Culture, Media, Language

Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79

Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, Paul Willis, Stuart Hall, Doothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, Paul Willis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134897155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 2004. A collection of the pioneering work from The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Part One
Introduction

1
Cultural Studies and the Centre: some problematics and problems*

Stuart Hall

The first issue of Working Papers in Cultural Studies appeared in 1972.¹ The title ‘Working Papers’ was deliberately intended to set the terms of our approach in a number of respects. This was not the scholarly journal of the field—which, indeed, hardly as yet existed.² We laid no proprietary claim on it. We recognized that, if Cultural Studies ‘took off’, it would deploy a greater variety of approaches than we could reproduce within the Birmingham Centre (at that time, less than half its present size). We also recognized that a particular ‘mix’ of disciplines woven together at Birmingham to form the intellectual base of Cultural Studies would not necessarily be reproduced exactly elsewhere.³ We could imagine Cultural Studies degrees or research based, just as effectively, on visual (rather than literary) texts, on social anthropology (rather than sociology) and with a much stronger input of historical studies than we drew on in the early days. Such courses have indeed been initiated since then—with conspicuous success.⁴ The Centre had, perforce, to work with the intellectual raw materials it had to hand. It chose to specialize in those areas which the small staff felt capable of supervising.⁵ It approached the problems of interdisciplinary research from those more established disciplines already present in the complement of staff and students working in Birmingham at that time.⁶ But we tried not to make the mistake of confusing these starting positions— over which we had relatively little control—with a theoretically informed definition of Cultural Studies as such. Hence, the journal specifically refused, at the outset, to be a vehicle for defining the range and scope of Cultural Studies in a definitive or absolute way. We rejected, in short, a descriptive definition or prescription of the field.⁷ It followed that, though the journal did not offer itself as a conclusive definition of Cultural Studies, it did confront, from its first issue, the consequences of this refusal: namely, the need for a sustained work of theoretical clarification.

On the other hand, the journal was conceived as an intellectual intervention. It aimed to define and to occupy a space. It was deliberately designed as a ‘house journal’—a journal or tendency, so to speak. Nearly all of its contributors were Centre members.⁸ Its aim was to put Cultural Studies on the intellectual map. It declared an interest in advancing critical research in this field. The phrase, ‘Working Papers’, however, underlined the tentative character of this enterprise, as we saw it.

In real terms, its publication and production was made possible by a small educational bequest made over to the Centre by Sir Allen Lane and Penguin Books in the early days—and without strings—to give the Centre some small independent financial support.⁹ Otherwise the journal had no official sponsorship or financial support: it was self-financed and self-produced. In conception and execution it was a collective venture, the product of staff and students working together. With the Stencilled Paper series, which was initiated at about the same time, it gave the Centre, and Cultural Studies, a necessary public presence.¹⁰ The first issue was designed and overseen by Trevor Millum, one of our first successful Ph.D students, in a period of post-thesis euphoria.¹¹

The development of the Centre, and of Cultural Studies, can be resumed in a number of different ways. We look at three aspects in this introduction: first, the changes in theoretical perspective and in the main problematics which have staked out the Centre’s development through the 1970s; second, the question of the different areas of concrete research in which the Centre has been centrally engaged; third, the modes of organization, the intellectual practices of analysis and research, through which that work has been practically realized.

Foundations of cultural studies

The search for origins is tempting but illusory. In intellectual matters absolute beginnings are exceedingly rare. We find, instead, continuities and breaks. New interventions reflect events outside a discipline but have effects within it. They most often work to reorganize a set of problems or field of inquiry. They reconstitute existing knowledge under the sign of new questions. They dispose existing elements into new configurations, establish new points of departure. Cultural Studies, in its institutional manifestation, was the result of such a break in the 1960s. But the field in which this intervention was made had been initially charted in the 1950s. This earlier founding moment is best specified in terms of the originating texts, the original ‘curriculum’, of the field—Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society and The Long Revolution, E.P.Thompson’s critique of the latter work and the ‘example’ of related questions, worked in a more historical mode, in The Making of the English Working Class.¹²

