The Marketplace in Cultural Studies: Two Moments from the Tampere Conferences

For a development of the original remarks at the first Tampere conference, see Higgins 2017.

Following—in most accounts—the ‘first wave’ of the late 1950s, represented above all by the work of Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Edward P. Thompson; the ‘second wave’ coming with the establishment of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964 and the decade or so of work from the centre associated with this; and a ‘third wave’ coming with the globalization of cultural studies since the 1990s. For a useful overview of these three waves, see Ampuja und Koivisto 2012.

For powerful statements and analyses of these dynamics, see, for instance, Collini 2012 and Brown 2015.

I discuss this at some length in Higgins 2019a. Several paragraphs of the current chapter are adapted from that discussion.

See, for instance, the classic study in favour of the entrepreneurial university by Clarke 1998, while for the case against, see Slaughter 1997. For a recent survey of universities and technology transfer across the world, see Allen und O’Shea 2014, and for an interesting recent overview of the whole idea, see also Wiener et al. 2020.

For a useful preparatory survey of the Centre’s work, and particularly the contributions to it of Stuart Hall, see Morley and Chen (Eds) 1996.

The title of Williams’s contribution to the collection of New Left ‘manifestos’ in Gavin Mackenzie’s collection, Conviction (1956); reprinted in Higgins, Ed. 2001.

With particular reference to cultural studies, this differentiation has come through in what Toby Miller describes as Humanities One ‘where the bourgeoisie and its favoured subalterns are tutored in finishing school’ (Trow’s ‘elite’ universities) and Humanities Two–identified with ‘elite’ education—and Humanities Two, ‘the humanities of everyday state schools, which focus more on job prospects’ (2012, p. 1–2).

For one of the first key articulations of the new ‘common sense’ in higher education funding, see especially Psacharopoulos et al. 1986; and also, with regard to the World Bank’s ‘successful’ experiment with a student loan system in Colombia, which was then put forward as a model for the rest of the world, see Carlson 1991.

For a useful survey of these developments, see Harvey 2005.

Or as he puts it elsewhere, what we are experiencing is a ‘privatized Keynesianism’, that is, “the replacement of public with private debt. Instead of the government borrowing money to fund equal access to decent housing, or the formation of marketable work skills, it was now individual citizens who, under a debt regime of extreme generosity, were allowed, and sometimes compelled, to take out loans at their own risk with which to pay for their education or their advancement to a less destitute urban neighbourhood” (Streeck 2011, p. 17).

Education features here as Article 26 Paragraph 1, “Everyone has the right to education; and ‘higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit”. In 1960, UNESCO declared that all states should “make higher education available equally accessible to all on the basis of individual capacity”; and again, in 2015, declared the “principle of education …a fundamental human right” (2015, p. 75).

For illuminating critical accounts of World Bank policy, see especially Heyneman 2003 and Kees, Samoff and Stromquist (Eds.) 2012.

Michel Foucault was an early critical observer of this trend in the early 1970s, pointing to the ways in which in human capital theory, each human being is considered “an entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of earnings” (2008, p. 226). For a probing engagement with and development of Foucault’s arguments, and a compelling critical appropriation in particular relation to higher education, see Brown 2015.

For a useful unpacking and survey of forms of structural inequality, see Therborn 2013, and, with specific reference to higher education in South Africa, Higgins 2019b. For an exemplary instance of the kind of denial involved in the promotion of the new competitive view of higher education, see Robertson’s extraordinary declaration: “We can forecast with reasonable certainty that the achievement of individual competitive advantage—that is, the ascendancy of merit over wealth or advantages of birth—will be more closely tied than ever to qualities of mind” (2000, p. 81).

A sense shared, for instance, by Colin Sparks, who observed (in a paper unknown to me at the time) that a “critical recovery of [Williams’s work in the] interpretation of cultural studies would mean a new lease of life for the relationship between Marxism and cultural studies” (1996, p. 99) and by Andrew Milner, who in a presentation at a later Crossroads conference argued that “Williams’s cultural materialism was never intended to be coextensive with cultural studies, but rather a particular argument within and against it”, one that needed much fuller debate and analysis (2002: n.p.).

