Pleasure, power and practicing place:

Meaghan Morris and Things to Do With Shopping Centres

Morris’s essay is an instructive model as you start to think about your assignments because it is shows a researcher consciously reflecting on her chosen methodology as part of the essay itself. Morris strives to be very transparent about the objectives which motivate her research and why these objectives influence the kinds of theoretical and methodological decisions she makes. This is what in cultural studies we call self-reflexivity – and it means acknowledging yourself within the research.

Stuart Hall describes theory as a “double practice”: a formal conceptual tool as well as a “trying out” a way of theorizing:

[It is] working with momentarily, temporarily ‘objectified’ theories, moments of ‘arbitrary closure’, recognizing that in the ongoing analysis of the concrete, theory must be challenged and revised… moving us a little further on down the road.

From Jennifer Daryl Slack Daryl (1996) ‘The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies’, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London and New York: Routledge

Hall also says that “the only theory worth having is that which you have to fight off, not that which you speak with profound fluency” in Hall, (1992) ‘Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies’, in Cary Nelson, Paula A Treichler and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Cultural Studies, London: Routledge

This means that when we ask you to use theory in this course we’re not asking you to mimic or “master” what we’ve introduced. That would be to reproduce an elitist and exclusionary form of scholarship that as we you’ll remember from my earlier lectures cultural studies began by critiquing. But what we do want to encourage is an ethic of engagement with the theories in recognition of their influence and historical importance. Ultimately what we want to read in your assignments is how you respond to examples in cultural studies’ theoretical development given the different circumstances you’re familiar with as well as how you demonstrate the use or the limits of available theoretical approaches in the specific context you choose to study.

Quotes from Michel de Certeau ‘“Making Do”: Uses and Tactics’ in The Practice of Everyday Life:

In the wake of the many remarkable works that have analyzed “cultural products,” the system of their production, the geography of their distribution and the situation of consumers in that geography, it seems possible to consider these products no longer merely as data on the basis of which statistical tabulations of their circulation can be drawn up or the economic functioning of their diffusion understood, but also as parts of the repertory with which users carry out operations of their own. Henceforth, these facts are no longer the data of our calculations, but rather the lexicon of users’ practices. Thus, once the images broadcast by television and the time spent in front of the TV set have been analyzed, it remains to be asked what the consumer makes of these images and during these hours. The thousands of people who buy a health magazine, the customers in a supermarket, the practitioners of urban space, the consumers of newspaper stories and legends—what do they make of what they “absorb,” receive, and pay for? What do they do with it? (30-1)

In reality, a rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular and clamorous production is confronted by an entirely different kind of production, called “consumption” and characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation (the result of the circumstances), its poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless but quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility, since it shows itself not in its own products (where would it place them?) but in an art of using those imposed on it (31)

What is called “popularization” or “degradation” of a culture is from this point of view a partial and caricatural aspect of the revenge that utilizing tactics take on the power that dominates production. In any case, the consumer cannot be identified or qualified by the newspapers or commercial products he assimilates: between the person (who uses them) and these products (indexes of the “order” which is imposed on him), there is a gap of varying proportions opened by the use that he makes of them. Use must thus be analyzed itself. (32)

Graeme Turner: ‘The obvious limitation to the progressive effect’ of Certeau’s work as it was popularly received is that it fails to acknowledge ‘that the textual system may well be more porous than the social system; making over the meaning of a television programme may be much easier than climbing out of a ghetto, changing the colour of one’s skin, changing one’s gender, or reducing one’s dependence on the varied mechanisms of state welfare’ (Turner 99)

For more on the limitations of popular uses of Certeau in cultural studies and Meaghan Morris’s different use see Melissa Gregg (2004) ‘A Mundane Voice’ in Cultural Studies 18, 2/3: 363-383