These were not textbooks for the inauguration of a new discipline: though they were the results of disciplined intellectual work of a high order. They were responses of different kinds to a decisive historical conjecture. They brought disciplined thought to bear on the understanding of their own times. They were far from neutral or scholarly: they were cultural interventions in their own right. They addressed the long-term shifts taking place in British society and culture within the framework of a long, retrospective, historical glance. What these writers in their various ways confronted, precisely, was post-war British society, recently emerged from the upheavals of total war, entering a period of change and development whose parameters were set by the terms of the post-war ‘settlement’. The depression and the war appeared to have established certain critical breaks with earlier developments. The ‘settlement’—defined by the revival of capitalist production, the founding of the welfare state and the ‘Cold War’—appeared to bring economic, political and cultural forces into new kinds of relation, into a new equilibrium. But what sort of qualitative break with the past did this constitute? Had there been a decisive rupture with the determining historical forces which had shaped Britain’s ‘peculiar’ route through the earlier phases of industrial capitalist development, or merely their recomposition into new continuities? Was Britain still a capitalist civilization or a ‘post-capitalist’ one? Did welfare capitalism represent a fundamental or merely a superficial reordering of society? The earlier phases of industrial capitalist development had produced a complex but distinctive type of social formation: what type of social formation was now in the making? Such transformations in the past had entailed profound cultural shifts and upheavals: as E.P. Thompson remarked, when surveying the deep changes in the social apprehension of Time which sustained an earlier moment of ‘transition’, ‘there is no such thing as economic growth which is not, at the same time, growth and change of a culture….’¹³ What did such cultural changes amount to now? What would be the consequences for traditional class relationships, for class formation, and their cultures—hitherto, the very basis of the cultural order itself? Were there new, emergent cultural forces and tendencies? Above all, how were these historical processes to be qualitatively understood and assessed?

These issues were being widely debated at the time. They formed, for example, a constitutive part of the agenda of the early ‘New Left’, with which many of the contributors identified above had been associated. They set the terms of the postwar ‘cultural debate’ which, with many changes of emphasis, continues today. They also defined the space in which Cultural Studies emerged, defined its objectives and its agenda. From its inception, then, Cultural Studies was an ‘engaged’ set of disciplines, addressing awkward but relevant issues about contemporary society and culture, often without benefit of that scholarly detachment or distance which the passage of time alone sometimes confers on other fields of study. The ‘contemporary’—which otherwise defined our terms of reference too narrowly—was, by definition, hot to handle. This tension (between what might loosely be called ‘political’ and intellectual concerns) has shaped Cultural Studies ever since. Each of the books referred to above inhabited this tension in a different way. Each addressed the problems defined by a decisive conjuncture—even when the mode of analysis was ‘historical’. Each sought fresh direction from within a tradition of intellectual inquiry, which it then both developed and transformed. Each insisted that the answers should match, in complexity and seriousness, the complexity of the issues it addressed. Each supposed that those answers, when and if found, would have consequences beyond the confines of an intellectual debate. This tension necessarily situated Cultural Studies awkwardly with respect to the existing division and branches of knowledge and the scholarly norms legitimated within the higher learning. Marked in this way by its origins, Cultural Studies could in no sense be viewed as the establishment of yet another academic sub-discipline. This prevented its easy absorption and naturalization into the social division of knowledge. It also made the enterprise problematic from the outset in the eyes of the powers that be —with near fatal consequences, on occasions, for the whole venture.

