Page 19 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

8 INTRODUCTION

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issues. It was systematically functionalist and integrative in perspective. It had
abolished the category of contradiction: instead, it spoke of ‘dysfunctions’ and of
‘tension management’. It claimed the mantle of a science. But its premises and
predispositions were highly ideological. In fact, it responded to the question
posed earlier—what sort of society was this now?—by giving a highly specific
historical answer: all post-capitalist, post-industrial societies were tending to the
model of the American dream—as one representative work put it, to the ‘first
new nation’. It celebrated the triumph of ‘pluralist society’, constantly
counterposed to ‘totalitarian society’, a highly ideological couplet which was
advanced as a concluded scientific fact. It did not deal with ‘culture’, except
within the terms of a highly pessimistic variant of the ‘mass society/mass
culture’ hypothesis. Instead, it referred to ‘the value system’ in the singular—into
which, as Shils eloquently put it, on the basis of pluralism, the ‘brutal culture’ of
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the masses was destined to be gradually and successfully incorporated. It
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militantly refused the concept of ideology. What was said earlier needs now to
be somewhat qualified. It did, after all, provide a sort of reply to the questions
being posed: it transposed them into its own, highly distinctive theoretical
framework. At the same time, it preferred a methodology—the method of the
social sciences— modelled on a highly outdated version of the natural sciences,
militantly empiricist and quantitative.
Perry Anderson has—in our view, correctly—argued that such a sociology
could produce no concept of ‘totality’ and, without that, no concept of ‘culture’
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either. Anderson argues that this ‘absent centre’ was filled in Britain, but in a
displaced form, by other disciplines, in which the concept of ‘totality’ assumed a
partial existence. He mentions anthropology and literary criticism; we might now
add the ‘new’ social history. One way of thinking of Cultural Studies is as the
intellectual space where the convergences between these displaced traditions
occurred. ‘Driven out of any obvious habits, the notion of totality found refuge in
the least expected of studies….’
This is no mere speculation. It refers directly to the politics of academic life in
which Cultural Studies, from the moment of its inception, was immersed.
Hoggart’s inaugural lecture, ‘Schools of English and Contemporary Society’,
which announced the programme of the Birmingham Centre, was an originating
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document. Its principal way of conceiving the field ought to have given little
offence to academic amour propre. It indexed Cultural Studies as primarily
concerned with ‘neglected’ materials drawn from popular culture and the mass
media, which, it suggested, provided important evidence of the new stresses and
directions of contemporary culture. This gave the Centre’s initial impetus a
distinctly ‘literary’ flavour’—with the Uses of Literacy as an exemplary feat. It
recommended the adaptation of literary-critical methods in reading these texts
for their qualitative cultural evidence: a modest proposal—in retrospect, perhaps,
too modest. But its relative ‘conservatism’ may have reflected that historic
compromise required to get these illicit questions posed at all, within a
traditional academic framework. Nevertheless, it triggered off a blistering attack