Page 249 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

238 ENGLISH STUDIES

stratum of employees into local authority pay, to supervise working-class
cultural activities (with parallels in the work of community development projects,
intended perhaps as ‘soft policing’ but becoming, until terminated, quite other
than that); and a mobilization of historically bypassed cultural practices. A host
of complex interconnections have surrounded attention to the reconstitution of
‘community’ in specific areas: a major redefinition of the meaning and
boundaries of artistic work; paranoia about inner-city ‘idle time’; the
continuation of ideologies of ‘cultural deprivation’; the intervention of groups
working in a cultural/political strategy. Community arts hang between alternative
and oppositional practice and test the simplicity of the dichotomy, connecting
both with attempts at more sophisticated modes of control and with more
democratic and participatory models. 43
Second, in Britain and several other European countries an alternative
publishing network has been powerfully forged in the last five years. Worpole
has cited, for Sweden, a project set up by organizations equivalent to the WEA
and the Cooperative Society, which has achieved 40,000 sales for novels by
working-class writers; also a Writers’ Book Machine, a state-subsidized

resource centre in Stockholm. It works on the principle that authors have
access to free use of a typewriter and small printing press and that they pay
half the origination costs of a limited edition…sent round to all the book-
reviewing agencies …perhaps re-commissioned with a much bigger print
run. 44

In England new journals have helped with the creation of a distribution co-
operative and small presses have been prolific. It remains to be discovered (and
Lane’s book may help illuminate) whether there is a point already (or soon to be)
45
reached at which such a network critically lacks capital and other resources with
which to develop further by comparison with mainstream institutions. The state’s
role, characteristically, has so far been to support otherwise untenable lame
ducks: in this area the Royal Opera House and the National Theatre. The case for
stronger state intervention, in the creation of spaces for non-commercial
bookshops, for many kinds of cultural production and distribution, is just being
heard again for the first time since Williams’s remarks in The Long Revolution. 46
Again, in the whole area there has been an absence of relevant supporting
work (analysis of the theoretical underpinnings of strategies, historical and also
critical) within higher education. The general issue broached here is the paradox
of an aggressive commercial development of the cultural field, and yet also the
variety of experimental alternatives attempted in the last few years.

Feminism and gender
Feminist criticism has an active relationship with the political practices of
feminism by which it was generated. Feminism’s critique of sexism and its stress