Abstract
John Hartley and Jason Potts begin Cultural Science with an obstacle, as they look to Darwin and his theory of evolution for an understanding of culture, and thereby must get the reader past concerns that social Darwinism lies around the corner. This is no small obstacle, and although I fear that many readers may hit that wall of concern and gently put the book back on the shelf, it would be a great pity to do so since Cultural Science is a wonderfully mind-challenging, expansive book that is boldly ambitious. Perhaps it is good that my mind needed to climb over that wall of concern, as it was then adequately stretched and ready for the vigorous and rewarding exercise it received from two writers trying to answer big questions with big answers.
Hartley and Potts have teamed up as, respectively, a media, communication, and cultural studies scholar and an economist, yet they proceed to innovate not even a hybrid approach but a new one entirely toward an understanding of how culture as a large breathing system works. Taking inspiration from Darwin’s lesser known writings on culture, they posit a grand theory that is as much about meaning, innovation, storytelling, authorship, identity work, knowledge, novelty, conflict, and collaboration as it is about culture writ large. Every one of these, and more, issues benefits from a critical distance from a new vantage point.
Central to the book’s thesis is an interest in culture as overarching entity that precedes individuals. This is not an attempt to erase either individuality or agency but rather to hold agency and system in “productive tension” (p. 30), by considering how “Culture is a system-generating mechanism that everyone uses but no one invents, the model for which is language,” such that “we must revise our understanding of individuals to explain their ‘groupishness’” (p. 22). Such an “externalist” mode, as they call it, of understanding culture, and of understanding individuals as constituted in and through networked relationships, regards culture and meaning as entities operating in their own interests in ways comparable to Darwin’s species, hence the title “cultural science.”
Of particular value within this vein is Hartley and Potts’ consequent framing and understanding of storytelling as an intricately cultural exploit. They focus on stories as belonging to cultural groups—“demes,” to them—and as created or told by these demes. Individual talent, they argue, is an outcome of culture, and that culture creates not works of art, talented individuals or even ways of life, but knowledge-making groups, which work as complex systems within which individual choice and creativity are produced, such that ‘culture makes us’ rather than the other way around. (p. 22)
Handily, they sidestep Great Man theories and myths of solitary authorial genius, and by asking how communities are responsible for stories, they refocus on the work of stories and on the processes by which communities seek or retract from innovation while also studying how conflict and collaboration between different communities or demes work.
The book also promises to generate plenty of thought and discussion for anyone interested in media and communication’s roles in constituting publics and their relationship to citizenship. Storytelling, they argue, comes before the polity, the audience before the citizen (pp. 36–37), since stories play a vital role in constituting demes and cultural groups while also serving as “the means by which humans store, distribute and refresh acquired knowledge” (p. 39), “the survival vehicle for culture” (p. 70). Stories rally groups together and give them purpose, meaning, and direction, and hence, as Hartley and Potts suggest, there is no purpose and no public without stories. Hartley and Potts insist on the centrality of stories, popular culture, and narrative to citizenship, not just allowing that stories and media might “contribute” to citizenship and to how we consider ourselves as citizens, but that they constitute us as citizens, groups, and publics in the first place, such that “all storytelling is political, constituting the ‘we’-community, seeking to create polities of trust, to expound the costs of cooperation for characters and deliver its symbolic rewards” (p. 71). Readers of a journal entitled Communication and the Public should certainly consider and consult Hartley and Potts’ work closely.
Hartley is, of course, a canonical figure in media and cultural studies, someone whose early work in books such as Reading Television and Understanding News contributed greatly to the then-fledgling discipline. Here, with Potts, he continues and advances its work of stepping back from an aesthetic mode of analysis to focus instead on processes, doings, and happenings and on texts and their audiences and producers as contributing to a grander drama, not constituting the drama in and of themselves. If the moniker of cultural science therefore scares away would-be readers (whether through fears of test tubes and complex mathematics or of positivist searches for objective truths, neither of which are in Hartley and Potts’ deck it should be noted), one might also consider this book more simply (yet no less importantly) as an attempt to reset cultural studies in the direction of what culture and meaning are and how they work, gently pushing aside text/audience/producer-for-the-sake-of-text/audience/producer work. When they write that ‘the “product” of culture is not the work of art or way of life, but the deme that in turn makes newness, in an open-ended, adaptive mode of productivity, not according to a pre-existing definition of what each culture is said to contain’ (p. 77) they take the emphasis behind Hoggart, Williams, and other early developers of cultural studies’ work and seek to push it forward to new realms of study.
Inevitably, a question is left at the end of how to do this type of work. Hartley and Potts don’t “just” offer theory, though, as they engage in a particularly rich analysis of the telling of the Anzac invasion of Gallipoli and its place in Australian national mythologies. But for the most part, the application is yet to come. Hartley’s subsequent book, Creative Economy and Culture, written with Wen Wen and Henry Siling Li, and other upcoming collaborative ventures offer moves in this direction, enough that I had debated whether to review them alongside Cultural Science. However, Cultural Science deserves its own mental space. As I read it, at times I had moments of exclaiming “but! but! but!”, yet those are signs of how thoroughly it challenged me to reconsider and reconceive much of the field of media, communication, and cultural studies, and much of the work within it. Generative, “big picture” books like this are rare, as perhaps we allow the canon to have set the terms of debate; thus, it is all the more refreshing and exciting to read something that puts some of our more sacred platitudes and concepts back up for debate and that inspires us to solve them again and better.