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In/Different Spaces

By Victor Burgin

University of California Press

Copyright © 1996 Victor Burgin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520202993


Introduction

There is an old story in which a couple of tourists, driving on an English country road and hopelessly lost, stop to ask directions from a local inhabitant who happens to be sitting on a fence by the road. "Excuse me," they ask, "What's the best way to get to Canterbury?" He thinks for a while. "Well," he finally says, "if I were you, I wouldn't start from here." Those who sit on fences may imagine otherwise, but the directions we take unavoidably begin where we are, and in relation to where we have been. I teach history and theory of contemporary visual culture in an American university, to which I came from England. In the first part of my introduction I shall glance back at the specific history that grounds the meaning of "theory of visual culture" as I intend it here—a meaning closely allied to the project of analysis of visual images which began as (French) "semiology," and to the view of "culture" defined within the project of (British) "cultural studies." I do not provide this trace of a course taken by many of my generation simply to confess "where I am coming from." It is also offered as an aidemémoire contribution to a history of still unresolved debates in cultural studies around identity and representations. I hope that by recalling this history we may avoid repeating it. Of the paths leading out of this history, the one I took has led me to consider the space and time of visual representations in which components of identity coalesce. Issues of the production of space have their own particular history in recent studies of contemporary culture. In the second part of my introduction I shall retrace a small part of this history in order to indicate in what way, forme, these "two histories" come into confluence. My itinerary will include intellectual sites and monuments already familiar to readers of recent cultural theory. But to return is not necessarily to repeat, provided we approach the place we know by a different road.

Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.
Karl Marx 2

Karl Marx, quoted by Guy Debord in "Theory of the Dérive," in Ken Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology, Berkeley, Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981, 51.

From Sweetness and Light to Semiotics and Psychoanalysis The expression "cultural studies," used to name an academic discipline, dates from the founding of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies—at Birmingham University, England—in 1964. In his book Keywords , Raymond Williams begins his account of the word culture by remarking that it is "one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language."3

Raymond Williams, Keywords, London, Fontana, 1983, 87.

The particular sense of the word as it first established the horizon of British cultural studies derives from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the impact of industrialization and democracy gave rise to a conception of "culture" as something separate from and "above" civil society. Writing in the early nineteenth century, the English poet and social theorist Samuel Coleridge elevates "culture" over what he calls "civilization" in arguing the political necessity of a "clerisy" of "cultivated" men, an intellectual elite learned in the liberal arts and sciences. This "clerisy" would consciously articulate, and translate into principles of government, the human values intuitively held in common by the rest of the populace. Following Coleridge, another English poet and social theorist, Matthew Arnold, sees the essence of these supposedly universal values as embodied in the greatest works of art,primarily literary works. In his book of 1869, Culture and Anarchy , Arnold gives his celebrated definition of culture as "the best which has been thought and said." Both Coleridge and Arnold wrote at a time of violent class conflict in France and Germany, and at a time when the Chartist movement was progressively politicizing the British urban working class. For Arnold it was precisely the pursuit of narrowly utilitarian class interests that threatened to lead to the "anarchy" referred to in the title of his book. Previously, religious belief had provided the primary social cement holding together the nation state. With religious belief on the wane however only culture, the source of "sweetness and light," now stood in the way of anarchy. For Arnold this "sweetness and light" was most potently distilled in great works of literature. Literature was the privileged means by which the culture of a ruling elite was to trickle downward through the class structure to secure the hegemony of the values of that elite. In Arnold's day one of the earliest professors of English Literature, George Gordon, declared in his inaugural lecture at Oxford University: "England is sick, and … English Literature must save it."4

Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, quoted in Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, London, Blackwell, 1983, 23.

In the modern university, the English Literature department is the still enduring monument to Arnold's teaching. Art History, a relative newcomer to the university, has in the main been equally Arnoldian in its mission. So has modernist art criticism. Clement Greenberg's influential essay of 1939, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in spite of its professed Marxism, makes fundamentally the same argument as Arnold's book of 1869. In the title of Greenberg's essay, the term "Avant-Garde" stands in the place of Arnold's "Culture," and "Anarchy" is now represented by "Kitsch." The difference from Arnold's argument is that whereas Arnold sees "culture" as a singular and solitary thing, Greenberg sees culture as threatened by an uncanny and grotesque double—in Greenberg's words, "that thing to which the Germans give the wonderful name of Kitsch: popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin PanAlley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc."5

Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in Art and Culture, Boston, Beacon Press, 1961, 9.

To all such manifestations of what he called "ersatz culture," Greenberg opposes "genuine culture," "art and literature of a high order." For Greenberg, as for Arnold, it is the historical mission of high culture to guarantee the stability of the social order, a mission it can only fulfill through the continuity of its traditions. His view of culture, then, is not substantially different from that of Arnold. Indeed, Arnold's book Culture and Anarchy remains the generally unacknowledged founding text of American cultural conservatism to this day—that which seeks to preserve the hegemony of the European Arts and Humanities "great works" tradition, and whose line passes through such otherwise disparate figures as T. S. Eliot and Alan Bloom.

Arnold's conservative theory of culture as a totalizing force, working to perpetuate the established social order, was soon opposed by another theory of the totality, that of Marxism. In a Marxist analysis, the culture that Arnold and his followers claimed as disinterested, universal, and historically transcendent is unmasked as a supremely interested, geographically local,...