Page 18 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE CENTRE 7

seminal work of social history of the post-war period. It was informed throughout
by a sense of how impossible it would be, after it, to give an account of that
formative historical ‘transition’, the 1790s to the 1830s, without a sustained
account of the ‘cultural dimension’. It was rigorously and, in the best sense,
‘empirically’ grounded in historical particularity, though its brief opening pages
on ‘class relationships’ constituted a brief but resonant statement, ‘theoretical’ in
effect, if not in manner or intent. Thompson stressed the dimensions of historical
agency through which a distinctive class formation made itself—the active tense
in the title was fully intentional. His definition of culture was rooted in the
collective experiences which formed the class in its larger historical sense. The
book situated culture in the dialectic between ‘social being’ and ‘social
consciousness’. In doing so, it broke with a kind of economic determinism, and
with an institutional perspective, which had marked and limited certain older
versions of ‘labour history’, which it effectively displaced. It also obliquely—by
demonstration, as it were—challenged the narrow, elitist conception of ‘culture’
enshrined in the Leavisite tradition, as well as the rather evolutionary approach
which sometimes marked Williams’s Long Revolution. It affirmed, directly, the
relevance of historical work to the task of analysing the present. Thompson
insisted on the historical specificity of culture, on its plural, not singular,
definition—‘cultures’, not ‘Culture’: above all, on the necessary struggle, tension
and conflict between cultures and their links to class cultures, class formations
and class struggles—the struggles between ‘ways of life’ rather than the
evolution of ‘a way of life’. These were seminal qualifications.
All these works, then, implied a radical break with previous
conceptualizations. They inflected the term ‘culture’ away from its traditional
moorings, getting behind the inert sense of ‘period’ which sustained the text/
context distinction, moving the argument into the wider field of social practices
and historical processes. It was difficult, at first, to give these breaks a precise
location in any single disciplinary field. They appeared to be distinctive precisely
in the ways in which they broke across and cut between the disciplinary empires.
They were, for the moment, defined as ‘sociological’ in a loose sense—without,
of course, being ‘proper’ sociology.

The break with sociology
Some elements within sociology ‘proper’ were, indeed, preoccupied at this time
with similar themes. One thinks, for example, of the work of the Institute of
Community Studies and of the wider preoccupation with the idea of
‘community’ which could be considered as a sort of analogue, within sociology,
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of the emergent concern with cultures elsewhere. But by and large British
sociology was not predisposed to ask questions of this order. This was the period
—the 1950s—of its massive dependence on American theories and models. But
American sociology, in either its Parsonian theorization or its structural-
functionalist methodology, was theoretically incapable of dealing with these