Page 15 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

4 INTRODUCTION

responses of different kinds to a decisive historical conjecture. They brought
disciplined thought to bear on the understanding of their own times. They were
far from neutral or scholarly: they were cultural interventions in their own right.
They addressed the long-term shifts taking place in British society and culture
within the framework of a long, retrospective, historical glance. What these
writers in their various ways confronted, precisely, was post-war British society,
recently emerged from the upheavals of total war, entering a period of change
and development whose parameters were set by the terms of the post-war
‘settlement’. The depression and the war appeared to have established certain
critical breaks with earlier developments. The ‘settlement’—defined by the
revival of capitalist production, the founding of the welfare state and the ‘Cold
War’—appeared to bring economic, political and cultural forces into new kinds
of relation, into a new equilibrium. But what sort of qualitative break with the
past did this constitute? Had there been a decisive rupture with the determining
historical forces which had shaped Britain’s ‘peculiar’ route through the earlier
phases of industrial capitalist development, or merely their recomposition into
new continuities? Was Britain still a capitalist civilization or a ‘post-capitalist’
one? Did welfare capitalism represent a fundamental or merely a superficial
reordering of society? The earlier phases of industrial capitalist development had
produced a complex but distinctive type of social formation: what type of social
formation was now in the making? Such transformations in the past had entailed
profound cultural shifts and upheavals: as E.P. Thompson remarked, when
surveying the deep changes in the social apprehension of Time which sustained
an earlier moment of ‘transition’, ‘there is no such thing as economic growth
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which is not, at the same time, growth and change of a culture….’ What did
such cultural changes amount to now? What would be the consequences for
traditional class relationships, for class formation, and their cultures—hitherto,
the very basis of the cultural order itself? Were there new, emergent cultural
forces and tendencies? Above all, how were these historical processes to be
qualitatively understood and assessed?
These issues were being widely debated at the time. They formed, for example,
a constitutive part of the agenda of the early ‘New Left’, with which many of the
contributors identified above had been associated. They set the terms of the post-
war ‘cultural debate’ which, with many changes of emphasis, continues today.
They also defined the space in which Cultural Studies emerged, defined its
objectives and its agenda. From its inception, then, Cultural Studies was an
‘engaged’ set of disciplines, addressing awkward but relevant issues about
contemporary society and culture, often without benefit of that scholarly
detachment or distance which the passage of time alone sometimes confers on
other fields of study. The ‘contemporary’—which otherwise defined our terms of
reference too narrowly—was, by definition, hot to handle. This tension (between
what might loosely be called ‘political’ and intellectual concerns) has shaped
Cultural Studies ever since. Each of the books referred to above inhabited this
tension in a different way. Each addressed the problems defined by a decisive