Cultural Studies: Its Origins and Characteristics (UGC NET English Unit VII)


Origins of Cultural Studies

The name “cultural studies” derives from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, established in 1964. CCCS was founded as a postgraduate centre initially under the directorship of Richard Hoggart (1964–1968) and later Stuart Hall (1968–1979). It is during the period of Hall’s Directorship that one can first speak of the formation of an identifiable and distinct domain called cultural studies.

The initial focus of CCCS was on ‘lived’ culture, with an emphasis on class cultures that chimed with the work of Hoggart and Raymond Williams. However, this moment of ‘culturalism’ – formed from an amalgam of sociology and literary criticism – was surpassed by the influence of structuralism, particularly as articulated with Marxism. Here the decisive intellectual resources were drawn from Barthes, Althusser and, most crucially, Gramsci. The key conceptual tools were those of text, ideology and hegemony as explored through the notion of popular culture as a site of both social control and resistance. The substantive topics of research included the mass media, youth subcultures, education, gender, race and the authoritarian state.

In 1972, the Centre published the first issue of Working Papers in Cultural Studies with the specific aim “to define and occupy a space” and “to put cultural studies on the intellectual map”. Since then, the work done at the Centre has acquired a mythological status in the field. The works of Richard Hoggart (b. 1918), Raymond Williams (1921–88), E.P. Thompson (1924–93) and Stuart Hall (b. 1932), all of whom were associated with CCCS at various times, are regarded as the foundational texts of cultural studies. Their focus was on how culture is practised and how culture is made – or how cultural practice leads different groups and classes to struggle for cultural domination.

Since the moment of CCCS cultural studies has acquired a multitude of institutional bases on a global scale. Further, the influence of poststructuralism has eclipsed structuralist Marxism as the decisive theoretical paradigm. In 1988, CCCS ceased being a postgraduate research centre and became a university department that included undergraduate teaching before it too was closed in the 1990s.


Richard Hoggart

Richard Hoggart started his academic career as an adult education tutor at the University of Hull. As professor of English literature at Birmingham University, he founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. His book The Uses of Literacy (1957) gave cultural studies its first identifiable, intellectual shape. Basing his work on F.R. Leavis’s (1895–1978) ideas on literary criticism, Hoggart argued that a critical reading of art could reveal “the felt quality of life” of a society. Only art could recreate life in all its rich complexity and diversity.

Raymond Williams


Raymond Williams also started his academic career as an adult education tutor – he taught at Oxford University from 1946 to 1960. His books Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) draw on two traditions within Marxism. For Williams, culture is an all-inclusive entity, a “whole way of life, material, intellectual and spiritual”. He traces the evolution of culture through its various historical conditions towards a “complete” form. Williams sees the emergence of a “general human culture” in specific societies where it is shaped by local and temporary systems. Williams goes beyond literary and philosophical analysis to examine language in all the forms in which it has been used to give meaning to lived experience. There is no such thing as the masses, Williams argues, only ways of seeing people as masses. We can have good as well as bad mass culture.

E.P. Thompson

A dedicated peace campaigner and Vice-President of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), E.P. Thompson was a radical historian who changed the perception of British history. In his seminal work, The Making of the English Working Class (1978), he sought to demonstrate the coming-into-being of the English working class in a specific historical period and thereby to recover the agency, concerns and experience of the mass of the English population ignored by the dominant tradition of conventional history. The possible developments of cultural studies that lead from Thompson’s work are considerable. Popular mass culture is not a new creation of consumer society – it has history. Moreover, Thompson’s distinction between a culture made for the working class, rather than by the working class, is important.

Stuart Hall


Stuart Hall, sociologist and critic, is perhaps the most canonized of the founding fathers. Indeed, as one critic has noted, cultural studies has tended falsely to unify itself around a small number of highly problematic articles by Stuart Hall. He was born in Jamaica (“early 1930s”) into a middle class and conservative family. In 1951, Hall won a scholarship to Oxford – and the rest, as they say, is (cultural) history.
In the 1950s, Hall was a leading light of the New Left; in the 1960s and 70s, he was at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham; in the 1980s, he moved to the Open University and led the “New Times” debate at Marxism Today.
[Read more about Stuart Hall]


Characteristics of Cultural Studies
The history of cultural studies has provided it with certain distinguishable characteristics that can often be identified in terms of what cultural studies aims to do.

1. Cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their relation to power. Its constant goal is to expose power relationships and examine how these relationships influence and shape cultural practices.

2. Cultural studies is not simply the study of culture as though it was a discrete entity divorced from its social or political context. Its objective is to understand culture in all its complex forms and to analyse the social and political context within which it manifests itself.

3. Culture in cultural studies always performs two functions: it is both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action. Cultural studies aims to be both an intellectual and a pragmatic enterprise.

4. Cultural studies attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge, to overcome the split between tacit (that is, intuitive knowledge based on local cultures) and objective (so-called universal) forms of knowledge. It assumes a common identity and common interest between the knower and the known, between the observer and what is being observed.

5. Cultural studies is committed to a moral evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of political action. The tradition of cultural studies is not one of value-free scholarship but one committed to social reconstruction by critical political involvement. Thus, cultural studies aims to understand and change the structures of dominance everywhere, but in industrial capitalist societies in particular.

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