Cultural studies: which paradigm?

Arguments within English Marxism

Hall’s article must be understood in the context of a broader and more fraught debate about the analysis of culture taking place within the British Left at the time – a struggle succinctly mapped out in Martin Jay’s Songs of Experience, a monumental reconstruction of the various ways in which the category of experience was a fundamental but always problematic term in Modern European and North American thought from the 18th century through to the present. In chapter 5 (Politics and Experience), he guides us through the thorny thickets of ‘the quarrel over experience in British Marxism’ (Jay, 2006: 199–215). ‘“Experience” had become a bone of contention’, he remarks, ‘between Williams, Thompson and their generation, on the one hand and the new, theoretically ambitious, politically militant – mostly Trotskyist – editorial board of New Left Review, on the other’ (Jay, 2006: 199). Williams had an arms-length relationship with Marxism and the politics of the New Left, and was an admired and respected if not somewhat aloof figure for the editors of New Left Review (NLR) who were, however, eager to recruit him to their cause. But this required critical clarification of some (for them) less than satisfactory aspects of Williams’ thinking, and so, over a period of months in 1978, Williams submitted to a series of grueling interviews with three members of the NLR editorial collective: Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett, and Francis Mulhern. He was pressed to clarify what he meant by a ‘structure of feeling’ and (closely linked to this) ‘life’ and ‘experience’. For Williams, the starting point for engaging with any question concerning culture and society was always individual, lived experience because that was what he (or anyone, for that matter) ‘knew’ – his own society and culture which he knew by virtue of actually living in it. This, as his interlocutors put it to him, was ‘the problem of the epistemological privilege of experience itself in your work’ (Williams, 1979: 165). It was redolent of a subjectivist, Leavisian (of whom more below) notion of value, of ‘life’ (Williams, 1979: 166–167). Hard-pressed, Williams replied,

a structure of feeling is the endless comparison that must occur in the process of consciousness between the articulated and the lived. The lived is only another word, if you like, for experience: but we have to find a word for that level. (p. 168)

While Williams struggled gamely with his NLR interrogators, Edward Thompson took them, and everything they stood for, head on. Williams was by temperament conciliatory. Thompson was a contrarian who now and then liked nothing better than a blazing good row – and he was a formidable polemicist. His disagreements with the NLR editorial board, and Perry Anderson in particular, had been simmering ever since the beginning of the 1960s when NLR was formed as a merger of The Reasoner and Universities and Left Review. In the late 1970s, he wrote a lengthy denunciation of ‘The Poverty of Theory’ – a furious and unforgiving full-frontal assault on Althusserian Marxism and the ‘new’ New Left (Thompson, 1978). Althusser’s (2001[1971]) philosophical project was to derive a ‘rigorous’ and ‘scientific’ theory of revolutionary practice from Marx’s writings (pp. 1–10). To do so required the exposure and excoriation of a whole raft of ‘bourgeois’ errors – notably, ‘historicism’, ‘empiricism’, ‘moralism’, and especially, humanism (Althusser, 2005 [1969]: 221–248).Everything that Althusser peremptorily dismissed, Thompson sought to redeem – and in particular, the category of experience which for Althusser was the very home and resting place of ideology. For Thompson, the historian, experience was, for all its imperfections, simply ‘indispensable’. It was where thinking began, not where it stopped.

The two paradigms essay was written in the immediate aftermath of these ructions. Hall had been involved in a particularly acrimonious meeting of History Workshop at Ruskin College in 1978 in which he and his colleague, the historian Richard Johnson, along with others, had responded critically to Thompson’s attack on Althusser. Thompson’s truculent response to them made subsequent discussion impossible – ‘the aftermath of [his] fusillade hung like a pall of smoke over the rest of the conference’ (Jay, 2006[2005]: 210). The whiff of gunshot has faded from Hall’s essay. On first reading, it seems to suggest the possibility of a synthesis between the two paradigms (although we are told it would not be easy) while acknowledging that neither one was adequate, for the moment, to the task of ‘constructing the study of culture as a conceptually clarified and theoretically informed domain of study’ (Hall, 1980: 67). But this was no more than a nod in the direction of a reconciliation between the two paradigms. The vocabulary and tone of the essay – the recurring invocation of a necessary scientific and rigorous (Marxist) theory operating at different levels of abstraction; the poke at culturalism’s ‘naïve humanism with its necessary consequence: a voluntarist and populist political practice’ (Hall, 1980: 67) – is unmistakably Althusserian.

