4. comment on the political implications of the death of the author. 20

Death of the AuthorMany of Barthess works focus on literature. However, Barthes denied being a literary critic, because he did not assess and provide verdicts on works. Instead, he interpreted their semiotic significance. Barthess structuralist style of literary analysis has influenced cultural studies, to the chagrin of adherents of traditional literary approaches.One notable point of controversy is Barthess proclamation of the death of the author. This death is directed, not at the idea of writing, but at the specifically French image of the auteur as a creative genius expressing an inner vision. He is opposing a view of texts as expressing a distinct personality of the author.Barthes vehemently opposes the view that authors consciously create masterpieces. He maintains that authors such as Racine and Balzac often reproduce emotional patterns about which they have no conscious knowledge. He opposes the view that authors should be interpreted in terms of what they think theyre doing. Their biographies have no more relevance to what they write than do those of scientists.In The Death of the Author, Barthes argues that writing destroys every voice and point of origin. This is because it occurs within a functional process which is the practice of signification itself. Its real origin is language. A writer, therefore, does not have a special genius expressed in the text, but rather, is a kind of craftsman who is skilled in using a particular code. All writers are like copywriters or scribes, inscribing a particular zone of language.The real origin of a text is not the author, but language. If the writer expresses something inner, it is only the dictionary s/he holds ready-formed. There is a special art of the storyteller to translate linguistic structures or codes into particular narratives or messages. Each text is composed of multiple writings brought into dialogue, with each code it refers to being extracted from a previous culture.Barthess argument is directed against schools of literary criticism that seek to uncover the authors meaning as a hidden referent which is the final meaning of the text. By refusing the author (in the sense of a great writer expressing an inner brilliance), one refuses to assign an ultimate meaning to the text, and hence, one refuses to fix its meaning.It becomes open to different readings. According to Barthes, the unity of a text lies in its destination not its origin. Its multiplicity is focused on the reader, as an absent point within the text, to whom it speaks. The writer and reader are linguistic persons, not psychological persons. Their role in the story is defined by their coded place in discourse, not their specific traits.A text cannot have a single meaning, but rather, is composed of multiple systems through which it is constructed. In Barthess case, this means reading texts through the signs they use, both in their structure in the text, and in their wider meanings.Literature does not represent something real, since what it refers to is not really there. For Barthes, it works by playing on the multiple systems of language-use and their infinite transcribability their ability to be written in different ways.The death of the author creates freedom for the reader to interpret the text. The reader can recreate the text through connecting to its meanings as they appear in different contexts.In practice, Barthess literary works emphasise the practice of the craft of writing. For instance, Barthess structuralist analysis of Sade, Fourier and Loyola emphasises the structural characteristics of their work, such as their emphasis on counting and their locations in self-contained worlds. He views the three authors as founders of languages (logothetes).The Structure of NarrativeIn Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives, Barthes explores the structure of narrative, or storytelling, from a structuralist perspective. Narrative consists of a wide variety of genres applied to a wide variety of substances for example, theatre, film, novels, news stories, mimes, and even some paintings. We can see what Barthes terms narrative whenever something is used to tell a story. People using this theory will often refer to the way people live their lives as narratives, and some will talk about a right to tell our own story.Narrative is taken to be humanly universal every social group has its own narratives. Barthes models the analysis of narrative on structuralist linguistics. The structure or organisation is what is most essential in any system of meaning.The construction of a narrative from different statements is similar to the construction of a sentence from phonemes. Barthes argues that there are three levels of narrative: functions, actions, and narration. Each has meaning only in relation to the next level.Functions refer to statements in narratives. Every statement or sentence in a novel, for example, has at least one function. Barthes gives examples like: James Bond saw a man of about fifty and Bond picked up one of the four receivers.For Barthes, every statement has a particular role in the narrative there are no useless statements, no noise in the information-theory sense.But statements vary in their importance to the narrative, in how closely or loosely it is tied to the story. Some are functions in the full sense, playing a direct role in the story. For instance, a character buys a gun so s/he can use it later in the story. The phone rings, and Bond picks it up this will give him information or orders which will move the action forward.Others are indices they index something which establishes the context of the story. They might, for instance, convey a certain atmosphere. Or they might say something about the psychology or character of an actor in the story. The four receivers show that Bond is in a big, bureaucratic organisation, which shows that he is on the side of order. The man of about fifty indicates an atmosphere of suspicion: Bond needs to establish who he is and which side he is on.Among the former the true functions these can be central aspects of the narrative, on which it hinges (cardinal points or nuclei), or they can be complementary (catalysers). To be cardinal, a function needs to open or close a choice on which the development of the story depends. The phone ringing and Bond answering are cardinal, because the story would go differently if the phone didnt ring or Bond didnt answer.But if Bond moved towards the desk and answered the phone, the phrase moved towards the desk is a catalyser, because it does not affect the story whether he did this or not. Stories often contain catalysers to provide moments of rest from the risky decision-points.Barthes sees true functions as forming pairs: one initiates a choice and the other closes it. These pairs can be close together, or spread out across a story. The choice is opened by the phone ringing, and closed by Bond answering it.Indices are also divided into true indices, which index things like an actors character or an atmosphere, and informants, which simply identify something or situate it in time and space. A characters age is an example of an informant. True indices are more important to the story than informants.All moments of a narrative are functional, but some more so than others. Functions and indices are functional in different ways. Cardinal functions and true indices have greater functionality than catalysers and informants. At root, however, a narrative is structured through its nuclei. The other functional elements are always expansions on the nuclei. It is possible, as in folk-tales, to create a narrative consisting almost entirely of nuclei.Functions are arranged into narratives by being attached to agents characters in the story who engage in actions. Every narrative necessarily has agents. The actions of an agent connect the nuclei of the narrative to particular articulations of praxis desire, communication and struggle.The third level, narration, occurs between the narrator (or writer) and the reader. The narrator compiles the narrative in a way which is addressed to the reader, and produces the reader as a particular position in the narrative. The positions of narrator and reader are clearest when a writer addresses a factual statement directly to the reader: Leo was the owner of the joint. Narrator and reader are largely empty positions within the narrative.Narratives also have a kind of logical time which is interior to them and is barely connected to real time. This logical time is constructed by the series of nuclei (which open and close choices), and their separation by other nuclei and by subsidiary elements. It is held together by the integration of the pairs of nuclei.Narratives implicitly receive their meaning, however, from a wider social world. Barthes maintains that narratives obtain their meaning from the world beyond them from social, economic and ideological systems.Barthes criticises the narratives of his day for trying to disguise the process of coding involved in constructing a narrative. As in Mythologies, he again argues that this naturalisation of signs, and denial of the process of social construction of meaning, is specifically bourgeois. Both bourgeois society and its mass culture demand signs which do not look like signs. They are reluctant to declare their codes.Narrative also contains other potentials. Like dreaming, it alters the familiar in ways which show different possibilities. Although what is known or experienced is constantly re-run through narratives, the narratives do not simply repeat what is re-run through them. They open a process of becoming. In other words, things can run differently when run through narrative. Narrative shows that other meanings are possible. Familiar things can be given different meanings.What happens in narrative has no referent. It doesnt refer to something in the real world. Rather, what happens in narrative is language itself the celebration of its many possibilities. However, it is also closely connected to monologue (which follows in personal development from dialogue).Barthes is highly critical of realist and naturalist views of writing. For Barthes, literature is built on emptiness: it represents something which is not really there. All the arts of fiction, including theatre, cinema and literature, are constructed based on signs. They function by the suspension of disbelief. They function by calling certain desires or structures into play, causing people to feel various emotions. They are not representations of reality, but rather, a way to induce feelings in the audience.The attempt to convince the audience that the story is real is a way of reproducing the naturalisation of signs. A supposedly realistic or naturalistic art or literature never really tells it like it is. It represents through a set of conventional signs which stand for reality.Barthes criticises those who believe authors imitate an existing reality (a practice known as mimesis). He is in favour of an emphasis on the creation of a discursive world (semiosis) rather than mimesis. Hence his interest in Sade, Fourier and Loyola. Instead of conventional views of the world, alternative presentations can denaturalise the present and provide utopian alternatives.Barthes also criticises the idea of clarity in literature, for similar reasons. Clarity is simply conventional. It is relative to a particular regime of signs. It amounts to a criterion of familiarity. Therefore, it has conservative effects. Barthes views clarity as a class attribute of the bourgeoisie, used to signify membership of this class (this contrasts sharply with the more common claim in activist circles that speech should be clear so as to be working-class or inclusive).However, this is not strictly an expressive view either. The actor or author doesnt necessarily induce sympathy for their own feelings. Such an effect can amount to confusing art with reality. Instead, the actor, author and audience all know its fiction.In some contexts, such as theatre, wrestling, and (in Barthess view) Japanese culture, performance or artifice is recognised for what it is. It is not taken to be natural or real. In these contexts, signs have no content. Their operation serves to show the existence and functioning of signs. It also allows an expressive use of signs, to stand for particular emotions.In Rhetoric of the Image, Barthes discusses the different levels of meaning in a Panzani advert. Firstly, theres a linguistic message, which has the usual denoted and connoted levels. Secondly, theres a connotation, established by juxtaposition, associating the brand with freshness and home cooking. Thirdly, theres the use of colours and fruits to signify Italianicity, the mythical essence of Italy. Fourthly, the processed product is presented as if equivalent to the surrounding unprocessed items. These signifiers carry euphoric values connected to particular myths. According to Barthes, at least the third of these meanings is quasi-tautological.The language of images is constructed in particular zones or lexicons. Each of the connoted meanings refers to a specific body of social practice which certain readers will receive, and others may not. For instance, it mobilises ideas from tourism (Italianicity) and art (the imitation of the style of a still life painting). Often the same signifieds are carried by text, images, acting and so on. These signifieds carry a particular dominant ideology. A rhetoric of the image deploys a number of connotative images to carry messages.All images are polysemous they can be read in a number of ways. In an image such as this, language is used both explicitly and implicitly to guide the selection of meanings. The text directs the reader as to which meanings of the image to receive. Barthes thus suggests that texts have a repressive value relative to images: they limit what can be seen. It is in this limitation that ideology and morality function. Ideology chooses among multiple meanings which ones can be seen, and limits the shifting flow of signification which would otherwise happen.Euphoria and AffectEuphoria has both positive and negative meanings in Barthess work. As a negative term, it refers to the enjoyment of a closed system or familiar meaning which is induced by mythical signifiers. For instance, the fashion system is euphoric because its persistence as a system defies death. People can partake in a system of meanings which seems eternal, and thereby experience some of its illusory universality as euphoria. Myth provides euphoria because it provides a sense that something is absolutely clear. It aims for a euphoric security which comes with enclosing everything in a closed system. Tautology, for instance, gives someone the minor satisfaction of opting for a truth-claim without the risk of being wrong (because nothing substantive has been said). This can be compared to Negris argument in Time for Revolution that systemic closure yields a certain type of enjoyment.On the other hand, it can also signify an experience of fullness arising from actually escaping the regime of myths. In The Third Meaning, Barthes analyses Sergei Eisensteins films, suggesting the presence of what he terms an obtuse meaning alongside the explicit denotative and connotative meanings.These images simply designate an emotion or disposition, setting in motion a drift in meaning. They dont represent anything. They are momentary, without development or variants. They have a signifier without a signified. They thus escape the euphoria of closed systems, pointing to something beyond.Indeed, an obtuse meaning is not necessarily visible to all readers. Its appearance is subjective. It is permanently empty or depleted (it remains unclear how this positive empty signifier relates either to the mana-words of Mythologies, or to Laclaus rather different use of the same term). It can also serve as part of mythical schemes. For instance, ,moral indignation can function as a pleasant emotion.The obtuse meaning is not present in the system of language, though it is present in speech. It almost sneaks into speech, on the back of language. It appears as a rare and new practice counterposed to the majority practice of signification. It seems like a luxury: expenditure without exchange. And it seems to belong, not to todays politics, but to tomorrows. Barthes sees such facets as undermining the integration of characters, turning them into nubs of facets. In other words, the molar self of the character (who, in Mythologies, is connected to social decomposition and misrepresentation) is replaced by a different kind of connection which is, perhaps, directly lived and connected to the world, rather than projecting a literary figure onto it.It has been read in terms of a moment of emotion prior to thought. I think it might be better linked to Deleuzes idea of the time-image: the obtuse image is a momentary image which expresses the contingency of becoming. Barthes suggests that the obtuse image is carnivalesque, and that it turns the film into a permutational unfolding, a flow of becoming in the system of signs.Writerly Reading: S/ZIn S/Z, a text devoted primarily to the study of Balzacs short story Sarrasine, Barthes proposes a distinction between two types of texts.A text is writerly if it can be written or rewritten today. A writerly text is constructed in such a way as to encourage readers to reuse and reapply it, bringing it into new combinations with their own meanings. It is celebrated because it makes the reader a producer, not a consumer, of a text. The writerly value restores to each person the magic of the signifier. The writerly text is inseparable from the process of writing, as an open-ended flow which has not yet been stopped by any system (such as ideology or criticism).It is necessarily plural. This is a kind of plurality distinguished from liberalism: it does not acknowledge partial truths in different positions, but insists on difference as such. Difference constantly returns through texts, which re-open the network of language at a different point.Barthes counterposes this view to an essentialist or Platonic view in which all texts approximate a model. For Barthes, texts instead offer entrances into the network of language. They do not offer a norm or law. Rather, it offers a particular perspective constructed of particular voices, fragments of texts, and semiotic codes. Texts have only a contingent unity which is constantly rewritten through its composition in terms of codes. A writerly text should have many networks which interact without any of them dominating the others.The readerly, in contrast, reduces a text to something serious, without pleasure, which can only be accepted or rejected. A readerly text is so heavily attached to a particular system of meanings as to render the reader passive. It is a reactive distortion of the writerly through its ideological closure.Readerly texts must, however, contain a limited or modest plural in order to function. This limited plurality of the text is created through its connotations. There are also writerly and readerly styles of reading texts, depending whether one seeks predetermined meanings in it, or seeks instead to inscribe it in new ways.Instead of treating a text as a single phenomenon which represents something, Barthes proposes to examine a text through the plural signs it brings together. Instead of giving a unified image of a text, it decomposes it into component parts. Such a reading uses digressions to show that the structures of which the text is woven can be reversed and rearranged.Barthes calls this style of reading starring of a text. It cuts the text up into blocks of signification, breaching its smooth surface and especially its appearance of naturalness. It interrupts the flow of the text so as to release the perspectives within it. Each block is treated as a zone, in which the movement of meanings can be traced. The goal of this exercise is to hear one of the voices of the text.Readers should reconstitute texts as plural. Among other things, this means that forgetting meanings is a necessary part of reading. It ensures that multiple readings remain possible, and therefore, that signifiers are allowed to shift or move.One cant reduce all stories to a single structure, because each text carries a particular difference. This kind of difference is not an irreducible quality, but the constant flow of language into new combinations. Analysing the function of each text restores it to this flow of difference.He also calls for re-reading, as a means to avoid repetition and to remove texts from linear time (before or after) and place them in mythical time. Re-reading is no longer consumption, but play, directed against both the disposability of texts and their distanced analysis, and towards the return of difference. It helps create an experience of plural texts.In this text, Barthes criticises many of his earlier views. He now claims that connotation is ever-present in readerly texts (though not in some modern texts). There is no underlying denotative layer. Denotation is simply the most naturalised layer of connotation.Further, connotation carries voice into the text, weaving a particular voice into the code. The writer, here, has more of a role than Barthes previously allowed. Writing brings in historical context through connotation.The text as expression for the reader is also criticised. Readers are also products of prior texts, which compose subjectivity as subject-positions in narratives. Reading is itself a form of work. The content of this work is to move, to shift between different systems or flows which have no ending-point.The work is shown to exist only by its functioning: it has no definite outcome. To read is to find meanings within the endless flow of language. We might think of it as creating particular, temporary points or territories by finding resonances within a field which is like an ocean or a desert.

3. Examine the nature of the revolution in women's education proposed by Mary Wollstonecraft. 20

The A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft is a central text in the history of feminist theory, which till date continues to be an important reference for any understanding of feminist thought and activism at the end of the eighteenth century. It essay also functioned as a remarkable intervention in a field of intellectual debate dominated at the time almost entirely by men.A Vindication of the Rights of Women is in a large part structured as a response to several works on women education and female conduct written by men during the latter half of the 18th century. Of these the best-known and most influential was Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Emile or On Education. In A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft writes against a conception of women and femininity as defined primarily by the ability to arouse male sexual desire deprive us of souls and insinuate that we are beings only designed by sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratify the sense of man.. Her vision of womens emancipation from the slavery to which the pride and sensuality of man and their short-sighted desire has subjected them hinges on a notion of natural freedom. From Wollstonecrafts perspective, women were to be governed by reasonable laws rather than the despotism that has characterized mens treatment of them; they might accede to that state of liberty and moral dignity which is so often denied to them the most perfect education, in my opinion, is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form of the heart.to enable the individual to achieve such habits of virtue as will render it independent. Thus, she is harshly critical of the intense sexualization of femininity that she sees Rousseau among others as undertaking, for it is this association of women with bodily dependence that prevents them, according to Wollstonecraft, from acquiring vigour of intellect and rational thought.Wollstonecrafts analysis of gender relations is based on a critique of the way in which womens roles are culturally constructed to hinder their ability to become fully rational and autonomous moral individuals. A Vindication of the Rights of Women takes a historicist perspective on female education and what might be termed a Universalist approach to social theory. Finally, Wollstonecraft demands that men grant women the possibility to prove themselves as individuals blessed with the qualities of reason and independent thought. As she puts it, It is time to effect a revolution of female manners time to restore to them their lost dignity make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.A keen and vital concern with education, especially of girls and women, runs throughout Mary Wollstonecrafts writing and remains a dominant theme to the abrupt end of her career. A Vindication of the Rights of Women begins as a plea for the equal education of women and includes an ambitious and far-sighted proposal for a national schools system. Education was critically important to Wollstonecraft both as a liberal reformer and as a radical theorist and proponent of womens rights. A broad spectrum of reformist writers and activists from conservatives wishing to shore up the status quo to Jacobins wishing to overturn it saw education as a, if not the, key locus for promoting social stability or engineering social revolution. According to associationist psychology, influentially applied to schooling and pedagogy in Lockes Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and subscribed to by nearly every important writer on education in Wollstonecrafts time, childhood was the crucial period for the formation of individuals and hence of social groups. As Wollstonecraft herself writes, upon later character and the associations built over the course of childhood can seldom be disentangled by reason in later life. Not simply the consciously held ideals but the unconscious habits, prejudices, and character traits of men and women are established during childhood.The efforts of parents and teachers cannot do everything, following associationistic logic, since dominant social manners and institutions have a large formative effect in themselves. Yet education could at least do something to form rational and virtuous moral subjects who could then, in turn, help set a better social tone and establish more progressive social institutions. In contrast to skeptics like Anna Barbauld, who noted the contingencies and uncontrollable aspects of childs early environment, most liberal and radical intellectuals of the time viewed education as the cornerstone of any social reform. This was especially true for Dissenting intellectuals, non-conformist Protestants excluded from the educational institutions (including English Universities) under official Anglican control. Left to build their own network of schools and academicians, with considerable success, Dissenters has a practical stake as well as a theoretical and political interest in education. Although Wollstonecraft came from an Anglican family, her intellectual career brought her into sustained contact with Dissenting culture, from Richard Prices circle at Newington Green to Joseph Johnsons celebrated group in London, and her though on education and childhood shows a great deal of coherence with leading non-conformist ideals.If education was preeminent in forming individual subjects, it was equally powerful, Wollstonecraft eventually argues, to deform the subjective lives of women. She came to see the history of female education as a virtual conspiracy of male educators and writers seeing to render women weaker and less rational than they would otherwise have become women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name of virtue; Men indeed appear to me to act in a very unphilosophical manner, when they try to secure the good conduct of women by attempting to keep them always in a state of childhood. For the amelioration of womens abject social condition, then, and for the rise of a revolutionary generation of rational, free-thinking, independent women, educational reform was crucial. Moreover, women could argue from their traditional role as nurturers and early educators of children for a sounder and more rational education. If women were to be wholly or largely consigned to the domestic sphere, that is, they could make this domestic form of subjection the very ground for educational reform, since only a thoughtful, well-informed strong mother could be expected to provide for her children a truly adequate rearing and education How then can the great art of pleasing be said to be a necessary study? Such arguments, made by Wollstonecraft in company with a wide range of female reformers from conservatives like Hannah Moore to radicals like Macaulay and Mary Hays, were inevitable double-edged. They challenged a key aspect of patriarchal domination the sub ordination of women through an invidious education meant to confine them to the domestic sphere through urging a revised conception of that very domestic role.Wollstonecraft argues for a reasoned assent to reigning social values, urging the development of a sound moral understanding over mindless cultivation of exterior accomplishments like drawing and music. Unfortunately, rote accomplishments, empty manners, and vicious examples are what can be expected from most girls boarding. Wollstonecraft relentlessly attacks Rousseau for limiting a rational and sound education to boys, consigning girls to a subservient education for the body alone. Even in their traditional roles as mothers and nurturers, however, women require a much more substantial education.Wollstonecrafts radical re-conceptualization of the maternal role overlaps with the reformist agendas of most of the periods writers on education for women, but goes much further in demanding a complete overhaul of the false system recommended by all writers on female education and manners from Rousseau to Gregory. In place of incremental reforms, she calls for civil equality and economic independence, as well as an independence of mind scarcely to be expected from women taught to depend entirely on their husband. Moreover, the entire slate of negative virtues recommended throughout the conduct book manuals must be repudiated for their morally as well as physically debilitating effects, including the cardinal virtue of female modesty. Her uncompromising dismissal of uniquely feminine virtues which would facilitate her demonization in the reactionary period soon to follow allowed Wollstonecraft to revise the existing system of female socialization, from the cradle up.Wollstonecraft also extends her arguments to assert that women should exercise equal rights with men the public sphere and develops a critique of the structural inequalities of marriage. Marriage is based on an unequal contract, where the woman has the sole responsibility of appeasing her husband not with her morals or intellect, but with her charms only. When a women has only been taught to please, marriage which is supposed to eradicate the habitude of life can only serve to bring about monotony and bitterness or extra-marital affairs since the womens pleasing beauty cannot have much effect on the husbands heart, when they are seen everyday, when the summer is past and gone. However, although Wollstonecraft is a stem critic of actually existing marriages, she does not reject marriage as an institution altogether. Instead, she envisages a form of marriage that incorporates the major features of the classical notion of higher friendship such as equality, free choice, reason, mutual esteem and pro- found concern for one anothers moral character Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship. The classical ideal of higher friendship provides a suitable model for her liberal approach to marriage be- because it represents the paradigmatic rational, equal, and free relationship. In such relationships, individuals exchange some of their independence for interdependence and are united by bonds of deep and lasting affection, as well as respect for and appreciation of one anothers character and individuality. Wollstonecraft uses the idea that marriage should emulate many of the features of higher friendship to criticize the practices and values of romance and family life in eighteenth-century English society and to suggest a way in which marriage might be reconfigured to realize central liberal values. To recast marriage in this way means that Wollstonecraft is applying liberal values to the world of romantic love and family life. That she thinks about marriage in political, and specifically liberal, terms and recommends a model of marriage that emulates many of friendships salient features is an important feature of her work.Mary Wollstonecrafts essay thus needs to be situated in a society in which liberal individualism was becoming the dominant ideological formation of (male) personhood and social organization, what she uncovered was the systemic inequality of women in all areas of life the family, work, culture, economics, the