One important question was the relation of Cultural Studies to the existing disciplines in which its problems were being rethought. Could this work be pursued in a disciplined, analytic way, yet break from some of the founding propositions of the intellectual fields in which it was situated? Each of the texts mentioned above referred itself and its readers to existing traditions of thought. The Uses of Literacy, which attempted to chart the process of change within the traditional cultures of the urban working class, employed methods similar to those developed by Leavis and the Scrutiny critics, attempting to rework their procedures and methods so as to apply them to the study of living class cultures.¹⁴ This aim was altogether different from the purposes behind the initial inspiration of ‘Leavisite’ criticism—and was accordingly repudiated by its ‘master’. The continuities nevertheless remained. For behind the emphasis on ‘practical criticism’ (‘These words in this order’) Leavisite criticism had always, in its own way, been profoundly sensitive to questions of cultural context, the sub-text of its ‘texts’:¹⁵ even if its definition of culture was peculiarly conservative, fundamentally anti-democratic, and depended on the historically dubious search, through an infinite regress, for some stable point of reference in a hypostatized ‘organic culture’ of the past.¹⁶ Leavis himself had always stressed the intricate relationship between the internal organization of experience, through language, in the preferred texts of the ‘Great Tradition’ and the general ‘state of the language’, which he took as a paradigm of the culture.¹⁷ In his ‘Sketch for an English School’ Leavis also revealed a deep, if idiosyncratic, historical sense.¹⁸ The Uses of Literacy refused many of Leavis’s embedded cultural judgements. But it did attempt to deploy literary criticism to ‘read’ the emblems, idioms, social arrangements, the lived cultures and ‘languages’ of working class life, as particular kinds of ‘text’, as a privileged sort of cultural evidence. In this sense, it continued ‘a tradition’ while seeking, in practice, to transform it.

Culture and Society undertook a work of contemporary description only in its conclusion. What it did was to resume and trace a tradition of English thought and writing, a line of critical thinking about English culture and society, back to certain social thinkers, writers and intellectuals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These writings—now often safely enshrined in academic curricula—Williams revealed as engaged, critical interventions in their own time in a set of key debates about the relations between culture and industry, democracy and class.¹⁹ What united these various writers into a ‘culture-andsociety’ tradition, in Williams’s view, was not their particular, often very different, actual positions and judgements, but the mode of sustained reflection they gave to qualitative questions about the impact on culture of the historic transformations of the past. Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy and Leavis’s Mass Civilization and Minority Culture were both shown as deeply engaged, embattled pieces of cultural criticism, hiding their partisanship a little behind the invocation to a fixed set of standards nominated as Culture with a capital ‘C’. It is true that, in emphasizing this highly literary tradition in critical bourgeois thought, Williams may have underplayed more radical alternative traditions and evidence from more popular, radical and artisan cultures not easily fitted into the literary framework. This was one criticism which Thompson levelled at The Long Revolution in a seminal critique, of which he gave a magisterial counterdemonstration in The Making of the English Working Class. Nevertheless, the condensations which Culture and Society effected—giving the thought of ‘the past’ an immediate reference and connotation in present debates, detaching them from their traditional moorings in the Eng. Lit. syllabus—was formidable.

Yet in reconstituting this tradition Williams also, in a sense, brought it to a decisive close. The Long Revolution, which followed almost immediately, was a seminal event in English post-war intellectual life. It marked the opening of a strikingly different kind of reflection on past and present. It linked with the ‘culture-and-society’ debate in its literary-moral points of reference. But in its theoretical mode and ambition it clearly also broke with that tradition.²⁰ It attempted to graft on to an idiom and mode of discourse irredeemably particular, empirical and moral in emphasis, its own highly individual kind of ‘theorizing’. It shifted the whole ground of debate from a literary-moral to an anthropological definition of culture. But it defined the latter now as the ‘whole process’ by means of which meanings and definitions are socially constructed and historically transformed, with literature and art as only one, specially privileged, kind of social communication. It also engaged, if in a highly displaced fashion, the Marxist tradition, and its way of describing the relation between culture and other social practices, as the only viable (but, in its existing English form, unsatisfactory) alternative to more native traditions.²¹ The difficult, somewhat abstract quality of some of the writing in The Long Revolution can largely be ascribed to its status as a ‘text of the break’. Bearing in mind the cultural and intellectual climate of the ‘Cold War’ in which it was conceived and written one can only register, without further comment here, the intellectual boldness of the whole venture.²²

