CCCS Selected Working Papers

Volume 2

Ann Gray, Jan Campbell, Mark Erickson, Stuart Hanson, Helen Wood, Ann Gray, Jan Campbell, Mark Erickson, Stuart Hanson, Helen Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134346394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Cultura popular

This collection of classic essays focuses on the theoretical frameworks that informed the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, the methodologies and working practices that the Centre developed for conducting academic research and examples of the studies carried out under the auspices of the Centre.

This volume is split into seven thematic sections that are introduced by key academics working in the field of cultural studies, and includes a preface by eminent scholar, Stuart Hall. The thematic sections are:

• Literature and Society
• Popular Culture and Youth Subculture
• Media
• Women's Studies and Feminism
• Race
• History
• Education and Work.

Section 1 Literature and society

Introduction

Stuart Laing

Preface

To begin on a (somewhat Hoggartian) personal note, it is now nearly thirty-five years since I first set pen to paper to draft the overview essay and bibliography on literature and society textual analysis which appeared in Working Papers in Cultural Studies 4 in Spring 1973. While this fact may appear to lend some inherent credibility to what follows in this twenty-first century re-sit, it will soon become apparent to the knowledgeable reader that this Introduction has two considerable limitations. Its author is, often, too close to the material – too inclined to explain (or explain away) the characteristics of the articles being introduced in terms of their micro-origins, rather than placing them in a broader subsequent intellectual and political context. Secondly (and unlike the other introductory essays in these two volumes) the credentials of the author, such as they may be, do not include any current standing or authority in the field; my own professional trajectory, especially in the last two decades, has taken me elsewhere than (certainly with any depth) into the issues of literature/society/theory/cultural studies.

The value of this introduction (apart from, hopefully, providing a reasonably accurate guide to the general arguments and types of article contained in this section) then lies in the obverse of its first weakness – in the reconstructions and reflective memories of someone closely involved in the work of the CCCS Literature and Society group between 1970–3 and particularly in the genesis and delivery of Working Papers in Cultural Studies 4, where five of these articles first appeared.

The place of literature at CCCS in the early 1970s

The study of literature occupied a very curious and ambiguous place in CCCS during the early 1970s, when all the essays in this section were written, or (in the case of that authored by Passeron) first published in English.

There was, first, the need to continue to acknowledge and place the double legacy of Richard Hoggart (whose permanent departure from CCCS was confirmed in 1971).

The Uses of Literacy remained much referenced as a key foundational text for CCCS, although there was much less clarity about how to evaluate and make use of its detailed arguments and modes of analysis. More immediately Hoggart (through a number of essays on literature and society/contemporary cultural analysis) seemed from 1964 to have clearly located the core project of CCCS in terms of a dialectical engagement between literary criticism and sociology, with the key question as how to read literary texts in relation to their social context(s), particularly in relation to their embodied ‘values’.

CCCS, also, had been founded as a subset of the University of Birmingham English Department and especially in the early days defined itself very significantly in relation to its degrees of similarity and difference from mainstream ‘EngLit’ – initially mostly in terms of object of study (popular literary texts, such as that long-lost text from 1968, the ‘Cure for Marriage’ study; or one of the first, perhaps the first, Centre doctoral study to be completed, Roger King’s study of the Hank Janson series of crime novels) and later in terms of method and theories.

It was also the case that the other founding father of British Cultural Studies (Raymond Williams) and his key text (The Long Revolution) were seen as outgrowths of English literary studies. In this respect it is indicative of the perceived CCCS project of the early 1970s (arguably of the 1970s as a whole), that the origins of both its key foundational texts in adult education teaching of the 1940s and 1950s were rarely acknowledged or discussed at that time (despite the fact that quite a few of the graduate students were engaged in similar, if more enforced by financial circumstance, attempts at popular education through their own ‘liberal studies’ teaching in local technical colleges). Rather, both Hoggart and Williams were seen as scholarship boys breaking back from the academy (and its canonical approach to ‘EngLit’) into broader social concerns.

In one sense, then, the study of literature (or perhaps more precisely the critical engagement with English Studies) was central to the CCCS project in its early days. However, from another perspective, it was, by the early 1970s, no longer entirely clear why (or if) literature was really all that important. As new students arrived and the mantle of leadership fell directly on Stuart Hall, the central areas of interest began to form up in other places: media; subcultures; work and leisure; a range of sociological theories and methods concerned with directly accessing ‘lived’ culture (ethnomethodology; symbolic interactionism; forms of participant observation) and from 1971–2 onwards a deliberately explicit (at times almost intellectually masochistic) encounter with Marxist theory (both Marx himself and the European neo-Marxists).

