Cultural Studies

History

The establishment of cultural studies as an academic discipline began with the founding of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) by Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams in the late 1950s. Researchers at the CCCS elaborated on Leavism, after literary studies scholar F. R. Leavis, whose highly original ideas on the relationship between literature and life particularly interested them. Moving away from the traditional art historian perspective in which an artwork was considered a static final product of culture, Leavis was interested in how art actively contributed to it: how literature (his main emphasis) was always reflecting and contributing to the events that compose our lives. Leavis thus regarded literature not primarily an aesthetical experiment but rather an ethical one. He claimed it was a moral stance that connected society to literature, a moral stance that was thus articulated with the text. A good writer, in his view, was not someone capable of writing beautiful stories that affect us with the aesthetics of language but rather someone able to create a new (or different, or other) language capable of expressing the complex moral problems of daily life.

An important consequence of Leavis's approach is that by stressing the nonlinear interdependency between a book and daily life, one can read daily life as a text. The book, or the work of art in general, does not get situated as an imitation of life or translation of its findings from a “real” discourse into a textual discourse; life functions interdependently with textual discourse. Hence, the theories of Leavis place important question marks around traditional and dominant ideas of representation in the works of both Plato and Aristotle by stressing this radical mutual interdependence of life and art. Reading daily life as a text allowed Leavis to read not only the artwork but the entire sociocultural context or historical moment in which it was situated or from which it was drawn as a manifold of signs and images. Consequently, Leavis did not see a radical break between text and life, a problematic moment in which one entity has to pupate into another; literature flows into daily life [Page 174]and back, continuously, performing a nonlinear textual intermingling of all types of materialities and moralities.

When Hoggart and Williams founded the CCCS, a double critique was integrated into Leavis's theories. This critique was not so much in opposition to their teacher's argument but more a continuation or even a refinement of Leavis's ideas. It is noteworthy that these critiques were political critiques. First of all, Hoggart's book The Uses of Literacy commented on the Leavisite appreciation for high culture (which, in the end, led to the definition of a rather conservative group of works that Leavis titled “The Great Tradition”). Having come from a working-class background, Hoggart was interested in low, or mass, culture and the influence that working-class environments had on people's lives. This interest led him to expand the notion of art, as used by Leavis, into all materiality and immateriality capable of articulating the cultural. Hoggart's critique on Leavis was in keeping with a long tradition: The study of the commonplace and mass culture had been an issue in the British sciences and arts since the early 1930s, coinciding with the growth of anthropology. Hoggart's ideas appealed to many others, for if literature talked back to life, wouldn't other (or “lower”) artifacts like newspapers, foods, buildings, and ultimately all things produced by humans also exert an influence over everyday discourse? Whether eloquent or crude, authentic or derivative, the sheer number of commonplace artifacts makes an argument for also studying their “lives,” as Arjun Appadurai refers to the arc of their influence as artifacts. If we are not so much interested in an artwork as a product of an artist's life but as an active contributor to life and culture in general, pulp magazines are of no less interest than their elitist counterparts of high literature in terms of their moral impact.

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