Cultural Studies 50 Years On

History, Practice and Politics

Kieran Connell, Matthew Hilton

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783483945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Stuart Hall conceptualized his time at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies as a series of interruptions. It was this fluidity that gave rise to Hall’s conception of cultural studies as a ‘moving target’, a fusion of a range of disciplinary approaches that was uniquely influenced by politics in the world beyond the academy. The political commitments of those at the Centre were wide-ranging and, from its embrace of collective ways of research and decision-making to its deployment of various strands of European Marxist theory, had a critical impact on the Centre’s working practices. Yet as the diverse work of many of these same scholars has shown, the political climate of the present-day is almost unrecognizable from that of the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, arguably the most productive period in the Centre’s history. Cultural Studies 50 Years On explores how the political, social and cultural contexts of the early 21st century influenced the object and method of doing cultural studies. In bringing together a historical reassessment of the Centre with present-day questions regarding the future of the field the aim is not to reduce cultural studies to the work of a single, now-defunct institution. Instead it aims to utilize what is a critical moment in the trajectory of the field in order to take stock of where it has come from and to explore where it might be going.

Part I

Situating the Centre

Chapter 1

The Lost World of Cultural Studies, 1956–1971

An Intellectual History

Dennis Dworkin

The best-known achievements of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham are from the 1970s and early 1980s. They draw on the cultural Marxist tradition of E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams; the Western Marxism of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser; and multiple strands of feminist and critical race theory. Yet, when the Centre was founded in 1964, these later developments were by no means preordained. Indeed, browsing through the annual reports and pamphlets that chart the Centre’s early history, I am struck by just how distant the world in which the Centre originated now seems. Many of the intellectual sources on which it relied no longer inform current debates and discussions. Rather than names such as Foucault and Spivak, Said and Bhabha, Butler and Zizek, we encounter Leavis and Eliot (the latter not as a poet but as a cultural critic), Weber and Riesman, and Berger and Luckmann. Of the pioneering influences on cultural studies, perhaps only Raymond Williams is still cited in contemporary discussions.

The word ‘lost’ in the title of my essay therefore does not refer to the retrieval of a narrative that has been buried and recovered.1 Rather, it seeks to recapture an intellectual and political world that has largely disappeared. The essay consists of three parts. First, I provide a rough sketch of the Centre’s origins and early formation. I stress the ideas on which it was founded, emphasizing its connection to the milieu of adult education and the early New Left of the 1950s and early 1960s. Second, I discuss the founding of the Centre in 1964, its original goals and aspirations, and its early intellectual trajectory. Third, I analyse the transformation of the cultural studies project in the late-1960s and early-1970s, focusing on the impact of 1968 and its associated meanings on the Centre’s students and faculty. Here, I draw on new sources that have recently emerged, including interviews. As a result of the tumultuous experience of the late-1960s, and numerous contentious debates and internal struggles, Centre researchers acquired new theoretical vocabularies, thought about cultural practices in fresh ways and explored collective modes of work.

In 1964, Eric Hobsbawm reviewed Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel’s The Popular Arts (1964) for the Times Literary Supplement. He described what constituted cultural studies the year in which the Centre opened. ‘British criticism in the field’, wrote Hobsbawm, ‘has long been the virtual monopoly of the local New Left: that is to say, it reflects a lot of Leavis (but without the Leavisite rejection of post-industrial culture), a much smaller quantity of Marx, a good deal of nostalgia for “working class culture”, a pervasive passion for democracy, a strong pedagogic urge and an equally strong urge to do good’.2

Hobsbawm captured critical elements of early cultural studies: its debt to Leavisite criticism, its ambivalent relationship to Marx and Marxism, and its connection to the early New Left. His allusion to its ‘nostalgia’ for working-class culture and a ‘strong pedagogic urge’ was less straightforward. He was likely referring to texts such as Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), which portrayed working-class values nostalgically. They helped define the terrain of cultural studies and the cultural politics of the New Left, but their ideas developed in the older intellectual and political milieu of workers’ and adult education.

