Page 27 - Decoding Culture

20 DECODING CULTURE
subsequent commentators have proved more than willing to iden­
tify the likes of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams as key
formative influences. Consider only two of the field's better intro­
ductory texts, those by Turner (1990) and Storey (1993).
'Customarily,' Turner (1990: 12) writes, 'cultural studies is seen to
begin with the publication of Richard Hoggart's The U s es of Literacy
([1957] 1958) and Raymond Williams' Culture and Society
1780-1950 ([1958]1961) and The Long Revolution ([1961]1965)"
all works which Storey (1993: 43) likewise identifies as among the
'founding texts'. These are not judgements made in haste or error,
nor are Storey and Turner unusual in making them, for most would
agree that Hoggart and Williams were indeed significant figures in
the early development of what is now called cultural studies. But
the growing inclination to conceive these writers as somehow rep­
resentative of the founding moment of the discipline, of its
fundamental ideas, is at best one-sided and at worst palpably mis­
leading.
The problem does not lie with the quality or importance of their
work, of course, but with the very act of identifying founders. To
name founders is to use a convenient shorthand for the issues of
the day, but like all such conveniences it carries with it the risk of
reification: replacing a rich and varied history with reductive autho­
rial labels. As a body of ideas cultural studies arose not from one or
two founders but from remarkably diverse sources, the more so in
that its historical roots were multi-disciplinary. To read its early his­
tory primarily in relation to Williams and Hoggart is to gloss it in
terms of only one of those disciplinary sources - important, of
course, but a single (mainly literary) thread in the early thinking of
cultural studies. The beginnings of this aspirant discipline were
much more heterogeneous than that.
Indeed, if any one analytic theme can be said to pervade all the
various early sources of cultural studies it is that of cultural

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