The Lost World of Cultural Studies, 1956–1971

An Intellectual History

Dennis Dworkin

The best-known achievements of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham are from the 1970s and early 1980s. They draw on the cultural Marxist tradition of E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams; the Western Marxism of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser; and multiple strands of feminist and critical race theory. Yet, when the Centre was founded in 1964, these later developments were by no means preordained. Indeed, browsing through the annual reports and pamphlets that chart the Centre's early history, I am struck by just how distant the world in which the Centre originated now seems. Many of the intellectual sources on which it relied no longer inform current debates and discussions. Rather than names such as Foucault and Spivak, Said and Bhabha, Butler and Zizek, we encounter Leavis and Eliot (the latter not as a poet but as a cultural critic), Weber and Riesman, and Berger and Luckmann. Of the pioneering influences on cultural studies, perhaps only Raymond Williams is still cited in contemporary discussions.

The word 'lost' in the title of my essay therefore does not refer to the retrieval of a narrative that has been buried and recovered. Rather, it seeks to recapture an intellectual and political world that has largely disappeared. The essay consists of three parts. First, I provide a rough sketch of the Centre's origins and early formation. I stress the ideas on which it was founded, emphasizing its connection to the milieu of adult education and the early New Left of the 1950s and early 1960s. Second, I discuss the founding of the Centre in 1964, its original goals and aspirations, and its early intellectual trajectory. Third, I analyse the transformation of the cultural studies project in the late-1960s and early-1970s, focusing on the impact of 1968 and its associated meanings on the Centre's students and faculty. Here, I draw on new sources that have recently emerged, including interviews. As a result of the tumultuous experience of the late-1960s, and numerous contentious debates and internal struggles, Centre researchers acquired new theoretical vocabularies, thought about cultural practices in fresh ways and explored collective modes of work.

In 1964, Eric Hobsbawm reviewed Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel's The Popular Arts (1964) for the Times Literary Supplement. He described what constituted cultural studies the year in which the Centre opened. 'British criticism in the field', wrote Hobsbawm, 'has long been the virtual monopoly of the local New Left: that is to say, it reflects a lot of Leavis (but without the Leavisite rejection of post-industrial culture), a much smaller quantity of Marx, a good deal of nostalgia for "working class culture", a pervasive passion for democracy, a strong pedagogic urge and an equally strong urge to do good'.

Hobsbawm captured critical elements of early cultural studies: its debt to Leavisite criticism, its ambivalent relationship to Marx and Marxism, and its connection to the early New Left. His allusion to its 'nostalgia' for workingclass culture and a 'strong pedagogic urge' was less straightforward. He was likely referring to texts such as Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Raymond Williams's Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), which portrayed working-class values nostalgically. They helped define the terrain of cultural studies and the cultural politics of the New Left, but their ideas developed in the older intellectual and political milieu of workers' and adult education.

Williams perhaps best summed up the dual influence of Leavis and Marxism for cultural studies: 'Leavis has never liked Marxists, which is in one way a pity, for they know more than he does about modern English society, and about its immediate history. He, on the other hand, knows more than any Marxist I have met about the real relations between art and experience'. F. R. Leavis was an influential literary and cultural critic, particularly during the interwar years and the following decade. He viewed criticism as an aesthetic and moral practice based on the stringent training of one's sensibility and the close reading of texts. Critics were to bring the 'play of the free intelligence' to bear upon 'the underlying issues' of the modern world. He saw them as being in the avant-garde of cultural renewal, necessitated by a spreading and corrosive mass culture. Early contributors to cultural studies – including Hall, Hoggart and Williams – rejected Leavis's blanket dismissal of mass culture but embraced his wide-ranging interests and his reliance on the close reading of texts. Indeed, Hall's initial definition of socialist humanism in the New Left journal Universities and Left Review (ULR) appropriated a quote from Leavis: 'a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent...