Meera Paul - Assignment 1

                                            

                                                  BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

Culture is not the polished romanticized notions but the basic material of life. It is a set of unresolved movements still going on. It is the whole way of life constituted by representations. Culture is human specific. The dominant structures of the society consolidate its own hegemony and it suspends all other inferior structures. In the earlier times ‘culture’ meant the cultivation and tending of crops, then its meaning changed into the habits, customs and tastes of the upper class. By the emergence of the bourgeois or the consumerist class its meaning changed again and got equated with the concept of civilization. It opened up the subjects like subjectivity, imagination and the individual. Culture is part of a signifying practice. It became a mode of generating meanings and ideas which are controlled by the power relations. Thus the elite component of culture gets more visibility and significance. For a long time, the term mass culture was used pejoratively and the popular culture was considered inferior.

According to Raymond Williams, Cultural Studies critically analyses the different societal relationships. The significance of Cultural Studies lies in the fact that that it has no distinct methodology, it is ambivalent, and its practice is self-reflective which enables us to decode what is going on around us. It dissipates the boundaries created by the dominant hegemony. Cultural Studies is a politically committed field. It is not just a theoretical practice but a bridge between the material culture and theory. It demonstrates the social difference a theory can make. It focuses on the generation of meanings and values in a society. Cultural Studies study culture as a product that is made, marketed and consumed.

Several factors contributed to the development of British Cultural Studies. British government promoted adult education as a means of reconstruction after Second World War. Second, American popular culture displaced traditional popular culture. Third, the ideas of French thinkers like Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault helped British intellectuals to problematize the concept of culture in new perspectives. Last, the attempts of the New Left to revive the Marxist critique of capitalism. The left thinking and labor politics in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s is the major contributing factor. By the arrival of modernity there was a conception that the working class has become indistinguishable from that of the middle class. Labor became deskilled, workers became affluent class and thus the consumerist culture emerged. Interesting studies on this new bourgeois and the emerging popular culture in Britain was done in the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. There occurred a change from objectivity too subjectivity.

E. P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams are known as the trio of the British Cultural Studies. . In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Hoggart analyzes working class culture, describes the youth culture, the conveyed the working-class attitudes and in the second half, he engages contemporary "mass" culture of the 1950s. He perpetuates a dichotomy between the "good" culture of the past and the "bad" mass culture of the present.

Raymond William’s work, ‘Culture and Society 1780-1950’, published in 1958, was the landmark work in the field of Cultural Studies. In the work he conceptualizes history as a process whereby cultural forms shape and are shaped by the context of the time. He examines the words such as "democracy," "class," and "culture," analyzing how the terms were used and how the terms changed. He offers us a broad definition of the term considering the "high" culture as well as the "mass" culture, and says that there is a need of holistic approach to the study of culture. The Long Revolution (1961), is the follow-up book, in which he extends his thesis, offering more concrete ways for a revival.

E.P. Thompson was a radical historian who wrote The Making of the English Working Class (1963), which draws out the emergence of the British working-class. He argues that class is an historical phenomenon, and we cannot understand it as a structure.

It was the works of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall that helped culture to be considered into the academic agenda. Along with this, the founding of New Left Review in 1960, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham in 1964 and Hoggart being its founding director and Stuart Hall’s leadership of that institution from 1969 to 1979 ignited the academic discussions.

For Stuart Hall Marxism is a failure in addressing the key concerns of cultural studies: culture, ideology, language and the symbolic. He noted that Marxism and its derivatives remained decidedly Eurocentric. He turned from Althusser to Gramsci to produce a theoretical perspective; Gramsci’s theories provide the facility for the construction of and resistance to power. He expanded the scope of cultural studies to deal with race and gender.

The Birmingham school focused on the working class and dissident youth populations, television personalities and audiences. Here the students from the working class background interpreted their cultures and realized that they were alienated by the ‘high’ cultures. The BCCS’s approach to cultural studies was purely Marxist and it adapted theoretical insights from post structuralism. ‘Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms’, the 1980 essay by Stuart Hall interrogated the part that popular culture plays within our life. His early essay ‘Encoding/Decoding’, published in 1973, set the scene for Cultural Studies of the media.

During the Thatcher era, British Cultural Studies got fragmented and migrated to the U.S.A, Canada, Australia, France, and India. It became less political and more aesthetic in orientation. British Cultural Studies was the first in the English – speaking world to problematize the generation of meanings.

Catherine Belsey is a contemporary British literary critic who is concerned with the problem of institutionalization of Cultural Studies. According to her cultural studies has lost its radical nature. She says that it has now become the celebration of popular culture. She calls for a revival of cultural studies were a wider range of subjects are researched.

                                                 

 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lewis, jeff. Cultural Studies. London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2008.

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

Shank, Barry. "The Continuing Embarrassment of Culture: From the Culture Concept to Culture Studies." American Studies (1997): 95-116.