which were quite large (though ultimately not large enough to entice advertisers seeking the mass market). Faced with a new economic structure characterized by the emergence of the mass audience, radical papers began to disappear. Those that survived pursued one of the following strategies: 1. Redefine the target audience and move "up market," moderating their politics accordingly.

Remembering the Audience

91

2. Find institutional sponsorship from trade unions or a political party, with its attendant inhibitions on independent radicalism. 3. Rely upon readership sales for financial support This third option meant restricting circulation in order to avoid the losses which would be incurred by seeking a wide distribution in the absence of substantial advertising revenue.28 As the Kent Commission has admitted, "it was left-wing viewpoints that tended to be under-represented as commercialism increased its hold"29 In effect, the economic structure of the modern popular press functions as a form of censorship and social control—one which restricts the political diversity of the media quite independently of the intentions and manipulations of owners.

2. The Free Lunch Smythe argues that the entertainment and information programming which we are accustomed to regard as media content, is little more than a "free lunch" designed to entice an audience for the most important content—the commercials. For several reasons, the distinction between editorial content and advertising ought not to be overstated: both types of content "must catch and hold audience attention and present its message in an entertaining way"; most news is itself produced by corporations, governments and other institutions, "and hence has the same manipulative intentions as does explicit advertising"; and finally, "advertisers require that the program content be suited to the advertisements."30 This last point has enormous significance in interpreting the ideological function of news: not only must the free lunch attract an audience of appropriate size and demographics, but it must also cultivate a frame of mind appropriately receptive to the advertisers' messages.31 In style, themes, topics and format, the programming complements the positioning of audience members which is attempted by the ads. Television news, for example, addresses or interpolates the viewer as a taxpayer, a consumer, a citizen and potential voter, but rarely if ever as a worker. This interpolation is evident in various ways: the dominant "consumer inconvenience" angle of strike reporting; the labelling of tax increases as "bad news"; the interpretation of oil price increases in terms of what it will cost the driver "at the pump"; and the general image of "the public" constructed in the news—a passive, homogeneous force affected by the machinations of business, labour or politicians. Ultimately, the most fundamental ideological constraint on news which is produced within commercial mass media may well be the necessity of telling stories in a way which attracts an audience prepared to adopt a consumerist lifestyle. And this imperative affects all media faced with the necessity of selling audiences, regardless of the character of ownership—chain or independent, locally-owned or conglomerate, and private or State.32

92 Popular Cultures and Political Practices

3. Audience Complicity

A third implication of the audience-production imperative, is that unlike other commodities, audiences participate in their own production. They share complicity, as it were, in their own positioning. Therefore, the temptation (with which Smythe flirts) to compare audience work with "mind slavery" must be resisted.33 While the ideological notion of consumer sovereignty must be rejected, there is a sense in which commercial media "give people what they want"—or, as Raymond Williams' concept of incorporation implies, part of what they want, or what they think they want34 Consequently, a social strategy for the media cannot ignore audience understandings of what counts as "news," and as "bias," "propaganda" and "objectivity." We also need to understand the gratifications which audience members seek when they attend to the news. Such expectations, which have been nurtured by the mainstream media, would constrain a socialist reconstruction of the production and dissemination of news. One of the main strengths of conventional "objective" journalism is its ability to make sense of the world in an ideological way, without appearing to be propaganda produced by people with an axe to grind. An analogy can be drawn with the market in capitalist society, whose class-biased distribution of wealth appears to result from an impersonal and natural allocation of rewards. Like the market, objective (bourgeois) journalism appears to be above and beyond the messy, self-serving world of politics and ideology. It would be difficult for a socialist system to sustain this legitimizing appearance of class neutrality (and natural-ness), whether in the realm of media production or that of economic planning as a whole.

4. Is Audience Complicity a Form of Work?

To see media institutions as involved in the production and sale of audiences, and to acknowledge a degree of audience complicity in this process, is not to accept every feature of Smythe's argument First, Smythe's discussion of the signifying practices of media workers and the ideological characteristics of media content tends to be schematic and determinist Although his analysis seems an advance over radical instrumentalism, he shares its tendency to reduce media content to an immediate effect of the political economy of media industries. Second, his view of the self-production practices of audiences seems on the one hand curiously restricted and is in some ways too close to a more orthodox "audience manipulation" argument On the other hand, his notion that the selfproduction of audiences is a form of labour is debatable. Audience tastes or preferences, and viewing/listening/reading time, are factors in the constitution of audiences as commodities. But the real work of producing the commodity— that is, obtaining and presenting the content, positioning the viewer, and constituting a plurality of viewers as an audience-object—is done by media and advertising organizations.