The importance of literature and also (not the same thing) literary criticism for cultural studies was now by no means obvious – and while outside the Centre both the expansion, and the expanding ‘crisis’, in English Studies continued, inside there was no particular commitment to the survival or otherwise of the EngLit enterprise. By coming to the Centre the graduate students (and staff ) had already made their personal break from that domain. If the modes of study necessary to position literature within cultural studies required the rejection of Eng Lit as a whole then the reply might well have been – ‘so what?’.

The key drivers of the CCCS ‘literature-and-society’ project in the early 1970s were rather (albeit perhaps at an unconscious level) to discover and justify the place and importance of studying literature for cultural studies and, more explicitly, to specify the place and function of literary texts within a whole social formation: ‘the key question is how this privileged activity, and its product, the literary text is related to other activities in the totality’ (‘Mapping the Field’ p. 40).

Work on literature at the Centre in the early 1970s was not driven (at least at a collective level) by any pressing contemporary social question (there was no literary equivalent of ‘the meaning of mugging’ or the political effects of television news and current affairs) nor by any compelling individual empirical research questions. The key issue presented itself rather as a straightforward theoretical and conceptual question – and in the domain of the very discipline where (in the UK at least) there had been, as Perry Anderson had so eloquently demonstrated in his majestic essay ‘Components of the National Culture’, the greatest resistance (even among those well disposed to linking literature to society) to abstract theorising.

European theory

The issue of ‘theory’ at that time translated itself concretely as engaging with European theorists from the period 1919 to the present – predominantly those within the Marxist tradition, but also in the recently emerging area of structuralism and semiotics.

The main internal reason (internal, that is, to the literature/society project – there were of course other over-arching political and cultural reasons in a post-1968 Europe) for the centrality of the Marxist work in this enterprise is set out in the ‘Mapping the Field’ essay:

the study of the Literature/Society problem in a Marxist framework, is not a marginal enterprise but absolutely central to the development of historical materialism as a science – because, within that problem, a critical absence in the theory can be, progressively, clarified.

(p. 42)

In fact if the place of literature (and art) within ‘the neglected theory of superstructures’ could not be specified then not only was there a problem for Marxism in general (as a totalising social theory) but, even more pressingly for many of those within CCCS in the early 1970s, the hoped-for alignment between Marxism and cultural studies as a whole could not occur. It was for this reason that the presence (and increasing availability) of a number of European theorists (and key texts) who claimed to have solved the problem of how to respect the particularity of literary texts, while also situating them as historically determined, commanded the attention of CCCS (or at least its more theoretically-inclined members) at that time.

The fact of the recent (or imminent) translation of many of these works into English is noted a number of times in the articles in this section. This issue is referenced with regard to (inter alia) Adorno, Gramsci, Goldmann, Benjamin, Brecht and Barthes as well as in relation to such key texts from Marx himself as the Grundrisse. It is worth noting here that the significance of this point lies not so much in the stereotypical linguistic insularity of the English; in fact, texts by Barthes, Kristeva, Goldmann, Althusser and the Frankfurt School were read by many CCCS members in the original French or German. Rather, the issue was that it was not until such texts were rendered into English and their forms of terminology became available in English, that it was possible to mobilise the new concepts they represented so as seriously to contest established Anglophone sociological, philosophical and literary normative assumptions.

Of all the European theorists whose work was interrogated (for once the aggressive connotations of this term are appropriate) by the CCCS group it is perhaps now surprising to recall that it was the work of Lucien Goldmann which first opened up new lines of thought. Goldmann’s work has (as far as I can judge) not, since the mid-1970s, been in any way influential in either the development of Critical Theory within English departments nor in the variety of ways which Cultural Studies has approached literature. Around 1970, however, the year of Goldmann’s death, there were a number of reasons (many treated at length in Adrian Mellor’s essay) why the figure of Goldmann and his work seemed particularly important and worthy of attention.

