British Cultural Studies all over again

A first attempt at a succinct summary of the conditions under which British Cultural Studies (BCS) appeared. This for my review of the recent volume of conference papers on Hoggart.

BCS belongs to the moment when a fraction of the working class/lower middle class gain entry into the university system. This part of the larger process across which , after 1945 and to use a Straussianism, the working class enter society. Established in 1964, BCS's primary program was to secure the terms in which a collapsing corporate working class (a new participatory 'affluent' or 'classless' working class) can join the received British cultural tradition. To achieve this, it brings to bear two disciplines: literary criticism (mainly of left-Leavisite kind) and sociology (mainly of a Marxian-Weberian kind).

This moment is best expressed in Hoggart's book on Auden, his Uses of Literacy (a nostalgic mythologizing of the interwar corporate working class); and Williams's Culture and Society, The Long Revolution and Border Country. But BCS's project fails almost immediately as the implicit political identity and program behind it, roughly the social democratic policies attached to the Labour party, falters with Harold Wilson's first government which also took power in 1964 and which committed itself not to an extension of state participation in the economy and civil society but to "modernization".

At any rate, by 1964 intellectual leadership of the new left had already passed to Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn at the New Left Review: Stuart Hall took up his position at Birmingham as Hoggart's assistant after having been deposed as editor of the New Left Review. Anderson and Nairn, insisting on a return to Marxian theory, will introduce the Contintental theorists (Gramsci and Althusser but also the Frankfurt School) to a wider audience in terms which break with the failed literary critical/sociology merger. Birmingham goes into abeyance from which it never fully recovers: its core concept: the materiality of cultural agency in riposte to a base/superstructure model is a failure because it can't account either for "culture's" various internal modes and genres or for its complex external relations to social formations. But with the emergence of identity politics and with the resistance to those forms of governmentality that will become neo-liberalism, it has something of a resurgence after, say, the publication of Policing the Crisis in 1978, the year Thatcher is elected.

Why then has BCS remained a kind of weathervane for so many of us (including me)? Because cultural studies becomes a (admittedly always marginal) post-discipline in a new managed and functionalized university system, and does so quite globally. And cultural studies remains the only place within the academy where a political engagement with contemporary cultural and social formations seems possible. In effect the story of BCS's beginnings, almost wholly irrelevant to actual intellectual work, has become the epic (the song of origination) of a post-discipline which has no methodological or even in the end political or cultural unity. We tell it to ourselves because without it where is our identity?

This is not to say that early works in BCS are irrelevant to us today. Hoggart's work is especially pertinant because it deals with a topic that later disappeared, namely what kind of knowledge and what kind of judgement can literature and literary criticism bring to the table for cultural studies. The claim he makes (and in his way Raymond Williams makes it too) is that literature has a powerful capacity to reveal contemporary experience (or, to speak more accurately of Williams's account, the gap between experience and ideology) in such a way as to expose social forms to critique and praxis. One example: we can learn more about the British working class from Raymond Williams's first novel than from Uses of Literacy.

Hoggart's neglected first book, Auden: an Introduction (none of these papers deals with it), offers one way into this issue. It describes Auden's project begins by clearing the successful from the unsuccessful elements in Auden's poetry. But it claims that Auden is able to "fix in communicable form" (23) the tenor and problems of a society which has become disjointed and incoherent, which no longer knows itself as a community: his poetry is a form of "sociological reporting" (46). For Auden, according to Hoggart, a disintegrated society causes "inner sickness" in individuals, a sickness that in turn intensifies social pathologies. His use of technical language, his difficulty, his modernism, his use of fragments and details, are required since he cannot call upon a received abstract discourse for diagnosis: suggestion, invocation is all he has got.