Richard E. Lee is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Deputy Director of the Fernand Braudel Center at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

Life and Times of Cultural Studies

The Politics and Transformation of the Structures of KnowledgeBy Richard E. Lee

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2003 Richard E. Lee
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822331605

Chapter One

The Politics of Culture I: Limits of Possibilities, 1945-1968

The whale’s belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult…. Short of being dead, it is the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility … the essential Jonah act … to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting.-GEORGE ORWELL, “Inside the Whale”

Events seemed to will men, not men events. For meaning can be given to history only in the quarrel between “ought” and “is”-we must thrust the “ought” of choice into the “is” of circumstance which in its turn defines the human nature with which we choose…. We must get outside of the whale. Both whales.-E. P. THOMPSON, “Outside the Whale”

The turn to culture as a major category of analysis by the independent left in Britain during the 1950s was immediately occasioned and furthered by the geopolitical events that figured in the East-West struggle and the multifaceted dominance of the United States that formed their context. The assertions of both the liberal, social democratic West and the Communist, Stalinist East were called into question and the theoretical perspectives associated with the blocs proved grossly inadequate in explaining the changes in social structure and practice that so clearly seemed to have taken place since 1945.

For a moment, the “dust” of the events of the mid-1950s was suspended in a fortuitous, if rapidly dissipated, cloud. The oppositional project it precipitated, an English third force catalyzed in 1956 by Suez, Hungary, and Khrushchev’s “secret speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress, was contained within the post-1945 conjuncture of a worldwide economic expansion and the cold war logic of U.S. hegemony. These were reflected at home in the rising affluence, debated on the left and touted by the right, and the subordination to the United States euphemistically known as the “special relationship.” Coupled with the new consumerism was a whirlwind of change in lifestyles and the arts. If one believes in origins (as Stuart Hall has commented), it is from this immediate matrix that cultural studies was constructed by its early protagonists and eventually emerged in its majuscule, institutional garb with the foundation of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964.

A Decade of Consensus

In the British general election of July 1945, Labour came to power in an unexpected landslide, winning 393 seats to the Conservatives’ 210. The Labour Party election manifesto Let Us Face the Future argued that permanent social reform and security could not “‘be built on rotten economic foundations’ and that for Labour to provide the extensive social reforms to which they would be pledged it was necessary and essential that industry should be socialized” (Saville 1993: xxvii). The new government embarked on a transition from wartime mobilization to a peacetime economy with moderate nationalization-the Bank of England, mines, rail and road transport, civil aviation, gas and electricity-as the logical, and relatively uncontroversial, outcome of wartime planning.

The dire financial straits that characterized the aftermath of the war were only partially alleviated by a loan of $3.75 billion from the United States and the Marshall Plan of 1948. Nonetheless, improvement in the living conditions of ordinary workers and the enactment of the package of measures originally put forward in the Beveridge Report of 1942, which formed the basis of Labour’s “Welfare State” legislation, fostered an air of prosperity and universality. Even after the return of a Conservative government in 1951, a consensus around these basic social programs remained.

Postwar enthusiasm was tempered in 1947 by the fuel and convertibility crises and overseas withdrawals. A period of consolidation followed, during which further moves toward planning and socialism were curtailed. But by 1953 confidence was on the upswing as the previous year’s rise in unemployment reversed. Achievements such as the four-minute mile and the scaling of Everest created contemporary heroes, and national pride and unity were focused on the Coronation of Elizabeth II in June. As Stuart Laing has pointed out, the event symbolized both the tradition, the Constitutional Monarchy, “unity through hierarchy,” and the rejuvenation, freedom, and well-being that were possible under the Conservatives (1986: 10).

Undeniably, class distinctions did not disappear, but maintaining separate styles of existence became increasingly difficult for the middle classes. As Eric Hobsbawm writes, “An entire mode of life became obsolete,” and although not particularly to their taste, “a marked emphasis on ‘culture’ was probably the most important innovation in the newspapers which appealed to the middle class in the post-war period” ([1968] 1969: 280). As old symbols faded or became financially inaccessible, intellectual, cultural, and leisure activities increasingly served to define class position: drama and opera versus the holiday camp and the new BBC “Third Program” versus the “Light Program” (see Morgan 1990: 62). As the purchasing power of the working class grew to fuel mass consumption, commercial interests scurried to satisfy the demand. For the first time “it was their demand which dominated commercially, even their taste and style which pressed upward into the culture of the non-working classes” (Hobsbawm [1968] 1969: 283-84).