law, education as well as inconsistency of the ideological positions that held this inequality in place. A Vindication of the Rights of Women was a response to that inequality. She examines the naturalness of womens inequality and discovers that it s not in fact natural at all natural indeed was a highly ideologically loaded word. Womens inequality, Wollstonecraft argued is socially constructed to shore up the position of the privileged liberal-individualist male. She argues that women, in particular, are rendered weak and wretched, by a variety of concurring causes, amongst which are inadequate parenting, bad education, the lack of property rights and the exclusion from the political sphere, as well as the negative effects of literary-cultural traditions the ideology of romantic love which makes women mere creatures of sentiment, and bad novels which reproduce a false picture of reality rather than an intelligent analysis of it.A small, but important example of her analysis is from her discussion of Dr. Gregorys A Fathers Legacy to his Daughters (1774), a conduct manual which focused on proper feminine behaviour. To quote Wollstonecraft, he advises them to cultivate a fondness of dress, he asserts is natural to them. I am unable to comprehend what either he or Rousseau meant, when they frequently use this indefinite term. She argues that if something is natural, then one will do it naturally, without the advice to cultivate the position advocated. If the fondness of dress is not a natural attribute of women, why should they be encouraged to cultivate it? The answer the love of power comes from the larger context of the book in which Wollstonecraft suggests that while women are denies other forms of power (political, educational legal) they will make use of whatever power left to them: in particular their sexual power to attract men because they are aught, and have learned their lesson well, that they can only draw power from sexual relationships rather than having any autonomous potency of their own. This sexualization of femininity, noted also by de Beauvoirs comment that women are often designated the sex, supports male privilege in two distinct ways: firstly it shores up a position that emphasizes the attractiveness of masculinity and its potency; secondly, it keeps women actually weak, while pretending to offer them (very limited) power.Dr. Gregory and similar male conservatives of the eighteenth century insist that women are unequal to men. On the one hand, their liking for clothes is labeled natural; and the word natural is heavily invested with positive value. In culture, however, women are routinely disparaged for liking clothes too much, a trivial, unimportant preference. So when they are told to cultivate their natural taste for clothes, they can be once more labeled as trivial unimportant people, incapable of serious thought. Ideology has a circular logic, and it is difficult to break the spell.While Wollstonecraft herself could not have used the words ideology and liberal individualist, her critique demonstrates the construcedness of social formations, and he inherent bias towards masculinity in those constructions. What she seeks is to improve the situation of women within the existing structures of society. Her work suggests that society is to blame for female oppression and for the general weakness of women. Women are not educated to do or know any better. Society has created womens foolishness and has then proceeded to blame women for their weakness, indeed has come to regard weakness as natural.For all her anger at the systemic oppression of women, however, Wollstonecraft is not quite a revolutionary writer, and her insights remain within the limits proposed by a liberal-individualist version of the world in the aftermath of the French Revolution. What she proposes is an extension of (male) individualist privilege to women. She does not propose to undo the very notion of privilege per se. The Vindication is basically a plea for bourgeois womans equality with the bourgeois man in the areas of educational, legal and political systems. It is all an attack on an ideal of femininity that constructs female inequality as natural. What is being demanded is therefore not so much a revolution towards an ideal of equality as a reapportioning of privilege to ensure that some (middle and upper class) women get some share of the spoils usually reserved to middle and upper class men. Her writings diagnose a social problem, but they articulate that problem within its own terms.The class, race and ethnic neglect of Wollstonecrafts writing have to be taken into consideration when thinking about the symptoms she uncovers and the diagnoses she produces in the Vindication, not least because of the significant space she apportions to literature in the formation of attenuated femininity she so deplores. In an age before widespread literacy, writing was necessarily addressed to the privileged few who could read. Her feminism is historically determined, depending on the ideological positions she deplores.Despite her bourgeois feminism, Mary Wollstonecrafts essay was instrumental in bringing in to the public sphere an initiation of intense debates on the question of emancipation of women. Her book was so popular that it had to be reprinted in the immediate next year.

5. What is Raymond William's contribution to the beginning of Cultural Studies at Birmingham? 2O

In this sense new museums as museums of identity would tend towards interdiscipli- narity, relying on collective memory and heritage. Future centers for heritage and local development (already partially recognized through the concept of eco-muse- ums) should be, as heritage-focused actions with the goal to acknowledge, preserve and integrally interpret the identity of a territory or community, the most similar to the concept of museums that answers the needs and desires of a society and which at the same time confirms Williamss theory of culture as the study of relationships be- tween elements in a whole way of life, or a unified system of civilizational, cultural, natural, social, economic and geographic values (2006: 39). In this manner the nine- teenth-century concept of identity manipulation with the purpose of positioning cul- ture would be replaced by a strategy of identity management. In the end we have to ask ourselves: do we need museums as (heritage) institutions? In his analysis of culture Williams thinks that the tendency of many academic insti- tutions towards self-perpetuation and their insensitiveness to change is often a great obstacle on the path of societal development. Change is necessary, as is the establish- ment of new institutions, but only if we understand the process of selective tradition correctly. The role of museums in the community is multiple: social and cultural ben- efits (cultural centers, development of identity in the area they exist in, educational function), economic benefits (tourism), political benefits (developing a sense of belong- ing). Museums are places for appreciating change but also an instrument of develop- ment. They are necessary for the survival of identity, the preservation of collective memory and the development of the community they serve. Concerning the concep- tual crisis and great changes in heritage institutions, as well as the fact that museums are too important to be relevant only to science (ola, 2003: 20), cultural studies, as a multidisciplinary area that shifts boundaries and tries to understand how culture works in contemporary society, with the special interest in the significance of identi- ty and the multiple ways it is transferred and experienced, could be of great help on the museums way towards redefining their role and mission.In the last quarter of the last century great changes in museum practice and museums as cultural and heritage institutions took place. One of the more significant ones is the trend of the museum boom, i.e., the phenomenon of the progressive growth in the number of newly built and reconstructed museums. Data reveal that the growth rate was the largest in the period between the 1960s and the 1980s, when one to two museums a week used to be opened in the developed European countries, while the growth somewhat decreased in the 1990s.1 For example, in Great Britain museums spring up like mushrooms:2 from the 1860s to the present approximately 1600 museums were established, about 800 of them in the period between 1971 and 1987, which amounts to approximately a museum per week.3 In one year in Germany (1988-1989) 189 new museums were established, which is 3.5 museums per week on average!4 The trend of growth in the number of museums in Germany continued, and according to the European group on museum statistics5 in 1998 there was the total of 5755 museums, 6059 in 2002 and 6197 in 2007.6 The data on the growth of the number of world museums collections, increase in the number of employees, volunteers, museum friends, financial param- eters and, of course, the number of visitors, are equally fascinating. According to the Register of museums, galleries and collections of the Republic of Croatia 203 museums were registered in 2006.7 Regardless of the long and rich history (the Archeological Museum in Split was founded in 1820), Croatia lags behind the more developed coun- tries. The boom of museums in Croatia happened during the 1950s and in the pe- riod between 1960 and 1990, when about thirty new museums used to be established each decade. The political situation and periods of war (1900-1945 and during the Croatian War of Independence) had an adverse effect on the development of muse- um activities. Over the last several years the number of newly founded museums and initiatives for the founding of museums in Croatia is on the increase, and the interest for establishing collections and museums stems mostly from local communities. What is the cause of the rapid increase in the number of museums and do they real- ly meet the needs they create? Regardless of the reasons for the increase, the impor- tance of museums in contemporary society is undeniable. Museums exist to ensure a better living and common good through their creative role in the society or, in short, to entertain and be useful. Considering the fact that culture in the wider, social sense of the word is still understood as an elitist product, it is necessary to redefine the position and significance of museums as non-profitable institutions in the service of so- ciety and their development within the overall cultural project. 