ABSTRACT
Therefore and however, let us return to the narrative before concluding with a rethinking of the route that cultural Marxism took. By the late 1980s cultural studies was institutionalized, internationalized and, from some perspectives, apparently depoliticized. The academic institutionalization was clearly a consequence of the cultural void that Perry Anderson had noted in his article, ‘Components of the National Culture’ (1964). Cultural studies, because of its immediacy and its European theory, had a presence which appeared to shatter the pretences of insular academia. And, in many ways, because it was concerned with the media, it was able to use the media to get its points home.1 It was strategic that the Open University was staffed by people associated with segments of the New Left and that journals like New Society, New Statesman, City Limits, Marxism Today, The Listener and the various Times supplements had many contributors who saw the media as the site of a voice/pen from which academia could be exposed and (hopefully) a new readership might be galvanized.2 The left certainly produced ‘organic intellectuals’—but for whom? The temptation was to be culturist for the sake of culturism, for New Left Marxism was, by the 1980s, vying for a different hegemonic position, that is as the arbiters of aesthetic taste and lifestyle for a largely bourgeois audience. The new universities of the 1960s had created interdisciplinary faculties of the humanities and social sciences, and many of the polytechnics, following degreegranting status in the early 1970s, established programmes in communication, humanities and cultural studies. None of this is to argue that cultural studies became part of the establishment, but rather that there was an established area of scholarship into which it easily might be inserted, or with which it might
compete on academic, rather than political, terms. That there might be different kinds of cultural studies with different political agendas is becoming clear once again.3 Auberon Waugh has argued an extreme elitist version of seeing culture as an essential element in class struggle4. But even in academia cultural studies is not the preserve of the left. Noel Annan, quoted in the epigraph to Chapter 4, saw himself as the continuity of a Bloomsbury culturalist tradition. At the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, for example, the School of English and American Studies has for many years been the centre of programmes in cultural studies, whose concerns are about as random and ‘liberal’ as the American Popular Cultural Association, where anything that is shared by any group of people is ‘popular’ and worth studying.5 As David Punter argues in an East Anglia collection on cultural studies, ‘we need to be reluctant to offer a definition of culture; to define it is already to collude in a hierarchy of meaning’ (Punter 1986:14)6
The institutionalization of cultural studies necessarily brought with it a publishing industry. Although the output from CCCS dwindled in the 1980s, the Open University, Verso, Commedia, Methuen, Macmillan and Routledge produced a steady supply of texts on aspects of cultural studies. Several new journals appeared, notably Cultural Studies, New Formations, News From Nowhere, 10/8, Block, Textual Practice, and Theory, Culture and Society. Cultural studies was exported-to Australia, Canada, Italy and the United States, in most cases emerging out of departments of communications or English. For the most part, the work fed into an international caravan of travelling scholarship which debated the finer points of deconstruction, modernism, postmodernism, gender, neocolonialism, post-Marxism, even post-feminism. Such political roots that cultural studies might have had were rarely in evidence, though Arena in Australia, Borderlines in Canada, and Social Text in the United States retained a dogged sense of purpose.7
