BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES
Cultural
Studies is very hard to define; it is not so much a discrete approach at all;
it is rather a set of practices. According to Patrick Brantlinger it is not a
tightly coherent unified movement with a fixed agenda; but a loosely coherent
group of tendencies, issues and questions. Arising from the social turmoil of
the 1960s, cultural studies is composed of elements of Marxism, post
structuralism, post modernism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology,
sociology, race and ethnic studies, film theory, post colonial studies and
popular Culture studies. Those fields concentrate on social and cultural
forces, that either create community or cause division and alienation. Drawing from
Roland Barthes on the nature of literary language and, Claud Levi Strauss on
anthropology, Cultural studies was influenced by both structuralism and post
structuralism. Jacquess Derrida’s, deconstruction urged cultural critics to
erase the boundaries between high and low culture, classic and popular literary
text and literature and other cultural discourses; that may be seen as
manifestations of same textuality. The discipline of psychology has also
entered into the field of Cultural studies recently.
A cultural Studies approach generally
shares some of the goals such as 1) CS transcends the confine of a particular
discipline such as literary criticism or history. CS is not necessarily about
literature in the traditional sense or even about art. It cut across diverse
social and political interest and address many of the struggles within the
current scene. Another approach is that, cultural studies are politically
engaged. Cultural critics see themselves as ‘oppositional’, not only within
their own discipline but to many of the power structure of society at large.
They question inequalities within power structures and seek to discover modest
for restructuring relationship among dominant and minority discourses. Because
meaning individual subjectivity are culturally constructed; they can thus
reconstructed. Another one is that cultural studies denies the separation of
‘high’ and ‘low’ or elite or popular culture. Cultural critics try to transfer
the term ‘culture’ to include mass culture whether popular folk or urban.
Cultural critics argue that after the second World War the distinctions among
high, low and mass culture collapsed.
BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES
Cultural studies in the beginning was
concentrated in Britain, being the birth place of Cultural studies, the
cultural studies from Britain is known as British Cultural studies. Even though
the study of culture has no origins or single site of activity, however
cultural studies as an institutionally located activity did have a birth place
from where it got named. The formation of Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies at the University of Birmingham in UK denoted the institutionalization
of cultural studies and its wide spread. British Cultural Studies emerged from
the research done at the BCCCS, an interdisciplinary research centre
established by Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall at the University of Birmingham
in 1964.
What is practiced in Birmingham,
Cultural studies seems to be changed a lot from its beginning, it appeared or
evolved into a more generic term referring to a cross-disciplinary field.
During the years of Birmingham Centre, people and institutions practiced in it
carried its tradition. Now a days it is clear that Britain no more stand as the
pioneer of Cultural studies. It is during the Thatcher years that Cultural
studies in Britain witnessed its decay. During those years Britain is
fragmented and left Great Britain, people migrating in the USA, Canada,
Australia, France and India. As a result of it is the so called British
cultural studies became fragmented and was exported to other English speaking
locations, especially in USA, Australia and Canada. Now a day’s cultural
studies seems to have their own independent national roots and origin. Different
nations have their own way of institutionalizing cultural studies and
formation.
There
are so many factors affected the development of British Cultural studies. The
Second World War and its effects on British society and cultural values made
the people to think about new Cultural Revolution, reorganizing those lost
values and culture. From this decay of British cultural values that the
emergence of British cultural studies took place. One of the factors which
affected the development of British cultural studies is that British government
at all level extended educational opportunities after the Second World War that
is promoting adult education as a means of reconstruction. Another factor is
that the influence of American popular culture on British traditional culture. Mass produced American popular culture such as
pop-music, Hollywood films and television programs displaced traditional
popular culture.
Another
factor is that the influence of philosophers and critics’, such as French
thinkers as Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault offered British
intellectuals new ways to frame the question of culture in new ways. Another
reason is the emergence of New Left in Britain as response to Russia’s invasion
of Hungary in1956, revived the Marxist critique of capitalism. From these
developments that Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P.Thompson focused on
the question of ‘culture’ in their class-based society and wrote texts for the
basis of BCS.
Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams,
Stuart Hall, E.P.Thompson were the major contributors to British Cultural
Studies or CS. Richard Hoggart, during his earlier times was a professor at
University of Hull (1946-59), later joined the University of Birmingham and
where he founded the CCCS, and he served as the director from 1964-68. In his
work The Uses of Literacy (1957)
through his earlier childhood experiences he shows the working class culture
and values, and their attitude towards religion, politics, poverty, sex…etc.
Through this work he also tries to portray the mass culture of the 1950s.
