cultural studies
Ken Gelder
Tony Bennett,
Michael Emmison and John Frow
Accounting for Tastes:
Australian Everyday Culture
CUP $34.95pb, 313pp, 0 521 63504 7
THE FIELD OF CULTURAL production -- television, literature, cinema, works of art, craft, interior design, architecture, fashion, advertisements, sport, dance, popular music in all its various forms, opera, theatre, and so on -- gains its character chiefly through disagreement, struggle and, often, outright conflict. Cultural producers know this only too well, of course, as they compete with each other for whatever they happen to value most: ratings and popularity, aesthetic merit, 'uniqueness', technical skill, and so on. But consumers know it too. Your cultural preferences are routinely contradicted by others. It can be quite bewildering to find that the things you've always found tasteful and edifying are viewed with sheer indifference, even contempt, by people you might otherwise be fond of.
Yet the cultural field isn't indiscriminate. It is never a case of anything goes, or 'to each his own'. One neither produces nor consumes arbitrarily; nor does one produce or consume as an 'individual'. Cultural forms are always processed socially, that is, in allegiance with some people but always against others -- which is where much of what constitutes our identities makes itself manifest. And the person who has given all this conflictual activity the most detailed elaboration in recent times is the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu.
Bourdieu's tremendous output of work hasn't had much impact on cultural criticism in Australia, partly because sociology here doesn't have a high profile. But he's very big in Britain and the United States (and France, of course), and now he makes himself at home in this country via an important study of our own cultural habits and practices, Accounting for Tastes.
Interestingly, the last major study of Australian popular culture -- and yes, there have been other commentaries since -- also had three male authors. Fiske, Hodge and Turner's lively Myths of Oz (1987) worked by reading sites of culture (the pub, the beach, etc.) 'semiotically'. The influence back then was Roland Barthes: you analysed cultural sites as if they were texts, yielding up their meanings to those with the appropriate skills and know-how.
Alas, the innocent days of semiotics are pretty much over. Culture is no longer encrypted into a site, waiting passively for some bright spark to come along and decipher it and so enlighten the rest of us. It is now a set of unfolding processes, already being read by those who use and consume it as a matter of course -- through the framework of, to use the buzzword, the 'everyday'. The task, then, is to look at consumers themselves: not to read semiotically, but to read ethnographically. And, of course, this is where things get complicated. Few people do ethnography well. Semiotics gave the cultural field a clear set of identities, laid out 'objectively'. But ethnography means getting up close and personal. As a result it can thoroughly confuse things, so that it can seem at times as if culture 'happens' everywhere, all over the place, without order.
The three authors of Accounting for Tastes follow Bourdieu's early work by going for a large ethnographic sample: their comprehensive survey gets 2,756 responses, to be exact, out of a randomly chosen group of 5,000 Australians. These people willingly yield up details about how they decorate their homes, what music they listen to (and through what sound systems), what they watch on television and listen to on radio, what they read, what sports they play, what leisures they pursue, what they eat, what cultural competencies they have, what they work at, what they expect from their children's education, and so on, in what seems like an exhaustive (and exhausting!) catalogue of activity.
Cultural Studies in Australia was never so 'totalising', and the authors know it. Their task, in fact, is to turn Cultural Studies here away from its semiotic heritage and towards the otherwise neglected disciplinary procedures of Bourdieu's sociology: to produce, as they say, 'an engagement with the "real"'. Their book is thus a sign of the times, a work of 'post-theory': pragmatic and flexible, building its account on hard-earned (literally, through a major ARC university research grant) facts.
Bourdieu isn't the only influence, however. One of the authors, Tony Bennett, brings his own considerable sociological background to bear on the survey -- drawing on a long history of Open University treatises on culture and leisure and work. The 'Reading by Numbers' chapter recalls Ken Worpole's Comedia study of some years ago, although it isn't cited here. The 'Care of the Self' chapter invokes Michel Foucault, also important to this study. And there is comment on cultural policy, too, stemming from Tony Bennett's work at Griffith University in Queensland -- with excellent points about the variable use of public, subsidised and private cultural forms, and the role of government and education in broadening people's cultural competences. So this is a busy book, covering a lot of ground -- and responding to a lot of respondents.
The authors in fact do an impressive job of organising an immense amount of commentary and data. They mostly shape their material through three of the primary social categories: class, gender and age. Class is treated as the most nuanced of these, allowing an argument with Bourdieu that runs through the entire book. Rather than rehearse the tired cliché about 'dominant culture', these authors realise that class, although a reality, is highly fractured in Australia.
More important, the cultural competences of class -- what one class group chooses to consume or participate in, and the knowledges and tastes these choices depend upon -- are also highly fractured. Those who hang on to the naive contrast between ordinary people and 'élites' favoured by commentators like Robert Manne will certainly be frustrated by this survey. Who is ordinary? What is élite? Professionals may be 'progressive' in their tastes, but managers and employers seem to be 'conservative', for example. Young people are more 'participatory' than older people. A range of women read more literary kinds of novels, but they may also read 'debased' fictional forms like romance and horror. A consumer's cultural tastes can appear 'ordinary' at one moment and 'élitist' at another; the contemporary proliferation of niche interests and increased levels of access across class divisions has meant that these categories can claim only the most local kinds of application.
Accounting for Tastes does try to think about what is 'Australian' about all the different modes of cultural consumption and competence it describes. Respondents overwhelmingly agree that there is in fact something distinctively Australian about our culture -- even as they willingly give themselves over to Americanisation (or, these days, Americo-Asianisation). The authors note that national sentiment in this country co-exists, albeit uneasily, with transnational cultural interests. But their own distinctive contribution amounts primarily to representing Australian cultural tastes as a matter of complexity. Like so much sociology, their findings are often 'predictable', as they freely admit -- yet they are also drawn to their respondents' many 'non-typical' expressions of taste and habit, refusing to reduce the myriad of details down to a few simple patterns (which is where another of their arguments with Bourdieu takes place). Respondents are organised into groups, but retain discrete identities ('Dorothy, who did not complete her secondary education...'). Class structures are alive and well in Australia, but the authors also speak up not for individuality -- an abstract idea that counts for little in sociological analysis -- but certainly for something like 'diversity'.