Anagha E - Assignment 1

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

The term Cultural Studies is nowadays very popular as the title for an important set of theories and practices within the Humanities circle. Cultural Studies was always present. Critics were aware of this area since the time of Plato. Basically Plato talked about the introduction of stories, the introduction of literature and other kind of arts, the ideal citizen, etc. and all these are part of the existing culture.  So the Cultural Studies in an abstract way was always there. It emerged as a discipline in Britain after World War II. Post war Britain was different from the earlier in many cases. After war, capitalism started to involve in the industrial production of the country. A Welfare state established and as a result, a new culture formed which is marked by modernity. British cultural studies appeared in this background. The “Birmingham School,” The centre for contemporary cultural studies was founded in 1964 with Richard Hoggart as the first chairman. The Center was established to provide an institutional structure to the study of culture much more broadly defined than traditional culture. There is a tradition in Britain going back to the publication of Matthew Arnold’s “Culture and Anarchy” in 1869, recognizing the importance of culture for maintaining political order in modern society. Arnold was aware of the consequence of the spread of the urban culture, which was advancing with the extension of democracy and literacy. He worried that the new culture formed as a result of industrialization would fail to equip its people for their political and social roles in the society. In the first part of the twentieth century, the famous literary critic and formalist F.R. Leavis talked about the cultural capital of the ‘Great tradition.’ He was actually dismissing almost all the works which were experimented with style, genre etc, saying that it did not add to the cultural capital. He criticized writers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, etc. for giving too much importance to the individual psyche instead of a great culture. He believed that a work should actually develop the moral sensibility of the reader. In his opinion, if the literature does not educate its readers, it cannot be considered as a ‘great’ literature. The inheritance of Matthew Arnold’s idea about culture can be seen in the works of F.R. Leavis. Both were concerned with the great culture and civilization tradition. Leavis studied the canonical literature through his journal ‘Scrutiny’ and books like ‘Great Tradition.’ Their understanding of culture limited to the great canonical tradition.

In the late 1950s, people like Richard Hoggart in his book ‘The Uses of Literacy,’(1957) and Raymond Williams in his book ‘Culture and Society’(1958) pointed out the limitations of analysis of the canonical literature for addressing the complexity of modern British life. In books like the ‘Culture and Society’ and ‘The Long Revolution’ (1961) Raymond Williams articulated a theory of culture that was entirely different from the prevailing dominant cultural theory in British and American literary studies. Hoggart’s work ‘The Uses of Literacy’ is written from his personal experience. According to Graeme Turner, the most important achievement of this book “is the demonstration of the interconnections among various aspects of public culture…and the structures of an individual’s private, everyday life.” He says that Hoggart was successful in applying analytical protocols of literary studies to a wider range of cultural products including music, magazines and popular fiction. Hoggart in this book also talks about the working class life in the prewar period in which private practices and public values are intertwined. According to Turner, Hoggart became a visible contributor to public arguments about the popular culture and media after the publication of The Uses of Literacy.

 The publication of Raymond William’s Culture and Society in 1958 influenced the development of cultural studies. In this book, William used an English way of thought and writing in order to represent the ideas within a proper cultural background. The Long Revolution reflects the intensity of contemporary debates on the cultural impacts of the media.

In Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams was trying to connect Marxist theory with the modern society. He was attempting to revive and understand Marxist theory in order to explain the culture today. In other words Williams challenges the conventional theory of Marxism. In his opinion, Marxism is a vibrant theory and therefore it should revive itself and encompass more things.  According to the traditional Marxist belief, real life is happening in the economic base and culture is situated in the superstructure. The traditional notion was that the base actually shapes the superstructure and superstructure maintains the base. But Williams says that base is a dynamic process in fact; not a static one. There are many contradictions and fewer similarities between the two. Williams considers this as one of the limitations of Marxism. Raymond Williams sees literature as an expression of reality. Marxism considers literature as a cultural product. He tries to look at literary production as a practice, not as an artifact. In this particular work, we can see Williams urging for a revival in Marxism in order to apply the theory in contemporary culture.

            Apart from Raymond Williams and Hoggart, Stuart Hall and Catherine Belsey are the other two prominent figures in the field of British Cultural Studies. In his essay ‘Encoding and Decoding,’ Hall proposes a new theory of cultural form of production and reception. In the first part of the essay, he talks about the circuit of communication by explaining how media messages are produced, circulated and consumed. He also mentions how power relations are established through Tele- Visual communication. Hall challenges the media aesthetics by breaking the older notion of considering audience as passive. In his view, messages are not transparent as it contains some power with them. According to him, a message is systematically distorted. He says that the meaning is not simply fixed at the centre.

 The real meaning of a message lies somewhere in between the sender and receiver. The sender encodes a message and receiver decodes it by using his intellectual and imaginative skills. From the production stage, message goes to circulation, distribution and consumption. Each of these is a phase and these phases are called ‘moments’. The last moment, reproduction, was added by Stuart Hall. This ‘moment’ of reproduction is in the hands of the receiver. Each of the phases is autonomous, separate entity. Each stage is distinct in character and none of them can guarantee each other, at the same time they are interrelated. He says that there is a ‘lack of fit’ between encoding, and decoding.

Again, Hall sees tele-visual communication as combination of fact and aural/ visual sign. He describes three different hypothetical positions from which decoding can be build

(1) Dominant- hegemonic position,

 (2) Negotiated code

 (3) Oppositional code.

In the dominant- hegemonic code, the act of encoding can direct or limit the decoding process. In this, receiver decodes whatever that is sent by the sender as such. There is no chance of questioning. In negotiated code, both encoded and decoded meanings appear almost similar. In the oppositional code, the receiver decodes the opposite meaning of whatever sent by the sender. Stuart Hall considers messages as interpretive social events. The construction of the meaning of a message depends on the collective experiences of a society.

In From Cultural Studies to Cultural Criticism, Catherine Belsey speaks of the institutionalization and reception of the discipline of Cultural Studies. She criticizes the critics like Arnold and Eliot for prescribing the ‘high culture.’ All these people include Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Leavis, Belsey, Hall, etc. played a crucial role in developing Cultural Studies as a discipline.

Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) is generally known as the key institution in the history of the field. It was established in 1964. Of course it is not the only research centre devoted to cultural studies. There are some institutions which showed interest in media and popular culture including ‘The Centre for Television Research’(1966 at Leeds), Centre for Mass Communication Research at the University of Leicester etc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

·         Turner, Graeme. British Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Third. London: Routledge, 2003.

·         Nayar, Pramod K. An Introduction to Cultural Studies. New Delhi: Viva Books Pvt Ltd, 2008.