8a short introduction to the development and work of cultural studies With the foundation of the British Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Bir- mingham9 in 1964 the development of a new discipline began, with the goal to ana- lyze and acknowledge the role of culture in (initially British) history and the study of contemporary forms and manifestations of culture previously located outside the usu- al academic interest, on the margins of life, work and entertainment.10 The Centers most prominent representatives and associates, such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Richard Johnson, Stuart Hall, Charlotte Brunsdon, Meaghan Morris and others, directed their interests toward the area of popular culture, working class cul- ture, theories of gender and racial identities, cultures of travel and subcultural life- styles, investigating at the same time the relationship towards the audience and the locations of cultural production. The ultimate goal of cultural studies is, in short, to understand the changes taking place in contemporary culture as the projections of opposing models of representations and the diverse ways of life and opposing communicational strategies. Cultural studies distance themselves from the traditionally structured institutions, as they resist all three of the traditionally essential epistemological elements, namely discipline, object of research and research methods, although without intention to succeed or surpass individual scientific disciplines under the guise of interdisciplinarity. Cultural stud- ies doesnt have a unified discourse or method, which is not surprising, considering the fact that the only starting point of their analysis, culture, is multidiscursive, i.e. its meanings become active in accordance with its usages within different traditions, his- torical contexts and relations of knowledge and power. Therefore it is very difficult to give a one-dimensional definition that would cover the wide area of the practice of cultural studies as an area that approaches cultural artifacts more from the stand- point of literary analysis, as texts to be read, and not as objects to be classified. Tony Bennett, using the syntagm reformers science, suggests several definitions of cultural studies. Cultural studies deals with all those practices, institutions and sys-tems of classification through which there are inculcated in a population particular values, beliefs, competencies, routines of life and habitual forms of conduct (1998: 28). An all encompassing cultural studies work is marked by an interdisciplinary concern with the functioning of cultural practices in the contexts of relations of pow- er of different kinds (Bennett, 1998: 27). The forms of power within which culture is analyzed include relations of gender, class and race as well as those relations of colo- nialism and imperialism which exist between the whole populations of different ter- ritories (Bennett, 1998:28). It is visible from the mentioned definitions that cultural studies engage in a continu- ous dialectic and permanent tension between the intercultural and academic life, an- alyzing new issues, models and ways of studying cultural practices and institutions in the context of various relations of power. How do museums as institutions function within contemporary society and culture, are they the indicators and mediators of con- temporary changes, do we need them at all as cultural (heritage) institutions and why do they spring up like mushrooms; these are the questions I will try to answer within the framework of cultural studies theory, by analyzing several selected texts by prom- inent literary cultural theorists. What seems relevant within this selection of texts is Williamss term of selective tradition, Halls analysis of identity from a deconstruction- ist standpoint and Bennetts principle of the multiplication of cultures utility.Culture in cultural studies Ideal, documentary and social definitions of culture Raymond Williams, one of the founding fathers of cultural studies in his glossary Keywords claims that [c]ulture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language (1983:87). Trying to define the complex term of culture, Wil- liams starts with its etymological roots in agriculture which at first meant something similar to cultivation.11 Williams leads us from the physical through the metaphysical extension of the meaning to the social and educational ones in the 17th and 18th cen- turies and to the aesthetical and civic definition of culture in the 19th and early 20th century, and finally to the postmodernist pluralization of the term culture and the recent usage of culturalism (2003:14). In further trying to define the concept of culture, Williams breaks down the term into three general categories: the ideal, documentary and social (2001: 57). The first one, ideal category defines culture as a state or process of human perfec- tion, in terms of certain absolute or universal values (Ibid.). According to this defi- nition culture is related to the ideal, the description of eternal values and universal human condition. According to the second, documentary definition, culture is the body of intellectual and imaginative work, in which, in a detailed way, human thought and experience are variously recorded, and the analysis of culture () is the activity of criticism, by which the nature of the thought and experience, the details of the language, form and convention in which these are active, are described and valued (Ibid.). The ex- amples of such activities are literary and art criticism which can be similar to the ide- al analysis in discovering the best that has been thought and written in the world (Ibid.) or can, as a critical activity, be directed at the specific work being studied in the sense of explaining and valuing the work as its basic goal. It can include a type of historical criticism which, after the analysis, studies specific works in the context of social regions in which the works originated. The third, social definition of culture defines culture as the description of a par- ticular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour (Ibid.). This definition of culture encompasses the previously mentioned critical activity within the documentary analysis, but also includes the clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture, as well as those elements of the way of life that are not culture at all: the organization of production, the struc- ture of the family, the structure of institutions which express or govern social rela- tionships, the characteristic forms through which members of the society communi- cate (Williams 2001:58). Williams concludes that each of the three definitions has its value and role in the anal- ysis of culture as a whole, and that the focus on any of them independently is unac- ceptable; because, if the ideal definition is valuable due to its insistence on the wider, universal sense of searching for absolute values, it nevertheless sees mans ideal devel- opment as separated from satisfying their concrete material needs. Documentary defini- tion draws from material testimonies and finds values exclusively in written and visu- al sources and is thus separated from other areas of life. Social definition tends to see values and works as by-products, a passive reflection of real social interests. There- fore, in the interrelationship between culture and society, all activities and their in- terrelationships should be studied as equally valuable and as active reflections of hu- man energy. When Williamss texts12 was first published, museology was starting its attempts to de- fine itself as a scientific discipline. There was a view within museologic theory that its subject matter was the museum, its historical development and activities, while muse- ography in this view was the description of museum work techniques. Museum work was mostly directed at collecting and preserving objects and artwork and at museum architecture. It was only after 1976 that the museum object was acknowledged as an INDOC (information and documentation) object.13 Furthermore, the development of semiology and communication theories affected the understanding of the museum as a medium, and of the museum object as a sign which, apart from its physical dimen- sion, contains also an intellectual one and bears a certain meaning. When transferred into a new museum environment, every heritage object is extracted, selected from its reality in order to become its document. The documented value of an object is therefore the basis of museality which develops along the line of the relation between time and space. Furthermore, every musealia14 is a communication object which develops an information process in the relation between the society and space it lives in, while in the relationship between time and society it develops a communication process of transfer of the values and messages of heritage as another important museological function (Maroevi, 1998:142). Time, space and society become the three basic deter- minants through which the life of objects or the entire system of human heritage through the changes of their identity15 and role in the society can be observed.Structure of feeling and culture of the selective tradition The most difficult thing in studying past periods is, Williams thinks, to restore and experience that sense of the quality of life (p. 63), that common element, which is neither the character nor the pattern, but as it were the actual experience through which these are lived, and for this common element, which is the result of all the el- ements comprising the system, he proposes the term structure of feeling (2001: 64). The structure of feeling is not the structure that can be learnedevery generation has its own structure of feelings, along with the specific manner of communication in rela- tion to inherited values. Documentary culture, that is, the collected material testimo- nies of a period, can help us as bearers of different meanings settling in different pe- riods of human history. Considering the fact that we are familiar only with one part of tangible heritage, the one preserved through time, the interpretation of history takes place through the process of selection. The further attempt to define the complex term of culture involves the differentiation among the three levels of culture: lived culture, available exclusively to those living in the given time and space, recorded culture as the culture of a period, which in- cludes art and everyday facts, and the culture of the selective tradition which as a fac- tor relates the lived culture and the culture of different periods. Williams thinks that [i]t is only in our own time and place that we can expect to know, in any substantial way, the general organization, and that, in the course of transfer to the present, cer- tain elements get irretrievably lost or, if it is possible to reconstruct them, reconstruct- ed through abstraction (2006: 63). Thus, selective tradition through continuous selection, rejection and limitation al- lows for new reevaluations and interpretations of meaning. How can we define the culture of a period, taking into consideration this constant selection and re-selection of ancestors (Williams, 2006: 69)? The structure of feeling, the central concept of Wil- liamss theory, can be in a manner understood as the culture of a period. The struc- ture of feeling is an attempt to resolve the duality of culture which is simultaneously stable and defined in the sense that any structure is, but also vague and elusive, be- cause it refers not only to material, objective reality but also to lived experience, the most sensitive and least tangible aspects of our activities. It is in these examples of re- corded communication that the real feeling of life is contained, the fellowship that enables recognizability.Museums in the context of various relations of power Selective tradition is closely related to social development, through the process of his- torical change as well as in contemporary system of interests and values where a specif- ic social situation affects contemporary selection. The selection in a society is guid- ed by various special interests, including the class ones. So, cultural institutions often become the tool or strategy in the hands of the dominant forms of power. When Tony Bennett speaks of the multiplication of cultures utility,16 he defines the reforming strategies in the areas of culture and art in the British context of the second half of the 19th century. The opening of museums, art galleries and reading rooms across the country to the regular people, and not only to the privileged ones did not take place only due to aesthetic or educational purposes, but due to solving a series of so- cial problems. So museums became, among other things, instruments of civilizing the people. Thanks to the aesthetic features of culture and their influence on the behavior of those exposed to them, museums were meant to bring about social good through transforming workers into new prudential subjects. Within the framework of English utilitarian cultural reform, the exposure of workers to culture involved the need to lead them to be sober and prudent. Therefore, culture served as a civilizing agent and a resource for introducing the people to more prudent modes of behavior. The nineteenth-century principle of multiplying the utility of culture resulted in a two-way positioning of culture: the creation of a prudential subject through the civ- ilizing influence of culture that serves to reform a persons behavior and the devel- opment of new capillary systems for the distribution of culture, i.e. the utilization of culture and expansion of its scope throughout the social body. The new forms of governmental power within nineteenth-century cultural management reflected in the idea of the museum as an instrument of public education. The role of museums in contemporary society has changed significantly. While tra- ditional museums were in the service of the ruling class as a strategy for establishing and regulating power, contemporary museums are slowly but safely becoming a cor- rective and adaptive social mechanism, a form of social intervention of a sort. Con- temporary, postindustrial and consumer society needs such mechanisms in order to secure the survival of identity and the continuity of collective memory. While muse- ums in their glorious past served to elevate and glorify the elite and produce rigid scientific information, contemporary museums have a mission to document, process and communicate all collected information from the past, thus taking part in the de- velopment and becoming a productive, vital social force. The new mission of the mu- seum refers not only to the affirmation of culture, but also to boosting the quality of life in general and to contribute to a better, more comfortable and fun living. Raymond Williams, as was stated earlier, defined the theory of culture as the study of relationships between elements in a whole way if life (2006:63). For him, culture is a wider term, a common good, not an elite product. Cultural studies fight against the elitist definition of culture and in their discourse culture is ordinary, connect- ed to the whole way of life and everyday activities which also produce meaning and contain certain values. When Richard Johnson reflects on some arguments for and against the academ- ic codification of cultural studies in his text17, he asks: Is not the priority to become more popular rather than more academic? (2006:658). Because, the codification of knowledge stands in opposition to the openness and theoretical plurality of cultural studies, and cultural processes do not always correspond to the framework of academ- ic knowledge. Johnson concludes that [a]cademic knowledge forms (or some aspects of them) now look like part of the problem, rather that part of the solution, and the fundamental question is: what can be won from the academic concerns and skills to provide elements of useful knowledge? (Ibid). Although culture is the central focus of interest of cultural studies, it is not viewed as a whole, but within the context of so- cial power, where it produces constant analytical tensions through activating the po- litical within its own discourse. The dynamics of social power reflects in the opposed definitions of culture: high/low or elite/popular. On the one end of the dis- course Culture begins with a capital C, on the other end lie the symbolic practices and experiences of ordinary people. In his Notes on deconstructing the popular18 Stuart Hall draws attention to culture as a battlefield because active forms of popular culture are in constant opposition to-wards the dominant culture. In this battle there is no final winner, although domi- nant culture, constantly [tries] to disorganise and reorganise popular culture; to en- close and define its definitions and forms within a more inclusive range of dominant forms (1981:233). Popular culture19 is not to be viewed as inferior, less valuable in comparison to high culture, but it should be approached differently, with an appro- priate critical discourse. Culture is a complex, multidiscursive term, and considering the fact that a unique definition is not possible, the term often functions as an umbrella term because it covers all sorts of phenomena and symbolic practices. Because, if there exist soccer culture, transition culture, caf culture, culture of travel, food culture, polit- ical culture, sport culture, urban culture, then it is perfectly acceptable to estab- lish new types of museums that present and interpret different artifacts, phenomena or symbolic practices that arewell-liked by many people and that are recognized as elements of popular culture. Therefore, if, on one hand, there exist complex muse- ums of art, and on the other hand emerges the need for museums that deal not only with fine arts but also with everyday and contemporary cultural symbolic practic- es, in the sense that they educate and inform the public in a pleasant and entertain- ing way. The museum of today needs to include the whole public, all layers of socie- ty, not only the educated elite. The number of newly established museums in Croatia has increased over the past sev- eral years20, while the cultural policy of the Republic of Croatia acknowledged the im- portance of museums as heritage and cultural institutions par excellence. The Draft of the Strategy for cultural development of Croatia in the 21st century21 supports new, inventive museum types (The Museum of ties, Childrens Museum, Museum of Wom-en Painting, Vladimir Dodig Trokuts Anti-Museum), museum forms that value the relation between the environment and authentic artifact (memorial centers and col- lections), and special value is added to the development of eco-museums as the mod- el in which heritage of the local community is musealised in situ. One of the exam- ples of a contemporary, inventive museum form is the Croatian artistic project called Museum of broken relationships.22 Authors Vitica and Grubii envisaged it as an artis- tic concept based on the idea of preserving artifacts that testify of passed love rela- tionships. The main creator of the Museums exhibition is the audience itself which, donating its own exhibits, testifies of the specificity of the environment and mental- ity of individual intimate stories. This traveling museum was guest in several Euro- pean cities, Singapore and the USA, where it continued creating a space of protect- ed memory for preserving the emotional heritage of broken love relationships.23 Wishing to humor the audience and be as attractive as possible, contemporary muse- ums are frequently on the path to the world of entertainment and profit. In order to avoid the possible disneyfication of museums, museums have to take care of a good interpretation of its material and of sending the message to the public and defining its mission with the goal of the common good in mind.Deconstructionist approach to identityTerry Eagleton called the continuous dialectics and conflict over meaning in the con- temporary (post)industrial society culture wars, and by this syntagm he implies the rift between Culture and culture, the struggle between custodians of the canon and devotees of difference (2000:51). Eagleton also thinks that cultural wars are conduct- ed in three different ways: between culture as civility, culture as identity and culture as commercial or postmodern, and defines them in short as excellence, ethos and eco- nomics. Along with the interest for popular culture, the question of identity through three of its basic problems (those of class, gender and race) is a part of cultural issues studied within the discourse of cultural studies, as well as in other disciplines. Within cultural studies theory, Stuart Hall24 wonders why there is such large need for speculating about identity and analyses the term within a deconstructionist ap- proach. The deconstructionist viewpoint approaches key terms as under erasure, as no longer usable in their original and un-reconstructed form, but as constructed in or through diffrance, through the relationship with the Other and towards some- thing that is not, and is called a constitutive outside. The objective of the deconstruction- ist method is to show that categories and categorizations do not exist in absolute and en Painting, Vladimir Dodig Trokuts Anti-Museum), museum forms that value the relation between the environment and authentic artifact (memorial centers and col- lections), and special value is added to the development of eco-museums as the mod- el in which heritage of the local community is musealised in situ. One of the exam- ples of a contemporary, inventive museum form is the Croatian artistic project called Museum of broken relationships.22 Authors Vitica and Grubii envisaged it as an artis- tic concept based on the idea of preserving artifacts that testify of passed love rela- tionships. The main creator of the Museums exhibition is the audience itself which, donating its own exhibits, testifies of the specificity of the environment and mental- ity of individual intimate stories. This traveling museum was guest in several Euro- pean cities, Singapore and the USA, where it continued creating a space of protect- ed memory for preserving the emotional heritage of broken love relationships.23 Wishing to humor the audience and be as attractive as possible, contemporary muse- ums are frequently on the path to the world of entertainment and profit. In order to avoid the possible disneyfication of museums, museums have to take care of a good interpretation of its material and of sending the message to the public and defining its mission with the goal of the common good in mind.Deconstructionist approach to identityTerry Eagleton called the continuous dialectics and conflict over meaning in the con- temporary (post)industrial society