Advancing Cultural Studies International Workshop
Södergarn, Lidingö by Stockholm, 4-5 February 1999
Marianne Gullestad
Professor
Institute for Social Research
Oslo, Norway
In this statement I have chosen to sketch out a research area which can contribute to the advancement of cultural studies in the Nordic countries. Even if they might not be easy to fund, I suggest these ideas because they might strengthen the field intellectually; because the proposed research might become an important societal contribution; and because the Nordic countries provides interesting contexts for this kind of research. I want to argue for a more systematic focus on the power aspects of the production and use of knowledge; in other words to develop both political theory and cultural analysis by integrating them in a sustained study of the politics of knowledge. The relevance of the politics of knowledge as a theme for cultural studies is revealed by the famous Sokal affair, as well as by the preoccupation of cultural studies from early on with power and politics, particularly in connection with the Gramscian (1971) notion of hegemony. In the Gramscian sense culture is the contested terrain of struggles for hegemony within civil society, while hegemony is ideology which has become self-evident and embedded in every day practice. Struggles for hegemony can be considered as struggles about what counts as knowledge.
In a reinforced examination of power and knowledge new theories will have to be included, and new questions added. Some central questions might be what counts as knowledge; for whom the knowledge is made; what it is about; whose interests it serves; whether the relations among producer of knowledge, 'object' of knowledge and receiver of knowledge are symmetrical or not; and how various kinds of knowledge are related to government and market power, as well as to citizenship, civil society, popular deliberations and empowerment.
For many reasons, the Nordic welfare states can provide particularly well suited contexts for the study of the politics of knowledge, not least in alliance with other marginal regions in the world. The accelerated capitalist globalization implies new challenges for national 'knowledge regimes', identity politics and civil society. In the Nordic countries the relations between political and administrative power, on the one hand, and research, on the other, is close; and the size of the reading public is relatively large. There are interesting differences among these countries, most notably, these days, that Norway and Iceland remain outside the EU while Sweden, Denmark and Finland are in, as well as interesting commonalties. In the welfare states there are various sorts of demand for research based knowledge, and established channels to fund and present it. Researchers may have a strong impact, at the same time as there is considerable competition between different traditions of scholarly knowledge. As political regimes the welfare states largely favour the innovations of technology, the abstract models of economy and the tables and figures of sociology to the interpretations of the humanities. Economy, political science and survey sociology lend themselves to technocratic-bureaucratic management in ways that the humanities do not. But the humanities have also played ñ and play ñ important and changing roles in the 'knowledge regimes' legitimating and supporting government regimes. And the knowledge produced by fictional writing (especially the novel) enjoy a limited but highly appreciated and almost sacred public space. It is often held that the status of novelists is higher in Scandinavia than anywhere else in Europe. In these countries there are also interesting traditions in the theory of science which can be further developed and incorporated into cultural studies. Important ideas can be found in feminist epistemology, as well as in the political philosophy and in the philosophy of science attached to the name of the philosopher Hans Skjervheim.
However, it should be noted that one of the most important contributions of cultural studies to political theory is precisely the study of forms of knowledge and organisation that transcend nation states. Cultural studies is not limited to work within the theoretical and empirical framework of the institutions of sovereign nation states, the way political theory traditionally is (for an exception, see Held 1995). For many purposes the nation state is not the most relevant frame of reference.
Since I know more about everyday life than about political theory, and accordingly more about the complexities of the cultural preconditions for democracy than about formal democratic organisations, I here ground the kinds of research questions I am arguing for in everyday life. The current pluralisation of identities is connected to the growing emphasis on 'finding oneself' by creating oneself, and implies a popular need for new kinds of knowledge to underpin identity management, self-fashioning and everyday interpretations of the politics of difference. Films, music and the mass media provide important resources for self-creation. Related to these processes, there is also a change from hierarchy and command to team work and negotiation in families, schools and work places (Gullestad 1996b). At the same time the number of scientists is overwhelming, scholarly knowledge has become specialised expertise, and scholars disagree among themselves. 'Ordinary people' ñ including scholars outside their own fields ñ are better educated, and therefore often both able and willing to judge for themselves. At the same time the complexities of modernity also forces them to make their own judgements and be in charge of their lives, whether they want to or not.
These social changes destabilise the social role of scholarly knowledge, and this is, I think, a fascinating topic for cultural studies. Through the systematic study of the politics of knowledge, the field of cultural studies can potentially expand the space it occupies between social statistics and the novel. With the theoretical developments of recent years, a new foundation has been made for renewing and further developing the critique of positivism in the social sciences and the humanities, and for expanding the popular understanding of the cultural aspects of technology and science, including revisions of the determinism involved in much thinking about technology. Cultural studies could take a leading role in a sustained critique of present knowledge regimes, including, not least, its own claims to knowledge.
What I am arguing for is a large field of research. In what follows I will leave the broader field that I have just sketched out for a more limited discussion of how to advance reflexivity within cultural studies. Methodological reflexivity is well advanced in cultural studies, but still there are important areas that scholars are trained to overlook. The development in cultural analysis over the last years are often summarised as a shift from seeing cultures as essentialized entities to studying cultural relations and processes. Scholars have so to speak rediscovered the close affinity between received notions of culture and 19th century notions of the nation as a homogenised and bounded entity. The naturalised tight conceptual connections among people, culture and territory are being analytically destabilised. One important reason for these changes which is often made explicit by researchers themselves, is the fact that essentialized cultural understandings have been used to legitimise ethnic cleansing and neo-rasism.
Even if it can be argued that analytical practices have always been more nuanced and subtle than just assuming that cultures are homogeneous, continuous and bounded entities, the emerging focus on cultural processes at the margins and in border zones no doubt imply a crucial theoretical advance. Within academic life the new ideas have very quickly acquired some of the self-evidence formerly enjoyed by essentialism.
However, at the same time as this is happening in the academic world, people in the street are turning to essentialist notions such as 'cultural tradition' and 'cultural belonging' with new force, attempting to defend their interests against the negative effects of the globalization of capital and the waning power of nation states and organisations such as trade unions to protect their members. There is a widening gap between cosmopolitan elites and common people: While common people often defend local values, elite people honour very different transnational loyalties (Lash 1995).
With special reference to Sweden, the anthropologist Jonathan Friedman (1997) has made the more general point that the shift from 'essentialism' to a focus on 'diversity' marks a shift in underlying and largely unacknowledged political ideologies: A 'cosmological shift' has taken place in the academic world, from the celebration of local autonomy to the celebration of 'hybridity' and 'diversity.' In his view the new ideas have become a largely unquestioned part of what he labels the 'political correctness' of present-day academic life. 'Political correctness' implies a logic in which argument is no longer important. What counts is how one talks. In other words, the symbolic value of linguistic utterances is more important than the content of what one says.
Friedman relates the 'cosmological shift' to the class positions of academic elites within a changing world order, maintaining that the participants in these discourses have 'identified with the cosmopolitan space of the global system and has vied for a hegemonic position within that space' (Friedman 1997: 89). In other words, what Friedman is saying is that it is an unacknowledged aim within cultural studies to reinforce and strengthen the elite position of the researcher. In a similar vein as Friedman, the anthropologist Bruce Kapferer (1999), building on Arrighi (1996) and Jameson (1998) has recently argued that the anthropological turn to cultural studies can be seen as a reflection of the divorce between production and finance capital and the accelerating abstraction of the latter.
I think researchers such as Friedman and Kapferer are right in calling attention to the structural conditions for scholarly knowledge and to the existence of hegemonies within academic life. At the same time I disagree strongly with the simplistic and deterministic terms of the analysis, and with the view that connections between structural position and cultural theories necessarily discredit the theories. The parallels between economy and culture cannot be reduced to reflections; changing ideas have many reasons and mediations which need to be carefully teased out; and no point of view is in itself privileged in relation to others.
Theoreticians such as Hans Georg Gadamer (1975), Donna Haraway (1991) and Hans Skjervheim (1976) can be invoked to advance reflexivity, through analyses of how the structured location of scholars influences the questions they ask, the kind of material they work with and the ways in which their material is analysed. According to Haraway (1991) a piece of research has to be reflexively 'situated' in order to be objective. Knowledge is situated when the researcher understands that it is partial, and that this partiality is connected to the various contexts in which it is produced.
Something is happening in the world today, which, mediated by their structured positionings, influences scholars to turn to notions such as 'movement', 'syncretism', 'hybridity' and 'diversity'. New theoretical perspectives not only mirror experiences, they are also attempts at grasping what goes on. The structural location of scholars, implying cultural preconceptions, identifications and experiences, function simultaneously as blind spots for some issues and as positions from which it is possible to see other issues particularly clearly.
What I ask for is not good intentions and political moralism, but a systematic reflection on what gives the analyst the moral authority to speak in the first place, and for whom the research is made. Once ethical and political issues are brought into the foreground, they can be publicly argued, defended, defeated and ameliorated in explicit and critical deliberations. The aim of knowledge for knowledge's own sake often covers other unacknowledged aims and effects, while explicitly stated political aims (for example to serve oppressed people) may be contradicted by the form, content and direction of research practices and presented results.
Among other things, it is interesting to look more systematically at rhetoric devices and the 'imagined' or 'immanent readers' implied in a research process, its resultant texts and its media presentations. My own books, for example ( see for example Gullestad 1984, 1992, 1996), are doomed to exhibit multiple and partly contradictory 'imagined readers: The people I have worked with, others more or less like them, academic peers, the general public, decision makers in state and municipal administration, politicians and so on. I now realise that my own reflexivity has so far been too much directed towards the personal, and too little towards the structural and the institutional.
Such analyses would make visible in new ways the inevitable political nature of cultural studies. It is by now trivial to note that every cultural interpretation is provisional, open to challenge, and can never transcend the historical contextuality of its own knowledge. But how do we deal with this fact? First of all we do of course need to develop continuous reflexive and critical distance to current political and scientific truths, as well as ways of discussing normative issues explicitly. My own normative aim can be defined as the advancement of knowledge to be used in the democratic deliberations of civil society, defined not only in terms of the nation state, but also transnationally. One of the most important political problems today is to develop shared commitment to democracy in terms of agreement on some fundamental rights and procedures, without enforcing cultural homogeneity and normalisation. This is different from just serving bureaucratic management, on the one hand, or the development of jargonised esoteric knowledge aimed at ever smaller groups of colleagues, on the other.
As people feel insecure by having to 'find themselves' in a world of obligatory self-fashioning, they seek out and cultivate difference. This should not be fetishized by scholarship, but neither should it be disparaged. The aim cannot be to deny people identities and 'cultural belonging', but rather to contribute to make identities more reflected; to achieve a balance between romantic self-expression and enlightened critique; and to reconcile identity formation and the development of a political culture tolerating differences and favouring reflection.
This last point leads to a discussion of the social role of the cultural analyst. Located between the hard core social scientist and the novelist, should she look at herself as a bureaucrat or an intellectual? And what is the role of the intellectual, as we are approaching the year 2000? Scholars are often well-fed employees; the historical record of the role of scholars and novelists in the twentieth century is disturbing (in Norway the novelist Knut Hamsun's support of nazism is a prime example); scholarly knowledge has become narrow expertise; enlightenment ideas and practices have become problematic; and scholars have lost the self-proclaimed moral authority to appeal to universal values. Bauman (1993: 90) suggest that the role of the free-floating intellectual in Mannheim's (1968) sense, is no longer possible. Accordingly, Emile Zola's self assured role in the Dreyfus case cannot be repeated. Bourdieu (1993: 29) is also sceptical about the traditional figure of the intellectual, and suggests a more modest role as a 'fonctionnaire de l'humanité'. Inspired by Levinas, Lyotard (1993: 29), for his part, locates the moral authority of writing in a duty or a debt to an unknown Other ('...d'un Autre, dont on ne sait pas ce qu'il demande, ni meme s'il demande quelque chose...').
I would rather attempt to reformulate the role of the intellectual building on Foucault's notion of 'the specific intellectual'. Foucault distinguished between the 'universal intellectual' and 'the specific intellectual'. The first belongs to history, while the second is somebody who makes her specific knowledge politically operative. To this idea I would add Bauman's (1987) suggestion that present-day society needs inntellectuals who act as interpreters between people with different ideas and values, more than as legislators and judges of what is supposed to be universally right. Political struggles are very much struggles about which ideas and concepts best describe social life, and cultural analysts can contribute to public deliberations by translating between ways of life, and by providing other accounts of what goes on among individuals and groups than the polarised accounts offered by the mass media and the extreme right.
In addition, elements of Gramsci's (1971) idea about the organic intellectual could also be considered. According to Gramsci, each class has its own 'organic' intellectuals who play a role in social movements by transcending their class to build alliances. What interests me here is not the reified notion of social classes, but rather the stress on communication. In addition, a redefinition of the role of the intellectual will have to be based on the idea that all construction of knowledge is influenced not only by the people whose practices are examined, but also by its (implicitly or explicitly) intended recipient (Altern and Holtedahl 1995, Holtedahl 1998). If the results are potentially going to be put into use, the research process itself has to be dialogical in the sense that both the people whose ideas and practices are examined, and the people who are going to use the research have to be involved in the research process, implying, among other things, that all categories of people are seen as social actors with the potential of changing their thought habits and practices. Cultural criticism thus has to be grounded in dialogue, or to use Michael Walzer's (1988) terms, it has to be connected. From the dialogical connectedness the intellectual can draw the authority to speak. Figuratively speaking, the voice of the intellectual should no longer come from above, but simultaneously from within and without.
Nevertheless, the production and communication of cultural scholarship is affected by cultural changes undermining the traditional enlightenment project. The scholar can no longer expect to be listened to uncritically; the results of our work are not accepted as 'the truth', but are instead used as resources in the formation selves and in further deliberations. There is thus a change from finished product to resource in the popular reception of scholarship, and a visible reduction in the status of scholars. Instead of seeing the change in the reception of research as a sign of the maturity of the general public, many scholars deplore it, and the growing gap between cultural analysis and the everyday knowledge of common people can in my view also partly be interpreted as result of strategies on the part of scholars to keep up the traditional asymmetry in a new situation where this asymmetry is less necessary and less legitimate. In democratically organised activities it should be an ideal, and not just a sad fact, that scholarly knowledge is subordinated to public deliberations.
One aspect of the gap between cultural analysis and the knowledge of common people is the scholarly stress on suspicion. Often cultural analysis is presented as a suspicious demasking of people and their ideas, for example when 'ordinary people' are reproached because something they think is 'natural' is culturally constituted. The practices of cultural demasking imply, as it were, simultaneously to catch people with their trousers down and to remove the carpet from under their feet. I think that this one-sided stress on suspicion is an unnecessary and unproductive positivist legacy in cultural studies, predicated upon unequal power relations between researcher and researched. Instead, it is possible to attempt to theorise and practise the research process as a way of building on the knowledge people already have, on reframing people's knowledge, and thus as an addition to their present knowledge, not necessarily a subtraction (Gullestad 1996a: 33-47).
The contribution of cultural studies can also be defined by means of a reconfigured 'holism'. The differentiation of modern society into specialised sub-systems (Luhmann 1977) makes the ideal of 'holism' simultaneously unattainable and all the more necessary. Systems of classification are not only rigidified in bureaucratic institutions, but are often also reproduced in the social sciences, in hyphenated sub-disciplines. The complete study of bounded entities is not feasible, but it is possible more modestly to search for connections among phenomena normally treated as separate and distinct in common sense understandings as well as scholarship (Gullestad 1992). This aim necessitates procedures allowing for the making of discoveries, rather than just confirming the self-evident.
The central challenge for cultural studies is now to develop forms of knowledge which can bridge the gap between the knowledge of cosmopolitan liberal elites, on the one hand, and the knowledge of more ethnically and/or nationally oriented groups, on the other. This, I would argue, is not only a question of staging a better transmission of results, in other words to package the knowledge differently (it is of course that too, not least to lighten the unreflected use of jargon). More radically it is a question of constructing cultural knowledge in new ways. This move necessitates both more freedom and more reflexivity. The risks involved can thus be balanced and legitimated by more systematic reflection. On the one hand, we need to reflect more on which aspects of scholarship function to maintain and develop our own power positions as academic elites. On the other hand we need to know more about the power structures which prevents cultural understanding and reflection among people in civil society contexts.
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