Williams perhaps best summed up the dual influence of Leavis and Marxism for cultural studies: ‘Leavis has never liked Marxists, which is in one way a pity, for they know more than he does about modern English society, and about its immediate history. He, on the other hand, knows more than any Marxist I have met about the real relations between art and experience’.3 F. R. Leavis was an influential literary and cultural critic, particularly during the interwar years and the following decade. He viewed criticism as an aesthetic and moral practice based on the stringent training of one’s sensibility and the close reading of texts. Critics were to bring the ‘play of the free intelligence’ to bear upon ‘the underlying issues’ of the modern world. He saw them as being in the avant-garde of cultural renewal, necessitated by a spreading and corrosive mass culture. Early contributors to cultural studies – including Hall, Hoggart and Williams – rejected Leavis’s blanket dismissal of mass culture but embraced his wide-ranging interests and his reliance on the close reading of texts. Indeed, Hall’s initial definition of socialist humanism in the New Left journal Universities and Left Review (ULR) appropriated a quote from Leavis: ‘a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked intensity’.4

As Hobsbawm implied and Williams reiterated, there is an ambivalent relationship between early cultural studies and Marxism. Marxism’s contention that the class relationships of modern capitalism provide the general context in which cultural practices are shaped was generally accepted. Deterministic versions of that relationship, notably mechanical and deterministic deployments of the base/superstructure model, were not. Here, Williams’s influential chapter on ‘Marxism and Culture’ in Culture and Society is illustrative of this viewpoint. He accepted base/superstructure insofar as it meant viewing cultural practices in a wider context. Yet he found the model to be static and believed that it was incompatible with the totalizing and dynamic impulse of Marx’s overall historical analysis. He argued that Engels’s critique (in letters written in the latter part of his life) of its formulaic deployment by those calling themselves Marxists had long ago highlighted its limits. Williams did not reject Marxism: he viewed its existing form as inadequate to either grasp the specificity of cultural practices or grapple with culture’s reciprocal impact on social and economic relations. In a now-famous formulation, Williams argued, ‘It would seem that from their emphasis on the interdependence of all elements in social reality, and from their analytic emphasis on movement and change, Marxists should logically use “culture” in the sense of a whole way of life, a general social process’.5

Williams’s thinking here is creative and innovative yet also a product of its time. First, it is symptomatic of the Cold War milieu in which he thought and wrote that when he did use Marxist concepts, he felt compelled to rework and disguise them, employing terms such as the ‘system of economic life’ rather than the ‘mode of production’. Otherwise, he would have been summarily dismissed. Second, Williams’s critique of Marxist cultural theory was largely aimed at English Communist critics, who, in his view, had failed to resolve the conflicts arising from their commitments to English romantic criticism, Marxist theory and Communist Party membership. In contrast with Williams’s later, more memorable engagement with Western Marxist thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Lucien Goldman and György Lukács, his original encounter took place within a distinctly national intellectual milieu largely bereft of innovative Marxist cultural criticism. The same could be said for early cultural studies more generally.

When Hobsbawm wrote his review, cultural studies occupied a hazily defined space on the intellectual map, a product of debates and discussions that took place in and around the late 1950s and early 1960s New Left. The New Left emerged from the experience of the Suez and Hungary crises in 1956 and grew and expanded as a result of a shared commitment to the nuclear disarmament movement of the late-1950s and early-1960s. It consisted of two groups, although there was an overlap between them. The Reasoner group, creators of the Reasoner and subsequently the New Reasoner, was mostly composed of ex-Communists, predominantly from the interwar generation. ULR was created by a group of Oxford students who wanted to create a discussion that would lead to a new kind of socialist politics, one that addressed the momentous transformations in post-war British society. What was ‘new’ about the first New Left was that it represented a third way: it rejected both the politics of the Labour and Communist parties in their existing forms. In 1960, New Left Review (NLR) supplanted the two journals. Despite their diverse origins and distinctive, sometime conflicting, interests, the political perspectives of the two groups were converging. ‘Culture’ was central to their politics.

The New Left came into existence at a time of Cold War polarities, Conservative Party triumph and widespread political apathy. The major question it faced, like the Left more generally, was not only returning the Labour Party to office but also re-energizing it with a socialist agenda in tune with the rapidly changing times – the result of full employment, steadily growing income, signs of class mobility and spreading mass culture. New Left activists were critical of orthodox leftists who remained committed to traditional notions of the class struggle and narrow views of politics. They also chided ‘labor revisionists’, such as C. A. R. Crosland, for believing that the mixed economy and the welfare state created the foundation of a post-capitalist society that obsoleted class politics. Various New Left writers analysed the consequences of the reshaping of working-class consciousness and culture, laying the groundwork for the more academic discussions that took place later at the Centre. Overall, they insisted upon the resilience of working-class culture, while condemning the growing impact of Americanization. Indeed, New Left activists were ambivalent about the United States. On the one hand, they viewed the impact of American mass culture as a threat to workin...