Page 39 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

28 INTRODUCTION

Concrete studies
The charting of problematics will, we hope, have given the reader some sense of
what has been involved in the attempt to give Cultural Studies a better definition
and a more secure theoretical basis. It may, however, have left the impression
that difficult positions are hardly won before they are dissolved in a further
methodological and theoretical reprise. In fact, this has not been the case. There
has never been a rigidly imposed unitary theoretical position in the Centre:
though there always has been a general project—the elaboration of a non-
reductionist theory of cultures and social formations—and a defined ‘universe of
discourse’ within whose framework different positions and emphases are
exposed to mutual critique.
Different lines of concrete work and research have, as we suggested earlier,
employed different paradigms, taken different stresses. Paul Willis’s work, while
increasingly taking into account the determining impact of wider sets of relations,
remains rooted in a critical ethnography and in the ‘recovery’ of the experience
and understandings of the groups of actors so constrained. It insists on the
irreducibility of this moment to any larger terms of a ‘structural’ explanation.
The early work on subcultures exemplified a strong base in this tendency, but in
subsequent work it has been modified and recast by the deployment of Gramsci’s
concept of ‘hegemony’ and by more sustained work on historically specific
forms of resistance. By contrast, media work—because of the centrality of textual
analysis—has continued to be more profoundly influenced than other areas by
linguistic and semiotic traditions. Recent research on the state, education and the
family has been influenced by the ‘new social history’, by structuralist and feminist
theories. The work on language has been deeply marked by the new concerns
with ‘discursive practices’ and their regulative properties. ‘Cultural history’ has
addressed itself to post-war historiographical traditions and to the relationship,
posed in these alternative traditions, between history and theory. Thus when one
turns from theoretical questions per se to concrete research in the Centre, we find
recurring emphases: but also a greater plurality of approaches than the
monolithic impression which may have been suggested by this necessarily
compressed account.
Priorities in the areas of concrete research have also changed over time.
‘Accreted’ sometimes seems a more appropriate term, since problems never
simply disappear, nor are they displaced by the opening up of new areas but are
transformed and developed within a different problematic. Centre work is full of
these recoveries and reprises. In the early days Centre research was mainly
concentrated in three areas: the media, literary analysis and popular culture.
Work on the media has continued throughout. But the shifts of perspective and
problematic are significant (they are charted in more detail below). Literary
studies, as we noted earlier, have had a somewhat chequered career: but this is a
history which the Centre shares with literary studies everywhere. Again, the
internal transformation of this field is very amply discussed in the relevant