Culture
as a term has umpteen number of definitions. Basically culture is something
which differentiates human from animals. Culture was part of great tradition
and only such a tradition could produce smart people for some and for others,
Culture was ‘ordinary’, ‘a whole way of life’. Culture in a society is usually
the dominant culture. It consolidates the hegemonic practices. In the most
original sense, Culture Studies attempts to question this forms of hegemonic
intentions of culture. It questions the categories in society which appears to be
apparently natural, like gender, race, class etc. By intervening into such
categories it brings out new perspectives and change in the perception of the
same. It is a continuous struggle with the already existing boundaries which
are constructed by the dominant hegemonic culture.
Cultural
studies had its beginning in the late 1950s, from Britain. It was from Britain
later it spread to other parts of the world. It was during the post war period
it started emerging. With the working class largely shifting to the consumerist
class, the bourgeois, many studies were held about the changing cultural
practice of the Britain of that time. The studies claimed that the after the
war the working class and the way of living became identifiable with the middle
class. But it was with the establishment of Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies at Birmingham, that Cultural Studies flourished into and
institutionalised discipline. Richard Hoggarts the Professor of Modern English Literature
was the one who established it.
Being
a new discipline it was vibrant, experimental and interdisciplinary and they
mainly concentrated on issues of everyday life. The practitioners focussed on
subjecting the existing knowledge to critical interrogation and thus generating
new ideas. Throughout the 1970s the scholars of CCCS focussed on critical
engagements with structuralism, psychoanalysis of Lacan, Structural Marxism of
Althusser. The later proponent Stuart Hall focussed on Gramscian theoretical frameworks.
Its instant approval was because of the fact that it took up topics which were
traditionally considered to be too trivial for discussions in academic circle, but
which had everyday experience embedded strongly in it. The topics ranged from
Women and feminism, working class youth subculture, racial and ethnic
minorities etc. They published a number of books which literally announced the
variety of topics they were addressing, Resistance through Ritual (1975)
Hall and Jefferson, Women Take Issue (Women’s Studies Group, 1978), Culture,
Media, Language (Hall, 1980), The Empire Strikes Back (CCCS, 1982)
are some of them.
Efforts
were made to conceptualize culture as a more fundamental practice, one which
was the result of sum of interrelations of different social practice. Its
method of analysis was also different from the traditional sense of analysis a
topic. Instead of compartmentalisation of the traditional practice, Cultural
Studies followed the method of ‘integrative’, which brought together varied
possibilities in a particular issue or problem, instead of reaching to a single
explanation or solution. It brought out varied perspective for either solving
or furthering the discussions regarding a particular topic. Cultural studies
made active interventions in to the dominant power relations in a society
through concrete studies which helps to locate power operating in everyday
life.
From
the beginning of cultural studies, we can identify its relation its relation
with society. Cultural studies is primarily the interventions made into the
society as such. Cultural Studies tries to remove the boundaries that exist
between culture and society. It inverts the concept of ‘high culture’ which
moves away from society, and set out an attempt at blurring the borders between
culture and society. Here is where the main proponents of the movement
contributed to enrich the discipline.
The
most important among them is Richard Hoggarts himself, who published the book Use
of Literacy, a study on changes in English working class culture in the mid
twentieth century, which was influenced by mass media and mass literacy. In the
book he explains the working class life and practices in the pre war period and
how it was a whole and interconnected. He criticized the mass culture into
which the same society was moving after war. He believed that the new mass
culture was unhealthy compared to the organic cultural practice which has been
in practice for a very long time. For Raymond Williams Culture is a ‘natural,
common and constitutive dimension of any human society’ (Culture and
Society). In his The Long Revolution he gives and anthropological
definition of culture as ‘a description of a particular way of life which
expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in
institutions and ordinary behaviour’. It is most evident in his Marxism and
Literature how he challenges Marxist concept of society as base and
superstructure through Critical Marxism. He said that Marxism has to move away
from its basic concept of base and superstructure and revive itself.
Stuart
Hall is considered to be one of the main pillars of Cultural Studies after
Richard Hoggarts. His, The Popular Arts, Television as a Medium and Its
relation to Culture are important documents of Cultural Studies. He
broke the convention of audience as passive listeners through his famous essay
‘Encoding and Decoding’. He found Marxism as a problem and believed it should
be deconstructed in order to deconstruct the society. E.P Thomson another exponent
who unlike Raymond Williams developed theory from within Marxism. His The
Making of English Working Class brings out his idea of culture. His culture
is constituted by the friction between competing interests and forces in a
social class. The intellectual project which he undertook was ‘to rewrite the
history of this culture in order to redress the imbalance of its
representations in official histories’. Another work is The Poverty of
Theory (1978).
Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies also played a major role in propagating the
discipline. When Hoggarts founded the centre, he saw Cultural Studies as a
combination of three disciplinary approaches,
- Historical and Philosophical
- Sociological
- Literary Critical
For
Williams and Hoggarts Cultural Studies has served a clear purpose of critical
intervention within the society with its target, a critique of the society as a
whole. This success later led to the wide institutionalization of the
discipline. Cultural Studies being an amalgam of different disciplines like
anthropology, sociology, literary studies, history, geography, communications
etc, it will be difficult for it to become a single institutional entity. This is how now Cultural Studies is gradually
replaced by Cultural Criticism as Catherine Belsey suggests in From Cultural
Studies to Cultural Criticism. Institutionalisation slows down the
development of the discipline and limits it, so now a new branch of study needs
to be evolved. As she rightly concludes, “other times demand other practices,
and new problems require new solutions. No discipline is forever”.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
·
Bennett, Tom and John Frow, The Sage Handbook of
Cultural Analysis. California: Sage Publications, 2008.
·
Hartley, John. A Short History of
Cultural Studies. California: Sage Publications, 2003.
·
Oswell, David. Culture and
Society- An Introduction to Cultural Studies. California: Sage
Publications, 2006.
·
Turner, Graeme. British Cultural
Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2003.
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