British Cultural
Studies: Key Themes
Critique of
class based access to education
Asserting the
existence, validity and scholarly merit of working-class culture
A focus on
‘history from below’: focused on individual agency and subcultural resistance
rather than ‘the condescension of posterity’ (Thompson, 1963)
A residual
humanism (in contrast to the ‘structuralism’ of European theory which only
became available later)
The
perception/fear of a cultural ‘fall’
Put popular
culture on the academic agenda
Institutionally
supported:
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The Birmingham Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies
est. 1964
Cultural
studies is not, however, a ‘discipline’, but an area where different
disciplines intersect in the study of the cultural aspects of society. The
particular complex of disciplines involved, and the types of approach adopted,
naturally differ from place to place (7)
From its
inception… Cultural Studies was an ‘engaged’ set of disciplines, addressing
awkward but relevant issues about contemporary society and culture, often
without the benefit of that scholarly detachment or distance which the passage
of time alone sometimes confers on other fields of study (17)
The Centre
has… attempted in this period to generate a new kind of intellectual practice
and to give it an organizational form. Especially, it has experimented with
ways of involving all its members, staff and students, in the shaping of that
practice to work in a specific organizational setting (43)
In general,
what has been involved here has been the attempt to make intellectual work more
collective in the actual forms of its practicing: to constitute research and
groups of projects and studies around working collectives rather than serial
groups of competing intellectuals, carrying their very own thesis topics like
batons in their knapsacks (44)
All taken
from: Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (eds) (1980) Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in
Cultural Studies, 1972-79, Hutchinson and the CCCS
“The audience
is at least as interesting to look at as the art is, and it seems to be aware
of that. A few people carry into the Guggenheim the air of town-house
seriousness that I still instinctively carry into a museum—that earnestness
with which one goes to “get” high culture at the Met. But most people are here
just to chill out and watch one another, secure in the knowledge that they are the culture.”
‘Sunday in Soho’ in John Seabrook (2001) Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing and the
Marketing of Culture New York:
Vintage
p. 169
***********
Ordinariness
I
am writing particularly of the majority who take their lives much as they find
them, and in that way are not different from the majority in other classes; of
what some trade union leaders, when they are regretting a lack of interest in
their movements, call ‘the vast apathetic mass’; of what, song-writers call, by
way of compliment, ‘just plain folk’; of what the working-classes themselves
describe, more soberly, as ‘the general run of people’ (Hoggart, 1958: 22).
Them and us
When
people feel that they cannot do much about the main elements in their
situation, feel it not necessarily with despair or disappointment or resentment
but simply as a fact of life, they adopt attitudes towards that situation which
allow them to have a liveable life under its shadow, a life without a constant
and pressing sense of the larger situation (1958: 92).
Workers’ Education
By
1944 there was an unusual feeling in the air among servicemen, not often
articulated cogently, but indicated by banal-sounding phrases: ‘We don’t mean
to go back to what it was like before’; ‘Things have got to change’; ‘I’m not
standing for that lot again’; ‘We didn’t go through all this just to settle
back where we were’. There had been a sea-change among men who had been, most
of them, ill-educated, not encouraged to have many expectations or to look
forward to any change for the better, to progress, to movement (Hoggart, 1990:
60).
A whole way of life
(Against TS Eliot’s original formulation)
We
use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life—the
common meanings; to mean the arts and learning—the special processes of
discovery and creative effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other
of these sense; I insist on both, and on
the significance of their conjunction (Williams, 1958: 75-6)
Scholarship Boys
Nor
was learning, in my family, some strange eccentricity; I was not, on a
scholarship in Cambridge, a new kind of animal up a brand-new ladder. Learning
was ordinary; we learned where we could. Always, from those scattered white
houses, it had made sense to go out and become a scholar or a poet or a
teacher. Yet few of us could be spared
from the immediate work; a price had been set on this kind of learning, and it
was more, much more, than we could individually pay. Now, when we could pay
in common, it was a good, ordinary life (Williams, 1958: 76)
The shift to culture
‘We are used to descriptions of
our whole common life in political and economic terms’, but ‘men and societies
are not confined to relationships of power, property, and production. Their
relationships in describing, learning, persuading, and exchanging experiences
are seen as equally fundamental’ (Williams, 1962: 18).
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British Cultural
Studies: Key Texts
Richard Hoggart (1958) The Uses of Literacy
Raymond Williams (1958) Culture and Society 1780-1950
Raymond Williams (1961) The Long Revolution
E P Thompson (1963) The Making of the English Working Class
Leading to the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies
at the University of Birmingham, a graduate school and
collaborative research endeavour producing such works as: