Page 49 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

CULTURALISM

Such deep community must, of course, transcend class; and yet it
remains irredeemably marked by class. For the early—culturalist—
Raymond Williams this remained a circle which stubbornly refused
to be squared. Only in the later encounter with western Marxism did
it finally become possible for him to explain, to his own satisfaction
at least, how it is that structures of feeling can be common to different
classes, and yet nonetheless represent the interests of some particular
class. We shall return to this matter in the next chapter. For the present,
let us simply note the way in which the working class, and with it
socialism, perform a functionally equivalent rôle for Williams to that
of Leavis’s English School and Arnold’s remnant, as a social force
capable of effective resistance to utilitarian civilization. In Williams’s
work, as in that of Morris or Orwell, we are confronted by a determined
effort to remould the Anglo-culturalist tradition so as to render it
compatible with the politics of socialism. But in general the socialist
movement has preferred to derive its theoretical resources from much
more orthodoxly Marxist quarters. It is to Marxism, then, and initially
to the work of Marx himself, that we will proceed in Chapter 3. But
let us add two further observations to this account of the development
of Anglo-culturalism: first, we need to recall the quite decisive
contribution of such left culturalisms to the development of British
cultural studies; second, we should note the deep complicity between
culturalism and yet another “ism”, that of nationalism.

Left culturalism and British cultural studies
Excluded from “English” by Leavisism, “the popular” became the
subject matter of the new proto-discipline of “cultural studies” largely
at the instigation of Williams and Hoggart themselves. In 1962, Hoggart
was appointed Professor of Modern English Literature at Birmingham
University. Two years later he became Director of the new Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies. For Hoggart, Williams’s “interesting
work” was to be one source of intellectual inspiration for the Centre. 61
Williams reciprocated, judging this “an excellent pioneering example” 62
of institutional innovation. Moreover, Williams’s own work sketched
out much of the subject matter of the new discipline. In two books on
the media, Communications and Television: Technology and Cultural
Form, he was able to develop a critique of existing mass media
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