This lecture is a kind of follow-on from the introductory lecture to the module and is meant as a broad introduction to French cultural studies.

It's meant as a broad introduction to French cultural studies because one of the main themes of FRE114: Introduction to Contemporary France II, is culture and identity. I link culture and identity together because culture is clearly one of the ways in which identity - national, ethnic, personal etc. - is constructed and expressed. To quote Jill Forbes from French Cultural Studies: An Introduction:

Culture is the visible territory on which the struggle continues, to define and defend a certain idea of France. (Forbes & Kelly: 1995 p.290)

discuss some of the ways in which the French state has sought to define France and to assert this definition on the French (examples taken from Forbes);

discuss some of the ways we, as individuals, use culture to define ourselves (examples taken from De Certeau);

outline some of the main assumptions and interests of French cultural studies.

Defining the Nation

One of the most important periods in French history, at least in terms of an attempt by the state to define its indentity through its culture, was during the Third Republic (1870-1940)

Those years were decisive one for France: the rural exodus, aided by improvements to France's transport infrastructure saw many French men and women move from countryside to city and suburb and industrialisation and the growth of an ever more powerful industrial working class continued apace. Culturally the period was significant too: male sufferage was introduced (i.e. men got the vote) and both primary school education and, for men, military service, became compulsory.

Reform to education was particularly important, as many considered that the educational system should become a vital channel for the dissemination, some might call it imposition, of a unitary or single idea of the French nation. The school could become le creuset de la nation. The primary school instituteur and institutrice became a vital agent in transmitting a certain approved version of France's history, geography and, of course, culture. To quote Brian Rigby, again from from French Cultural Studies: An Introduction:

In the Third Republic, the principal means of creating a common republican culture was through the state's establishment of a universal system of national education, whose principal aim was to make every child in every corner of France into a full and worthy citizen of the new secular, republican nation. (Forbes & Kelly: 1995 p.38)

The historian Eugen Weber has a more negative appraisal of this process in his book Peasants into Frenchmen:

French culture became truly national only in the last years of the [nineteenth] century ... We are talking about the process of acculturation: the civilisation of the French by urban France, the disintegration of local cultures by modernity, and their absorption into the dominant civilisation of Paris and the schools. Left largely to their own devices until their promotion to citizenship, the unassimilated rural masses had to be integrated into the dominant culture as they had been integrated into an administrative entity. What happened was akin to colonisation. (E. Weber: 1979 p.132)

Defining Ourselves

Although the Third Republic sought to forge a single nation, speaking a single language and sharing a common culture, it is very clear to anyone looking at France today, that there is in fact a plurality of languages and cultures in circulation. In the 1960s and 1970s, the sociological writings of Pierre Bourdieu - La Distinction from 1979 is particularly important - described a France composed of innumerable cultures and sub-cultures. He saw France as a country that was not so much unified, as divided by culture.

Although Bourdieu adopts a rather negative position on the culture of dominated groups within our society, seeing working-class culture, for example, as inevitably subordinate to, and in awe of, the high culture of the middle classes, a more positive note is struck by Michel De Certeau. De Certeau is interested in the ways in which ordinary people use culture, and certain cultural practices, to define themselves and to resist assimilation to the dominant culture. One work in particular, L'Invention du quotidien first published in two volumes in 1980, represents the most detailed attempt to account for the ways in which ordinary people negotiate, relate to and use the products, spaces and activities of everyday life.