Remembering the Audience

93

The view of audiences as "workers" which figures in the "blindspot" paradigm as outlined by Smythe and others has provoked considerable response, including a recent article by Mike Lebowitz which critiqued both the original paradigm, and my particular use of it in an earlier paper on media strategies for the Canadian left35 Lebowitz argues that the original paradigm violates a basic methodological principle of Marxism, by taking as its starting point the selfconception of media capitalists, who see themselves as selling audiences to advertisers. Such a conception obscures the underlying structural reality, namely, that the media's economic role is to sell the commodities of industrial capital to consumers, and hence to reduce the costs of circulation of that capital. "Profits of media-capitalists are a share of the surplus value of industrial capital." Lebowitz is skeptical of conceptions of the audience as working, exploited, a source of surplus value, and/or a commodity. They are, he feels, inconsistent with the Marxist tenet that "surplus value in capitalism is generated in the direct process of production, the process where workers (having surrendered the property rights over the disposition of their labour-power) are compelled to work longer than is necessary to produce the equivalent of their wage."36 For Lebowitz, one clue to the invalidity of the blindspot paradigm is the point that: if media capitalists sell an audience to industrial capitalism, it must first be theirs to sell. The begged question then becomes: how did this commodity become the property of the media-capitalists in the first place?....How is the contract specified—and how is it enforced!*1

Lebowitz's reservations about audiences working are appropriate. But his dismissal of the "blindspot" paradigm goes too far when he downgrades the sale of audiences (or at least, their attention to media messages) as a commodity to the mere "self-conception of media capitalists" and insists that the nature of the "contract" be specified. In my view, such an objection places too much emphasis on the formal/legalist criterion of juridical ownership. After all, broadcasting capitalists do not legally "own" the airwaves over which their enterprises transmit, yet their broadcasting licence is effectively one of the assets of the enterprise. Lebowitz's perspective would not seem to be able to explain the huge discrepancy between the book value of tangible physical assets (such as printing presses, or TV production facilities) which media corporations own, and the much greater prices for which those corporations are actually bought in ownership transfers. It is surely access to audiences which is being bought and sold. Lebowitz asserts, rightly, that many points in my earlier discussion of media and audiences are not dependent on the "blindspot" paradigm. Nevertheless, that paradigm is relevant to this, and to the present discussion, for two reasons. First, to the extent that certain elements of the "blindspot" model have validity, it is important to explore their implications for an understanding of media ideology and oppositional practice—questions on which its protagonists have previously been largely silent. Second, it is a useful corrective to some established socialist

94 Popular Cultures and Political Practices ways of thinking about the product of the media as "content" which is "biased" by corporate ownership. To argue, as Lebowitz does, however, that my position "scorns...the prescription of social ownership" and dismisses "matters like capitalist ownership of the media" as "quaint," is a serious misinterpretation. Neither here nor in the earlier paper do I mean to suggest that capitalist ownership of the media is irrelevant, or that social ownership and workers' control of the media are unnecessary. Rather, my criticisms are directed against a particular understanding of the relationship between ownership and media ideology as a direct one, centering on the identity, social background, manipulation, interventions, and/or intentions of media owners. Ownership structures are not irrelevant; they are a key mechanism whereby the media are tied into the logic of capital accumulation, cornmodification, and production for a market. But it is the significance (for news as a form of popular culture) of that logic—as distinct from juridical ownership alone—which needs to be stressed.

Formulating Oppositional Strategies In light of the preceding analysis, what are some possible strategies for the socialist movement on the question of the hegemonic character of the news media? Sketchy as they are, the following suggestions are intended only to begin to identify an agenda for collective discussion.

1. Using the System

First, given their need to maintain credibility and to incorporate popular-cultural interests in order to build audiences, the news media are not a watertight system. Movements for social change should continue to use the opportunities presented by the contradictions and "leaks" within the media in order to influence the content This strategy can surely be pursued without falling into the traps of playing media politics—traps (such as staging media spectacles at the expense of grassroots movement building) which Gitiin has identified in his study on the news media/New Left relationship during the 1960s.38 On the other hand, it is crucial that capitalist ownership and the commodification of cultural production remain key targets of socialist criticism. Without a fundamental restructuring of media industries even the best media tactics will be able to do little more than give the free lunch a somewhat more progressive flavouring; the basic menu will likely remain the same.