In the election of 1951, although Labour led in the popular vote, Conservatives won a majority of the seats. In 1955, voter apathy was perceived as a major factor, especially on the left, in the drop in total turnout. The unequal split in the decline ensured a Conservative victory. The 1959 election repeated the story. For Conservatives, in the wake of the Suez debacle and the Eden resignation of 1957, the social theme of domestic prosperity eclipsed geopolitical dominance in the constitution of their essential message. Television sets and cars at home replaced showing the flag in foreign ports as vital indicators of a successful politics.

All the same, contemporary themes of affluence (full employment with increased wages and shorter hours supposedly leading to private satisfaction of both basic needs and ephemeral wants) and embourgeoisement (incorporation of segments of the working class into the middle class) far from described a blanket prosperity in the 1950s. Although the overriding social-economic reality for a quarter century following 1945 was the end of war and a worldwide economic expansion, the immediate experience was reconstruction. Indeed, some rationing continued until 1954, and it was decidedly unfashionable at the time to flaunt one’s wealth, whether old money or new expense account spending. Wage levels rose, but increase in well-being was uneven and the gap between unskilled workers and the rest of society tended to widen. Moreover, desire for material possessions and some lifestyle modifications did not automatically catapult workers-the majority of the population-into the middle class.

So domestically, during the so-called decade of consensus beginning in 1945, the social program of the Labour Party was enacted and perpetuated under the Conservatives; unemployment remained low and incomes were generally well above prewar levels; health improved; and culturally, the concentration on “things British” in the arts, which had been a part of the war effort, continued.

In the international arena, Britain was forced back on itself geopolitically and commercially. Drained by war, it had lost its place in the sun to the United States, to which it was now economically dependent. Furthermore, Britain was obliged to assume the role of junior partner in the binary logic of the cold war when it became a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. This was also the beginning of the end of the empire, giving the lie to the heavy veneer of pomp and circumstance and televised theatricality of the Coronation in 1953. The incongruity of the first communique of the new reign, announcing that Britain would explode her own atomic bomb, with the larger reality is telling. Already in 1947 Britain had referred the Palestine question to the UN and the Jewel in the Crown was carved up into two new countries, India and Pakistan. Having long ceased to be the “workshop of the world,” holdings in the Americas too were divested to satisfy obligations incurred during the war.

The significance of shifting class and status relations became particularly apparent as the young, with money in their pockets between the last years of school and marriage, and intellectuals, who could no longer be recruited exclusively from the upper and middle classes, emerged as significant social groupings. Here we find the scholarship boys, a little older now and tempered in battle, whom Richard Hoggart portrayed so forcefully in The Uses of Literacy. When he discussed the uprootedness and the nostalgia they felt, along with their idealism and their redemptive emphasis on culture, he was looking back on his own situation. They were the “aliens” with “a curiosity about their best self” that Matthew Arnold had described in the 1860s: this “bent always tends to take them out of their class, and to make their distinguishing characteristic … their humanity” (quoted in Hoggart [1957] 1967: 255). These were the “aliens” who, in their zeal to act, had joined leftist organizations in the 1930s. The impulse did not disappear in the “endless relativity” of the 1950s. Despite their cynicism, they had not cashed in: “These few, because they are asking important questions, have a special value” (258). Here Hoggart, in company with Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, was solidly on the terrain of the first New Left.

Consensus Contested: The First New Left in Britain

Social legislation and the very real increase in well-being tended to blunt the traditional domestic concerns of British activists on the left in the post-1945 period. This was the Great Apathy, a function of individual impotence both East and West, as E. P. Thompson (1959b) would have it. In 1956, the conservative Charles Curran noted that “nothing fails like success…. Full employment in a Welfare State, with universal social services financed by taxation, means the end of mass-movement politics” (19). The only question, seemingly, was how to implement such a program without inflation, a question that called for a politics of administration or, very simply, good management.

