Page 25 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

14 INTRODUCTION

this rupture there emerged new kinds of questions about the ‘politics of culture’
(all that was resumed in the cultural revolution of 1968 and after) which gave the
work of the Centre a new dynamic and a new relevance to the emergent
contradictions in contemporary advanced societies. The Centre did not, of course,
bring about this reversal single-handed: though we were prescient in sensing,
quite early, that the whole armour-plated craft of structural-functionalism was
less seaworthy than it had appeared. But we did not fire the releant torpedo.
Simply, it became possible to pose—as it were, against sociology— certain
‘sociological’ questions (for example, the question of ideology) to a ‘science’
which had only given us the reassuring vista of the ‘end of ideology’. If the
ensuing disarray caused consternation in the sociological camp, it also released
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intellectual energies, set people free to undertake new kinds of work. Certainly,
so far as Cultural Studies was concerned, it gave us a much-needed theoretical
breathing-space. Its effect has been, in the long run, profoundly liberating,
intellectually.

New dimensions of culture and the impact of the
‘structuralisms’
From this point onwards, Cultural Studies is no longer a dependent intellectual
colony. It has a direction, an object of study, a set of themes and issues, a
distinctive problematic of its own.
First, there was the move away from older definitions of culture to new
formulations. Culture no longer meant a set of texts and artefacts. Even less did
it mean the ‘selective tradition’ in which those texts and artefacts had been
arranged, studied and appreciated. Particularly it did not mean the values and
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ideals, which were supposed to be expressed through those texts—especially
when these were projected out of definite societies in historical time—and
deployed as an ‘ideal order’ (what Williams called a ‘court of appeal’), against
which the (widely assumed) inevitable process of cultural decline could be
measured. These constituted very much the going ‘Humanities’ definition of
culture. It seemed to us to ascribe a general and universal function to values in
the abstract which could only be understood in terms of their specific social and
historical contexts: in short, an ideological definition, as important for what it
obscured as for what it revealed. This definition had to be, to use an ugly
neologism, ‘problematized’.
The abstraction of texts from the social practices which produced them and the
institutional sites where they were elaborated was a fetishization—even if it had
pertinent societal effects. This obscured how a particular ordering of culture
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came to be produced and sustained: the circumstances and conditions of cultural
reproduction which the operations of the ‘selective tradition’ rendered natural,
‘taken for granted’. But the process of ordering (arrangement, regulation) is
always the result of concrete sets of practices and relations. In constituting a
particular cultural order as ‘dominant’, it implied (though this was rarely