Page 102 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

Easthope’s general characterization still stands, nevertheless: from
the mid 1960s onwards, a heady combination of Western Marxist
and structuralist or post-structuralist continental European “Theory”
did indeed come into direct and often explosive conflict with an already
dominant culturalism, both in literary studies itself and in the newly
forming proto-discipline of cultural studies. In the latter case the conflict
was more or less effectively orchestrated and managed by Stuart Hall.
But whereas cultural studies had itself been the effect of a prior rupture
within culturalism, mainstream literary studies was still very much
the domain of a more or less unreconstructed Leavisism. The incursion
of Theory, sometimes radical and always foreign, into the erstwhile
conservative heart of the national intellectual culture thus precipitated
what Peter Widdowson rightly termed a “crisis in English studies”. 61
The crisis was acted out in the “Sociology of Literature” conferences
organized annually from 1976 to 1984 by Francis Barker and his
colleagues at Essex University; in the journal Literature and History,
edited from 1975 to 1988 by Widdowson and others at Thames
Polytechnic; and in Screen, the journal of the Society for Education in
Film and Television (SEFT).
If the disintegration of traditional culturalism had begun with the
rupture from which cultural studies had emerged, then it proceeded
thereafter through three reasonably well defined stages. In the first,
during the early to mid 1970s, the radical critique was overwhelmingly
Marxist in character, its own internal debates in effect a confrontation
between culturalist and structuralist Marxisms. This was very much
the moment of Anderson’s New Left Review and of the Birmingham
Centre under Hall. In the second, during the very late 1970s and early
1980s, left culturalism evolved into cultural materialism at much the
same time as Althusserian structuralism imploded on itself, leaving
behind a legacy of Derridean, Foucauldian and Lacanian post-
structuralisms. This was the theoretical moment of Screen and the
political moment of a kind of radical feminism often determinedly
post-structuralist in its theoretical predilections. In the third, during
the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the debate shifted focus away
from such abstract questions of “Theory” and towards a much more
substantive engagement with the problem of postmodernism. The
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“‘theory wars’ of the 1970s and 1980s”, as Easthope, after Kreiswirth,
nicely terms them, were thus concluded, not so much in the victory of
any one protagonist as in a sudden diminution of theoretical interest,

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