Page 24 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE CENTRE 13

culture. This reworking of Cultural Studies on the ground of the ‘base/
superstructures’ metaphor was a highly significant moment, which had a
formative impact on the Centre’s work—for example, in media studies, in
historical work, in the debates concerning the methods of ideological analysis, in
the kind of theoretical argument sustained at that time in our General Theory
seminar (the place where these issues were constantly thrashed out).
It was here that the charge of ‘theoreticism’ was first advanced. And there is
no doubt that the Centre was, for a time, over-preoccupied with these difficult
theoretical issues. It has to be said, however, that we had no alternative but to
undertake a labour of theoretical definition and clarification at the same time as
we attempted to do concrete work in the field. The two could not be separated.
The term ‘culture’ could not be simply taken on loan from other traditions of
thought and surreptitiously applied, by infinite extension, to an unfolding series
of new objects. It could not just be ‘tested’ empirically. There were different
definitions of the term ‘culture’. Each implied a different programme of work.
Each was only one term in a matrix of related concepts and propositions. To
establish the field required a break with older problematics and the constitution of
new ones. More recently, Althusser’s discussion of how new knowledges are
developed by an ‘epistemological rupture’ with previous ideological
problematics has greatly exaggerated the absolutism of such breaks and has
helped to induce a practice in which texts are not only read ‘symptomatically’,
for their underlying problematics, but actually reduced to them. But his general
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argument stands. Terms and concepts cannot be treated or changed in isolation;
they must be judged in terms of their position in a set of concepts—‘the
problematic’—and in relation to the ‘constitutive unity of effective thoughts that
make up the domain of an existing ideological field’. This is not cited in
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defence of every twist and turn of the theoretical screw, but it explains the
necessarily theoretical nature of our enterprise as opposed to the obviousness of
empirical common sense.
The break into a complex Marxism was made possible, though not easier, by
the creative disintegration from within of sociology itself in its mainstream form.
After a period of methodological certainty, sociology too entered its theoretical
agony. The theory of the self-regulative properties of advanced capitalist societies
was shown to be penetrated by highly ideological notions. More important, the
‘tension-managing’ capacities of liberal-pluralist societies—for which, at the
time, America provided the paradigm case—began to look increasingly
precarious under the impact of the political events and upheavals of American
society in the late 1960s. Advances were made here not simply by taking thought
but through the perceptible impact of real historical events on a particular
structure of knowledge. When Martin Nicolaus, the translator of Marx’s
Grundrisse, asked his distinguished American sociological colleagues, ‘What
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is this science which only holds good when its subjects stand still?’ he marked
not the turning of another methodological corner but the break-up of a certain
structure of thought under the force of historical events it could not explain. From