For two useful accounts of the imperialism of English-language speakers in cultural studies, see, for instance, Horak 2015 and, for a sense of how much European scholarship is missed in a purely ‘Anglo-American’ genealogy, see Koivisto und Thomas 2010.

Žižek 1997, p. 46. Cevasco’s presentation was also very much in line with Fredric Jameson’s observation concerning cultural studies in the USA that when “foreign theory crosses the Atlantic, it tends to lose much of its contextual political or class overtones. Nowhere is this more striking, however, than in the current American reinvention off what was in Britain a militant affair and commitment to radical social change”, and the general absence of Williams’s cultural materialism in most discussions (1993, p. 28).

I quote here from the original text of the presentation, kindly made available by Prof Cevasco (1998). See also Cevasco 1993 and 2000.

For this, see Higgins 2014, pp 155–73 and Higgins 2019a.

See Bakhtin 1981. Whether a later exclusion of Brazil from a special issue of Cultural Studies on Cultural Studies in Latin America is a related phenomenon, I am unable to say. The editors for the issue noted “one glaring omission is a report from Brazil, and for that we can only offer our apologies.” (26, p. 1).

Though Ang already warned of the conference as “a contested terrain where concrete, differentially positioned subjects have to forge particular strategies to speak and to be heard” (1999: 20), and noted Morris and Muecke’s observation that “publishers from all over the world to be written for an international market” (cited 20). See below for further discussion.

Of course, it is possible simply to view this as an intensification of the existing structures of intellectual competition so well described by Bourdieu, when he noted how the “literary or artistic field is a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces. The network of objective relations between positions subtends and orients the strategies which the occupants of the different positions implement in their struggles to defend or improve their positions (i.e. their position-takings), strategies which depend for their force and form on the position each agent occupies in the power relations (rapports de force)” (1993: 30). That such an intensification may be fundamentally restructuring academic identities in a restructured higher education system is the general argument underlying the current essay. See also, in this regard, Halvorsen 2017.

For this, see Advertising—The Magic System, an essay in which Williams points out that “the material object being sold is never enough…but must be validated, if only in fantasy, by association with social and personal meanings” (1981, p. 185). As Doraszelski and Markovich report, “A survey of senior executives in 1999 reveals that 82.9% somewhat or strongly agree that good advertising can provide their company with an edge over the competition in the marketplace. Furthermore, 86.8 % somewhat or strongly agree that advertising is a long-term investment that contributes to the financial growth and stability of their company” (2007, p. 557).

For informative surveys of the changing landscape of academic journal publishing, see, for instance, Steele 2014 and Academy of Science of South Africa 2018. Steele notes there are now “two competing, and at the moment, irreconcilable forces operating in scholarly communication. On the one hand, the recognised need for scholarly change and, on the other, the increasingly embedded publishing system and the rewards enshrined in the dominant Thomson and Elsevier article metrics used for research assessment and University league tables.” (2014 p. 9) while the ASSAF report notes how “Elsevier has a major, virtually monopolistic hold over a large domain of scholarly publishing… profit margins for Elsevier increased from 30.6 % to 38.9% between 2006 and 2013” (2018, p. 46). See also Miller’s pertinent discussion, where he notes how “Corporate opportunism and greed saw the price of…journals increase 200 to 300 per cent beyond the rate of inflation between 1975 and 1995” while “Presses… perceived as favouring interdisciplinary humanities work that addresses ‘trendy’ subject matter [are] assumed to recover more costs of production than disciplinary based writing” (2012, pp. 46, 59).

