Page 16 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE CENTRE 5

conjuncture—even when the mode of analysis was ‘historical’. Each sought fresh
direction from within a tradition of intellectual inquiry, which it then both
developed and transformed. Each insisted that the answers should match, in
complexity and seriousness, the complexity of the issues it addressed. Each
supposed that those answers, when and if found, would have consequences
beyond the confines of an intellectual debate. This tension necessarily situated
Cultural Studies awkwardly with respect to the existing division and branches of
knowledge and the scholarly norms legitimated within the higher learning.
Marked in this way by its origins, Cultural Studies could in no sense be viewed
as the establishment of yet another academic sub-discipline. This prevented its
easy absorption and naturalization into the social division of knowledge. It also
made the enterprise problematic from the outset in the eyes of the powers that be
—with near fatal consequences, on occasions, for the whole venture.
One important question was the relation of Cultural Studies to the existing
disciplines in which its problems were being rethought. Could this work be
pursued in a disciplined, analytic way, yet break from some of the founding
propositions of the intellectual fields in which it was situated? Each of the texts
mentioned above referred itself and its readers to existing traditions of thought.
The Uses of Literacy, which attempted to chart the process of change within the
traditional cultures of the urban working class, employed methods similar to
those developed by Leavis and the Scrutiny critics, attempting to rework their
procedures and methods so as to apply them to the study of living class
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cultures. This aim was altogether different from the purposes behind the initial
inspiration of ‘Leavisite’ criticism—and was accordingly repudiated by its
‘master’. The continuities nevertheless remained. For behind the emphasis on
‘practical criticism’ (‘These words in this order’) Leavisite criticism had always,
in its own way, been profoundly sensitive to questions of cultural context, the
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sub-text of its ‘texts’: even if its definition of culture was peculiarly
conservative, fundamentally anti-democratic, and depended on the historically
dubious search, through an infinite regress, for some stable point of reference in
a hypostatized ‘organic culture’ of the past. Leavis himself had always stressed
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the intricate relationship between the internal organization of experience, through
language, in the preferred texts of the ‘Great Tradition’ and the general ‘state of
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the language’, which he took as a paradigm of the culture. In his ‘Sketch for an
English School’ Leavis also revealed a deep, if idiosyncratic, historical sense. 18
The Uses of Literacy refused many of Leavis’s embedded cultural judgements. But
it did attempt to deploy literary criticism to ‘read’ the emblems, idioms, social
arrangements, the lived cultures and ‘languages’ of working class life, as
particular kinds of ‘text’, as a privileged sort of cultural evidence. In this sense, it
continued ‘a tradition’ while seeking, in practice, to transform it.
Culture and Society undertook a work of contemporary description only in its
conclusion. What it did was to resume and trace a tradition of English thought
and writing, a line of critical thinking about English culture and society, back to
certain social thinkers, writers and intellectuals of the nineteenth and early