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CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE CENTRE 29

section. Popular culture was always a problematic area: largely descriptive in
definition (often no more than a mere listing of residual customs and forms) and
inscribed within the inadequate terms of the ‘cultural debate’ (with its ‘popular/
high’ culture oscillations). The analysis of popular texts has, however, recently
revived within both the Media Studies and English Studies areas. And this
development is complemented by a quite novel concern with ‘the popular’ in a
radically new sense: national-popular cultural traditions, popular ideologies, the
popular as the ground of common sense in which more developed and organized
‘philosophies’ intervene, the popular as the stake in the struggle for hegemony
and consent (populist/popular democratic elements in political discourses and
their articulation with different class practices, for example). 101 A combination
of some of these interests, within the framework of a more developed theory of
the state and with an attempt at the analysis of a specific historical conjuncture,
resulted in a collective Centre enterprise, eventually published in Policing the
Crisis. 102
This did mark the beginning of a whole new phase of concrete research more
directly concerned with political formations, state and civil institutions,
institutional policies and practices. It also marked the beginning of a new
concern with questions of historical periodization and the attention to specific
historical conjunctures in their own right. Indeed, there has been a thorough-
going ‘historicization’ of the Centre’s previously rather theoreticist practice,
which seems to us an unqualified gain. This is now beginning to deliver its own
provisional results, in work to come on state formations in the 1880s-1920s and
the 1930s; 1945, the Welfare State and the terms of the post-war settlement;
literary formations and women’s writing in the 1930s and 1950s; the post-war
legislation on sexuality, and the restructuring of women’s work; and the labour
process and the post-war history of race relations. The most general consequence
is the pressing of this whole range of work—whether contemporary or
‘historical’—towards historical specificity and a sense of the present conjuncture
(these only appear to be antithetical and opposed emphases if the term
‘historical’ is taken, simple-mindedly, to refer to the past, but we have
attempted, rigorously, to break with this disabling, descriptively inert definition).
We have already mentioned the impact of feminism. This too has had its
consequences for the areas and directions of concrete research. For some time
work in this area was organized within the Women’s Studies group. But after an
initial phase this has been abandoned in favour of making questions of gender
and patriarchal relations central to the concerns of all our research groups and no
longer the responsibility of women alone to sustain. Thus one can find these
concerns now best developed in (for example) the analysis of the impact of
schooling on girls and of paid/unpaid domestic work on women; in the analysis
of feminine representations in literary and media discourses; in the study of
feminist political representation; in the examination of state policies and
strategies directly addressed to women, strongly marked in their patriarchal
forms; in the connections between school and family. More generally, the