Page 92 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

80 COLIN SPARKS

ROUND TWO: A REDISCOVERY
The version of cultural studies which developed, increasingly focused
around the Birmingham Centre, in the 1960s was thus one in which the
explicit legacy of marxism was more or less absent. If one examines the
early self-published Occasional Papers of the Centre, its Annual Reports,
or the more formally published work it inspired, there is little evidence of
the kind of intellectual upheavals that were imminent. The Centre was
certainly involved in trying to elaborate a project of cultural studies, but
this had quite other points of reference than those which marked the earlier
phase. The recurrent theme of methodological inquiry throughout
this period was the relationship between the literary and social scientific
approaches. Literary approaches were, of course, personified in the figure
of F.R.Leavis. The key representative of sociology was Max Weber (Anon.,
1965:3; Shuttleworth, 1966:32–3; Hoggart, 1969:4–5). More substantive
studies, like the one of Your Sunday Paper, demonstrated a variety of
debts, among which that to McLluhan was perhaps the most frequently
cited and from which Marx was excluded (Hoggart, 1967). The Marx who
was discussed in Hall and Whannel’s The Popular Arts was Groucho, not
Karl.
The absence of Marx from the universe of discussion extended to the
directly political analyses of the people who were central to cultural studies.
In the collective text May Day Manifesto 1968, edited by Raymond
Williams, and involving contributions from Hall and Edward Thompson
amongst many others, one might discern a trace of marxism but certainly
not its full presence. What is present is an explicitly humanist theoretical
standpoint:

…we define socialism again as a humanism: a recognition of the
social reality of man in all his activities, and of the consequent
struggle for the direction of this reality by and for ordinary men and
women.
(Williams, 1968:16)

One of the sources of this humanism was probably a version of marxism,
but it could equally well be claimed for ethical socialism or a number of
other forms of socialist thought. Whatever its origins, it placed the
working-class experience of British capitalism at the centre of its analysis
of the need for socialism. In a political context, the expressive humanism of
cultural studies took the form of socialist humanism.
It is against this intellectual background that we have to examine the
wholesale conversion of cultural studies into marxist cultural studies which
took place in the aftermath of the events of 1968. This examination reveals