Throughout this work he perpetuates a dichotomy between the ‘good’ culture of
working class communities of the past and the ‘bad’ mass culture of the
present.
Another
important person in the development of British cultural studies was Raymond
Williams (1921-88). He was a leading literary intellectual in Britain in the 20th
century. He was one of the founding figures of cultural studies. It was during
professor at Cambridge University that he was taught Stuart Hall and Terry Eagleton,
who would themselves became important figures in literacy and cultural studies.
In Marxism and Literature (1977) Williams seeks to criticize and develop both
Marxism and Literary theory, questioning the dogmas of Marxist cultural theory
and problematic concepts in literary theory to form a new advanced theory to
overcome this crisis- Cultural Materialism. The book reveals the power and
practices in which the bourgeoisie succeeded in attributing its own cultural,
literary, social, and economic standards. Through this work Williams
criticizing the Marxist notion about culture, he emphasize that Marxist theory
did not successfully question the bourgeois notion of culture. The bourgeois
trapped the cultural production within the superstructure, conceiving it as the
mere reflection of the economic activities that constitute the base. Here
Williams suggest that Marxist theory should change the notion of culture as a
hierarchical model, he also suggest that both base and superstructure should be
treated in a mutually interacting entities. Raymond Williams offers us a broad
definition of culture; one that includes ‘high’ culture as well as ‘mass’
culture, and suggest that we have to take holistic approach to the study of
culture.
Another
notable figure in the field of BCS is E.P.Thompson (1924-93), a British
historian whose work The Making of the
English Working Class (1963), demonstrates the emergence of the British
working class. He outlines the political and the cultural formation of the
English working class influenced by the French Revolution, Industrial
revolution…etc. Thompson argues that class is an historical phenomenon, which
we cannot understand it as a structure. He further emphasizes that to
understand ‘class’ we must see it as a social and cultural formation arising
from the process of over a time period. According to him culture must be
understood in terms of the experience of the winners and losers in the
struggles to fix meaning in society.
Another
important figure in the field of BCS was Stuart Hall (1932), the most prominent
and influential theorist of British cultural studies and leftish intellectual. He
was deeply involved in the New Left revisionist engagement with Marxism during
the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1990s Hall took up issues connected with racial and
cultural identities, “the politics of difference:, and the African diasporas.
When Thatcher was gained power in Britain, Hall became increasingly discouraged
about the prospects of leftist politics in Britain and turned his attention
after 1998 to contemporary art, video and urban art forms. He was more
connected with communication methods and models. In his important article
‘Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse’ is a turning point in cultural
studies and communication. Through this work Hall makes a conclusive break with
the hitherto dominant American communication models with the notion of the
audience as passive consumers of mass culture.
In this work he describes how media messages are produced, circulated
and consumed, proposing a new theory of communication. Hall argued that the
meaning is not fixed/ determined by the sender, the message is never
transparent and the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning. He further
adds that there is a ‘lack of fit’ between the moment of the production of the
message (encoding) and the moment of its
reception (decoding). The meaning of text relies between its producer and
reader. The producer (encoder) framed ( or encoded) meaning in a certain way,
while the reader( decoder) decodes it differently according to his/her personal
background, social situations, and interpretations. The message cannot be said
to be understood unless it produces the intended reaction within the audience.
His notion of meaning of a message is strictly related to its cultural
background or the surrounding it its produced is relevant in the construction of
studies regarding Culture.
Another
notable figure who contributed to the BCS is Catherine Belsey, a British
literary critic. An interview with Catherine Belsey by Paul Bowman entitled
‘From Cultural Studies to Cultural Criticism?’ describes how cultural studies
turned towards cultural criticism. In this interview she mentions about the
development of British Cultural studies, tracing its origin from BCCCS, gives
details about the situations in which cultural studies emerged as an
institution, how it is changed now a days from the so called ‘great tradition’.
She emphasize through her interview that institutionalization of cultural
studies made change to it and cultural studies moved away from theory also.
Like Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Richard
Hoggart, E.P.Thompson many scholars had contributed to the development of
cultural studies. Even though it was originated in England against American
civilized culture, it became spread all over the world as a unique discipline.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alasuutari,
Perti (1995). Researching Culture:
Qualitative Method and Culture Studies. London: Sage Publications.
Baker, Chris (2002). Making
Sense of Cultural studies-Central
Problems and Critical Debates. London: sage publications
Gressberg, Lawrence (2010). Cultural
Studies in the Future Tense. Orient Blackswan Private ltd.
Turner, Graeme (2005).British
Cultural Studies-An Introduction. Taylor&Franscis.pdf.
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