Page 22 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE CENTRE 11

idealist tradition and in the famous ‘debate over method’ from which German
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sociology first emerged. They can be identified with the verstehen or
‘interpretative’ hermeneutic stress which characterizes early historical sociology
and the Geistwissenschaft approach in general (Dilthey and Simmel are
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representative figures here). At the same moment as we began to excavate this
neglected tradition in classical sociology, a parallel movement of recovery began
within sociology itself. Sociologists began to speak of the ‘two sociologies’—
counterposing Weber to Durkheim. Gradually these themes began to be
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reappropriated within ‘mainstream’ sociology itself. They are to be found in the
phenomenological reprise associated with Berger and Luckmann’s ‘social
construction of reality’ approach and based on the rediscovery of the work of
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Alfred Schutz; later, in ethnomethodology, with its interest in the ‘common-
sense’ foundations of social action, its focus on language and conversational
analysis as a sort of paradigm for social action itself. 37
More significant for us was the rehabilitation of ‘social interactionism’. This
had a distinguished, if subordinate, history within American mainstream
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sociology— especially in the work of Mead and the ‘Chicago School’. But it
had recently been revived in the writings of Howard Becker and the subcultural
theorists. They chose to work at a more ethnographic level. They were
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sensitive to the differences in ‘lived’ values and meanings which differentiated
subcultures from the dominant culture. They stressed the importance of the ways
in which social actors define for themselves the conditions in which they live—
their ‘definitions of situation’. And they deployed a qualitative methodology.
This emphasis on qualitative work has exercised a formative influence within
Cultural Studies and can be traced in the early work on youth cultures, in Paul
Willis’s study of the cultures of school and work and, in more recent research on
women, on women’s work and experience. It posed the question of the status
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of the experiential moment in any project of research in ‘lived’ cultures as an
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irreducible element of any explanation. The tension between these experiential
accounts and a larger account of structural and historical determinations has been
a pivotal site of Centre theorizing and debate since then. Moreover, the
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ethnographic tradition linked Cultural Studies with at least two other kinds of
related work: with the descriptive emphases of some kinds of social
anthropology (for example, the anthropological study of the interpretative
schema or ‘folk ideologies’ which social groups employ to give their conditions
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of existence meaning); and with the ‘history from below’ which characterizes
the new social history—for example, the ‘oral history’ movement, the work of
Centerprise and History Workshop, a great deal of feminist historical writing (the
work of Sheila Rowbotham, for instance) and that whole body of work inspired
by Thompson’s The Making. 44
There was, however, another aspect not so readily assimilated by this route.
The ‘lived accounts’ which social actors gave of their experience themselves had
to be situated. They had their own determinate conditions. Consciousness is
always infused with ideological elements, and any analysis of social frameworks