Cultural Studies

                          Cultural Studies

     Towards the end of 1990s Cultural Studies dominated the direction of literary criticism. Cultural studies try to understand the functioning of culture, particularly in the modern world, how cultural productions work and how cultural identities are constructed and organized. It is defined as an interdisciplinary approach in the analysis of culture. This is a form of contemporary practices, other than theory, consisting of the elements of Marxism, post structuralism, postmodernism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology, ethnic studies, Sociology, film theory and postcolonial Studies. The first known exponent of cultural studies in England is Raymond Williams. With the founding of The Birmingham Centre for contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS in 1964 by Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall, the new discipline officially emerges.

     It is an empirical approach (gaining knowledge by means of direct and indirect observation or experience). The concept of text includes not only written language, but also films, photography, fashion, video games folk songs, music albums etc. The texts of cultural studies include all the meaningful artifacts of culture. In Cultural studies there is a redefing of the idea of culture. The term designates both Traditional high culture and popular culture. The analysis of everyday meanings and practices has become the main focus of Cultural studies.

    Matthew Arnold is the starting point of any discussion of culture. His ideas of culture were refuted by the twentieth century culture theorists. Matthew Arnold in his Culture and Anarchy said that culture is primarily a body of knowledge. He sees the popular culture as a form of anarchy. He was a strict Classist. The flag bearer of Arnold's idea of culture as an elitist form in twentieth century was F.R. Leavis.

    The real cultural studies project begins with activities of Centre for CCC at the University of Birmingham in 1964. Its aim is to put cultural studies on the intellectual map. The works of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall are regarded as the foundational texts of cultural studies

    Raymond Williams, with his working class background, confronts the elitist version of culture. He develops a Marxist project known as Cultural Materialism. In ‘The analysis of culture' (a chapter in The Long Revolution), Williams delineates the three general categories of culture: first, there is the 'ideal', in which culture is a state or process of human perfection, in terms of certain absolute or universal values'. Second, there is the documentary record: the surviving texts and practices of a culture. Accordingly, 'culture is the body of intellectual and imaginative work, in which, in a detailed way, human thought and experience are variously recorded. Third, the 'social' definition of culture, in which culture is a description of a particular way of life. The social definition of culture forms the basis of Culturalism, though Williams argues that ideal and documentary aspects are also very important sometimes in analyzing culture.

    Williams offers the possibility of a democratic definition of culture as the 'lived experience of ordinary' men and women, made in their daily interaction with the texts and practices of everyday life. This is democratic in the sense that it subverts the hierarchical structures of culture that Leavis proposes. However, Williams is against the equation that popular culture is working class culture, people are what they consume. Indeed, the popular is 'instituted, financed and operated by the commercial bourgeoisie', against authentic working class evolution.

     William's Key Words published in 1976 is an important work that charts the evolutions of the central concepts in culturalism. In Marxism and Literature (1977) Williams sets out his own approach to cultural studies, which he calls cultural materialism. In short, by insisting that 'culture is ordinary’ Williams attempts a historical evolution of the very concept itself in the true democratic way.

     Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy is another work important to cultural studies. It is divided into two parts: An "older" order, describing the working class culture of Hoggart's childhood in the 1930s; and 'Yielding place to new', describing a traditional working class culture under threat from the new forms of mass entertainment of the 1950s.

    In 'Cultural studies: two paradigms', Hall analyzes the problems of the two approaches in the discipline. While culturalism (Hoggart and Thompson) privileges 'lived' experience as the agent of social change, structuralism (Levi-Strauss and Barthes) argues experience itself is socially constructed, an 'effect of language and culture. Hall gives articulation a Marxist perspective by bringing in Gramsci and Althusser, and thus CCCS emerges as a collaborative research hub (of theory and praxis) in the historical context of 1968. Hall endeavours to legitimize not only new methods for defining and studying culture but also whole new domains of cultural production. Especially influential are his works on critical race theory, ethnicity, immigration, and "diasporic identities", which points to a new direction in British Cultural Studies towards postcolonialisms.

     E. P. Thompson is yet another theorist, important to Cultural Studies. In The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1967, he argues that the rise of English working class is a historical phenomenon of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (from 1790-1830). Against the classical Marxist theory, he argues that class is not a 'structure' or a 'category'. In short, Thompson proposes the authentic working class as a self-made, organic reality by describing that the formation of the working class between 1790 and 1830 as the most distinguished popular culture England has known'.

    Cultural studies generally share four goals. They are: 

• Cultural studies go beyond the limits of   a particular subject such as literary history   or criticism.
• Cultural studies are politically active. Cultural critics see themselves as against    the power structures of the society. They question the inequalities of the power structures and seek to restructure them.
• Cultural studies deny the separation of “high” and “low” or popular culture. All forms of cultural productions are studied in relation to other cultural practices.
• Cultural studies analyses not only the cultural work that is produced but also the means of production.

There are significant differences between British and US Cultural Studies. The British form emerges out of the sociological and materialist studies of people like Williams and Hoggart, who were associated with the Birmingham Centre. By the early 1980s, with Hall at the head of the Centre, new emphases on multiculturalism and the problems of immigration, exile, and Diaspora brought Cultural Studies into the postcolonial orbit. Culture Studies in the USA from the 1950s to the 1980s is primarily concerned with the historical analysis of national characteristics (major political figures and parties, economics). By the mid-1980s, new forms of cultural critique like the writing cultures' movement in anthropology’ which advocated a textualist approach to the representation of culture, emerge as the new waves. With renewed interest in areas like film, theatre, performance, pop culture, clothing, sporting events, new media and pornography, its scope is widening and currently, English departments are currently being redesignated as culture studies departments. Donna Haraway, Teresa de Lauretis, Slavoj Zizek, Iain Chambers, Angela McRobbie and Janice Radway are some important practitioners of contemporary cultural studies.