Several commentators express a related web of misgivings. Perhaps the most aggressive assertion came from Bourdieu and Wacquant, who argued “Thus do purely marketing decisions homogenize research and university teaching in accordance with fashions coming from America, sometimes managing to fabricate outright ‘disciplines’ like cultural studies, this mongrel domain born in England in the Seventies, which owes its international dissemination—if not the whole of its existence—to a successful publishing strategy” (1999, p. 74). Striphas presents a sympathetic but well-grounded set of concerns, noting how “[c]hanges in academic book publishing threaten to blunt cultural studies’ political and intellectual cutting edge, reducing it from an engaged critical praxis to a banal and repetitive exercise” (2002, p. 442). During, for instance, noted that “it may be dispiriting to be reminded of the strength of the institutional conditions which organise our interests and work”, but insisted on asking “how is the money supporting teaching and research earned?” and asks “if we ask why so many faculty at the Australian university I was asked to assess declared themselves to be in cultural studies, the answer is not to be found by looking for a disciplinary formation that they share but by examining the calculations (and institutional structures underpinning those calculations that led them to respond in that way” (2006). See also Rutherford’s view: “The institutionalisation of Media and Cultural Studies in the corporate university means that it now functions as a commodity. It can be bought and sold in the global market. It is disaggregated, reconfigured and renamed in response to perceived student demand and cost-cutting rationalisation. And it is turned away from political engagement and communication with the public world by the research criteria of the proxy market of the Research Assessment Exercise.” (2005, p. 308–309) For a provocative analysis of the shifts from radical cultural studies, to policy-oriented cultural studies, and then to creative industries discourse, see Miller 2012, especially p. 68–82.

See, for example, Dworkin 1993, p. 38; Inglis 1995, p. 173; Milner 1996, p. 25; Storey 2010, p. 44.

Naturalism was the prime focus of the first trilogy, which included Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (London: Chatto, 1952), Raymond Williams, Drama in Performance (London: Frederick Muller, 1954) and Raymond Williams and Michael Orrom, Preface to Film (London: Film Drama Ltd, 1954). Williams returns interestingly to the topic of naturalism with the essay Theatre as a Political Forum in Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 81–94.

See F.R. Leavis, Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (Cambridge: Minority Press, 1930); and for a useful discussion of its impact on the formation of literary studies in England, Francis Mulhern, The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’ (London: New Left Books, 1979). For a detailed account of Williams’s engagement with Leavis and Scrutiny, see John Higgins, Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 14–19; 34.

For more detailed discussion, see Higgins 1999, pp. 48–51.

John McIlroy put this well in his indispensable survey of Williams’s work in adult education, writing of how “The Long Revolution was an inspirational book and it is difficult now to re-experience its powerful impact in the 1960s. To the idea of culture as a way of life and the struggle for a common culture Williams now added the central idea of a learning community, the cultural empowerment of the majority of the population, the excluded and disinherited who through the third phase of revolution would achieve enfranchisement in the cultural powers of meaning generation. The Learning Community reflected his experience of the democratic educational participation of the WEA but its realization would close the existing gap between education and life. These three, central intertwined ideas represented a freshened statement of the concerns of radical adult education and a programme to which existing adult education could contribute” (1993, p. 305–306).

T.S. Eliot was Williams’s main antagonist here. In the essays gathered together as Notes Towards the Definition of Culture and published in 1948 Eliot had notoriously claimed that “the idea of a uniform system such that no one who was capable of receiving higher education could fail to get it, leads imperceptibly to the education if too many people, and consequently to the lowering of standards” ([1948] 1985 p. 100–101). See, also, for instance, J.F.C. Harrison’s comment, with regard to the ‘new’ situation facing adult education, that is “clear that a full employment welfare state has begun to create new social attitudes” (Harrison, cited in Higgins 1999: 53), while for a notable example of the ‘end of ideology’ argument, see Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Free Press, 1965). In this, Williams articulated a core resistance which exemplified or helped to explain the emergence of the ‘New Left’ which was, in part at least, called for precisely to face this challenge, as Dennis Dworkin reminds us (see Dworkin 1997, p. 3).

It is interesting to note that with the phrase ‘permanent education’—derived, Williams suggested, from his reading of French theorists—he maps out something like the theoretical terrain covered by Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, or Althusser’s own reworking of that in the notion of Ideological State Apparatuses, against the usual claim (as, for instance, Storey 2010 p. 39) that it was only after reading Gramsci that Williams discovered the workings of power in culture.

For a useful reconsideration of the oft neglected May Day Manifesto, see Woodhams 2010.

Stuart Hall had explicitly recognized “a different kind of critical practice” in The Country and the City, the practice involved “in seeing literary form historically” (1980, p. 64).