Page 248 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AT THE CENTRE 237

time television drama series) has been similarly striking. To understand the
emergence of these and many other new kinds of cultural practice requires us to
take stock of the uneven histories of diverse activities. We should be particularly
hesitant about describing such cultural developments as concomitant reflexes or
as in any way parallel to new moves in ‘theory’; initiatives such as Socialist
Centres may have more to do with a legacy and history of regional political
41
activities than with the exegesis of Gramsci on counter-hegemony. There are
several histories, of a complex and broken kind, which relate to the politics of
specific cultural practices and should not be conflated: ideologies and ways of
working which both converge and diverge; different histories, different funding,
different practices, different politics.
At one pole there have been the efforts of ex-students (but also of working-
class people and of other groups) in pioneering local initiatives, often
deliberately ephemeral, working in and with the resources and potential of a
particular place and moment; at the other, a large increase in official funding for
the arts, including regional associations and sub-panels, and in more direct local
authority initiatives. In one direction the enormous fissure between these
activities and the operations of the major culture/leisure industries (with their
stock-exchange citations and their capacity to create international and multi-
media selling patterns and spin-offs) is still there:

the great problem now is to see the extent to which (self-organizing, self-
stating initiatives) can for long coexist with or eventually replace what is
still a very powerful sort of minority culture…actually a few very large scale
institutions which really do capture the big audiences and have become
skilled in supplying them. 42
In another, at the level of form, strategic questions about the use of traditional
forms (recognizable, starting ‘where the audience are’) or of experimental forms
(making and claiming imaginative space) remain open: Trevor Griffiths’s
television work was a striking case for hard arguments about the constraints of
realism; attempts to locate Brechtian work in a post-war British context
reverberate in Left drama groups.
There are two particular areas of contradiction, where the limits of potential
work are blurred or open. One is found at the interface between ‘community’ and
the local state. Many emerging practices have clustered around the notion of
‘community’ in various forms: engendering community ‘spirit’ (often ‘as it used
to be’) by Tenants’ Associations, sometimes with a radical critique of local
government politics; the relocation of resources back in supposedly ‘culturally
deprived’ innercity areas and council estates (community workers and theatre
groups, children’s drama, community artists); the active recovery of forgotten or
moribund cultural forms (Centerprise in Hackney, and many others). The
development of interest by the local and national state in the promotion of new
forms of community life has had two very different effects: the grafting of a new