Page 20 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE CENTRE 9

specifically from sociology, which, while not concerned with such issues,
reserved a proprietary claim over the territory. For example, the opening of the
Centre was greeted by a letter from two social scientists who issued a sort of
warning: if Cultural Studies overstepped its proper limits and took on the study of
contemporary society (not just its texts), without ‘proper’ scientific (that is quasi-
scientistic) controls, it would provoke reprisals for illegitimately crossing the
territorial boundary.
It may be hard for us—confronted as we are now by the immense disarray of
‘mainstream’ sociology—to recall a time when British sociology was so
confident of its claims and proprieties. But this was no idle threat. It was
compounded by an equally conservative reaction from those ‘humanists’ who
might have been expected to know better (after all, they too were under notice to
quit from an emergent technicist positivism). They regarded ‘culture’ as already
inscribed in the texts they studied and in the values of liberal scholarship.
Anything more modern was, by definition, a sign of cultural decline and
debasement. Spending time analysing modern cultural forms was a positive
collusion with the ‘modern disease’. They shared, in fact, with Leavis, the
assumption that culture and democracy were unalterably opposed. ‘Organic
culture’ lay irredeemably in the past. Everything else was ‘mass culture’. Despite
these areas of agreement with what Leavis called the ‘diagnosis’, they refused
his moral seriousness and strenuous programme as too embattled for their tastes.
It seemed vulgar, then, to point out that this whole definition of culture had been
framed in very specific and peculiar historical conditions: that it entailed its own
peculiar reading of history; that it enshrined its questionable ideological
judgements as ‘truths’; that it was militantly elitist in practice. Cultural studies then
was either hopelessly unscientific or a product of the very disease it sought to
diagnose—either way, a treason of the intellectuals. The relative caution and
uncertainty which accompanied the inauguration of the Centre was due in no
small measure to this inhospitable climate. For years ‘Cultural Studies’ found
itself required to survive by running the gauntlet, skilfully, between these two
entrenched—but, in their different ways, philistine and anti-intellectual—
positions.
This was not without its real effects. When the Centre gained its first funded
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project —a study of social change through an examination of the popular press,
1930–64—it was proposed that since we were not equipped to undertake ‘proper
sociological’ investigation, we should analyse the ‘texts’ by methods of cultural
reading, and then the social scientists might be recruited to ‘test’ our (soft)
hypotheses by the appropriate (hard) scientific methods. A not dissimilar
argument was advanced when we first applied to the Social Science Research
Council (SSRC) for the funds which eventually led to the project undertaken by
Paul Willis (and subsequently reported in Learning to Labour). Fortunately, so
far as the Rowntree project was concerned, this broken-backed strategy found no
takers, and we simply had to do the whole job ourselves. Actually, the common
meeting-ground in the project itself between these two irreconcilable alternatives