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David Walton. 2012. Doing Cultural Theory.

David Walton. 2012. Doing Cultural Theory. London: Sage.

Walton's second handbook of cultural studies contains all the successful features of his first (Walton 2007), except perhaps for the cartoons. After that brilliant book, the expectations were very high. This is, however, no mere sequel to the previous volume, but rather a vast expansion of it, suggesting how the cultural studies field has come of age after structuralism. In fact most of the theoretical content of that book is revised (without practice activities) in the first, introductory chapter of the present work. It is, therefore, from Chapter 2 that the richly imaginative practice suggestions and heuristics are offered (as in Walton's earlier manual), with the occasional "Oversimplification Warning" and welcome "Help Files", which do their clarification job more compellingly than footnotes might have done.

The book is packed with theoretical issues (the table of contents alone runs to 6 pages), bibliographical references and cultural concepts, including an 18-page "mini-dictionary" of debated terms as an appendix. The span could not afford to be narrower, given the sprawling dimensions of its subject, which the Glossary defines as "a loose miscellany of self-reflective, inter-disciplinary approaches" (298). Yet not everything can be encompassed. For example, Walton no longer makes the (in my view, unsuccessful--Valdes Miyares 2008: 188-9) attempt to include a panorama of feminist cultural studies. Instead, after a brief reference (21-22) to Angela McRobbie's ground-breaking Women Take Issue (1978), what Walton now does is to integrate the insights of various feminist authors and perspectives into his new description of the practice of cultural studies. Chapter 10, "Gender and Sexuality: Judith Butler" (171-188), is an obvious landmark in this respect, but feminist issues are crucially advanced through other authors as well, both in previous and subsequent chapters. Among them, we find Kaja Silverman on structuralism (37), Laura Mulvey's adaptation of Althusser (87), Sherry B. Ortner on deconstruction (108), and Elizabeth Wright on Lacan (131), Susan Bordo's criticism of gender games (185), and particularly Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson's retort to postmodernism a-la-Lyotard (221-22). Thus, without meaning to be exhaustive, the survey feels, at the very least, representative.

One may notice throughout the theoretical weight of certain authors, who were already important in the former volume and in the "narrow" British cultural studies tradition (3) particularly, such as Althusser, Foucault, Gramsci and Stuart Hall, while others, traditionally associated with poststructuralism (Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Baudrillard), acquire a new weight. Others yet, especially North American critics Fredric Jameson and Lawrence Grossberg, strike keynotes in the later chapters, through their critique of postmodernity and their calls for committed anti-capitalist cultural criticism. However, practically none of them is allowed to have their say without a nuanced review of their characteristic positions, which is often achieved by bringing in significant criticism by less known names. Walton's ambitious aim "to help readers get to that 'other place' of the specialist" so as "to aid interpretive independence" (xv) requires this sort of contrasted analysis, which opens up the various perspectives without unconditionally espousing any of them. At the same time, his commitment to the "project" of cultural studies implies that the author cannot remain aloof, that he must politicize culture with a utopian gesture towards a "more equitable" world, and offer "critical thinking linked to possible forms of agency" (265). Thus, the book is part of that dynamic social process that Raymond Williams envisaged in The Long Revolution (1961), as Walton states it (16 and 262).

The overall project, therefore, stems from the duly acknowledged British paradigm, which Walton (5) calls, after Andrew Tudor (1999), "the founding myth of cultural studies". While Walton's previous handbook queried, "cri-tickled" and expanded imaginatively the canonical works and their authors, the first chapter in the new one sums them up, mostly following general surveys like those by Inglis (1993), Strinati (1995) and Storey (2009). Although he admits that "the Birmingham Centre (...) was by no means the only hotbed of cultural analysis", Walton (18) makes no attempt to include "the important research (...) being done elsewhere in Britain, in the US and other parts of the world". Admitting that this first chapter focuses on Britain, and that some of the research done elsewhere is duly incorporated in the following ones, one may still wonder why there is no reference at all, for instance, to the pioneering research done by the Glasgow Media Group in the 1970s and 1980s particularly in TV news, which was made readily accessible by Eldridge (1995) and Philo (1995). We may likewise wonder why the British cultural studies myth always assumed Saussurean semiology as the norm, and never gave much thought to Charles S. Peirce's arguably more sophisticated semiotics (free of the binaries which post-structuralism has taken such pains to deconstruct), whose existence Walton merely acknowledges (29, 40). Moreover, British Cultural Studies has also tended to pay little regard to the parallel development of Michael Halliday's functionalism, pragmatics, and discourse analysis. Critical Discourse Analysis as popularized by Norman Fairclough (2010), among others, provides a practical model to explore the relationships between language and power, the linguistic "acts of power" which are also a central concern for cultural studies (38). But such work usually goes unacknowledged, as if they were worlds apart, in cultural studies books, and Walton's is no exception. The rationale is probably that, in spite of the "linguistic turn" of structuralism, the thrust of cultural studies is philosophical and political, rather than linguistic or analytical.

