Studying British Cultures

An Introduction

Susan Bassnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134349470
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

'British Studies' and 'British Cultural Studies' cover a wide range of facets of contemporary Britain. Studying British Cultures: An Introduction is a unique collection of essays which examine the most significant aspects of this quickly developing area of study, analyzing the ways of teaching and reading British culture.
The work covers the contemporary and key issues, including:

• the terminological distinction between 'British Studies' and 'British Cultural Studies'
• the problem of national cultures and identities in contemporary Britain
• studying language and literature from a British Studies perspective
• models for studying the historical context of the development of ideas of `Britishness'
• studying contemporary Britain overseas

The contributors are some of the key names in current debates surrounding British Studies, and Susan Bassnett holds together their work with a substantial and accessible introduction. Studying British Cultures: An Introduction will be essential reading for students and teachers concerned with the study of contemporary Britain.

Part 1

1
BUT WHAT IS CULTURAL STUDIES?
Antony Easthope

The mere presence of a spectator…is a violation

Jacques Derrida¹

The study of national cultures, national languages and national literatures all developed with the rise of the nation state inaugurated in 1776 and 1789. In the Westernized world, by the 1960s, study of the national literature had been codified into a university discipline which taught a canon of established texts (the word ‘canon’ comes from the canon of accepted books of the Bible and the religious comparison is only too fitting).

People sometimes say, ‘why don’t you forget all this theory and get back to literature itself?’. But this ‘literature itself is nothing like as innocent, self-evident, value-free as its defenders sometimes pretend. The study of ‘literature itself (and this may be a familiar story) only developed in a context heavily laden with assumptions—with theory in fact—though these have now become so much a matter of habit we tend to forget what they are. I think we must reject any idea of ‘literature itself and move towards a new conception, a new methodology.

To get there let me spell out, even at the risk of some caricature, what was assumed by the study of literature in and for itself.

Literary study proceeded in the belief that literature came down from heaven, touched its reader with greatness, and then immediately went back to heaven again. Literary study was based on three theoretical principles, all of which have to be refuted:

• The great literary text was just there, in itself, to be read by the sympathetic reader who set aside all questions of use, interest or purpose (the text was its own purpose).
• The great literary text was intrinsically great, containing within itself its own perfection and not dependent on anything outside it.
• Literature is not popular culture.

The academic study of great literature only became properly instituted in the West in the 1930s. If you go back to the founding fathers (Empson, Richards, Leavis and others) you can detect how literary study was constructed on the basis of a forgotten contrast: the canon of literature was defined in opposition to popular culture (ballads, broad-sheets, football, music hall, cheap novels, newspapers, the cinema, radio, popular song, television, and now video). No one studies great literature unless they are paid, either as a student or a teacher—popular culture in contrast is what we all pay to enjoy.

Now for the assumptions:

Assumption 1, the notion of the text ‘in itself, relies ultimately on the idea of the aesthetic introduced by Emmanuel Kant in the 1790s: the view that there is a special realm of aesthetic experience which exists for its own sake and which is defined against the material concrete world in which we live. Art inhabits that domain.
I would argue that the text cannot interpret itself, is always read in a context, is always inevitably caught up in a world of human uses, interests and purposes (including showing you are a real gent because you enjoy literature ‘for its own sake’).

Assumption 2, that the great text is simply great, cannot be demonstrated. There have been many attempts to isolate and define the feature of the great text which guarantees its greatness. Terms on offer here include ‘imaginative power’, ‘imaginative unity’, ‘richness’, ‘complexity’, ‘complex irony’, ‘thematic realization’, as well as the view that some feature of the great text ‘defamiliarizes’ its meaning or that it ‘foregrounds’ its own textuality or reflects on itself. My conclusion is that no attempt to show that the great text is great and will always stay great because it secretes some magic literary ingredient, some special internal feature, has ever succeeded. The reason is that the text exists as it is read, and the text itself cannot guarantee how it will be read. Even Shakespeare’s greatness may fade unless people go on treating him as great.