It was quickly followed by Thompson’s critique and The Making. The latter, in its radically democratic emphasis, and its heroic labour of recovery of popular political cultures hitherto largely lost to serious historical work, is the most seminal work of social history of the post-war period. It was informed throughout by a sense of how impossible it would be, after it, to give an account of that formative historical ‘transition’, the 1790s to the 1830s, without a sustained account of the ‘cultural dimension’. It was rigorously and, in the best sense, ‘empirically’ grounded in historical particularity, though its brief opening pages on ‘class relationships’ constituted a brief but resonant statement, ‘theoretical’ in effect, if not in manner or intent. Thompson stressed the dimensions of historical agency through which a distinctive class formation made itself—the active tense in the title was fully intentional. His definition of culture was rooted in the collective experiences which formed the class in its larger historical sense. The book situated culture in the dialectic between ‘social being’ and ‘social consciousness’. In doing so, it broke with a kind of economic determinism, and with an institutional perspective, which had marked and limited certain older versions of ‘labour history’, which it effectively displaced. It also obliquely—by demonstration, as it were—challenged the narrow, elitist conception of ‘culture’ enshrined in the Leavisite tradition, as well as the rather evolutionary approach which sometimes marked Williams’s Long Revolution. It affirmed, directly, the relevance of historical work to the task of analysing the present. Thompson insisted on the historical specificity of culture, on its plural, not singular, definition—‘cultures’, not ‘Culture’: above all, on the necessary struggle, tension and conflict between cultures and their links to class cultures, class formations and class struggles—the struggles between ‘ways of life’ rather than the evolution of ‘a way of life’. These were seminal qualifications.

All these works, then, implied a radical break with previous conceptualizations. They inflected the term ‘culture’ away from its traditional moorings, getting behind the inert sense of ‘period’ which sustained the text/ context distinction, moving the argument into the wider field of social practices and historical processes. It was difficult, at first, to give these breaks a precise location in any single disciplinary field. They appeared to be distinctive precisely in the ways in which they broke across and cut between the disciplinary empires. They were, for the moment, defined as ‘sociological’ in a loose sense—without, of course, being ‘proper’ sociology.

The break with sociology

Some elements within sociology ‘proper’ were, indeed, preoccupied at this time with similar themes. One thinks, for example, of the work of the Institute of Community Studies and of the wider preoccupation with the idea of ‘community’ which could be considered as a sort of analogue, within sociology, of the emergent concern with cultures elsewhere.²³ But by and large British sociology was not predisposed to ask questions of this order. This was the period —the 1950s—of its massive dependence on American theories and models. But American sociology, in either its Parsonian theorization or its structuralfunctionalist methodology, was theoretically incapable of dealing with these issues.²⁴ It was systematically functionalist and integrative in perspective. It had abolished the category of contradiction: instead, it spoke of ‘dysfunctions’ and of ‘tension management’. It claimed the mantle of a science. But its premises and predispositions were highly ideological. In fact, it responded to the question posed earlier—what sort of society was this now?—by giving a highly specific historical answer: all post-capitalist, post-industrial societies were tending to the model of the American dream—as one representative work put it, to the ‘first new nation’. It celebrated the triumph of ‘pluralist society’, constantly counterposed to ‘totalitarian society’, a highly ideological couplet which was advanced as a concluded scientific fact. It did not deal with ‘culture’, except within the terms of a highly pessimistic variant of the ‘mass society/mass culture’ hypothesis. Instead, it referred to ‘the value system’ in the singular—into which, as Shils eloquently put it, on the basis of pluralism, the ‘brutal culture’ of the masses was destined to be gradually and successfully incorporated.²⁵ It militantly refused the concept of ideol...