ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a prehistory of British cultural studies by focusing on a widespread demand for theory within the left between about 1957 and 1965.1 My main interest in the topic is simple enough. I seek to make the case that the academic “turn to theory” needs to be understood in social as much as in intellectual terms.2 I do so partly in the hope of catching a glimpse of a moment when academic “theory” had clear and widely recognized social and political ambitions which might help weight it materially even today. At the same time I wish briefly to examine what intellectual possibilities were lost to the humanities across the period of theory’s emergence, though let me concede in advance this is not an ambition I satisfactorily fulfill. By its nature this project involves simplifications, of which the most obvious
concerns the classification of theory itself. For me, operating under a basic nominalism, “theory” is just what calls itself such. But, patently, more than one mode of conceptualizing, with more than one disciplinary base, has been named “theory” inside the modern humanities. Nonetheless, for my purposes we can effectively divide theory into three main (and, admittedly, connected) phases. First, the theory that was imported into British socialism after the New Left’s decline, whose major figures were Gramsci and Althusser. Then the literary post-structuralism that was widely disseminated mainly in the United States after the early 1970s, whose primary inspirations were Derrida and de Man, and which can be regarded (from an intellectual-historical point of view) as the attempt to import certain thematics within traditional European philosophy on to a literary field whose ethical basis had been broken both by the impact of structuralism and by the 1960s youth movement, and which thereby could, or acted as if it could, contribute to philosophy from within the discipline of literary studies.3 It is still within that moment that theory emerges, in a third form, as a discrete formation inside the humanities after about 1970 and extends its range to include figures like Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray and Jean Baudrillard as well as philosophical Western Marxists such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. This field produces a body of very loosely connected concepts with varying genealogies and implications (if still
connected to the European philosophic tradition) that constitute a residual, unrecognized-as-such “theory corpus” not always able to be tied to particular proper names. Of these three theory formations, only the first is fruitful for my purpose,
i.e., the examination of the social preconditions for theory’s emergence, the main reason being that literary post-structuralism as well as the ongoing European philosophization of the humanities were academic from the beginning, which is not true of socialist theory. Hence the latter kinds of theory can be understood (although not completely) in functionalist terms – as means through which certain humanities disciplines have reproduced themselves. Let me gesture at some of these functions. Theory may bridge divisions between disciplines, or even help federate them. Because it is recondite, it can provide intellectual capital able to hierarchize academic fields and to resource career building. More complexly, it promises a phantasmal but expressive conceptual mastery of the world to intellectuals who operate from positions of relative powerlessness, especially to young academics struggling with their field’s difficulties in providing careers adequate to their aspirations. As it offers this promise, however, it enriches and divides the humanities’ conceptual repertoire, injecting intellectual energy into academic work as much in being rejected and critiqued as in being absorbed. Within British cultural studies, “theory” is doubly displaced: it was
imported into Britain first from Italy, then from France, mainly by intellectuals working outside or on the margins of the university system, and then transposed into the academy in the aftermath of May 1968. If we ask, “Why did this happen?” we need to turn not just to the politics of the socialist left in the period, but to the wider situation in which the left was undergoing rapid mutation. To sum my argument in a phrase: British theory begins as a response to the crisis of socialism under welfarism. The first significant call for theory within this milieu occurred early. In
1958 a group of writers, loosely associated with what is now known as the “first New Left” appeared in a volume entitled Conviction.4 They included the young literary critics Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, but also politicians, economists, novelists, journalists, scientists, and historians – a breadth of contributors that would become much rarer after 1968. Williams was then writing The Long Revolution and contributed a characteristic piece, “Culture is Ordinary,” posing suggestions for national media policy (Williams 1961: 342 ff.). Hoggart’s “Speaking for Ourselves” demanded a “reassessment” of contemporary culture and society, claiming that “by a close and constant discipline of thought and feeling, working from the grounds outwards, we shall be better able to take stock of our lives for growth” – growth that he conceived of as developing towards classlessness, not along what he thought of as American lines, but towards “a merging of the considerable, lived-into virtues still to be found in all classes” (Hoggart 1958: 138).