Perhaps the first chapter is too similar to the previous book, missing the chance to challenge the foundational mythology on which both books stand. The second chapter, "Structuralism and the Linguistic Turn", seems to confirm that this volume is not going to be as creatively critical as the first, nor its heuristics so challenging. Explanatory diagrams are also fewer and perhaps more conventional. But the impression gets better as we read on. Walton still has his flair for explaining and illustrating even the most complex concepts with excellent clarity, and he is best when he creates his own examples for practice (for example, the sections "Food for thought" (32-35), an allusion to Levi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked, exploring the semiological shift from linguistics to anthropology and culture in structuralism), while his revision of other authors' research, necessary in order to familiarize the readers with them, is always neat and useful. Though we may miss the more playful features of the other book, the present volume is, as we shall be trying to argue in the following paragraphs, even better, deeper, more thoroughly researched and practical.

Chapter 3, "Semiotics: Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes and Stuart Hall" is among those which can make a reader feel s/he read their whole books. For Walton not only sums up classical concepts, such as Barthes' "anchorage" (50), but also develops them in ways the original authors may not have envisaged, often by drawing on an author's later interpretations, like, for example, when an image from Zizek is used for illustrating Barthes on myth (59). Thus this chapter approaches ideology from a semiological perspective, through Barthes and Hall, and the complexity of the concept is duly balanced with a particularly wide range of examples (60-2 and 64-6), leading to its full exploration through Althusserian Marxism in the following chapter. The revision of Hall's encoding/decoding model and his calls for oppositional readings (64) does not forget various later revisions and questionings of that model, assessing its current use, and encouraging readers to rethink it by themselves (66). Finally, a further reading section invites exploration beyond the classic examples which the handbook necessarily favours, since its aim is to teach established concepts as well as to practice, expand, and, if necessary, challenge them.

Chapter 4 does not add very much to the memorable corresponding chapter on Althusser in Walton's previous book, but in Chapter 5, "Poststructuralism: Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida", we meet again the ironic, witty "Davoid Walton" (95) that readers of that book might have been missing. It is after a compelling account of Barthes' stepping into poststructuralism through his "Death of the Author" that "Davoid's" authorial self-consciousness emerges, via Derrida's arguments on "the trace" and conceptual "erasure", admittedly simplifying Derrida "in a very un-Derridan way" (97). I, for one, must also admit that Walton's review of deconstruction has helped me understand some of its ideas which I had been struggling with for very long, though this may not be the first time I feel such "metaphysics of presence", the pleasant illusion that I have "finally" understood Derrida's thought. But Walton will not leave us with the impression that Derrida is just a philosopher, since Chapter 6, "Doing Deconstruction", immediately revises the importance of deconstructing patriarchy, the popular, historiography, and post-colonialism, via illustrative deconstructive readings done, respectively, by Monique Witting, Hall, Spivak and Bhabha, culminating in Walton's own deconstruction of a work he had previously held up as a model, Barthes' Mythologies. After this powerful chapter, the reader can rest assured that deconstruction is both practicable and momentous in the current world. The self-critical awareness that comes with this realization stays throughout the remaining chapters.

