Freedom, Appropriation and Self-Empowerment, or: What’s the Matter with Cultural Studies?

Text: Anette Baldauf

In the summer of 1997 Katharina Weingartner and I spent several evenings outside a diverse range of discos, clubs, youth centers and shopping malls in the Voralberg region of Austria, trying to get young women rushing through the parking lots to stop for a quick chat. »What does girl culture mean to you?«; »Have you ever heard of ›Riot Girl‹?« we asked, and: »What does feminism mean to you«? In the preceding months we had interviewed around 100 musicians, fans, activists, designers, literary figures, researchers, visual artists and art critics in New York in order to document the »Girl« scene for a feature on WDR.¹ Previously, in a springerin article printed in 1996, we had attempted to reconstruct how a cultural movement focused on the girl as a subject began to take over the stages of youth culture, occupying them with new ideas. We regarded »Revolution Girl Style« as an attempt to make female voices heard in the public sphere – voices to which other women can relate, voices that talk back, are repeated and inscribed into the discourse through quotes.² We admired the strategies of solidarity-building, collectivization and creation of female icons for women to identify with. In cooperation with Sabine Folie of Femail, the women’s advice center in Voralberg, we sought to test the applicability of the girl scene’s tool set: Was it possible to transfer the girl strategies to Voralberg? How had the protagonists’ messages been received thus far in the context of girl culture? What methods of reading them have been most prevalent and what are the most dominant applications?
The project: »Lips. Tits. Hits. Power? Popkultur und Feminismus« was made up of different alternating but complementary building blocks: it combined an empirical study, two radio features (ORF 1992, WDR 1995), workshops for girls and multipliers, an anthology, a number of articles, a tour with the band Parole Trixi, readings, and a dissertation at the University of Vienna. Central to this discussion was an exploration of the tense relationship between feminism and popular culture. We were particularly interested in looking at strategies for self-empowerment and collectivization developed by young women in the orbit of the US punk rock and hip hop movements and how these were incorporated into the fields of music, style, text, film and video.
The project was conceived and planned to typify the brand of Cultural Studies that flourished in the 1990s. The many different and often contradictory conceptions of Cultural Studies defied from the outset any fixed definition or canon, and yet the majority of works circulating under this label can be abstracted into five epistemological premises: Cultural Studies focuses on culture, whereby the concept of »culture« is understood to be a space pervaded by vectors of power, a space marked by conflicts, fragmentation and destabilization. Cultural Studies advocates the principle of radical contextuality, rejecting universalist attempts at explanation in order to understand cultural articulations in the context of their own space and time. Furthermore, Cultural Studies pursues an intervention-oriented approach: it aims at a redefinition of the context. Cultural Studies seeks to give those who find themselves in marginalized positions instruments to help them gain an insight into the power-based construction of their identities. The postulate of the »theoretical detour« demands that theory be viewed as a tool for political action and social change. Methodologically, Cultural Studies attempts to cobble together different approaches. Depending on the problem under examination, the choice of theories and methods may be pragmatic, strategic or self-reflexive. The principle of self-reflexivity encourages us to think about our own contextuality and assess our own connection to the challenges formulated.³
The project »Lips. Tits. Hits. Power?« was fundamentally inspired by the premises of Cultural Studies. The formative power of the context of »Girl Culture« is acknowledged, as well as the desire to drive its contents forward, for example among young women in Vorarlberg, inspired by the creativity of girl culture in the USA. We had conversations with young women in different »girl-identified« spaces in order to discover their fields of interest and lines of conflict, and published our findings in the magazine »Stoff.«⁴ Together with interested girls, we organized a workshop lasting several days at the Conrad Sohm disco in Dornbirn, where the girls played music, handed out their zines and decorated the tables with glasses containing floating tampons soaked in red dye. Furthermore, we curated an exhibition of girl materials in the Bregenz Kunstverein’s Magazin 4 art space.
Many of the girls surveyed in Voralberg had heard of the phenomenon of Riot Girl. The explosive spread of »Girlism« had brought girl-centered contents to girls’ bedrooms far and wide, where young women were inspired to formulate their desires and form collectives. In the process, aspects of girl culture came to light that are not traditionally associated with the status of »girl« – demands for the satisfaction of sexual desires in general, and lesbian desires specifically, but also aggression, toughness and dominating behavior.⁵ It was striking that many of the girls questioned associated girl culture with a specific style and an idiosyncratic, self-empowered attitude: mini-skirts, red lipstick and a »fuck you« attitude came to mind. When asked what a girlie is, a young woman from Lochau answered: »An emancipated chick... If a guy disrespects her, she leaves... She is a bit egoistical, arrogant, you could say.« Her friend added: »A girl who boasts, walks around in mini-skirts with her breasts almost hanging out.« These chains of association make the selective nature of the pop-cultural dissemination process evident: as the girl virus spread, girl culture became increasingly connected to consumer culture. In their association with shopping and the acquisition of consumer goods, the articulations that came together in the diffuse node we call »Girl« promised self-empowerment and the possibility of radical reinvention: the chest of girl-culture props offered values such as freedom and mobility – available at H&M, on sale soon.
Body politics have always been a volatile minefield in the context of feminist movements. According to historians of popular culture, second-wave feminists (apparently) looked for a return to natural forms of femininity. Then, in the 1990s, many of their daughters celebrated the artificial nature of their conspicuously staged poses. While the former rejected the beauty industry as an instrument of patriarchal oppression, the latter celebrated the beauty case as an artistic toolbox for realizing the stylized body: bodywork, fashion and style were considered a »technique of the self,« used not so much for creative expression as to showcase oneself.⁶ This version of girl culture was clearly marked by a postmodern sensibility that allowed the protagonists to perceive themselves as performers, and their actions as performances.⁷ The call to »Invent yourself« fed by naive readings of deconstructivist theory and DIY imperatives replaced the 1970s dictate to »Discover yourself«; it promised endless freedom with respect to the construction of the self and thus functioned as a productive motor in the marketing of girl accouterments.⁸ In the anthology »Lips. Tits. Hits. Power? Feminismus und Popkultur« we concluded:
»Usually delivered as a complete package, ›girlie‹ culture draws on a defined and standardized pool of music, behavioral repertoires (›A girl is…‹) and props (›100 Things a Girlie Needs‹). Girlie style not only flooded shopping malls and plundered credit cards, but also burdened already stressed young women with another imperative to carry on their shoulders – for the satisfaction of the male gaze, girls not only had to be rail-thin and smartly styled, but also tough and sexy.«⁹
The specific story of the project »Lips. Tits. Hits. Power?« highlights some important areas of conflict within the history of Cultural Studies. In the 1990s, the field of Cultural Studies established itself as a reference point in numerous academic and artistic disciplines, especially in the USA, Australia and England. But does the success of Cultural Studies at a higher level mean that the crucial battle for political change has been lost? What I mean to say is: In its attempt to forge connections between culturalism and structuralism, has Cultural Studies lost sight of historical inscriptions, and is it thus subtly encouraging the spread of neoliberal mythologies?
Forced Alliances
In British tradition, the Cultural Studies approach to culture can be traced back to the field’s legendary founding fathers, Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggard and E. P. Thompson, who were active in the area of adult education for workers in the years after the war. Their position, as well as their pedagogical work, set in motion a problematization of the concept of »culture« that caused them, among other things, to regard the decisive element determining class as being not only economic privilege but also residing in attitudes, mind-sets and forms of expression, i.e. in the principles guiding a way of life.¹⁰ In 1964, Richard Hoggard founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, which pushed for the attempt to synthesize culturalism and structuralism simultaneously on many fronts. Drawing on the premise formulated by Raymond Williams that »culture is ordinary,« the Centre rejected an understanding of culture as high culture alone, entrenched particularly in literary scholarship, and directed its focus instead toward »a whole way of life.« Against the grain of orthodox Marxism, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies worked its way through conventional ideology, targeting the theory of economic determinism, the notion of false consciousness and the reduction of social antagonism to the single factor of class. Cultural Studies pursued a theory of power that allowed for sovereignty, agency and hence also the possibility of social change, finding it first in an engagement with Althusser’s theory of interpellation and later in Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.
Inspired by this field of theory and the British Labour Party’s continuing crisis, the Birmingham Centre developed a series of analyses in the 1970s that predicted the spread of Thatcherism, even before Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979.¹¹ Stuart Hall, who had become director of the Centre in 1968, saw a new form of authoritarian populism emerging through Thatcherism – a combination of an anti-bureaucratic and individualistic stance with nationalist and socially conservative attitudes.¹² In parallel with these studies, the Centre attempted to enlist the burgeoning subcultures as a resource to help interpret the fundamental contradictions of English postwar society. Contrary to the prevalent premises of deviancy research, Cultural Studies defined subculture as an oppositional culture: in 1960s and 70s England, the promise of prosperity for all stood in conflict with the stark reality of growing social and urban polarization and the fall of the working class. Cultural Studies interpreted the narratives offered by Punks, Mods, Teddy Boys, Skinheads and Rockers as symbolic negotiations of this promise of progress in the face of latent social decline.¹³
In many ways, these subculture studies were groundbreaking for the future profile of Cultural Studies, although as early as 1982 feminists such as Angela McRobbie criticized two of the field’s most prominent proponents, Dick Hebdige und Paul Willis, for their discursive exclusion of women.¹⁴ While in the late 1980s the so-called mainstream developed a seemingly insatiable appetite for subcultural symbols, attempting to absorb the emblems of anti-capitalist protest movements and poverty, the focus of Cultural Studies shifted towards popular culture. Now one approach to Cultural Studies made the provocative assertion, to paraphrase John Fiske, that it is not the culture industry but people themselves that create popular culture. Fiske claimed, in analyzing a phenomenon he named »subversive television-watching,« that they do so by extracting what is most meaningful and exciting to them from a menu of offers.¹⁵ Cultural Studies based on this interpretation by Fiske celebrates the agency of television audiences, making the fatal mistake of equating »agency« with »power«: active readings of polysemous texts are not necessarily »subversive« appropriations, nor are they an indicator of the absence of inscriptions of historical power ¹⁶
Fiske’s studies on consumerism and appropriation called into question the cultural pessimism of mass-culture theory as well as that of critical theory, concentrating instead on the individual in his or her quest for fun, freedom and empowerment. In this sense, Cultural Studies was seized by the same widespread tendencies towards individualism it had tried to challenge just a few years before. Later studies building on the work of Fiske that celebrated the image of the empowered consumer, and even more influentially, that of the empowered female consumer, put the value of freedom of choice on a par with freedom per se and thereby opened up a significant intersection with neoliberal premises of the production of the self. As Cultural Studies found its way in the 1990s, via the primacy of self-empowerment through consumption, to audience and reception studies, questions about the conditionality of the freedom offered by the consumer world often remained obscured. The works neglected to reflect on the new constraints and regulations that accompanied the spread of the notion of »freedom« that had established itself so well within the neoliberal vocabulary, but was tempered in its mobility through factors such as »race« and class.¹⁷
In the 1990s, growing institutionalization brought with it a series of orthodoxies, for Cultural Studies had defined difference, destabilization and friction as its principles of production and identity. In many places, Cultural Studies lost its experimental nature: premises were no longer questioned critically; the meta-discourse and concrete educational practices had begun to diverge.¹⁸ At the end of the 1990s, the credo of anti- and interdisciplinarity forged a suspicious new alliance with the administrations of new, »pared-down« universities: following the call for downsizing, many universities looked for opportunities to disband certain disciplines and merge resources.¹⁹ Outside academe, the interest shown by Cultural Studies in consumption called forth a disturbing echo in the advertising industry, where the study of consumer desires was snatched up eagerly by so-called »Coolhunters.« ²⁰
The Politics of Cultural Studies
A great number of lectures and articles in the past years have posed the question: »What’s the matter with Cultural Studies?« In 1992, during a Cultural Studies conference at the University of Illinois, Stuart Hall had already described his surprise, but also fear, in face of the unexpected boom. »Cultural studies is not one thing, and it has never been one thing,« he insisted, adding: »It is a project that is always open to that which it doesn’t yet know, to that which it can’t yet name. But it does have some will to connect; it does have some stake in the choices it makes.«²¹ Intellectual work, according to Hall is »serious business«:
»Not theory as the will to truth, but theory as a set of contested, localized, conjunctural knowledges, which have to be debated in a dialogical way. But also as a practice, which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect. Finally, a practice, which understands the need for intellectual modesty. I do think there is all the difference in the world between understanding the politics of intellectual work and substituting intellectual work for politics.«²²
The relationship between Cultural Studies and Marxism is and always has been a pivotal point of conflict within the field. In 1996, a fake article published in the magazine »Social Text« attempted to expose Cultural Studies and its alleged postmodern jargon and twisted politics.²³ That same year, Robert McChesney asked whether Cultural Studies was lost beyond hope. His answer was a clear yes, because it was fixated on postmodernism and identity politics, he argued. The simple truth had been lost sight of: »the big picture« of capitalism and mass-media propaganda. »It is only through class politics that human liberation can truly be reached,« McChesney emphasized. In his opinion, the role of Cultural Studies is to reveal the mechanisms of propaganda.²⁴
Stuart Hall by contrast has on more than one occasion described the relationship between Cultural Studies and Marxism as wrestling with angels. »The only theory worth having, is that which you have to fight off, not that which you speak with profound fluency,« he stressed.²⁵ As early as 1982, he summarized his criticism of Marxism in an interview:
»I think of Marxism not as a framework for scientific analysis only but also as a way of helping you sleep well at night; it offers the guarantee that, although things don’t look simple at the moment, they really are simple in the end. You can’t see how the economy determines, but just have faith, it does determine in the last instance! The first clause wakes you up and the second puts you to sleep.«²⁶
Hall himself was criticized repeatedly throughout the 1980s for his alleged treachery towards the left, following his suggestion that the left should learn from the rise of Thatcherism as a hegemonic political project. The phenomenon of Thatcherism was only successful, according to Hall, because it was able to establish itself as the winner in the theater of popular politics and popular concepts. Thatcherism offered a convincing interpretation of the crisis, promised efficient political intervention, and embedded all this in one comprehensive and identity-establishing ideology. »Politics is either constructed ideologically, or not at all,« Hall recognized in 1988, in »Marxism Today.« ²⁷
What Hall defined as a crisis during the 1980s has expanded into a threat of catastrophe over the past two decades. In the state of continued turbo-capitalism since the financial crisis of 2008, deregulation, the rise of financial markets and neo-conservatism are the largely unquestioned building blocks of hegemonic political projects in the USA and Europe. Even today, left-wing theorists still tend to bypass a response to these problems by reminding us of »false consciousness« – such as in Kansas.²⁸ All the while, it is one of Cultural Studies’ great achievements to avoid presuming phenomena such as neoliberalism as facts, but to instead study them in great detail, to dismantle them into their constituent components and examine their dynamics in order to gain a greater understanding of their functions.
A central element of this analysis is, as Hall correctly recognized in the 1970s, a reflection on one’s own personal context. Applied to the project »Lips. Tits. Hits. Power?« this insight highlights the need for a more subtle analysis of the space where it took place, which proved to be fertile ground for the dissemination of girl symbols. However, to a greater degree it also demands an analysis of the moments in which the project itself became guilty of naively reproducing mythologies of self-empowerment, without taking into account the conditional nature of their promises. In contrast to the stories of second-wave feminism, which were marked by a compulsion towards authenticity, the versions of the »Girl Culture« counter-narrative reproduced by the mass media made use of the neoliberal credos of »feasibility« and »changeability.« A naive type of individualism was slumbering within these mythologies of self-empowerment that considered gender, sexuality or class as variables that could be easily deconstructed and playfully rearranged – along the lines of the Spice Girls’ motto »What you want, what you really, really want« (1996). So: What’s the matter with Cultural Studies? Cultural studies would be doing what it does best if it were to concentrate (once more) on trying to understanding these constellations – Michael Bérubé calls it: »to make things complicated.«²⁹