culture wars, and by this syntagm he implies the rift between Culture and culture, the struggle between custodians of the canon and devotees of difference (2000:51). Eagleton also thinks that cultural wars are conduct- ed in three different ways: between culture as civility, culture as identity and culture as commercial or postmodern, and defines them in short as excellence, ethos and eco- nomics. Along with the interest for popular culture, the question of identity through three of its basic problems (those of class, gender and race) is a part of cultural issues studied within the discourse of cultural studies, as well as in other disciplines. Within cultural studies theory, Stuart Hall24 wonders why there is such large need for speculating about identity and analyses the term within a deconstructionist ap- proach. The deconstructionist viewpoint approaches key terms as under erasure, as no longer usable in their original and un-reconstructed form, but as constructed in or through diffrance, through the relationship with the Other and towards some- thing that is not, and is called a constitutive outside. The objective of the deconstruction- ist method is to show that categories and categorizations do not exist in absolute and rigid meanings, that it is not possible to go unpunished taking over and transplanting terms from one discourse to another without at the same tame taking over their hy- potheses and effects. Identity is one of such terms operating under erasure in the interval between reversal and emergence; an idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but without which certain key questions cannot be thought at all (Hall, 1996:2). Therefore, Hall proposes the term identification, defining it as the process of articula- tion, a suturing, an over-determination not a subsumption, as a never-ending process based on the recognition of common origin or common feature shared with another person or group. Halls concept of identity does not imply an essentialist subject-root- ed order holding a predictable meaning, but a temporally and spatially contingent, intrinsically plural and contradictory, strategic and positional identity built and mul- tiplied through different intersecting discourses, practices and positions. Identity in the postmodern society is a continuous change and transformation. The dominant culture which is, according to Eagleton, a blend of excellence, ethos and economy, is increasingly subverting traditional identities. An increased growth of the number of museums over the last several decades is nothing but an answer to the loss of identity in the global culture. People of modern society are forgetful. The excess of information causes the deletion of memories, and globalization causes the loss of roots, personality, originality, freedom, the loss of belonging. The power of the elec- tronic media (the internet, television, radio, mobile phones ), as well as the availa- bility of press and the quantity of books produced increase in geometrical progres- sion and cause crucial changes in the overall communication among the members of a culture, changes in the communication between the culture and the past (tradition) and the communication among simultaneously existing cultures. The emphasis is on the present (present in alternative movements and learning, hyperreality in every- day life), while the fear of future grows larger, and the past serves as a retreat from the present. In this sense museum is an antidote, a corrective and adaptive societal mechanism with the mission to defend identity and secure its continuity.Conclusion Museums as heritage institutions continuously select and interpret, transfer material and spiritual testimonies from a rich treasury of the past to the present, thus creat- ing a new culture, the culture of selective tradition. Hereby, every element studied is seen as active within real relations, taking into consideration the documentary, ideal and social analysis of culture as equally valuable. It is due to selective tradition that cultural institutions dealing with the preservation and transfer of tradition are ded- icated to tradition as a whole, not only to the selected parts that correspond to con- temporary interests and expectations, thus enabling the reevaluation and rediscov- ery of values of the previously discarded activities. During the first museum boom (second half of the 19th century) which was brought about by the idea of progress, industrial and technological development, urbaniza-tion, the new experience of time and space, but also as the motif of prestige and the support for the ruling elite, the role of museum represented the accumulation of en- cyclopedic knowledge and affirmation of national consciousness.25 The museum also served as a means for the multiplication of cultures utility, as a new form of govern- mental power and an instrument of public education. The second museum boom was caused by new circumstances in the world we live in over the last fifty years: infor- matization, the increase in the level of education, ideological and political uniformi- ty of the world, the processes of disculturation and commodification of culture, that is, turning culture into commodity, subject to market rules. The process of moderni- zation resulted in the growing distance between people and their past, which in turn caused the fear of identity loss, and the subsequent desire to regain it. The reasons for the rapid growth of the number of museums therefore have to be observed with- in a wider economic, political, and cultural context. The culture industry made culture the top priority of our time, and museums, as parts of the culture industry and participants in radical social changes, are forced to keep balance between the opposing poles of historical elitism and popular culture. Modern consumer society based on mass communication imposed new responsibili- ties on culture. The demands of the audience and users are increasingly moving to- wards an alliance between art and entertainment, towards the entertainment industry of the mass media which integrates art as well. Contemporary museums represent a place in which one can learn, play, paint, construct, experiment, eat, drink tea, chat, buy or otherwise spend ones free time usefully. The focus is on tactile experience, attraction, interactive and multimedia approach to exhibiting. The door of the mu- seum is open, and the borders of activities are being increasingly stretched to include the user and the wider community. Considering the appearance in the second half of the twentieth century of phenomena and discourses previously not present with- in the framework of interest of humanist disciplines, which are defined as contem- porary popular culture (daily newspaper, music, weekly magazines, television shows, lifestyles), a need emerged for establishing new types of museums or at least projects within the existing ones that try to answer complex questions of contemporary life. Parallel to the development of new types of museological activity goes the reconcep- tualization of traditional museums which embrace contemporary aspects of exhib- iting and presenting their material. The rapid increase in the number of museums is also the sign of a certain conceptu- al crisis because, regardless of the fact that museums spring up like mushrooms, it can be concluded that not all mushrooms are edible.26 Only those museums estab- lished upon a new pattern, upon the paradigm that shifts its focus from the collection and the curator to the communication of the overall identity of a community, answer the needs of the contemporary society. In this sense new museums as museums of identity would tend towards interdiscipli- narity, relying on collective memory and heritage. Future centers for heritage and local development (already partially recognized through the concept of eco-muse- ums) should be, as heritage-focused actions with the goal to acknowledge, preserve and integrally interpret the identity of a territory or community, the most similar to the concept of museums that answers the needs and desires of a society and which at the same time confirms Williamss theory of culture as the study of relationships be- tween elements in a whole way of life, or a unified system of civilizational, cultural, natural, social, economic and geographic values (2006: 39). In this manner the nine- teenth-century concept of identity manipulation with the purpose of positioning cul- ture would be replaced by a strategy of identity management. In the end we have to ask ourselves: do we need museums as (heritage) institutions? In his analysis of culture Williams thinks that the tendency of many academic insti- tutions towards self-perpetuation and their insensitiveness to change is often a great obstacle on the path of societal development. Change is necessary, as is the establish- ment of new institutions, but only if we understand the process of selective tradition correctly. The role of museums in the community is multiple: social and cultural ben- efits (cultural centers, development of identity in the area they exist in, educational function), economic benefits (tourism), political benefits (developing a sense of belong- ing). Museums are places for appreciating change but also an instrument of develop- ment. They are necessary for the survival of identity, the preservation of collective memory and the development of the community they serve. Concerning the concep- tual crisis and great changes in heritage institutions, as well as the fact that museums are too important to be relevant only to science (ola, 2003: 20), cultural studies, as a multidisciplinary area that shifts boundaries and tries to understand how culture works in contemporary society, with the special interest in the significance of identi- ty and the multiple ways it is transferred and experienced, could be of great help on the museums way towards redefining their role and mission.5. What is Raymond William's contribution to the beginning of Cultural Studies at Birmingham? 2O

