Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 57
In the introduction to The Long Revolution, Williams (1965) regrets the fact that ‘there
is no academic subject within which the questions I am interested in can be followed
through; I hope one day there might be’ (10). Three years after the publication of these
comments, Hoggart established the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the
University of Birmingham. In the inaugural lecture, ‘Schools of English and contemporary
society’, establishing the Centre, Hoggart (1970) states: ‘It is hard to listen to a
programme of pop songs . . . without feeling a complex mixture of attraction and
repulsion’ (258). Once the work of the Centre began its transition, as Michael Green
(1996) describes it, ‘from Hoggart to Gramsci’ (49), especially under the directorship
of Hall, we find emerging a very different attitude towards pop music culture, and popular
culture in general. Many of the researchers who followed Hoggart into the Centre
(including myself) did not find listening to pop music in the least repulsive; on the
contrary, we found it profoundly attractive. We focused on a different Hoggart, one
critical of taking what is said at face value, a critic who proposed a procedure that
would eventually resonate through the reading practices of cultural studies:
we have to try and see beyond the habits to what the habits stand for, to see through
the statements to what the statements really mean (which may be the opposite of
the statements themselves), to detect the differing pressures of emotion behind
idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances. . . . [And to see the way] mass publications
[for example] connect with commonly accepted attitudes, how they are
altering those attitudes, and how they are meeting resistance (1990: 17–19).
Culturalists study cultural texts and practices in order to reconstitute or reconstruct
the experiences, values, etc. – the ‘structure of feeling’ of particular groups or classes
or whole societies, in order to better understand the lives of those who lived the
culture. In different ways Hoggart’s example, Williams’s social definition of culture,
Thompson’s act of historical rescue, Hall and Whannel’s ‘democratic’ extension of
Leavisism – each contribution discussed here argues that popular culture (defined as
the lived culture of ordinary men and women) is worth studying. It is on the basis
of these and other assumptions of culturalism, channelled through the traditions of
English, sociology and history, that British cultural studies began. However, research at
the Centre quickly brought culturalism into complex and often contradictory and
conflictual relations with imports of French structuralism (see Chapter 6), in turn
bringing the two approaches into critical dialogue with developments in ‘western
Marxism’, especially the work of Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci (see Chapter 4).
It is from this complex and critical mixture that the ‘post-disciplinary’ field of British
cultural studies was born.