The entries are in alphabetical order.
 

CRITICAL THEORY (CT) is a rather vague general term used to refer to the work of writers like Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer and Habermas among others). The first 3 are also known as members of the 'Frankfurt School'. Critical theory is wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, addressing culture, politics, philosophy and art, and drawing upon marxism, Freud, and a panoply of German (and even Greek) philosophers. The best single piece on the early work at least is Held's (1982) (Introduction to Critical Theory). You will often come across references to two works in particular: Adorno and Horkheimer (1976) Dialectic of Enlightenment, which contains an essay on the 'culture industry', and Marcuse One-Dimensional Man, a rich source of quotes for those hostile to consumerism, and a key text for 1960s cultural politics. There is an excellent collection of pieces in Adorno T (1991) The Culture Industry (and see the Intro by Bernstein). Steve Crook, a former Marjon lecturer (!) has edited and introduced a recent collection --  Adorno T (1994) The Stars Come Down to Earth...

These works are usually dismissed (by gramscians - see below) as 'too critical' or 'too pessimistic', often with little evidence of having read critical theory in any depth I have argued. CT is relentlessly critical of any approach or theory that tries to prematurely close debate (and thus set itself against communist politics and, of course, Nazism back in the 1930s), and it is very acutely worried about the tendencies in capitalism to anticipate and incorporate critical cultural politics (e.g. by turning them into a mere style). Clearly, CT offers little concrete support for British gramscian cultural struggle, but few gramscians have wanted to take on CT in any detail. There is an excellent on-line essay on the links and differences between gramscian cultural studies and critical theory -- see Kellner on the Zupko database
 

ETHNOGRAPHY appears in our story as a technique used to do research into the subjective meanings of participants (using participant observation, for example).There are several good texts on how to use the approach, should you be considering an empirical dissertation. Hazards awaiting the unwary ethnographer include, for example, the twin problems of 'observer effects' (the researcher disturbs the behaviour of the group by her very presence), and 'going native' (the researcher becomes so involved in the life of the group that she just becomes amember and stops being able to be critical).

Some ethnographers have taken up theoretical arms to reinstate the interacting individual as a creator of meaning, and thus disagree with structuralists. Some ethnographers disagree with marxists too, seeing no need to insist that all meanings derive from a mode of production in the end. Gramscians have tried to graft ethnography on to their version of marxism however, and there is considerable debate about whether this is legitimate. Willis offers perhaps the best example -- skilfully bringing to life the strange world of the school early leaver (Learning to Labour) or the biker (Profane Cultures), and then offering a clever marxist commentary on the political significance of these views. See also his views on the need for ethnography to maintain a certain open-ness and 'surprise' (in Hall et al (eds) Culture Media Language).

Recently, ethnography has started to feel the weight of postmodern critique as writers like Clough (The End(s) of Ethnography?)suggest that ethnographers operate more or less like journalists, trying to give us a sense of having been there by clever and involving writing. To be cynical for a moment, this 'good writing' is the technique to deliver results, rather than all that solemn stuff about recording and processing 'data'. Willis's work is very open to such a cynical reading, in my view.

FIGURATIONALISM appeared in leisure studies as an alternative to marxism. Based on the work of Norbert Elias, its main representatives for our purposes are Rojek (Capitalism and Leisure Theory), Dunning, and Mennell (see his book on Elias). (Early) Rojek argues that social groups are best studied as figurations -- groups formed on the basis of any social ties (of dependency) between the members (including leisure pursuits, skin colour, tactical interests etc), with no special privileges given to social class, race or gender,unlike as in gramscianism. Figurations must be studied concretely, as they emerge and change in unpredictable ways (i.e. not according to some necessary logic of class struggle). The emphasis is on the processes of growth and emergence, which cannot be reduced to some simple underlying logic. The unpredictable coalitions of groups who have shaped our modern eating behaviours is a good example (see Mennell All Manners of Food)

Elias is also cited as a theorist of the civilisation process, defined in terms (derived from Freud) of a growing awareness of and ability to take the role of other people. This restrains our immediate emotions, impulses and desires and permits more complex forms of social ties to develop. There is a long term trend towards civilisation detectable in changing leisure pursuits, for example. It is an uneven process, however, as we shall see in Dunning's work on football hooliganism (where working class males can lag behind the others in  terms of their exposure to civilisation), and there are other pathologies -- it is possible to become overcivilised, for example.

MARXISM, in various guises, has set the agenda for a lot of the work, in the CCCS tradition at least, as we have seen. What is often puzzling to the newcomer is that there are different strands inside marxism, and that marxists spend a lot of time debating with and criticising each other. Gramscians, for example, hasten to dissociate themselves from both orthodox marxism (with its insistence that some basic characteristics of the capitalist mode of production explain everything in capitalist societies) and structuralist marxists (mostly French writers, who tend to see social life as heavily influenced or structured by certain processes which reproduce capitalist social formations --  see Althusser file ). In the early works, they did much to split from critical theory (which see) too. They were inspired instead by the life and work of Antonio Gramsci who did much to launch a subtle marxist analysis of the complexities of Italian culture in the 1930s and early 40s.

These other approaches for gramscians, are insufficiently aware of struggles in society, resistance, opposition, very often generated in complex ways in cultural locations (not economic ones). Concepts developed by Gramsci, especially the idea of hegemony, grasp these complexities and struggles better than the other marxisms, and offer both better analysis and better cultural politics, it is argued see Gramsci file . Briefly, hegemony refers to cultural and political leadership (rather than straightforward domination), and draws attention to the clever ways in which dominant groups interpret strands in popular culture and respond to them in a way which protects their interests. This is an ongoing task. It implies that some strands in popular culture are dangerous to the status quo, and do offer some sort of potential for resistance, and so must be 'managed'. It is rare that this management is ever totally successful, and so some elements of struggle remain in popular culture itself. The Communist Party in Italy was to engage in much more cultural politics itself, for Gramsci, to try and win back some of this critical potential.