Assumption 3, that the literary canon is securely opposed to popular culture, falls if you can’t demonstrate some intrinsic literary feature of the literary text which gives it a special privilege over the works of popular culture.
Cultural studies, then, would look at both texts from the old ‘canon’ and from popular culture together, alongside each other, on equal terms.

If, as I think we must, we move forward from literary studies to cultural studies, this will entail not just a change in the object of study (additional texts) but a transformation in the method of study. Instead of the old, formalist concern with the text ‘in itself and the search for its hidden greatness, the text must be understood in context. But what sense of ‘context’ is appropriate? What method should we use? What is Cultural Studies?

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

For more years than I care to mention I have been reading the work of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and others. Kindly informed by American colleagues that all this was now to be known as ‘British Cultural Studies’ I felt both pleased and a little patronized, like a man suddenly told that all his life he had been speaking prose.

Certain historical factors shape the development of British Cultural Studies. It grows from within the English tradition which inherits a concern with the moral state of culture, a tradition exemplified in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and, in the twentieth century, F.R.Leavis. This concern itself derives in part from the anxieties arising from a manifest contrast between the ideal unity of a national culture and the actual existence of class divisions within that society. British society has exhibited a split between the gentry and the people since at least the seventeenth century. Increasingly from 1900, with the development of the modern mass media, this split has become a chasm. Art in the high cultural tradition and the popular culture of the masses now present themselves as irretrievably separated domains. Hardly anyone who enjoys Madonna also enjoys Milton and fans of Abba generally have little enthusiasm for Aeschylus.

During the 1950s the new prosperity in Britain posed the question of society’s cultural divisions even more urgently as new media were introduced and older media appeared in new forms (so-called ‘commercial’ television in opposition to the state-sponsored broadcasting of the BBC began in 1954). Accordingly, from the 1950s, the form of cultural critique represented by British Cultural Studies began to develop.

In the work of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, British Cultural Studies emerged from literary criticism but wanted to break with its formalism, elitism and aestheticism. If you want to move away from literary study, the most promising place to start is with a recognition of audience; who reads a text, where, how, and what for (all the questions repressed by traditional literary study). Williams and Hoggart turned therefore to the social sciences, to sociology, ethnography and, above all, history and social history, for ways to set the text in a context, to flesh out the sense of reading and response as forms of culture produced by the activity of a whole society.

But in leaning on the social sciences and their notion of the objectivity of the social formation, the founding parents wanted to retain from literary study a sense of ‘genuine personal response’, individual experience, subjectivity as lived actively in the creation of culture. They did not want to go all the way with the social sciences because their instinct was that these tended to fix society as a knowable object, a thing (and their instinct was dead right for we can now see that culture as understood by the social sciences leads only too quickly into ‘communication studies’, ‘media studies’ and the ‘sociology of mass media’).

So, for essentially political reasons, Williams and Hoggart were determined to stress culture as a process, as transformation, as active construction and experience. The foundational project of British Cultural Studies, then, was to bring together into a single intellectual perspective a conception of objectivity with a conception of subjectivity. At the risk of losing some suspense in my argument let me say now that for me cultural studies is defined by this ‘problematic’, the set of questions and answers arising from the relation and interaction between objective structural conditions and subjective experience, between culture on the one hand as constructed collectively and on the other as experienced by a class, group of individual.

In exploring this problematic British Cultural Studies has so far been through what I shall discriminate as three broadly separate movements. To understand what is at stake means following these through in some detail. The first of these we may term Culturalism.

Culturalism

Writing in 1930, the year after the world economic crisis, F.R.Leavis set out the following position on the role and significance of the high cultural tradition:

In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends…. The minority capable not only of appreciating Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Hardy (to take major instances) but of recognizing their latest successors constitute the consciousness of the race (or of a branch of it) at a given time. Upon this minority depends our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition. Upon them depend the implicit standards that order the finer living of an age, the sense…that the centre is here rather than there. In their keeping is the language, the changing idiom upon which fine living depends, and without which distinction of spirit is thwarted and incoherent. By ‘culture’ I mean the use of such language.²

This needs little commentary: high culture as represented in the literary canon is an elite preserve for defence against ‘mass civilization’; it is a castle immune to the ‘red death’, that is, popular culture. And the qualifying term ‘culture’ is reserved exclusively for high culture and denied to the rest of the members of society, the actual majority, who are seen as simply without culture.

This liberal elitist tradition is challenged in the work of Raymond Williams. In Culture and Society 1780–1950, published in 1958, Williams undertakes a sustained struggle to think of culture as an attribute of all members of a society, not merely the economically privileged. Culture, he argues, pertains not to the development of a single class but to ‘the development of a whole society’, and this must include ‘steel-making, touring in motor-cars, mixed farming, the Stock Exchange, coalmining, and London Transport’.³ The aim of Williams’s some-what grim-jawed argument is to validate working-class culture precisely as culture. To do this he reviews the British tradition of writers on culture (from Coleridge to George Orwell) assessing in each case how far the writer is open to the idea of popular culture as valid culture.

At this time Williams writes from a position that is explicitly not that of a Marxist, for he refuses to take culture as a simple expression of economic class (or a complex expression of it, for that matter). He worries especially about high culture in terms of the Marxist framework, posing the following alternative: ‘Either the arts are passively dependent on social reality, a proposition which I take to be…a vulgar misinterpretation of Marx. Or the arts, as the creators of consciousness, determine social reality.’⁴

His insistence is that art and culture, including working-class culture, can create consciousness, and so culture does not just reflect pre-existing economic and social forces. Clearly, against the sociologism of (vulgar) Marxism, Williams is trying to hold together a notion of culture as both social construction and personal experience, objective conditions and the possibility of subjective transformation.

Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy, published in 1957, also defends traditional working-class culture, locating it particularly in trade union organization, forms of choral and group singing, and the institution of brass bands, but also in moral attitudes still imbued with

Nonconformist Protestantism. From this ethical base he attacks what he terms ‘candy floss’ culture represented by such 1950s commercial products as cheap magazines, popular newspapers, popular songs, and what he calls ‘spicy books’. The content of the last of these can be assessed from such typical titles as The Killer Wore Nylon, Broads (Girls) Don’t Like Lead, Sweetie, Take it Hot. A moralizing stance is always susceptible to unconscious betrayal, and so it is in Hoggart’s case, for the titles of these ‘spicy books’ are not the result of careful research but rather of the author’s own imagination. He has, as he admits, made them up himself: they are his own ‘imitations’.⁵

Williams and Hoggart together stand for the Culturalist phase of British Cultural Studies. Their work exposes some of the problems of this kind of account, problems that might be schematically listed as follows:

1. Culturalism fails to distinguish adequately between texts and society—rather they are deliberately run together as ‘culture’.
2. It is humanist, conceiving people as freely expressive (and this appears symptomatically in the way Williams at this juncture objects to Marxism on the grounds that it denies freedom to the human subject, whether individual or collective).
3. It is moralizing, referring always to a politics arising primarily as a form of moral choice and in terms of personal experience.
4. Although it aims to contest the dominance of the high cultural artistic tradition, in effect it leaves that tradition in place since it seeks merely another place for working-class culture as well (sometimes termed the ‘enclave’ theory).
5. Its method and procedure, as you might expect in Anglo- Saxon culture, is empiricist, pragmatic and descriptive; there is simply no attempt at theory.

Overall, Culturalism seeks to relate objective structure to subjective experience by running the two together into the notion of ‘culture’. The amalgam is not stable, as we shall see. For the next stage or moment in British Cultural Studies, what may be called ‘Marxist Structuralism’ or ‘Structuralist Marxism’, takes off very much from a sense of the limitations of the preceding work of Williams and Hoggart.

Structuralism

In 1964 Richard Hoggart helped to found the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, with himself as Director, a position later taken over by Stuart Hall (now Professor of Sociology at the Open University). The 1960s witnessed th...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: STUDYING BRITISH CULTURES
• PART 1
• PART 2
• AFTERWORD: STUDYING BRITISH CULTURES, 2003
• BIBLIOGRAPHY