Thanks for the careful attention to the article. Some responses below...
On Friday, April 20, 2012, Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
> ``In the first phase, as mentioned above, culture itself was relatively
> small and local; unrecorded folk and avant-garde elite; a source of
> resistance and pleasure in a society where needs and desires were
> increasingly fulfilled by commodities. Michael Denning argues that this
> material circumstance explains the modern meaning of the word "culture:"
>
> <...>
>
> Don't know how to approach this passage. I'd reconfigure it and make some
> missing distinctions. There was culture in the anthropology meaning of the
> word long before capitalism. The distinction of `local' also suffers. After
> all there was nothing local about ancient empires, or the great imperial
> cultural periods of China. One of the hallmarks of empires is the spread of
> a transnational or international style as they say in art history and
> enforced interregional and international language regimes.
I don't disagree with this. In part what I take Denning to be saying in the sections I was quoting was this: though there was culture in the anthropological meaning, there wasn't Anthropology. The latter discipline, and its concept of culture, emerge near the middle of the nineteenth century when capitalism is really in full swing. I don't know about that chronology, but the argument is less that culture didn't exist than that the concept of culture didn't exist till then. And this concept of culture conceived its object as primarily those areas outside of capitalism: rich avante garde and folk culture in the imperial center; virtually all culture in the periphery.
I see your point as well about culture being local. In some respects it's moving the goalposts, but I would say that imperial culture before the age of the capitalist nation state operated in a different way. In part this has to do with the lack of the cultural form of the nation - the idea (and in some ways the enforced fantasy) that everyone in the state had some common, imagined community (or what Vico called "culture" i.e. the nation).
The obverse being that the state was acting in the interest of this cultural collective - a specific local version of that collective's culture which was raised up to an administrative level and, almost inevitably, became an cudgel to beat down the dissenting subjects.
Maybe this is a bullshit claim - and feel free to call me on it - but its my sense of how Denning's meaning could survive this line of questioning (at least long enough to shuttle me into the next section of the paper!)
In any case, these are valid considerations that I'll take to heart the next time I try to periodize the concept.
> In terms of capital and culture the central distinction I'd make is the
> difference between production by hand as in craft and reproduction by
> machine as in the printed books. The first contrete entrance into the mass
> production of culture was exactly that transistion to moveable type---as in
> the machine precision necessary for interchangible parts. Practically all
> of later industrial methods followed from the earlier printing industries.
>
And I'd say that this is technologically deterministic in a sense. The technology was important, yes, but so was the political economic system in which that technology was embedded. You're definitely onto something, but I think we can zoom back a little to talk about it slightly differently.
Benedict Anderson - who I just cryptically referred to above in relation to the concept of Imagined Communities - also traces the rise of nationalism (and therefore a kind of administrated version of some local culture) to the rise of the printing press.
It's been a few years, but IIRC, he prioritizes the political economy, saying that it is the rise of what he terms "print capitalism" that allows the emergence of the modern notion of a national culture. There are a variety of mechanisms he mentions, but one of them - outlining the national language - is facilitated by and constituted through the clarification of national borders. As the nascent state centralizes its power, it must create a common set of administrative languages and protocols. This is both made possible and necessitated by the emergence of large scale mass printing - i.e. in order to print stuff for everyone in your borders, everyone has to be able to read and understand that language AND since this is the case, you have to formulate and/or consecrate the national language as such. The final step is that, once this exists, and there are "national" publications, the people who read the daily newspaper of the national level can imagine themselves a part of this collective. This certainly took a long time to build up to - making your claim here quite true:
> Over just a few decades mass culture, mass reproduction, capitalist
> systems and a transnational culture developed together in the 1600s. These
> material production systems practically invented (founded) the intellectual
> world from the Reformation to the Enlightenment as cultural artifacts. The
> bureaucratization or institutionalization of the cultural artifacts of
> philosophy, sciences, mathematics, humanities, literature and arts follow
> suit within the vast emperial monarchies and their Royal and Learned
> Societies and the rise of National Libraries and Museums...
>
But I'd argue that these processes really become institutionalized on a broad basis only in the late 1700s - in some ways this was the time when there was the most at stake in the idea of the nation, e.g. after the wars for national independence that begin around this time (especially the US and Hathi and the French Revolution) which are based explicitly upon those Enlightenment ideals as such. The 18th century is really the golden age of those empires - and it is largely using the nationalist tools developed by those earlier revolutions.
Nationalism, in this sense, might be the outlier in Denning's framework - as one of the key concepts of culture that doesn't correspond to that outside of capitalism. On the other hand, Postmodernism is usually seen as corresponding to the collapse of this notion of the nation so it would just be a parallel transformation (or, maybe we could say that it became commodified in a way that it no longer represented a "spirit of the people" in quite the same way.
On the other hand, in the 1700s you have people like Montesquieu, who obviously held some understanding of culture - drawing the line, basically, between East and West - in order to outline those Enlightenment ideals (even if the contrast was also always a caricature). I guess the only response is back to the idea that he doesn't really call this "culture," preferring something like "spirit."
> I understand your goal isn't historical technological origins. I'd just be
> careful about the implication that our era was the first, because it wasn't.
>
It's not my goal, but I shouldn't ignore it. A very good set of suggestions. Thanks.
>
> CG
>
> ps. Before I forget. I had to wiki Birmingham School to contextualize what
> Sean Andrews was writing about. The Center for Comtemporary Cultural
> Studies aka the Birmingham School, was founded by Hogarth and others. Here
> is the wiki and is more than worth the time:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Centre_for_Contemporary_**Cultural_Studies<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Contemporary_Cultural_Studies>
>
> Note the closing and overhaul in 2002. I have no doubt at all this was a
> reactionary political move by the administration to stop the production of
> leftwing critiques of the neoliberal order....closing the pomo-culture wars
> and seemingly endless moves of the UC system to stop leftwingism from
> breaking out across the humanties and social sciences is a familiar story
> out here.
>
I haven't looked too closely at the Wiki, but I'm glad it was helpful for background. I will say that, among my current colleagues in the Cultural Studies discipline, I think the general feeling is that part of what the people at Birmingham failed to do was to come up with a routinized set of methods which they could point to as the things that are unique to Cultural Studies and therefore would legitimate work from within the program as Cultural Studies. I'm sure there was some reactionary nugget in there as well, but the field has long been more accepted in the UK than the US.
This appears to be a failure to understand the demands of neoliberal governmentality, but also a failure to understand the basic requirements of an academic discipline. IIRC, there was also a languishing class of grad students and a good number of professors who hadn't done a great deal of recent work. The atmosphere was collaborative and interesting I'm sure, but at some point you have to prepare yourselves for when the wolves come knocking at your door.
Then again, I don't really know the circumstances and I tend to feel some kinship with the kinds of critiques you mention - most recently articulated by Catherine Liu in her book American Idyll, which I'm trying to work my way through. Basically, she frames US Cultural Studies (and by that time British) as a misguided form of populism that ultimately leads to an anti-elitism, fitting it into other critiques of our wider culture a la Christopher Lasch and Hoffstadter's "anti-intellectualism in American life." I'm sure Doug's heard some of her argument since he hung out with her for a while in California. In any case, though she exaggerates some to make her point, her diagnosis seems damning.
Lui's argument (which joins many others) makes it perfectly sensible to believe that part of what damned Birmingham was their resistance to hard, intellectual tasks like understanding that part of the role of an academic discipline is to justify and legitimate one's claims to producing knowledge. You can be reflective about it, but the most important form of reflection is being able to say how you got to the conclusion you reached and why it is valid. Leaving all the argument to implicit assumption and commonly held belief is not an academic discipline: it's a religion. And I'm pretty sure the only religion the British state funds is the Church of England.
As I said, I'd happily be refuted in this assessment, but my overall belief is that, whatever happened in the early 2000s in Birmingham it has something to do with the wishy washy nature of a lot of the work in the field. I don't think we should do something specifically as a reaction to this, but in general the ways we could respond correspond to actions we should have been taking long ago. There will be disagreement about this among people in the field till long after it is gone, but if the culturalists keep winning unopposed, those final days will come much sooner.