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ГЛАВА 4. ИНФОРМАЦИОННЫЕ И КОММУНИКАЦИОННЫЕ ТЕХНОЛОГИИ В ПРОЕКТИРОВАНИИ, ПРОИЗВОДСТВЕ И ОБРАЗОВАНИИ
УДК 378 Sadykhova L.G,
MSTU (Moscow State Technology University named after N.E. Bauman); Moscow, Russia
CULTURAL STUDIES AND SOCIAL-CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
Possible ways to optimize social-cultural development in periods oof recession are being considered. Cultural practices, new educational forms, and interrelations between disciplines as a result of cultural policies in some European countries are analysed. Compensatory functions of such cultural production and cultural activities are discussed. Cultural studies is shown as integrating approach to combine research and professional training, particularly as it started in adult education system, which is increasingly important in terms of adjustment to social and economic recession, as well as ofplanning further social-cultural development for the long term. Key words:
social-cultural development, cultural studies, cultural policies, adult education.
Cultural practices such as various festivities, forms of educational institutions, cult services etc. normally result from many eventually developing structures and functions of any particular society. When the latter drastically changes, these also undergo corresponding transformation, becoming marked with implicit controversies and sometimes subversive character. On the other hand, cultural practices can be not only immediate and spontaneous reflection of, or issue from, society's transformation, but planned phenomena as well: e.g., by special panels or committees of more or less professional administrators such as art councils, culture/ cultural development department, education and science ministries [1-4], etc.
The task of such type of establishment becomes particularly important in the time of social, economical or political crises when it is crucial to minimize their impact on too many people, as culture makes up, besides its many other properties, a means of resistance to social disintegration. Thus, for instance, in the time of the unprecedented industrial growth, and the relevant social and economic polarization in the 19th century Western Europe, in that period's mass culture there developed such productions, in literary and, even more remarkably, theatrical forms [5] which provided public with somewhat emotionally consoling content. That was particularly important because theatre, before the emergence of screen images, was the most popular mass culture venue and means of translation of new ideas and eventually transformed values [5; 6]. What was to become later, in the 20th century, popular cinema production gave mass audience, with their too rapidly changing surrounding and thus inevitably accumulating frustration, somewhat understandable picture of the world, including its good to be reinforced and evil to be punished, which made it morally and emotionally easier for the public to cope with daily problems of an increasingly split and divided society.
Since the mid-19th century, some Western European countries' cultural elite [7; 8] began to develop special project of so-called National theatre which would unite most various people by such productions the content of which, whether in terms of their story or heroes staged, would be historically and culturally important for them as that particular state's citizens. In France, for instance, the state sometimes got involved in the project, supporting it by relevant cultural policies and, accordingly, financing.
To take an example of cultural production in post-colonial countries or those with recent experience of social conflicts, one can see the way so-called national idea began to develop, which was the case of corresponding programmes of Irish Literary Theatre [9] and the Theatre National Populaire (TNP) in France [10]. The underlying idea was to create a unifying cultural
space to contribute to the formation of the nation-state solidarity, and it actually helped to overcome many local intergroup conflicts based on different ethnic and/ or confessional belonging.
Two more examples of the post-war France's cultural policies were (i) the state's support of the national cinema (which has never ceased ever since, to enable the French cinema production to stay authentically recognisable as such, qualitative and popular at the same time), and (ii) the formation of a network of local centres of culture (les maisons de la culture) to give access to culture to those who had been deprived of it because of either their unfavourable social-economic background or limited capability of visiting big cities with their cultural centres. Since then, small towns' and remote country places' inhabitants who had neither time no money to go to large theatres and museums got the opportunity to see various performances and exhibitions which began to come to their vicinity. However, the main problem involved, according to some critics, seems to have been stressing somewhat material aspect of those centres of culture, or their infrastructure [11], which made them means of artistic production distribution rather than true social-cultural development.
An interesting alternative of meeting practical demands of social-cultural development was the formation of new educational institutions: adult and further education, including so-called open universities which appeared in many countries (Britain, the US, France) across the second half of the 20th century. Such type of education was less formalized than traditional one, and gave new opportunities of self-realisation in general, and employment in particular, to many working people, those disabled, those who had not been able to meet classical universities' requirements, etc.
The last, but the most integrative case of theoretic and practical works to be analysed here as contributing to social-cultural development is an innovation begun by a group of British scholars in the 1930-s: that which would be the brand-name of cultural studies [12]. R. Williams, one of its founding fathers, then a lecturer and scholar who started teaching at Birmingham, where post-industrial economy manifested as marked recession as in other cities mainly populated by working class people. Williams considered culture as inseparable from social development, and (the conception he elaborated together with a French sociologist of literature L. Goldmann [13] ) cultural patterns as crystallizing attitudes and what he called "structures of feelings" which express a corresponding period's regime with its ideology. Williams also emphasized the role played in social changes by educational system as well as by various means of communication, including mass media [14]; accordingly, he drafted a programme to
reform educational system to make it more appealing to potential students.
As far as his practice was concerned, Williams, together with E.P. Thompson and several other colleagues of theirs worked in adult education, paying particular attention to making their courses more understandable and syllabus more flexible and connected with their students' life experience than it had been possible within classical educational forms and programmes. Thus, e.g., while doing English studies they did not try to mainly analyse literature linguistically or philologically as it would have been the case at Oxbridge: instead, they discussed it with their students, accounting for what it implied, and at the same time analysing the ways different people understood it depending on their background. This meant, apart from it being an educational technique, that they introduced to their teaching and studies research methods which had been applied in anthropology. Also, they extrapolated critical analysis method previously used in philology to mass culture production (movies, popular music, etc.) which had not been considered worth studying in the previous decades' academic research based on much more conservative division of objects under study into those allegedly superior and inferior, the latter exemplified by mass culture.
To further elaborate their programmes Williams and his colleagues did their best to research their target audience's milieu, living conditions, as well as their values and attitudes; the result of such factors being taken into consideration was particularly important for evening classes' or professional colleges' students who had been in less favourable circumstances to learn than their younger counterparts - prestigious schools' graduates.
All this would both improve social-cultural development and start cultural studies as such. As for the students, they became more motivated
and eager to use the same approach in their own work, when becoming teachers and scholars themselves. It is indicative that cultural studies which appeared in that practical, problem-oriented context, and in polytechnics rather than classical universities, would soon become part of the curricula of those latter [15]. Williams himself, e.g., came to teach to a newly opened university at Warwick (one of so-called ^new' universities, in contrast to those ^old', academically oriented, which themselves were akin to polytechnics); it was there that he opened his centre of social history research. In this way a network of research exchange was built which enabled his colleagues to conduct longitudinal studies such as, e.g., those of social dynamics across the years 1930s - 1950s.
Besides the obvious advantage in adult students' education model universally, this also contributed to practical improvements at a local level: increased numbers of those who continued learning and thus got access to better jobs and higher income, which was actual social and economic achievement (particularly in those regions which experienced recession), on the one hand, and provided social and economic development departments with such statistical data on living, learning and working conditions they needed, on the other hand. In a way, that was the formation of a new cultural policy: coordination of educational programmes, social-cultural development monitoring, and corresponding meeting job market demands, primarily at the local community level.
To sum up, cultural policies, however differently originated and whatever level (state's or local community's) institutions involved, can be an efficient means to realise social-cultural development, cultural studies being an example of research and educational systems' efficient contribution to the process.
ЛИТЕРАТУРА
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