Page 11 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

INTRODUCTION

has been published by Methuen and then by Routledge since 1987.
Apparently, there is at least one draft GCE “A” level syllabus already
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in circulation. If cultural studies is still not yet a fully organized
discipline within British higher education, then it is nonetheless well
on the way to becoming so.
As currently constructed both in Britain and elsewhere this “proto-
discipline” of cultural studies still remains deeply indebted to the
work of the Birmingham Centre. Originally founded in 1964, as a
graduate research unit under the directorship of Richard Hoggart,
the Centre became, for much of the 1970s and 1980s, the intellectually
pre-eminent institutional location for cultural studies in the English-
speaking world. Antony Easthope, for example, now Professor of
English and Cultural Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University,
judges the Centre’s work the most important “intervention in cultural
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studies in Britain”. Lawrence Grossberg, from the University of Illinois,
agrees that: “there remains something like a center—to be precise,
the tradition of British cultural studies, especially the work of the
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Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies”. Graeme Turner, a
founding editor of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies and a
key figure in the development of cultural studies in that country, echoes
this view: “the Birmingham Centre…can justifiably claim to be the
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key institution in the history of the field”. The emergence and expansion
of what eventually became known as “cultural studies” (which
continues apace, despite the politically motivated antipathy of the
Conservative government toward the old Birmingham Centre itself)
has constituted one of the most exciting intellectual developments
engendered by the protracted crisis of post-war Britain.
British cultural studies became the site for a sustained encounter
between an earlier English tradition of “literary” cultural criticism
on the one hand, and a variety of French structuralist and more generally
continental Western Marxist (and sociological) traditions on the other.
This encounter has been theorized as that between “structuralism”
and “culturalism” by two subsequent directors of the Birmingham
Centre, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. In each case, an empiricist
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culturalism is contrasted with a theoreticist structuralism. Hall’s account
in particular has been very widely influential. For Hall, culturalism
elides the distinction between active consciousness and relatively
“given” determinate conditions; it thus becomes susceptible to a general
“experiential pull” and to an “emphasis on the creative”, which

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