Page 16 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Cultural studies and cultural theory

to be his view: ‘the student should have an initial discipline
outside Cultural Studies,’ he would write, ‘an academic and
intellectual training, and a severe one’ (Hoggart, 1995, p. 173). The
modish notion of a ‘post-disciplinary’ cultural studies, canvassed
in the early issues of the International Journal of Cultural Studies,
appears to differ only very slightly from Hoggart’s sense of the
interdisciplinary (cf. Hartley, 1998, pp. 5–8). There is a real differ-
ence, however, in the conception of cultural studies as a kind of
political intervention, associated above all with Hall, Hoggart’s
immediate successor as Director at Birmingham. For Hall, the
‘seriousness’ of cultural studies was inscribed in its ‘political’
aspect: ‘there is something at stake in cultural studies,’ he insisted,
‘in a way that . . . is not exactly true of many other . . . intellectual
. . . practices’ (Hall, 1992, p. 278). Similarly ‘political’ conceptions
recur throughout the cultural studies literature. According to
During, this politically ‘engaged form of analysis’ constitutes one
of the discipline’s most obviously distinguishing features
(During, 1999, p. 2).
The third conception sees cultural studies as an entirely new
discipline defined in terms of a new subject matter: that is, the
study of popular culture. America’s culture wars were substan-
tially matters of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, but
insofar as they also brought cultural elitism into conflict with
cultural populism, they clearly touched on this issue. For
cultural elitists such as Harold Bloom, Professor of Humanities
at Yale University, cultural studies has threatened to substitute
‘Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies, and
rock’ for ‘Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Wallace
Stevens’ (Bloom, 1994, p. 519). For cultural populists like Gross-
berg, this is precisely its promise. There can be little doubt that
cultural studies did indeed emerge by way of a quasi-populist
reaction against the elitism of older forms of literary study. All
three of the discipline’s widely acknowledged British ‘founding
fathers’—Hoggart himself, E.P. Thompson and Williams—were
clearly committed to the study of popular or working-class
culture. Nonetheless, none of them actually imagined cultural
studies as in any sense coextensive with the study of the ‘popular
arts’. The growing sense of cultural studies as a sociology of mass

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