In a well-known essay, Stuart Hall, director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) from 1969 to 1979, declares, there is something at stake in cultural studies, in a way that I think, and hope, is not exactly true of many other important intellectual and critical practices. Here one registers the tension between a refusal to close the field, to police it and, at the same time, a determination to stake out some positions within it and argue for them. That is the tension. 1 What does Hall mean by this highly cryptic and loaded statement? Will discovering what Hall means aid our understanding of British cultural studies as an intellectual discourse? In order to answer these questions we first need to address the most pertinent and demanding question of all: what is cultural studies? Certainly, thinkers such as Hall had cause to ask and answer this question many times and in many different ways from a theoretical standpoint, in an effort to define the field of discourse in which they worked. However, it is only recently, with sufficient hindsight, that we find ourselves in the position to begin to ask and answer this question from a historical point of view.Contemporary British cultural studies has its origins with the founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in 1964 as a postgraduate research institute. In fact the intellectual genealogy of British cultural studies is concomitant with the intellectual history of the CCCS. The Centre is acknowledged for producing what are generally regarded as thefoundational texts of modern British cultural studies. Its approach was interdisciplinary, drawing on sociology, literary criticism, and history. The Centres approach and methodology drew upon a long history of British cultural thinkers and later mined the intellectual wealth of contemporary European theoretical thought. These multiple approaches and multiple voices in turn impelled new questions and a subsequent rethinking of what culture means. The Birmingham group re-conceptualized popular culture as the location or site of resistance and negotiation by marginalized and disempowered groups in modern society and thus granted popular culture an entirely new order of importance. They perhaps most importantly reinterpreted culture in relation to dominant political structures and social hierarchies. The intention of this project, both implicitly and explicitly, was to give a voice to the marginalized. Initially, this project was propelled in terms of class but later, as we shall see, also in terms of gender and race.While scholars have done work in chronicling the intellectual history of British cultural studies, 2 none have analyzed in detail, the importance of the intervention of gender and race in the cultural discourse at the Centre. Of particular interest to me are the discursive effects that the inclusion of multiple voices and perspectives had on the Centre and thereby on British cultural studies in general. In other words I am interested in the extent to which the central voice of the Birmingham school was ruptured by the breaking in of other previously marginalized and often discordant voices. My ultimate objective however is to determine whether the arrival of these voices at the Centre was contestatory and defiant on the one hand or complementary and constructive on the other. The first step in accomplishing this task is to trace the intellectual trajectory of British cultural studies as it happened at Birmingham. 3 Perhaps Mikhail Bakhtins notion of the dialogic (or polyphonic) is a useful intellectual framework in examining how voices at the Centre were at once conflicting and complementary to the overall discourse (in the most literal sense of the word) of British cultural studies as it emerged from the CCCS.In his book Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics (1929), Bakhtin observes that the characters in Fyodor Dostoevskys novels are liberated to speak a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices which are not contained by the authoritative control of the author. 4 In other words, the dialogic form of the text allows the characters to speak in their own voices. This allows the creation of a textual space where several voices, each possessing their own palpable definitiveness, are heard, where they converse, and yet where no voice or perspective dominates the others.5 A dialogic approach is profitable to understanding the manner in which different voices within British cultural studies and at the CCCS interacted, conversed, answered one-another, argued and disagreed. In a dialogic setting no single voice would come to dominate the others yet ideas and perspectives are always fiercely debated. Bakhtin suggests that these different voices and the subsequent modes of discourse are not just a verbal or literary phenomenon, but a social one as well. These discordant voices (what he refers to as a polyphonic heterogeneity) disrupt the authority or centrality of a single voice. Yet in the case of the Centre we must recognize the tenuous and protean nature of this situation. The dialogic at the CCCS was something that was never certain or fixed but always struggled over. As an ideal it was sometimes achieved and sometimes not. The more conscious and palpable this goal became in the minds of those at the Centre the more authentic and purposeful the struggle to achieve it became.When I use the term British cultural studies, I am explicitly referring to a specific discursive field of academic inquiry centered on the CCCS. It is the history of this discursive field (in both its intellectual and political context) that I will now trace a history that includes the formation of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies but, more significantly, beyond this institution to a whole field of academic inquiry. Originally the Centre was founded as part of the school of English at the University of Birmingham. Its agenda from the beginning was to utilize the methods and techniques of literary criticism to analyze mass culture and develop a critical criterion for texts. However, the Centre was soon granted autonomy as an independent postgraduate research centre. Cultural studies at the Centre was initially conceived not as an independent field of study but as a supplementary adjunct to social-scientific analysis. Stuart Hall, a key figure during the Centres formative years, notes:Cultural studies have multiple discourses; it has a number of different histories. It is a whole set of formations; it has its own different conjunctures and comments in the past. It included many different kinds of work. I want to insist on that! It always was a set of unstable formations. It was centered only in quotation marks, in a particular way. It had many trajectories; many people had and have different trajectories through it; it was constructed by a number of different methodologies and theoretical positions, all of them in contention. Theoretical work in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was more appropriately called theoretical noise. It was accompanied by a great deal of bad feeling, argument, unstable anxieties, and angry silences. 6Halls quote richly characterizes the spirit of the Centre its hybridity and its dialogic atmosphere. His implication that the Centre had no fundamental intellectual Centre I believe succinctly articulates not necessarily the amorphous nature of the CCCS but rather its loose confederation of simultaneously complementary and conflicting voices. This dialogue, as characterized by Hall, with its multiplicity of voices and discourses never deteriorated into a discordant impasse or to the point of intellectual immobilization. Undeniably this dialogic was highly emotive, often hostile, and always volatile; nevertheless, it constantly seems to have fostered an environment of intellectual ferment and innovation in spite of this.The genealogy of British cultural studies as a mode of scholarly inquiry can be traced to such early cultural writers and commentators such as Mathew Arnold, the Leavises and T.S. Eliot. This early manifestation of the discipline (unlike French and German cultural studies which had roots in sociology) has its roots in literary criticism but also operates from a perspective of cultural elitism. These cultural commentators narrowed their definition of culture to high culture the Great Tradition of English literature, which consisted of a limited literary canon (e.g. Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, etc.).7 However, even though these pioneers are credited with being the first to negotiate the terrain of culture from a British perspective, mass or popular culture was viewed by them as a subject to be derided and not worth serious study. British cultural studies, as it emerged from Birmingham, was built more or less directly on the intellectual and methodological foundation laid by two key figures: Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, both of whom drew extensively upon literary criticism a field in which they were trained.8 However, both attempted to engage culture not in the elite parochial sense of Arnold, Leavis or Elliot but in the sense of mass or working class culture that is culture tout ensemble.But leaving aside the intellectual lineage of cultural studies as it was manifested, fostered and given shape by the founding of the CCCS, let us turn briefly to the political and social milieu in which British cultural studies and the Centre was envisioned and mobilized. The project of cultural studies, as it took root and flourished at Birmingham, was shaped by a postwar British social and political movement known as the New Left. Dennis Dworkin asserts that the project of British cultural studies cannot be viewed in isolation; it must be seen in the context of the crisis of the British Left, a crisis virtually coterminous with the postwar era. 9 The character of the New Left movement was contingent and tumultuous; it lacked any form of permanent organization or centralized leadership. 10 Overall, the New Left movement was a tenuous heterogeneous conglomeration of ex-Communists, disaffected labour supporters, and socialist students hopeful of renewing socialist theory and practice.11 These individuals aggregated in reaction to resurgence of the British Tories in the 1950s. As Dennis Dworkin writes: leftist intellectual culture, dominant in the thirties and forties, was displaced by a stifling conservatism founded on the revival of traditional values and a definition of Western culture defined as the best that has been thought and written. 12The New Left was also mobilized in trenchant protest to specific political events, specifically the Suez and Hungary Crises in 1956, and in support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) during the late fifties and early sixties. It was also committed to breathing life into the social democratic politics that drew from a tradition of English popular radicalism but that skirted Leftist orthodoxy that was out of touch with the economic and social realities of postwar Britain. Hence, the New Left was also motivated by their disenchantment with the conventional or orthodox left. On the other hand, its emergence was also impelled by the disillusionment of many British Communists with Stalins Soviet Union. While the movement was impelled by these political commitments, it did possess a fundamental intellectual and theoretical component that was synonymous and inseparable from the political dimension. Dworkin notes: They never succeeded in creating a permanent organization, but they created a new political space on the Left, and their project was critical to the development of radical historiography and cultural studies in Britain. 13Consequently, in discussing the New Left as a postwar British political and intellectual project, it is also crucial to acknowledge that this project was firmly grounded in Marxist ideology.While the Centres Marxist roots are deep, these roots are not just intellectual but profoundly political. 14 The individuals at the Centre drew not only on the intellectual tradition of Marxism but on the Marxist-leftist legacy of political and social praxis as well. E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart, the three founding figures of the Centre,