Page 91 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES AND MARXISM 79

The four figures reviewed here were unanimous in their rejection of
central aspects of what they understood to be marxism, and only
Thompson was still prepared, after 1956, to call himself ‘a marxist’. The
nature and meaning of this rejection varied widely. For Hoggart and Hall,
marxism was more or less unimportant except as an obstacle to
understanding the real nature of contemporary culture. For Williams and
Thompson, a harsh critique was tempered by a continued engagement with
the central problems of marxist socialism.
There was a greater degree of unity between the four writers on the
positive programme they wished to elaborate in place of the marxism they
were rejecting. If one asks what common term could be most
correctly applied to these disparate positions, the obvious candidate is
‘expressive humanism’. Hoggart, the least touched by any theory, let alone
marxism, put the central case most clearly in discussing the impact of the
affluence of the 1950s on the older patterns of working-class life:

Will all this and much else—increased eating in restaurants, the
spread of wine-drinking, the increase in telephone installations,
foreign holidays—make working-class people middle-class? Not in
any useful sense of the words. The essence of belonging to the middle
class was to hold a certain range of attitudes, attitudes chiefly decided
by that class’s sense of its own position within society, and its relation
to other classes within it. From this its characteristics—its snobberies
as much as its sense of responsibilities—flowed. These attitudes are
not brought into play merely by possessing certain objects or
adopting some practical notions from the middle class.
(Hoggart, 1973:58)

It was the early programme of cultural studies to excavate this ‘certain
range of attitudes’ in order to show how they represented not the results of
a process of brutalization and brainwashing but the embodiment of
positive human values of the highest order. These common human values
found expression in the cultural life of the working class.
There were major difference of emphasis between the different authors
as to how this project was to be realized. Williams and Thompson were
concerned to show how the working class created distinctive cultural
forms. Hoggart and Hall, on the other hand, concentrated more on
demonstrating the possibilities of a ‘discrimination’ within modern cultural
production between, for example: ‘the work of artists, performers and
directors in the new media, which has the intention of popular art behind
it, and the typical offerings of the media—which is a kind of mass art’
(Hall and Whannel, 1964:68). What they shared was the effort to explore
the ways in which certain kinds of life could find expression in certain forms
of cultural production and consumption.