Chapters 7 and 8 are devoted to Lacan's psychoanalysis and to applying it to culture. After justifying, in a section playfully called "preliminaries" (123), the importance of "Lac(k)an", as Walton likes to call him in an ingenious allusion to the psycoanalyst's central tenet, we are easily introduced to each of his key concepts, from "the subject" and objects petit, to "the Name of the Father" and the Real. The unraveling of complex theories is duly followed by fascinating examples of their use by "Feminist and other Forms of Cultural Analysis" (141), including the "anti-corporate activist pranksters" known as "The Yes Men" who created a bogus World Trade Organization website to dupe and expose the dubious ethics of some great corporations (146-7), largely the kind of cultural activism that this book will recommend in its closing chapters. The Lacanian chapters conclude highlighting the "points of connections" between poststructuralism, Derrida and Lacan (151-2). Such connecting sections are numerous in the book, and they help readers keep an overview through the large number of concepts which are progressively spelled out.

Chapters 9 and 10 partly repeat the dual pattern of theory and its exemplification, but this time Foucault's "Discourse and Power" (Chapter 9) is utterly transformed under Judith Butler's perspective in the following chapter. The Foucault chapter stands out for its useful explanation and practice of the genealogical approach to history (163-6), while the one on Butler focuses on the complex working of genealogy when applied to gender subversions and "corporeal styles" (181-6), once a full account of "performativity" has been given (177-80). Indeed, if what counts as meaningful is not what we are in any essential way, but how we perform, that is, what we do, the notion of performance is importantly related to the "Doing" in the book's title.

In turn, Chapter 11 explores "The Postmodern Condition" through Daniel Bell, Lyotard and Habermas, and then similar ideas are shown at work in Baudrillard's writing on "Identity and Consumption" (Chapter 12). Baudrillard's "art of provocation" (220) becomes another important strain in the central thesis developed by Walton's book. However, what some readers might perceive as cynical playfulness in postmodernism, is compounded, and confronted, by a more "unplugged", committed, Marxist brand of criticism as found in Fredric Jameson work, expounded in Chapter 13, "Postmodernism Unplugged: Fredric Jameson." The revision of Jameson's ideas is so engrossing that it is necessarily followed by a "Practice" box (235), raising questions about the Jamesonian discourse, and by a subsequent "Help File" (236-7), suggesting answers which result in a deconstruction of it, opening up the critical notions that Jameson himself denied in his rigid definition of postmodernism and stern rejection of its political value. For example, his refusal to see little in postmodern culture beyond "heaps of fragments" (240) leads to introducing the concept of "cognitive mapping" (241-3), a way of making sense of the complex, disjointed current world, which the present book holds up as the most promising model of cultural analysis. Once again, discussion of the subject is not concluded without stimulating suggestions for critical practice, in this case the possibility of applying Jameson's "high-tech paranoia" to a more appreciative analysis of cyberpunk (241-2).

Thus, after navigating the most influential streams of cultural theory and learning how they both come into conflict and are ultimately interrelated, we reach the two concluding Chapters, 14 ("Practising Cultural Studies: Hegemony and Cognitive Mapping") and 15 ("Where to Go from Here: Cognitive Mapping and the Critical Project of Cultural Studies"), where Walton maps out his view of the present and future cultural studies that matter. In order to define his own position, he uses Linda Hutcheon's "historiographic metafiction" (248), which shows how to overcome the dilemma of being either totally complicit with postmodernism or totally critical of it, by considering it as "unmarked politically", a site of struggle rather than a concept, in other words, a space for "hegemonic interventions" (249), which is, for that matter, what cultural studies should also remain, in Walton's view. This is immediately pinpointed with a practice section describing in great detail Haacke's work MetroMobilitan as a model of cognitive mapping by means of an article by Travis English (250-4), that is, as a postmodern work which does not stop at endorsing its aesthetics self-contentedly, but actually performs a political intervention denouncing certain international corporations. In this Chapter 15, which also includes Walton's own analysis of Susan Daitch's novel L.C. as a further example of art as cognitive mapping in practice, Grossberg's view of cultural studies as "a political history of the present", and his call to changing the world rather than just interpreting it (according to Marx's celebrated quote, 261, 266) becomes significant as a counterpoint to Jameson's shortcomings as a radical thinker.

