The Origins of Cultural

Studies

‚Culture and Civilisation’ and

‚Culturalism’

Early thinking about popular/low

culture

•‘Culture & Civilisation’: Matthew
Arnold, F.R. Leavis

•‘Culturalism’: Richard Hoggart,
Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson
---------------------------------------------------------------
•CCCS

(Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies)

19c Britain – Elitism and

‘Anarchy’

18/19c URBANISATION, INDUSTRIALIZATION – a

break with all previous cultural relationships:

A) Class-segregated cities

B) New social relations

C) An independent working class culture

Threat of weakened cultural cohesion &

social stability &

threat to established authority

Disraeli, 1845. Sybil or The Two Nations - & the ‘Condition

of England’ debate

Engels, 1844. The Condition of the Working Classes in

England

Matthew Arnold

(1822-1888)

• A vacuum in which anarchy is let loose: ‚anarchy’ as a synonym

for popular culture

• Context: gradual extension of the vote (1866-67) to those

‘unprepared’ for participation - and leadership

• The mechanisation of production and commercial culture

First in tradition of POLITICAL discussion of popular

culture

Culture and Anarchy (1867-69) established a frame for the

discussion of POPCULT that lasted almost 100 years

Though there is little or no actual engagement with

popcult itself,

(The idea of cultural ‘tradition’ is modern?)

EB Tylor, Primitive Culture,

1871

Culture, or civilization,
taken in its broad,
ethnographic sense, is
that complex whole
which includes
knowledge, belief, art,
morals, law, custom, and
any other capabilities
and habits acquired by
man as a member of
socjety.

F R Leavis

(1895-1978)

Mass civilisation and Minority

Culture (1930)

Continues the theme: 20c marked by increasing cultural decline

(standardisation, levelling down)

To be resisted through education

Mass civilisation and Minority Culture (1930)

Reiterates the central idea: culture has always been in minority keeping

This minority has experienced a

collapse of authority

Traditions of taste and the literary

canon being reversed by popular

sentiment and the vote

This will lead to a loss of civilisation

and chaos - Anarchy

Mass Media as a powerful de-

educator of the public mind

Demonstrating the debasement of mental and

emotional life through examples for analysis

Schools must train pupils to resist Mass Culture

and Escapism – classroom analyses of

adverts

A first attempt to apply the ‘critical techniques’

of serious culture to popular

‚Culturalism’

• Taking everyday and popular culture

seriously

• Hoggart
• Williams
• Thompson

Richard Hoggart

(1918-)

The Uses of Literacy, 1957

A lament, comparing:

The ‘Lived’ working class culture of the 1930s (the ‘Beano’)

Organic, communal, deep, shared – activities rather than products

The ‘Consumed’ culture of the 1950s (the ‘Juke Box Boys’)

Thin, weak commercial culture based on hedonism and products

CULTURAL SUBORDINATION AND LOSS OF NATIVE CULTURE
(globalisation)

Hoggart

• Like Leavis, has a notion of

CULTURAL DECLINE

• But with a difference: a detailed study

of pre-masscult working class culture

• So he continued AND transformed a

tradition

Raymond Williams

(1921-1988)

• An ‘anthropological’ position –

culture as a description of a way of
life

• Analyses should clarify implicit

meanings and values and
RECONSTRUCT a particular way of
life (structure of feeling)

• Breaks with Leavisism: making art is

one human activity among others

• Working class culture is social and has

created institutions; not individuals
focused on creating ‘works’

• Lived experience and the democratic

definition of culture (not a hierarchical
one)

E.P. Thompson

(1924-1993)

E.P. Thompson

(1924-1993)

• The Making of the English Working Classes, 1963

• Class is not a thing it is a historical process that

can only be grasped in hindsight

• Study of apparently unconnected events and sub-

processes – the raw material of experience and

consciousness

• It is not a STRUCTURE

• Crucial: emphasis of AGENCY over

STRUCTURE – very important

development for Cultural Studies

• The experiences, values, ideas actions

and desires of ORDINARY PEOPLE

• Massively expands idea of culture, far

beyond Leavis

Social context of the

emergence of Cultural Studies,

1950s/60s

• Expansion of mass education and welfare state

• Full employment, affluent society, expanded

consumer culture

• TV, tv-radio-satire

• Pop music as a national obsession

• Paperbacks, Penguin, Everyman library

• Critique of the effects of American commercialism

Centre for Contemporary

Cultural Studies, 1968

First Cultural Studies university department inspired by

Hoggart, Thompson (and Raymond Williams) &

Chicago School

Initially Marxist, devoted to analysing processes in ‘sub-

ordinate’ cultural groups (skinheads, bikers, punks…)

Later experiments with structuralism, semiotics etc.

ENORMOUSLY INFLUENTIAL