De Certeau maintains that the majority of ordinary people are denied access to the means of cultural production and have little choice but to consume the products of the dominant cultural economy of large corporations amd multinationals. However, despite their apparent powerlessness, and in the face of a seemingly all-pervasive institutional control, ordinary people assert their own creativity:

A une production rationalisée, expansioniste autant que centralisée, bruyante et spectaculaire, correspond une autre production, qualifiée de `consommation': celle-ci est rusée, elle est dispersée, mais elle s'insinue partout, silencieuse et quasi invisible, puisqu'elle ne se signale pas avec des produits propres mais en manières d'employer les produits imposés par un ordre économique dominant. (De Certeau: 1980, xxxvi)

As an example of the ways in which ordinary people use culture to define their own identity, De Certeau cites the ways in which the peasantry superimposed onto the Christianity imposed on them by the Church, their own `super-stitions' (pp.34-5). Ordinary people find innumerable ways of escaping the imposition from above, as it were, of the culture of those in power. He gives another example of imigrants recreating their own cultural ways of life in the anonymous housing estates of the French suburbs:

Ainsi, les manières d'`habiter' (une maison ou une langue) propres à sa Kabylie natale, le Maghrébin à Paris ou à Roubaix les insinue dans le système que lui impose la construction d'une HLM ou du français. Il les surimpose et, par cette combinaison, il se crée un espace de jeu pour des manières d'utiliser l'ordre contraignant du lieu ou de la langue. (De Certeau: 1990, p.51)

French Cultural Studies

Cultural studies emerged in the U.K. in the 1950s and became institutionalized in the 1960s. French cultural studies, however, only began to make inroads, in the U.K. at least, in the 1980s and 1990s. The publication of the journal French Cultural Studies in 1991 and of books like Brian Rigby's Popular Culture in France: A Study of Cultural Discourse (1991), K. Ross', Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (1995) and J. Forbes & M. Kelly's French Cultural Studies: An Introduction (1995) mark this belated beginning.

What is `Cultural Studies'?

Broadly speaking, cultural studies is the analysis of culture understood in the broadest and most inclusive sense of the word. Cultural studies collapses the distinctions frequently made between `culture' and `non-culture', or what are more commonly known as `high culture' and `popular culture'. Cultural studies rejects the social narrowness or exclusivity demonstrated by such definitions and the implicit system of values that underpin them. Cultural studies strips culture of élitism and hierarchical ordering (the terms `high culture' or `middle brow', for example, are implicitly informed by this hierarchy of value), broadening and extending the definition of culture to include such texts and practices as cinema, television. popular music, advertising and the like. Its object of study is, therefore, culture understood in the broadest and most inclusive sense of the word.

French cultural studies in particular analyses the changing cultural texts and practices that emerge as the result of, to paraphrase J. Forbes & M. Kelly, the following historical developments:

technological advance: mass production and distribution of printed material (e.g. popular press, paperbacks, etc.) and of sound and images (cinema, photography, stereos, etc.);

international realignment: with the end of empire the notion of cultural universalism (i.e. the idea that French culture has a universal value representative of all human experience) that informed colonisation collapsed;

the emergence of globalization: French national culture began to be replaced by Anglo- American cultural dominance;

shifting socio-cultural patterns: different modes of cultural consumption began to emerge with a newly affluent working-class.

Some Key Assumptions

Cultural studies insists on the notion of culture as a way of life. Culture is not just what we do, it is who we are, an integral part of how we act out our relationship to the world. Cultural studies therefore draws on the social sciences as much as on literary studies or other humanities subjects and embraces multidisciplinarity.

Culture is socially and historically situated. The meanings of cultural texts or practices must be analysed in terms of the particular historical moment of its production and the particular historical moment of its consumption. Cultural texts and practices do not have essential meanings.

Cultural studies insists that cultural texts and practices are not simply `reflections' of the society in which they are produced. Rather than simply refect debates, cultural texts and practices actually help shape them. The relationship between text or practice and historical and social context is therefore problematic.

Cultural studies holds that culture is essentially political. Western society is divided unequally along class, race and gender lines. Culture is the site where these divisions are established and where they may be contested. Culture is a field of struggle over meaning in which dominant groups attempt to impose meanings on subordinate groups, and where subordinate groups can resist this imposition of meaning. Cultural studies privileges the political and downplays the aesthetic.

Notes