As we'll see, gramscians also tend to employ more and more non-marxist 'bourgeois' social science to explain complexity and struggle, but they often used to feel rather apologetic and defensive about doing so. In particular, certain linguistic approaches tended to be welded on to the old Italian (as in the work of Laclau or Mouffe) to produce enriched gramscianism. Various appropriations from the then fashionable Foucault produced elaborated gramscianism, best seen for our purposes in the work of J. Hargreaves. Both terms are discussed further in Harris's very wonderful book.

This sort of largely academic effort is less noticeable these days though, since gramscians have been peculiarly unsettled (at last) by postmodernism. Gramscians have had a long struggle (sic) with postmodernism, trying to reject it first as the mere concern of French academics, then admitting that there was something in postmodern critique and trying to grab the best bits of it for gramscianism (see Hebdige's final chapter in Hiding in the Light -- which also has a good summary of postmodernism). One strange amalgam is post-marxism which I have discussed in my 1992 book (and which is also in  my file on postmodernism and very wonderful 1996 book -- see below)

POSTMODERNISM is a term used in both academic and cultural debates. The following definitions, will serve us for now:

'...The three word version is Jean-Francois Lyotard's: "incredulity towards metanarratives"....[which]... means that the postmodern condition has rejected the certainties of large schematic perspectives (e.g. of Marx ,Freud), replacing them with discontinuity, fragmentation, ephemerality.

The two word definition is by Linda Hutcheon who identifies postmodern fiction as "historiographic metafiction". By this she means fiction that talks about itself, the writing process (metafiction), and explores the relationship between history and narrative (historiography). Examples include John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman...

The single -- word definition...is by a recent undergraduate of mine, and requires no gloss: "crap".'

G. McKay, the Guardian, September 7 1992

The 'three word definition' is what has caused all the academic discussion, as grand theory after grand theory has come under close scrutiny and has been found wanting: all of them use tricky arguments, ambiguities, persuasive rhetoric and downright emotional appeals to try to convince the readers they are 'scientific'. Marxism has been attacked in particular, and the founding fathers of British cultural studies have had to quietly abandon many of their claims to offer a technically superior 'science' and an infallible guide to correct political practice. On the other hand, they have also done much to raise the issue of the sociology of postmodernism -- who are the postmodernists exactly? what's their (material) interest in this fashionable onslaught?

The 'two-word definition' applies not only to literature but to all cultural activities -- films, TV programmes, magazines, educational texts, clothes, youth subcultures, pop musicians, architects, all now self-consciously comment on (and often ridicule or parody) the very styles or conventions they are using. So 'postmodern' films abandon conventions like nice ordered narratives and realism, and become playful, ironic, episodic (with a series of episodes or scenes), cross-generic (i.e. mixing the conventions of different types of films - westerns, soap operas, documentaries, musicals), and intertextual (i.e. they are full of references to other films).

The 'one word' definition is appealing but far too simple, and would not single out postmodernism from some of the other approaches we are studying.

STRUCTURALISM is another term with several meanings according to whom you read. Culler's book (Structuralist Poetics) or the OU course Popular Cultureoffer the best sources for us, possibly. Very briefly, cultural activities can be understood best as a kind of symbolic language, as coded messages, using signs (words, images, gestures). Individuals and groups use these codes to express themselves, often in ways which they do not fully understand. One classic variant of the technique was employed in anthropology.

It makes sense then to direct analysis at the codes and signs themselves, to try to grasp the rules and significance of signs, to decode activities from the outside, using a structuralist (linguistic) method, rather than by researching the intentions or backgrounds or class positions of the individuals themselves. Barthes -- e.g. in Mythologies -- gives lots of little examples of how to decode, say, margarine adverts or striptease shows, or films.

Structuralism of this kind could be added on to marxism, as long as you see the codings and symbols as the result of a political process (class struggle again, more or less). Strictly speaking, this sort of development is what became post-structuralism. In France, the post-structuralists went around decoding or deconstructing all sorts of discourses (often literary ones, which look so harmless and 'universal' but which really perpetuate options rooted ultimately in power struggles). Foucault's work is probably more congenial to us -- he critically deconstructed important discourses, about health, sexuality, crime and punishment and education, and exposed the power relations in what looked like mere 'common-sense' or even 'scientific knowledge'. Inevitably, post structuralism itself came under scrutiny -- were the post-structuralists also guilty of hiding specific interests under apparently universally 'good' activities of deconstruction?
 

Can deconstruction as a technique be deconstructed itself? Despite some ingenious arguments (especially in Derrida -- but I won't bore you with them now), postmodernists thought so (well, they would).

Back home with good old British cultural studies, some marxists took the anti-individual elements in early structuralism to support their views of codes as being used to manipulate people and control their meanings. Others (especially the gramscians) tweaked structuralism their way and found struggle and resistance in linguistic structures: particular codes and messages were obviously influenced by the power of speakers to impose meaning on others, and this domination could be exposed and opposed by techniques such as bricolage, inversions of meaning, using the old signs in a subversive way (e.g. parodying 'straight' conventions of dress). This approach preserved complexity, and brought in a powerful and fashionable theoretical technique in a nice domesticated way. Many gramscians would like to stay with this approach -- but the people they borrowed the ideas from were already heading into post-structuralism and postmodernism.