Page 69 - Cultural Theory

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••• Douglas Kellner •••

was continuous with the radicalism of the first wave of British cultural studies (the
Hoggart–Thompson–Williams ‘culture and society’ tradition) as well as, in important
ways, with the Frankfurt School. Yet the Birmingham project also eventually paved
the way for a postmodern populist turn in cultural studies.
It has not been widely recognized that the second stage of the development of
British cultural studies – starting with the founding of the University of Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1963/64 by Hoggart and Stuart Hall –
shared many key perspectives with the Frankfurt School. During this period, the
Centre developed a variety of critical approaches for the analysis, interpretation, and
criticism of cultural artefacts (see Hall, 1980b; Agger, 1992; McGuigan, 1992; Kellner,
1995). Through a set of internal debates, and responding to social struggles and
movements of the 1960s and the 1970s, the Birmingham group engaged the inter-
play of representations and ideologies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and national-
ity in cultural texts, including media culture. The Birmingham scholars were among
the first to study the effects of newspapers, radio, television, film, and other popular
cultural forms on audiences. They also focused on how various audiences interpreted
and used media culture in varied and different ways and contexts, analyzing the fac-
tors that made audiences respond in contrasting ways to media texts.
The now classical period of British cultural studies from the early 1960s to the early
1980s continued to adopt a Marxian approach to the study of culture, one especially
influenced by Althusser and Gramsci (see, especially Hall, 1980a). Yet although Hall
usually omits the Frankfurt School from his narrative, some of the work done by the
Birmingham group replicated certain classical positions of the Frankfurt School, in
their social theory and methodological models for doing cultural studies, as well as
in their political perspectives and strategies. Like the Frankfurt School, British cul-
tural studies observed the integration of the working class and its decline of revolu-
tionary consciousness, and studied the conditions of this catastrophe for the
Marxian project of revolution. Like the Frankfurt School, British cultural studies also
concluded that mass culture was playing an important role in integrating the work-
ing class into existing capitalist societies and that a new consumer and media culture
was forming a new mode of capitalist hegemony.
Both traditions engaged the intersections of culture and ideology and saw ideology
critique as central to a critical cultural studies. Both perceived culture as a mode of
ideological reproduction and hegemony, in which cultural forms help to shape the
modes of thought and behaviour that induce individuals to adapt to the social con-
ditions of capitalist societies. Both also conceived of culture as a potential form of
resistance to capitalist society and both the earlier forerunners of British cultural
studies, especially Raymond Williams, and the theorists of the Frankfurt School
viewed high culture as containing forces of resistance to capitalist modernity, as well
as ideology. Later, British cultural studies would valorize resistant moments in media
culture and audience interpretations and use of media artefacts, while the Frankfurt
School tended, with some exceptions, to conceptualize mass culture as a homoge-
neous and potent form of ideological domination – a difference that would seriously
divide the two traditions.
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