Goldmann’s emphasis on reflection and homology between social structures and literary structures fitted well with the core CCCS focus on the question of how literary content was both shaped by and offered a distinctive insight into the contemporary social structures from which it had been created. Goldmann’s notions of world-vision and different types of class consciousness seemed also to offer a way round the twin elephant traps of seeing literature as either a-historical creative vision or a form of ideology or false (through its class limitations) consciousness. Additionally both Goldmann and his work had presence within English intellectual life. The influential essay on the sociology of literature had been published in the International Social Science Journal in 1967 and Jonathan Cape had published the more general monograph, The Human Sciences and Philosophy in 1969; the latter text was one of the core texts selected for the CCCS general seminar in Autumn 1970 – a seminar intended to lay the ground for another of those legendary unfinished projects, the publication of a Centre definitive theoretical and exemplificatory Reader on Cultural Studies. And behind these texts lay Goldmann’s monumental analysis of Racine and seventeenth-century France, The Hidden God – a text which through its sketching of social class, class consciousness and its relation to drama, Jansenism and philosophy appeared to show empirically how to solve the key problem of ‘mediations’. For many, including some of those in CCCS, the plausibility of this analysis was probably aided by their own relative lack of detailed knowledge of any alternative accounts of class consciousness and class fractions in the era of Louis XIV.

Goldmann had also recently visited England – a version of his paper to the Dialectics of Liberation conference in 1967 had been published in the Penguin Special of that name – and his lectures at Cambridge in the Spring of 1970 were celebrated in Raymond Williams’s ‘Literature and Sociology; in memory of Lucien Goldmann’, published in New Left Review in the May-June 1971 edition. This was one of the first essays in which Williams signalled his re-engagement with forms of Marxist theory. In particular the possibility of the alignment of the notion of social totality (as developed by Goldmann from Lukacs and other neo-Hegelians) with Williams’s own ‘culture as a whole way of life’ formulations suggested a more painless way of linking the CCCS’s early 1960s position with the Marxist tradition than seemed possible elsewhere (such as in encounters with Althusserian Marxism).

As the ‘Mapping the Field’ essay suggests, Goldmann’s work was probably the most influential of those at the reflectionist pole – pushing the work of Lukacs (and even of Marx and Engels themselves) to a new level of specificity. Less well developed and more dispersed was a range of work which took (or could be aligned with) the core Marxist notion of production as the primary social process and situated literature as one form of cultural production alongside many others. This range included a wide range of sharply opposed positions – from Sartre’s Problem of Method, centred on ideas of individual creativity, to Althusser’s anti-humanism, to the Brechtian emphasis on the writing and performance of drama as a collective social process, to the structuralist/semiotic view of the primacy of the linguistic and sign systems.

The ‘Mapping the Field’ essay itself was the result of a number of individual contributions from different members of the Literature and Society group being put alongside each other and then heroically, and at times ingeniously, stitched together (predominantly by the efforts of Stuart Hall) into what was still essentially a series of related snapshots rather than a fully coherent argument – as the lack of even a pretence at any Conclusion revealed. In retrospect (after three decades of subsequent development in theoretical and empirical work on literature and cultural studies), despite the exceptionally ambitious aim of encapsulating such a breadth of theoretical work in such a small space, it is striking how relatively narrow an area of enquiry concerning literature/society relations the essay opens up. At that time, for example, both the study of actual conditions of literary production (the economics of authorship, the nature of publishing, methods of marketing and distribution) and consumption (contemporary patterns of reading) were generally regarded as the province of the wholly untheoretical sociology of literature or the literary historian and hence of limited interest. Also despite the rather heavy-handed shift to using ‘she’ rather than ‘he’ in the latter sections of the ‘Mapping the Field’ essay, the work on literature within CCCS in the very early 1970s remained relatively innocent of gender issues (let alone of those of race, hybridity, nationalisms etc). Further the shift to concern with European theory had largely displaced earlier concerns with the nature of popular fiction, while the crucial turn within English Studies itself to put in question the nature of ‘English’ as a social and cultural institution did not seem relevant until later in the decade, when more focus began to develop on the notion of cultural institutions and, then in the 1980s (with a more benign connotation than Adorno and others could ever have imagined) on the ‘cultural industries’. Nevertheless, despite these limitations ‘Mapping the Field’ remains a major document of its time in signalling a paradigm shift for literary study into a post-theory world. It is hard now to convey the degree of intellectual effort and, even, imagination necessary at that time to make even (what may now appear as) these relatively timid and limited steps away from the safety of the Anglo-American devotion to close...