Page 14 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE CENTRE 3

‘Working Papers’, however, underlined the tentative character of this enterprise,
as we saw it.
In real terms, its publication and production was made possible by a small
educational bequest made over to the Centre by Sir Allen Lane and Penguin
Books in the early days—and without strings—to give the Centre some small
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independent financial support. Otherwise the journal had no official sponsorship
or financial support: it was self-financed and self-produced. In conception and
execution it was a collective venture, the product of staff and students working
together. With the Stencilled Paper series, which was initiated at about the same
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time, it gave the Centre, and Cultural Studies, a necessary public presence. The
first issue was designed and overseen by Trevor Millum, one of our first
successful Ph.D students, in a period of post-thesis euphoria. 11
The development of the Centre, and of Cultural Studies, can be resumed in a
number of different ways. We look at three aspects in this introduction: first, the
changes in theoretical perspective and in the main problematics which have
staked out the Centre’s development through the 1970s; second, the question of
the different areas of concrete research in which the Centre has been centrally
engaged; third, the modes of organization, the intellectual practices of analysis
and research, through which that work has been practically realized.

Foundations of cultural studies
The search for origins is tempting but illusory. In intellectual matters absolute
beginnings are exceedingly rare. We find, instead, continuities and breaks. New
interventions reflect events outside a discipline but have effects within it. They
most often work to reorganize a set of problems or field of inquiry. They
reconstitute existing knowledge under the sign of new questions. They dispose
existing elements into new configurations, establish new points of departure.
Cultural Studies, in its institutional manifestation, was the result of such a break
in the 1960s. But the field in which this intervention was made had been initially
charted in the 1950s. This earlier founding moment is best specified in terms of
the originating texts, the original ‘curriculum’, of the field—Hoggart’s The Uses
of Literacy, Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society and The Long Revolution,
E.P.Thompson’s critique of the latter work and the ‘example’ of related
questions, worked in a more historical mode, in The Making of the English
Working Class. 12
These were not textbooks for the inauguration of a new discipline: though they
were the results of disciplined intellectual work of a high order. They were

*This introductory survey was based on outlines proposed by Stuart Hall and Andrew
Lowe. It was extensively discussed by the Editorial Group. The main text was drafted by
Stuart Hall and revised in the light of comments offered by the Editorial Group and other
members of the Centre.