Page 21 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

10 INTRODUCTION

was provided not so much by sociological methods as by a return to the ground of
concrete historical analysis. This was the first time, in a real sense, that historical
questions came firmly into play within the Centre’s practice. In our view, the
book which resulted from breaking this methodological sound barrier, and which
dissolved the false literary versus sociological antithesis—Paper Voices—was a
much better one than could have been produced in the way originally proposed:
and it was the combination of literary and historical work which sustained it. 30
This was certainly one early point where the Centre began to desert its
‘handmaiden’ role and chart a more independent, ambitious, properly integrated
territorial space of its own.
The ‘sociological encounter’ could be described in many different ways. It led
to a quite new range of work in the Centre, taking into previous definitions of
that work new emphases on ‘lived cultures’—the study of youth cultures, for
example; the concern with subcultures and the study of deviance; attention to the
institutions of schooling and the relations of the workplace. What was also at
issue was the need to confront theoretically, and in a manner appropriate to
ourselves, the dominant discipline which cast its proprietary shadow across our
path. This could not be done by simply grafting sociology on to Cultural Studies
from the outside—though this was often what, at the time, ‘interdisciplinary’ was
taken to mean. With the extension in the meaning of ‘culture’ from texts and
representations to lived practices, belief systems and institutions, some part of
the subject matter of sociology also fell within our scope. Yet the dominant ways
of conceptualizing these relationships within structural-functionalism prevented
our posing these questions correctly.
However, it was also clear that there were more mansions in the sociological
kingdom than its guardians suggested. Thus began the Centre’s appropriation of
sociology from within. We staked out a line for ourselves through the ‘classic’
texts and problems. Here, alternative traditions within sociology itself began to
make their appearance. Structural-functionalism turned out to be not science
itself but a particular kind of theoretical construct and synthesis, put together in a
very specific historical moment: the moment of American world-cultural
hegemony. But there were other traditions which did attempt to deal with social
action and institutions as ‘objectivated structures of meaning’. They examined
types of historical societies (‘capitalist’ ones, for example) from the perspective
of their ideological formations (for example, the ‘Protestant Ethic’). They
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proposed two types of sociological explanation for cultural phenomena: the
societal and historical forces which produced them, and those phenomena
analysed in terms of their ‘relevance for meaning’. In their very different ways
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these approaches connected with the theory of communication outlined in The
Long Revolution and the project of ‘reading’ working-class life in terms of its
‘lived meanings’ which The Uses of Literacy had attempted.
It is clear, in retrospect, where this line of thinking pointed. It tended to give
Cultural Studies a distinctively ‘Weberian’ gloss. This is clear enough in
Weber’s own work. But similar lines can also be traced elsewhere in the German