TV times: archive, mood, media

Today, television is spreading centrifugally: it no longer requires a broadcasting schedule nor the furniture traditionally associated with it (the ‘box’ in the corner of the front room). In this age of Television-after-TV one phenomenon that is particularly important is the increasing access and ease of access to the televisual past. This article investigates (sometimes in a speculative manner) how these changes are forming and transforming popular historical consciousness: the ordinary sense that we have of living at a particular moment that is connected with and disconnected from what came before

Migrant cuisine, critical regionalism and gastropoetics

This essay is based around two sentences from Nadeem Alslam’s 2004 novel Maps for Lost Lovers. From this base comes an exploration of what aesthetics could mean for cultural studies, and what sorts of practices it could foster. The essay argues for the pertinence this may have for the study of food culture, while also taking up the project of ‘critical regionalism’ and ‘gastropoetics’ as a way of moving from the tightly figured frame of a fragment from a novel, to the histories, geographies and affects that impact on it

Out of place: unprofessional painting, Jacques Rancière, and the distribution of the sensible

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Into the labyrinth: phantasmagoria at Expo 67

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Aesthetic matters: writing and cultural studies

What would it mean to treat Cultural Studies as a project that has had amongst its accomplishments the production of new forms and styles of writing, and a generative approach to aesthetics? An initial answer to this question would be that this would recognise how Cultural Studies interceded in an academic environment not only through its concern with supplying ambitious questions and insisting on a broad range of objects of scrutiny, but also by showing how this often entailed reconfiguring the forms through which intellectual inquiry conveyed its cargo. This article doesn’t seek to provide a taxonomy of Cultural Studies’ forms and styles; what it seeks to do is to encourage a self-reflexive attention to aesthetics within Cultural Studies as a form of practice. It suggests that there are two guiding questions that might frame such an attention: how might Cultural Studies generate forms that are adequate to the complexity of the configurations that it seeks to register; and how might Cultural Studies generate forms that could reach the ear of new audiences not attuned to the cadences of scholarly writing? The tension between these two questions should be seen as an invitation to purposeful experimentation within Cultural Studies

Habitat’s scenographic imagination

Habitat, the furniture and household goods retail chain, has been characterised as evidencing an ‘eclectic’ approach towards design styles and promoting a ‘lifestyle’ attitude towards domestic interiors. In an attempt to fill-out these two terms and to explore the elusive (and allusive) content of Habitat’s ‘eclectic lifestyle’ this article analyses the domestic scenography that is presented in three arenas of display that can be seen as being authored by Habitat: the shops themselves; the annual catalogues; and the advice books that were published under the authorship of Terence Conran and promoted and sold by Habitat (but also available more widely). I suggest that one way of recognising the affective content of Habitat’s scenographic imagination is to grasp it as constituting a genre that incorporates variety yet also mobilises a particular set of domestic promises

Formations of feelings, constellations of things

This essay revisits Raymond Williams’s notion of ‘structures of feeling’ with the intention of clarifying what Williams meant by ‘feelings’, and of exploring the concept’s possible range and reach within the study of culture. It recovers the initial anthropological context for the phrase by reconnecting it to the work of Ruth Benedict and Gregory Bateson. It goes on to suggest that while the analysis of ‘structures of feeling’ has been deployed primarily in studies of literary and filmic culture it might be usefully extended towards the study of more ubiquitous forms of material culture such as clothing, housing, food, furnishings and other material practices of daily living. Indeed it might be one way of explaining how formations of feeling are disseminated, how they suture us to the social world and how feelings are embedded in the accoutrements of domestic, habitual life. The essay argues that by joining together a socially phenomenological interest in the world of things, accompanied by an attention to historically specific moods and atmospheres, ‘structures of feelings’ can direct analyses towards important mundane cultural phenomena

Feeling it: habitat, taste and the new middle class in 1970s Britain

In 1964 the furniture designer and entrepreneur Terence Conran, along with various partners, opened a shop in London selling furniture and household goods. It was a ‘lifestyle shop’ called Habitat. By the late 1970s is was a fixture of many cities and towns across Britain. In this essay I treat Habitat as a taste formation, as part of a structure of feeling that was specific to what many social commentators were calling the ‘new middle class’. This essay charts some of those feelings and the material culture that supported them, and argues for an approach to taste that treats it as an agent of socio-historical change as well as a practice that maintains and reproduces social class. The feelings that Habitat could be seen to activate ranged from ‘cottage urbanism’ and improvised sociability to a sense of middle-class-classlessness. Habitat’s role was ambiguous, nurturing both middle class radicalism and the marketization of democratic impulses. In the transition from welfare state socialism to neoliberal hegemony Habitat’s role was both surreptitious and substantial

Taste as feeling

This article is premised on two presumptions. The first is, I think, uncontroversial, the second less so. The first presumption is that today, serious discussions about taste usually start out by rehearsing Pierre Bourdieu’s contribution to our understanding of how taste preferences operate in society. This, then, is merely to recognize that when Bourdieu first published books such as The Love of Art (1969, written with Alain Darbel) and Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), he was making a concerted intervention into debates about cultural value and challenging the philosophical understandings of taste based on such ideas as disinterested attention. Today Bourdieu is often the starting point for discussing taste, rather than invoked as a critical response to other starting points that might go by the name of Immanuel Kant, or David Hume, or Archibald Alison. The second, more contentious presumption is that Bourdieu was not actually interested in taste and rarely addressed its particular qualities in his work. Or to put it differently, Bourdieu was only interested in taste as a function of something else, and that something else was the generation and maintenance of social distinctions. This meant that tastes (particular choices, specific likings and dislikings) were only ever relevant or worthy of note if they were already marked as having some sort of social distinction and value. It doesn’t take long to notice that such an approach requires the discounting of all those aspects of taste that might matter to tasters but that can’t be used to explain social differences: for instance, the way I much prefer strawberry jam to the raspberry variety, or why, out of all of John Coltrane’s albums, I am always particularly drawn to his 1961 album Olé Coltrane. Nor does it address questions of taste that might not be accessible through Bourdieu’s favored method of the questionnaire; questions about overarching changes in taste that might mark one epoch from another, one national context from another. For Bourdieu, a taste that is shared by all would not be a taste at all

Out of Birmingham: towards a more peripatetic cultural studies

This piece of writing is an experiment in digressive and peripatetic cultural studies that follows a thought path around the city of Birmingham in England. Instead of constructing an argument it tries to perform a mode of enquiry that could be sensitive to the 'simultaneous non-synchroncity' of culture, and could craft a form of writing adequate to history's torn and crumpled state. I doesn't try to claim preferential treatment for such a practice, merely a marginal place for such a practice within cultural studies