Cultural Studies

Cultural studies is now well known as a title for a scientific project with different formations researching cultural processes. The essential characteristic of cultural studies is the analysis of cultural contexts, with research into and criticism of the conditions under which individuals as well as groups and classes within society can become culturally self-aware, both in everyday life and in their cultural practices.

Its institutional origins were initially most closely associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham, United Kingdom, founded in the early 1960s with Richard Hoggart as its first director (1964–1968). Cultural studies simultaneously, however, calls to mind many persons and formations mainly with stances in cultural analysis in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. Critical association with this tradition is linked with three central authors of the British postwar era: Hoggart, whose book The Uses of Literacy (1957) definitively set into motion enquiries into the influence of mass culture on working-class culture and on daily life; Raymond Williams, whose book Culture and Society (1958) set decisive terminological, conceptual, and theoretical positions in disputing the traditional positions of Arnold, Eliot, Richards, and Leavis, followed shortly by The Long Revolution (1961); and E. P. Thompson, whose book The Making of the English Working Class (1963) further delved into the historic background against which these matters were set.

Williams's contemporary role in cultural studies is undoubtedly based on his having achieved within the debate on English culture—a debate from which he drew concepts that are nowadays still significant for the analytical work of cultural studies—an independent perspective whose goal was to make it possible to apprehend culture as an integrated process, as “a whole way of life.” The meaning and role of this concept (which is, to be sure, problematic but is nonetheless central to Williams's criticism), to which further phrases such as “common culture” or “culture is ordinary” are associated, can be understood, not surprisingly, as having arisen in reaction to the conservative cultural criticism that then dominated the academic realm.

In this conflict cultural debate appeared deadlocked between the cruder economic determinisms of much Communist Marxism and the political conservatism and cultural elitism. It was—together with other stimuli [Page 153]that led to the founding of the New Left, among them the uprising in Hungary and the Suez crisis—the postwar climate in English society to which this circle was opposed and which prompted its new positions.

Since the 1970s, a culturalist and a structuralist approach to cultural analysis in the context of cultural studies have developed. These two theoretical strains still determined the cultural analyses carried out under Stuart Hall, second director of the CCCS (1968–1979), from which the driving forces that were at the heart of research emanated into both everyday culture and popular culture since the mid-1970s. These analyses dealt with the media and with the theory of media, with the question of ideology, and with youth subcultures. The significance of the culturalist stance consists, above all else, in having used a new, expanded definition of culture (culture as a whole way of life) to prepare the way for the perspective on everyday culture and popular culture that is typical for cultural studies. The contribution of the structuralist paradigm lies in its acceptance of cultural or, later, discursive constructions of reality. The origins of both approaches exhibit a clear relationship to Western Marxism which thereafter, for later generations in particular, receded behind the designations of culturalism and structuralism. Althusser and later Gramsci and Foucault came to the fore, with whom the analysis of ideologies and of social hegemony and power is linked in different phases of the 1980s and 1990s.

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