Page 50 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

institutions and texts that avoided the disabling cultural élitism of
Leavisite criticism. Both books sought to identify the institutional
forms that could sustain a properly democratic communications system.
Thus the new televisual technologies were, in Williams’s opinion,
“the contemporary tools of the long revolution towards an educated
and participatory democracy”. 64
When Hoggart left Birmingham in 1968, he was succeeded by
Stuart Hall, then still very much under the influence of the left culturalist
argument. Hall established a house journal for the Centre, Working
Papers in Cultural Studies, and later a joint publishing venture with
Hutchinson. Though both Hall himself and the Centre generally were
to prove increasingly susceptible to structuralist and later post-
structuralist developments in cultural theory, the culturalist position
remained nonetheless more or less in play. This is particularly evident
in the Centre’s work on youth subcultures, where an ethnographic
focus inspired by The Uses of Literacy is combined with an emphasis
on generation and class deriving in part from Williams, so as to produce
accounts of subcultural resistance to the dominant culture. Though
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some of this work has been essentially structuralist and post-structuralist
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in theoretical inspiration, strongly culturalist themes remain present,
for example, in the work of Paul Willis. Indeed, Willis’s more recent
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work can be read as a determined celebration of the empirical as
against the theoretical, agency as against structure, “common culture”
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as against élite culture. Elsewhere, an equally developed culturalism
persists into the work, for example, of the sociologist, Jeremy
Seabrook. 69

Nationalism and culture

From Herder onward, German culturalism has displayed a recurrent
disposition to connect cultural specificity and uniqueness with the
native language, and with notions of nationality or race. In Hegel’s
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Philosophy of History, it is, characteristically, the nation that is the
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medium through which the World Spirit is consciously realised. For
the Anglo-culturalists also the ideal organic community had more
often than not been imagined as that of the nation. This is clearly so
for Eliot and Leavis. Hence the manner in which the Leavisites
constructed English studies as an almost quintessentially nationalist

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