2. Alternative Media

Second, socialists can continue to produce alternative media, which are distinct from conventional news media in at least the following ways: i)

Their internal operations are co-operative and democratic, rather than characterized by a hierarchical, rigid division of labour.

Remembering the Audience

95

ii)

In terms of media relationship to sources, the views and statements of the official spokespersons of bureaucratic institutions, and the leaders of the dominant electoral parties, are treated with less prominence and greater skepticism. Conversely, more attention is given to the response of ordinary people affected by governmental and corporate policies.

iii)

Readers/listeners/viewers are regarded as participants in a common struggle, rather than as a commodity whose attention can be sold The information supplied to audiences is intended to help them build an alternative culture and to take control of their lives, rather than to encourage consumption or to entertain on the basis of established social values.

iv)

Much of the news in the conventional media consists of events which threaten or disrupt established institutions and values. Alternative media are more inclined to represent the world in ways which portray such values and institutions as themselves a potential threat to the well-being and rights of oridinary people. Moreover, alternative media are more willing to report on ongoing social/political processes without being restricted by a rigid dependence on "hard news" events, a dependence which is reinforced by the conventional media's daily production cycle.

However, the preceding analysis has identified a crucial difficulty facing alternative media within the existing economic system. It is financially difficult to expand beyond an audience ghetto of the committed, given that alternative media: (1) do not reach audiences whose demographics are sufficiently attractive to advertisers; and (2) do not offer editorial content which is complementary (or at least non-antagonistic) to the advertising messages. Alternative journalism is also constrained by the oligopoly of a few news agencies in providing "hard" news from distant locations—agencies which gear their selection and construction of news towards their major clientele, the mainstream American press. It would be worth exploring and debating the potential for an opening for alternative journalism created by the emergence of new user-paid media services, such as videotex, videocassettes, and pay-TV. Notwithstanding the control over the development and application of such technology by transnational corporations, there might be such an opening if such specialized services could profitably be marketed. One is reminded that the capitalists might compete to sell the rope that would hang them! However, the process of audience fragmentation associated with the development of specialized services might ghettoize alternative electronic journalism as much as its print-media predecessor. Such reflections ought not to induce inactivity, however. The importance of building alternative media lies in the fact that the process of transforming social patterns of communication is not merely a policy to be instituted by some future socialist government Rather, it is unavoidably part of how we build the socialist movement in the first place.

96 Popular Cultures and Political Practices

3. Media Criticism

A third element of strategy involves conducting and publicizing socialist criticism of the mainstream media, in order to expose the limitations and biases of the existing media, to undermine their naturalness, and to increase popular receptivity to alternative journalism. Once again, the difficulty is to publicize the results of such analyses to a broad audience. But occasionally there is scope for such analysis within mainstream media themselves, particularly when it is perceived to be topical.

4. Internal Reform

Fourth, journalists and their unions can attempt reform from within the beast The major impediment would be the lack of incentive for journalists to rock the boat and to challenge their own occupational training, in the absence of strong pressure from outside. As the Kent Commission noted, most Anglo-Canadian journalists "do not question the structure and general principles of the traditional libertarian press."39

5. A Media Reform League

A fifth element of strategy is to institutionalize a pressure group, perhaps an expanded version of the Canadian Broadcasting League. It could sponsor public debates on questions of media structure and orientation, conduct studies, undertake public education, and lobby for progressive legislation on the media industry. It would be an appropriate forum to formulate media policy proposals, which must surely address the financial basis of the media in addition to their ownership and control. Canadian Dimension exhibited a healthy awareness of the importance of financing in its submission to the 1970 Davey Committee enquiry on the mass media. It proposed, for example, a 100% tax on corporate advertising and public relations budgets, with the proceeds used in part to maintain common printing facilities for all publishers in a particular locality. Advertising revenue would be pooled and distributed to the different newspapers on the basis of circulation, thus preventing advertisers from reinforcing trends towards monopoly by disporportionately favouring the largest-circulation newspaper.40 A further approach, possible within a capitalist economy as Swedish practice shows, is government subsidization of newspaper production, based on the amount of newsprint used for editorial content41 Such measures as the abovementioned are intended to counteract the pressures of commercialism by reducing the costs of starting or running a newspaper, and hence to promote press diversity.

6. Audience Resistance

Finally, socialists ought to consider the potential for a politics of audience transformation and resistance. In part, this strategy includes promotion of critical

Remembering the Audience

97

awareness of the media amongst the consumers and potential producers of media content, in educational institutions and public forums. It could also include greater critical feedback from progressive members of the audience to media organizations, including at its most radical, boycotting particularly obnoxious media outlets and/or their most prominent advertisers. The object is for viewers/ readers actively and publicly to resist their ready incorporation into the audience commodity. While a major obstacle is posed by the privatized conditions under which audiences are assembled, it is perhaps the strategy which contains the greatest potential for widespread involvement It is based on the assumption that, in Eco's words: In political activity it is not indispensable to change a given message: it would be enough (or perhaps better) to change the attitude of the audience, so as to induce a different decoding of the message—or in order to isolate the intentions of the transmitter and thus to criticize them.42

In his analysis of the potential for reforming American journalism, Herbert Gans argues persuasively that fundamental change will occur only when audiences change their orientation to the news, seeking from it useful information rather than entertaining spectacles. In turn, he argues, such new audience expectations probably depend on America becoming a participatory democracy, in which ordinary people need information in order to participate effectively in making decisions which affect them.43 (He does not add the Catch-22, however: that the existing structure and orientation of the news media industries may be one important reason why America does not move in that direction!) The above strategies are not mutually exclusive; indeed, to some extent they are mutually supportive. For instance, media criticism could help stimulate audience demands for change, which in turn would strengthen the potential for internal reform or alternative media. The important thing is to begin. New beginnings in critical analysis and socialist practice, however, will necessarily take us far beyond the assumptions of radical instrumentalism and its preoccupations with media ownership. The project of truly democratizing the media will also demand transformation of audience expectations and uses of the media, the relationship between cultural workers and their audiences and associated conventions of media professionalism.

Notes 1.

See, for example, Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979); and Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular," in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People's History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).

98 Popular Cultures and Political Practices 2.

Todd Gitlin, 'Television's Screens: Hegemony in Transition," in M. Apple (ed.), Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education (London: Routledge, 1982), p. 202.

3.

See John Downing, The Media Machine (London: Pluto Press, 1980).

4.

Much of the material discussed in the body of this essay is drawn from Robert A. Hackett, "For a Socialist Perspective on the News Media," Studies in Political Economy, 19 (Spring 1986).

5.

Canadian Dimension staff, "Brief to the Senate Hearing on the Mass Media," in Brian Finnigan and Cy Gonick (eds.), Making It: The Canadian Dream (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979), p. 200.

6.

Wallace Clement, The Canadian Corporate Elite (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975).

7.

For example, Eleanor Maclean, Between the Lines—How to Detect Bias and Propaganda in the News and Everyday Life (Montreal: Black Rose, 1981).

8.

Clement, The Canadian Corporate Elite, p. 342.

9.

Ibid., p. 341.

10.

See, for example, Graham Knight, "Strike Talk: A Case Study of News," Canadian Journal of Communication, 8(3) (June 1982):61-79; and Robert A. Hackett, "The Depiction of Labour and Business in National Television News," Canadian Journal of Communication, 10(3) (Winter 1983):5-50.

11.

Clement, The Canadian Corporate Elite, p. 343.

12.

Ibid., p. 283.

13.

See Lorraine Gane, "How Publishers Influence Daily News Coverage," Carleton Journalism Review, 2(1) (Spring 1979): 3-5; and Edwin R. Black, Politics and the News (Toronto: Butterworth's, 1982), p. 114.

14.

Royal Commission on Newspapers, Report (Ottawa: 1981), Chapter 10.

15.

Black, Politics and the News.

16.

Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Quartet Books, 1973), pp. 205-206. Emphasis in original.

17.

See Hackett, "The Depiction of Labour and Business in National Television News."

18.

Peter Drier, "Capitalists vs. the Media: An Analysis of an Ideological Mobilization Amongst Business Leaders," Media, Culture and Society, 4 (1982): 111132; and Liz Guccione, "Does Business Get a Fair Deal from TV?," The Financial Post Magazine (26 April 1980): 11.

19.

See, for example, Nicos Poulantzas, "The Problem of the Capitalist State," in Robin Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in Social Science (New York: Vintage Books, 1973); Miliband's "reply" in the same volume, and his later discussion in Marxism and Politics (London: Oxford, 1977).

Remembering the Audience

99

20.

Carl Gardner, "Introduction" to Media, Politics and Culture: A Socialist View, ed. Carl Gardner (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 8.

21.

David Morley, The "Nationwide" Audience: Structure and Decoding (London: British Film Institute, 1980).