Revising possible objections to cognitive mapping (266), and producing a version of it which (via Grossberg's use of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts, 287) is "akin to Giroux's idea of 'performative politics'", Walton finally offers it as an all-round critical approach that will carry cultural studies beyond the dominant paradigms of postmodernism. This time the case studies are Nestle's contravention of the code regulating the marketing of breast milk substitutes in Third World countries, the Coca-Cola corporation's anti-union policies, and the global water sales (perhaps "no healthier than tap water") of these two multinationals and Pepsico. After cognitively mapping what these corporations are doing, the corresponding practice would consist in activism, for example boycotting, against the abuses of such "oligopolies" (267-9). Walton starts the job for us by further mapping "the military-industrial complex" (271), "the business of higher education", where the sponsorship of multinationals weakens the power of higher education to make corporate interests accountable (274), "the rise of disaster capitalism" (277), and "the IMF and World Bank" (279-80). The task of fighting these formidable entities may look beyond the capacities of the average cultural studies reader, though the book also offers examples of how this has been done by "new social movements, subvertizing, culture jamming and DiY" (284-7). Of course multinationals also provide many jobs, and destroying them does not guarantee a better world; like any other powerful institutions, including churches and political parties, they have their dark sides, which should be kept in check. The idealist's job may be challenging, but there is no doubt cultural studies (including postcolonial studies) has moved a long way from its roots in literary studies and semiology. The practice of cultural or literary studies without such cognitive mapping in mind today might smack of aestheticism or complacent escapism, if not connivance with corporate interests and abuses.

This book signals a critical turning point in the development of the humanities--should they remain the bastions of a timeless (as Matthew Arnold had it) Great Tradition (a la F.R. Leavis) of human achievement in the arts, or reinforce their commitment to the present? The "homo economicus" which Adam Smith hailed has returned with a vengeance, or rather has never departed in the first place, as he or she has never quite been replaced by a pure, disinterested "homo academicus" (272-3). Indeed, Walton's ultimate point is educational (in connection with Giroux's "radical pedagogy"), and, after cognitively mapping the Bologna process and how it tends to subordinate the institutions of higher learning to the existing powers, he endorses Derrida's call for the preservation of a critical public space to resist "the powers that limit a democracy to come" (275). The last practice section uses Stephanie Black's documentary film Life and Debt (2001), on the economic predicament of Jamaica, as an example of the kind of text that will help us cognitively map the "Empire" of all-encompassing late capitalism (280). He advocates the link between academic contexts and investigative journalism, as well as the "new social movements" like avaaz.com. His stress on agency, seeking to empower individual students with an "all-purpose toolbox" (265), crucially distinguishes Walton's cultural studies from the Marxism of the Frankfurt School or even Jameson, who tend to see people as a mass of passive dupes. Always aware of how heuristic concepts may be used in contradictory ways, the book closes with sections on checking the reliability of sources, "struggling with theory", and further reading and resources. Thus Walton is bent on pushing cultural studies one step beyond its traditional emphasis on "identity politics and representation" (293), and starting on a new path. All in all, this is, possibly along with Grossberg's (2011), the cultural studies handbook to do so, which sets it apart from the classic ones by Inglis, Strinati, or Storey.

References

Eldridge, John (ed.) 1995. News Content, Language and Visuals: Glasgow University Media Reader. London: Routledge.

Fairclough, Norman 2010. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (2nd edition). Harlow: Pearson Education.

Grossberg, Lawrence 2011. Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Inglis, Fred 1993. Cultural Studies. Oxford: Blackwell.

Philo, Grege (ed.) 1995. Industry, Economy, War and Politics: Glasgow University Media Reader. London: Routledge.

Storey, John 2009. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. (5th edition) Harlow: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Strinati, Dominic 1995. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. London: Routledge.

Tudor, Andrew 1999. Decoding Culture. London: Sage.

Valdes Miyares, Ruben 2008. Review of David Walton, Introducing Cultural Studies. Learning Through Practice. Atlantis, 30/2, 187-191.

Williams, Raymond 1961. The Long Revolution. London: Hogarth.

Walton, David 2007. Introducing Cultural Studies. Learning Through Practice. London: Sage.

J. Ruben Valdes Miyares

University of Oviedo, Spain
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Author:Valdes Miyares, J. Ruben
Publication:European English Messenger
Article Type:Book review
Date:Jun 22, 2013
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