Is cultural studies inherently left wing?

Most are not prepared to pay - in a capitalist economy - in order to benefit from the products of an independent left culture. Current popular culture is not inherently right wing, either. The significant number of “Left” people in media and entertainment industries adequately attests to this.

Historically cultural studies theorists have suggested that media and cultural forms are, de facto contradictory, thereby leaving the left and right categories in place, and fashioning popular culture around them. But I no longer think that this is adequate. Programs such as South Park cheerfully satirise across the whole political spectrum, while Team America: World Police made merry hay with left-liberal Hollywood celebrities.

One of the best on Australian politics has been Judith Brett’s recent book, Australian Liberalism and the Moral Middle Class. She begins from a refreshing premise, which does not assume we already know what the Liberals stand for: big business the middle-class, political conservatism and so on. Instead, she argues that cultural researchers need to examine the archives of the Liberal Party in order to identify important and neglected strands of the party’s history, and investigate the reasons why it has been successful in Australian politics. Brett’s point has been to draw attention to how little is known about Liberal Party history - compared to Labor.

Perhaps this is because political history tends to be predominantly written either by Labor, or by their left wing critics. Importantly, Brett is able to separate John Howard’s current political success, or his ability to tap into popular Nationalist sentiments across Australian society, from the perspective of how she feels personally about the policies of the Howard Liberal government, thus being one of the few able to unclog what has a collective clogged artery among Australian humanities intellectuals.

It could be then, that left wing oriented cultural studies may err on the wrong side of history. Not simply because neo-conservative governments are returned in America and Australia, but because of its way of constructing, or construing, a political spectrum. The Euro-conceptual origins of left and right wings stem from pre-revolutionary France in the late 18th century. They sit awkwardly in other parts of the world, particularly post-Cold War.

The left is as prone as the right to overgeneralising about contemporary cultural phenomena. Like the renewal of “spiritualism”, in its various forms of opposition to secularism, which is a tendency widely taken to be associated with the rise of the political right. But, in its several manifestations - New Age spirituality, progressive Christianity, the rise of Buddhism in the West and so on, it may yet produce a tilt in other directions.

Similarly, demand for greater parent-choice in education can be presented as a rejection of the state - driven by consumerist greed. But clearly inherent is a popular call for decentralisation, closer connections between students, parents, teachers and a curriculum, that could be seen in other contexts as being about the democratisation of education.

There is also a tendency to assume that support for market-based approaches towards public policy is synonymous with political conservatism. Yet elsewhere in the world, economic liberalisation and a greater role for the commercial market have been visibly associated with the relaxing or lifting of authoritarian political controls.

China may be a conspicuous example of this, but there are enough concrete examples to suggest that the idea of “commercial democracy”, and a link between a greater role for open markets and political democratisation is far from being simply a fantasy of the political right.

Markets are sometimes more attuned to a progressive, political, outcome. The cultural policy debate, of the 1990s, challenged reflex anti-statism found in the “resistance” strands of cultural studies, by reinforcing the arguable notion that governments, in themselves, were best equipped to deliver cultural democracy.

As such, the thinking was perhaps too focused upon the official institutions of public culture (museums, art galleries and so on); middle-class cultural consumption (public broadcast, rather than commercial or pay TV); and a “top-down” attempt at understanding how a loose, seemingly untameable culture is created, perpetuated, commercialised, and cultural resources distributed.

What is apparent is that not only is a lot of “bottom-up” culture being created and distributed from multiple sites, but cultural and or creative (cottage) industries are not a handful of global corporate behemoths parasitic off the imaginary copyrighted culture of others.