22.

Robert A. Hackett, "Decline of a Paradigm? Bias and Objectivity in News Media Studies," Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 1(3) (Sept. 1984):229-259.

23.

Cited in Stuart Hall, "Culture, the Media and the 'Ideological Effect'," in J. Curran, M. Gurevitch and J. Woollacott (eds.), Mass Communication and Society (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), p. 321.

24.

Karl Marx, On Freedom of the Press and Censorship, trans. Saul K. Padover (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 41.

25.

Dallas W. Smythe, Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness and Canada (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1981), p. 23.

26.

Clement, The Canadian Corporate Elite, pp. 270, 285.

27.

James Curran, "Capitalism and Control of the Press, 1800-1975," in Curran, et al. (eds.), Mass Communication and Society, pp. 195-230.

28.

Ibid., p. 221.

29.

Royal Commission on Newspapers, Report (Ottawa: 1981), p. 15.

30.

Smythe, Dependency Road, p. 15.

31.

Ibid., p. 38.

32.

Notwithstanding its mandate to provide minority-interest programming, the CBC is not exempt from the pressures of commercialization, given such factors as its continued dependence^ on advertising for about 20% of its operating funds, its continued reliance on profit-oriented private affiliates for the full distribution of network programming, and given that large audiences are a political necessity in securing an annual appropriation from Parliament.

33.

Smythe, Dependency Road, p. 9.

34.

See Raymond Williams, Communications, 3rd edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), pp. 108-109.

35.

Hackett, "For a Socialist Perspective on the News Media"; and Michael S. Lebowitz, "Too Many Blindspots on the Media," Studies in Political Economy, 21 (Autumn 1986).

36.

Lebowitz, "Too Many Blindspots," pp. 169, 167.

37.

Ibid., p. 171.

38.

Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

39.

Royal Commission on Newspapers, Report, p. 32.

100

Popular Cultures and Political Practices

40.

Canadian Dimension staff, "Brief to the Senate Hearing on the Mass Media," pp. 184-220.

41.

Royal Commission on Newspapers, Report, p. 15.

42.

Umberto Eco, cited in John Hartley, Understanding News (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 10.

43.

Herbert J. Cans, Deciding What's News (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 290.

Garamond Books: Argue, Gannage, Livingstone: Working People and Hard Times: Canadian Perspectives Basran and Hay: Political Economy of Agriculture in Western Canada Bolaria and Li (eds): Racial Oppression in Canada (2nd. ed.) Brickey and Comack (eds): The Social Basis of Law Brym (ed): The Structure of the Canadian Capitalist Class Burrill and McKay: People, Resources and Power Cantelon and Hollands: Leisure, Sport and Working Class Cultures Centennial College English Faculty Association: Writing for the Job Dickinson and Russell: Family, Economy and State Gruneau: Popular Cultures and Political Practices Henderson: The Future on the Table: From Liberalism to the Challenge of Feminism Knuttila: State Theories: From Liberalism to the Challenge of Feminism Livingstone (ed): Critical Pedagogy & Cultural Power Moscovitch and Albert (eds): The Benevolent State: Growth of Welfare in Canada Niosi: Canadian Multinationals Olsen: Industrial Change and Labour Adjustment in Sweden and Canada Panitch & Swartz: The Assault on Trade Union Freedoms (2nd. ed.) Young (ed): Breaking the Mosaic: Ethnic Identities in Canadian Schooling The Network Basic Series Acheson, Frank and Frost Industrialization and Underdeuelopment in the Maritimes, 1880-1930 Armstrong and Armstrong: Theorizing Women's Work Armstrong et al: Feminist Marxism or Marxist Feminism Buchbinder et al: Who's On Top: The Politics of Heterosexuality Burstyn and Smith: Women, Class, Family and the State; Intro by Ng Cohen: Free Trade and the Future of Women's Work Duffy, Mandell and Pupo: Few Choices: Women, Work and Home Laoombe: Ideology and Public Policy: The Case Against Pornography Livingstone: Social Crisis and Schooling Lowe and Northcott: Under Pressure: a Study of Job Stress Luxton and Rosenberg: Through the Kitchen Window: the Politics of Home and Family Newson and Buchbinder: The University Means Business Ng: The Politics of Community Services Veltmeyer: The Canadian Class Structure Veltmeyer: Canadian Corporate Power White: Law, Capitalism and the Right to Work Garamond Press, 67A Portland St, Toronto, OnL, M5V 2M9 (416) 597-0246