Page 81 - Cultural Theory

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••• Chris Rojek •••

the elitism of Oxbridge, it created a bridgehead in the Academy for the rigorous study
of class and culture. Hoggart himself was the founding Director of the Centre. In
1964, among his first acts in this capacity was to recruit Stuart Hall from Chelsea
College, University of London to participate in course development and teaching.
The Birmingham Centre was an unprecedented experiment in British higher edu-
cation. Hall (2000) recalls it as a time of immense excitement in his intellectual
career. He had the lion’s share of curriculum development and the organization of
pedagogy. Hoggart’s (1970) original vision for the Centre was of an organisation
devoted to a tripartite project of teaching and research: historical–philosophical,
sociological and literary–critical, of which the most pronounced element was intended
to be the latter. But under Hall’s leadership from the late 1960s onwards, academic
activities became more theoretical and more political.
The presiding spirit of pedagogy and research cultivated in the Centre was based in col-
laboration rather than hierarchy. The conventional division between lecturer and student
was relaxed. Although the traditional supervisory role between academic and student was
retained, the sub-group emerged as the nucleus of research and debate. Sub-groups were
thematically organized around key subjects in theory and culture. Since cultural studies
was a new area, staff and students at the Centre had the exhilarating sense of making up
the curriculum as they went along. At its height, the Centre never employed more than
three full-time staff. For most of Hall’s time in Birmingham the staff complement was
two. The mould-breaking work being done in Birmingham during the 60s and 70s and
the sense of operating in an embattled environment created by the condescension and
hostility of several established academics and University administrators on campus, com-
bined to create unusually high levels of commitment to the Birmingham ‘project’.
The latter is often seen as an exclusively Marxist venture, but it was in fact a coat
of many colours. Intellectual labour in the Centre was obviously located on the Left.
Hall and his associates adopted the orthodox New Left position in regarding Britain
as a class dominated society. As the New Right emerged in the mid 70s the drift into
‘the law and order society’ became a defining theme of Bimingham intellectual
labour. Capitalism was unquestionably the system which Hall and his associates crit-
icized and against which they advocated a socialist political, economic and cultural
alternative. In as much as this is so the Centre may be regarded as operationalizing
in pedagogy and research many aspects of the broad New Left perspective embodied
in the New Left Review, of which Hall had been editor between 1960–61. Chief among
them were a disdain for the limpid insularity of British life, the espousal of the value
of independent thought, sensitivity to technological change and globalism and a
commitment to the socialist transformation of society.
Notwithstanding this, the Birmingham project was always more complex than a
narrow identification with the traditional goals of New Left Marxism. In addition to
Marxism, ideas from feminism, structuralism, post-structuralism and semiotics were
thrown into the Birmingham melting pot. Hall’s attitude to Marxism was anti-
dogmatic. Later, in the ‘New Times’ thesis he was critical of those on the Left who
assign a doctrinal status to Marxism. Elsewhere, he (1986) declared himself to be in
favour of ‘Marxism without guarantees’. By this he appears to mean a commitment to

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