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.Where he remains aligned with Afghan values it is through the exotic capes andhis loyalty to a traditional culture that the Taliban had attempted to extinguishand that the West is happy to respect.The political equivalent of  World Music ,if you like, the meaning of Hamid Karzai can retain the hint of the exotic becausehe has now been reprocessed by media representations so that such aspects areeasily assimilable.A disclaimerAll of this has been laid out with the confidence that my analysis will gain myreaders assent.So at this stage we need to recover the notion that messages are31FI RST PRI NCI PLESpolysemic.The reading I have been presenting is highly specific and clearlycontestable; I simply do not know what these images and text might mean to anon-Western or Muslim reader.The historical and political location of the readeris going to affect dramatically what they make of this material.Even thosereading from within pro-US Western cultures may well vary in their response to,for example, the mobilization of discourses of celebrity in the representations ofsuch an important political figure, or in their political opinion of Karzai s rolewithin the larger debates about the so-called war on terrorism and the legitimacyof the attacks upon Afghanistan itself.The American media s enthusiasm forKarzai will have been read within a much larger context than that which I havepresented here, and readings of that will vary too.Some may regard it as a highlycynical public relations exercise to assist in maintaining international support forAmerican policy; others may see it as a welcome sign that there are limits to thedemonizing of Arab or Eastern ethnicities that flourished in the wake of theevents of 11 September.This is a useful reminder.A group of texts such as this always needs to beplaced in a historical context.To outline properly the particular historicalconjuncture that has produced these texts and given Hamid Karzai his temporarycelebrity is beyond my brief here.But it is important to note that a reading ofthese texts would not be complete without some consideration of such a context.We could not understand the cultural construction of  Hamid Karzai withoutfurther exploring the sources of the constitutive myths  around his ethnicity,around fashion as a signifier of Western values, and so on  within Westerncultures.The texts can help us to understand how these sources are constructed,legitimated and disseminated  as well as to understand something about theconstruction of the specific historical conjuncture.Ultimately, however, todescribe the shift in meaning I have set out to examine would involve the elabora-tion of a specific history, not just a resonant, but arbitrary, array of texts.Nevertheless, as is the case with cultural studies itself, the close analysis of thetexts provides us with a provocative starting point.32Chapt er 2The British traditionA short historyMy account of cultural studies  first principles has inevitably foregrounded theEuropean theoretical influence.This should not obscure the fact that Britishcultural studies has very specific historical roots in postwar Britain, where therevival of capitalist industrial production, the establishment of the welfare stateand the Western powers unity in opposition to Russian communism were allinflected into a representation of a  new Britain.This was a culture where classwas said to have disappeared, where postwar Britain could be congratulated forits putative discontinuity with prewar Britain, and where modernity and theAmericanization of popular culture were signs of a new future.The preciseconditions of British or, more particularly, English culture were subjected toespecially keen scrutiny in the attempt to understand these changes and theircultural, economic and political effects.British cultural studies emerged from this context.But it was not the onlyproduct.Within the social sciences there was a substantial revival of interest inthe nature of working-class culture and communities.Addressing the widely heldthesis that the working class had become  bourgeois  that is, that their livingconditions and their ideologies had become indistinguishable from those of themiddle class  were a number of studies of urban working-class life that docu-mented the survival of working-class value systems and social structures.Thework of the Institute of Community Studies and a proliferation of participantobserver studies of working-class communities attempted to get inside thesestructures, often abandoning the conventions of scientific objectivity in order todo so (for an outline of this movement, see Laing 1986: ch.2).Interest in British popular culture came from other quarters as well; in the33FI RST PRI NCI PLESearly 1950s the Independent Group (IG) was examining the visual arts, architec-ture, graphic design and pop art, and establishing itself at the Institute ofContemporary Arts (ICA) in London.This movement, like cultural studies later,was primarily interested in everyday, not elite, culture and focused particularly onthe influence of American popular culture on British life  an influence that waslargely to the movement s adherents taste.In fact, as Chambers (1986: 201)points out,  the very term  Pop Art , coined by the art critic Lawrence Alloway inthe early 1950s, was intended to describe not a new movement in painting but theproducts of popular culture.The IG s relish for postwar culture, style and modernity was not, however,widely shared within the British academic world.Indeed, the major academictradition I will trace into British cultural studies was implacably opposed topopular culture.The so-called  culture and civilization tradition was concernedby the development of popular culture and the concomitant decline of more organic communal or folk cultures that proceeded from the spread of industrial-ization during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Matthew Arnold sCulture and Anarchy, published in 1869, warned of the likely consequences of thespread of this urban,  philistine culture , which was accelerating with the exten-sion of literacy and democracy.Where class divisions had once been sufficientlyrigid to confine political and economic power to one class, industrialization andthe growth of the middle class and an urban working class had blurred these divi-sions.The aesthetic barrenness of the culture of the new  masses worriedArnold, who felt that such a culture must necessarily fail to equip its subjects forthe social and political roles they would play within democratic society.The  culture and civilization tradition is most clearly defined, however, by itsresponse to the twentieth-century technologies that radically extended thepurchase of  mass culture  in particular those that enabled the mass distributionof cultural forms such as the popular novel, the women s magazine, the cinema,the popular press, the popular song and, of course, television.Between the wars,general concern about the moral and aesthetic content of culture began to concen-trate on its forms of representation (the mass media in particular) and to becomeidentified with the work of a circle around the English literary critical journalScrutiny: F.R.Leavis, his wife Q.D.Leavis, Denys Thompson and L.C.Knights [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]