Page 47 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

2
Barrington Moore, Perry Anderson and
English social development*

Richard Johnson

It is useful to start by sketching what might be the specifically historical
concerns of a Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies. One central task is to
reconstruct, in concepts and in imaginative understanding, the succession of
cultural formations within the capitalist epoch. We might concede to our title
word ‘contemporary’ that our interests should not normally stretch much beyond
the 1880s. It is certainly in that decade that many ‘modern’ developments begin.
And we will also tend to continue to focus on Britain, perhaps within a widening
comparative span. As a main object of study we might take the systems of
culturally mediated social relations between classes and their internal cultural
resources and repertoires. This must include cultural differences within classes,
for, whether within a dominant or a subordinate class, these often supply the
means of control. It must include too a continued attention to the subject’s
experience and to the records of this in literature or autobiographical fragment.
Attention to the subjective moment is not a mere romanticism. It is only through
the conscious, social and more or less creative activity of individual men, women
and children that the systems of class-cultural relations are reproduced. It is they
who within given conditions reinforce in their lives the cultural patterns or make
their breaks with them. The histories of intention and consciousness (and also of
emotional economy and the only-partially-conscious) are necessary components
in any explanatory history at all.
It is especially important to chart cultural movement. We might think of this as
a process of transition from one more or less stable set of relations to another.
The record shows a history of such transitions: from periods of manifest
challenge to periods of relative ‘order’, from dissent to consent, from manifest
contradiction to apparent resolution. These phases, movements of a mid-term
duration, are a principal, immediate and urgent object of study. They are the
subject of a history of hegemony. But they rest, in the last resort, on shifts of a
more subterranean nature and of a longer duration that roll right through the
epoch as a whole. We have to understand this underlying movement too.
The second aim is to examine further what Edward Thompson has called the
‘peculiarities of the English’. What is distinctive about British social
development in comparison with other countries that have taken the capitalist
route? Like the knowledge of conjunctures, this is necessary knowledge, ‘really