The events of 1956 foreclosed on such arguments. Already jolted by the experience of East Germany in 1953, the entire left, including the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which had preached unity and reconstruction in the immediate postwar period, was traumatized by the revelations of Khrushchev’s “secret speech” and the events of Hungary and Suez. Three years after the death of Stalin, Khrushchev revealed the atrocities of the regime and denounced the “cult of personality,” breaking ground for home-front “rehabilitation” and “peaceful coexistence” worldwide. In Poland and Hungary, intellectuals had a vision of a humane socialism; but while in Warsaw compromise prevailed, in Budapest students called for Soviet withdrawal and multiparty elections-a revolution that was put down in three days with ten thousand casualties. In the words of Mervyn Jones (1976) borrowing from Marx, the tragedy of Hungary was played out as farce in the Middle East. When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the British and the French conspired in a secret deal with the Israelis to get it back. However, Eisenhower refused to support the pound sterling, under pressure from the expense of such a deployment, and the invasion collapsed. It was from this turmoil, “power without value … no comfort for any honest man or woman looking for a home to put politics in, nor East nor West” (Inglis 1991: 148), whence sprang the first New Left.

As developments in the Soviet East drove members out of the CPGB, so Labour’s support of intervention in Egypt revealed the imperialist implications of the social-democratic consensus. “‘Hungary’ and ‘Suez’ were thus ‘liminal,’ boundary-marking experiences. They symbolized the break-up of the political Ice Age” (S. Hall 1989: 13). In international politics, the New Left repudiated the cold war and embraced the ideals of the Bandung Conference of 1955 by advocating an “active neutrality” (E. Thompson 1958: 50). In the face of Stalinism and social democracy, neither of which seemed to over people a capacity for controlling their own lives, the New Left reaffirmed humanist values with an emphasis on experience and agency. However, to differentiate the New Left by citing its concern for cultural questions over the bread-and-butter issues of the Old Left was possible only if, as Thompson argued, “it is understood that these ‘cultural’ questions are questions about life. For the New Left wants political and economic changes for something, so that people can themselves do something with their lives as a whole” (1959b: 11). In such a campaign, or more properly, political project, intellectuals had a leading role in constructing a theory and practice to which the creativity of individuals in the production of society, politics, and history was central. The corollary to this was a rapprochement among politics, art, and daily life under the star of community: the “socialist end has been the creation-not of equality of opportunity within an acquisitive society-but of a society of equals, a co-operative community” (E. Thompson 1960: 3).

The movement found its voice in two journals: The New Reasoner (summer 1957), with roots in communist politics, and Universities and Left Review (spring 1957), which reflected the independent socialist traditions of the left student generation of the 1950s. “NR held that our political problems were constant; it asked how the transition to a new socialist morality was possible. ULR had a moral criticism of our society, but asked what a socialist politics would be like” (Birnbaum 1960: ix-x). The two merged in late 1959, forming the first New Left Review under the general editorship of Stuart Hall. It was “more than a journal, but not quite a movement” (“Letter” 1959: 128); “a review of the New Left not a new Left Review” (R. Williams 1960: 343). David Widgery characterized the editorial platform as “stout enough to hold together the cultural journalism of the university New Lefties with the anti-colonialist and unilateralist commitments the Reasoners had inherited from their Communist past (this blend of concerns was interpreted by bourgeois observers as humanistic undergraduates being taken for an intellectual ride by wily Bolsheviks, although in fact exactly the reverse was to happen)” (1976: 510-11).

The editors of Universities and Left Review spelled out clearly to the new journal their idea of what New Left represented: “a new current of feeling which has entered politics in Britain since the thaw in 1956. This current is, if you like, socialist and humanist.” They were also trenchant on its motivations to action: “If any event has transformed the course, tempo and tone of politics since the crucial dates of Suez and Hungary, it is the formation of CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament], and the development of a body of people drawn into politics (many for the first time in their lives) around the fight against nuclear stupidity” (Editorial 1959: 1-2).

Continues…
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