The problematic of humanism

The immediate source of this anti-humanism was For Marx, a collection of essays by Althusser published in France in 1968 and in England the following year in a famous translation by Ben Brewster. The essays are an attempt to re-read Marx and, in so doing, to rediscover his philosophical theory and its practical political applications. Althusser rejects the ‘humanism’ in the writings of ‘the young Marx’ (alienation as man’s estrangement from his human ‘essence’) and argues for an ‘epistemological break’ into the ‘mature Marx’, the author of Capital, with its focus on the economic, political, and social structures that determine the life-situations of individuals in capitalist societies. The new concepts of the later writings – social formation, productive forces, superstructures, ideology, determination in the last instance by the economy – constituted ‘a radical critique of the theoretical pretensions of every philosophical humanism and the definition of humanism as an ideology’ (Althusser, 2005[1969]: 227, original emphases).

Althusser may have been the immediate source of the anti-humanism in the two paradigms essay, but it had a much wider resonance at the time. The structuralist turn of the 1970s was indicative of a growing crisis of self-belief in the humanities and its two leading disciplines, History and English Literature, in particular. All the leading figures in the formation of CS (with the exception of Thompson, a historian) had studied English and all had been deeply influenced by F.R. Leavis who dominated and defined the new field of literary criticism that he, as much as anyone, established in English universities. The structuralism of CS2 was, most basically, a turn to Theory and was as much a turn against the parent discipline of English Literature and its intransigent champion, Leavis, as it was a turn toward Althusser’s anti-humanist Marxism. ‘Liberal humanism’ (cf. ‘neo-liberalism’ today) became the label dismissively applied to Leavis as the embodiment of ‘traditional’ English Literature by the younger NLR generation who were cutting their critical teeth in the 1970s:

Scrutiny [the journal of literary criticism founded by Leavis in 1932] represented nothing less than the last-ditch stand of liberal humanism, concerned […] with the unique value of the individual and the creative realm of the inter-personal. These values were summarized as ‘Life’, a word which Scrutiny made a virtue out of not being able to define […] either you felt Life or you did not. Great Literature was reverently open to Life, and what Life was could be demonstrated by great literature. The case was circular, intuitive, and proof against all argument, reflecting the enclosed coterie of the Leavisites themselves. (Eagleton, 2008[1983]: 36)

More than anyone else at the time, Terry Eagleton defined the theoretical turn taking place in English Literature in the 1970s. Literary Theory (from which the quotation above is taken) has sold nearly a million copies in the last 30 years. Leavis was Cambridge born and bred. He taught there for most of his working life. Williams read English at Cambridge while Leavis was still in his heyday (the 1930s–1950s). Eagleton read English at Cambridge while Williams was in his heyday (the 1960s). And in his heyday (the 1970s–1980s), Eagleton (1976) turned on them both, Williams especially, in a notorious NLR article – ‘Criticism and politics: the work of Raymond Williams’. Writing ‘in the spirit of comradeship and good faith’ (p. 9), Eagleton attacked first Leavis and then Williams as petit-bourgeois and provincial. Leavis, the son of a Cambridge shop-keeper, Eagleton tells us (to ensure we grasp his class-position), was also guilty of ‘liberal humanism’. Williams was not charged with that. His politics were potentially correct. He was a self-declared socialist. But his socialism was tainted with ‘left Leavisism’ and ‘romantic populism’. It was a gradualist, reformist, parochial, and peculiarly English socialism (Perry Anderson laid exactly the same charges against Edward Thompson), lacking in the proper revolutionary spirit that inspired the comrades in the French Communist Party (CP) across the Channel. Williams had not yet fully and properly embraced Marx – more exactly the Marxism of NLR – but, hopefully, Eagleton concluded, he was getting there. Shortly afterward, the NLR editorial collective did its best to sort Williams out to their own satisfaction in their 5-month cross-examination of him published in 1979 as Politics and Letters.

Media Studies, child of the 1970s, was parented by English Literature. The offspring inherited the problems of its family genealogy going back to its grand-father, the unyielding figure of F.R. Leavis. The struggle over the direction of media and CS must be understood within the context of the crisis in the humanities (on both sides of the Atlantic) that developed around this time. ‘The Humanities’ was a then quite recent term that had gained currency in the United States after World War 2. The term quickly crossed the Atlantic and became current in Britain. In 1964, a Pelican Original was published in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books with the title Crisis in the Humanities (Collini, 2012: 63). The concept was forged, as Stefan Collini points out, in the shadow of the inexorable post-war rise of the sciences in the face of which the humanities were increasingly racked by self-doubt. They lacked the virtues of the sciences. They were not methodologically sound, they were unsystematic, they could not give good accounts of their procedures, nor of their aims and purposes.

Leavis had been asked (by René Wellek) back in the 1930s to give a more systematic account of literary criticism – to spell out its concerns, its principles, and its methodology (Wellek, 1937).He had refused. ‘Life’ was invoked as a foundational value for Scrutiny, but what it meant (like experience) remained unexamined and unaccounted for. I deeply dislike the tone of Eagleton’s article, but he had a point. It is hardly surprising that by his time, the humanities had come to feel that they might become properly rigorous and theoretical if they became more scientific. The theoretical turn of CS2 was underpinned by deep anxieties, by a desperate sense of lack. What was it that was missing? The answer was supplied by Perry Anderson. Britain by the 1960s, alone of the advanced European countries, had failed to produce a critical sociology, an adequate theoretical conceptualization of ‘the social totality’. Other countries had produced a structural analysis of the social totality; Germany had Weber, France had Durkheim, Italy had Pareto (and America had Parsons, I might add). Britain had no such comparable figure. What then, Anderson asked, was ‘the sociology of no sociology’? How to account for this failure? The explanation lay with the historical formation of the British (liberal humanist) bourgeoisie and its failure to challenge the British ruling class:

The British bourgeoisie from the outset renounced its intellectual birthright. It refused ever to put society as a whole in question. A deep, instinctive aversion to the very category of the totality marks its entire trajectory. It never had to recast society as a whole in a concrete historical practice. It consequently never had to rethink society as a whole in abstract, theoretical reflection … The category of the totality was renounced by the British bourgeoisie in its acceptance of a comfortable, but secondary station within the hierarchy of early Victorian capitalism. (Anderson, 1969: 228)

Surveying the barren landscape of intellectual life in 1960s Britain, the only place where Anderson could find the glimmer of a critique of contemporary society was English Literature still dominated by the lonely and embattled figure of F. R. Leavis. It was not so much Leavis’ literary criticism as his social criticism that commanded the attention of the New Left. Leavis, like Williams, was subject to the intensive scrutiny of the NLR collective because he, like Williams, mattered for them. He was the grit in their oyster (Mulhern, 1979). Back in the 1930s, Leavis had produced an uncompromising criticism of the disastrous impact of industrial capitalism on contemporary social and cultural life (Leavis, 1978[1930]; Leavis and Thompson, 1932). At the same time, in a famous early editorial in Scrutiny, he had dismissed the Marxist critique of capitalism for its vulgar economism (Leavis, 1932). It was the moral seriousness of Leavis’ social criticism that was inspirational for a generation that included Hoggart, Williams, and Hall. His dismissal of Marxism rankled because there was some truth to it. The re-think of Marxism undertaken by the New Left had to tackle the charge of economic reductionism, and it did so by addressing the ‘base-superstructure’ problematic: the relationship between the three fundamental components of the social totality – the economic ‘base’ and the political and cultural ‘superstructures’. The economy was dominant but not central. It was not wholly determining. The political and the cultural were not merely the effects of the economic base. Each had its own specific effectivity. In this way, Leavis’ charge was overcome and a relative autonomy for politics and culture was salvaged. There was some point after all in being concerned with them both from a Marxist perspective.

II

So which is it to be: experience or ideology? In his review of them both, Hall went for the structuralist paradigm with Ideology as its master concept. I go for the culturalist paradigm with Experience as its foundational term, and I want to reclaim it as the starting point for thinking about media, culture, and society today. I want to focus on the particular usage of experience in the writings of Hoggart, Williams, and Thompson for all of whom experience was attached to the word ‘lived’ – as in lived experience.

The content of lived experience is life (what else?). But what does that mean if not the experience of being alive and living in the world? Experience is the word for the immediate encounter with existence (with being alive and living in the world) that is common to every individual human being – it is the term that captures how we (human beings) encounter life – our own life and the life of the world (the living world) as a whole. We encounter the world in, through, and as our experience of it. Experience (as lived) is the irreducible, primary, fundamental, and immediate encounter with reality if by that is meant something like the real experience of what it is to be alive and living in the real world in real time and in a real place with other real people (like, in each case, me). The redemption of experience as a meaningful term (in the first place) and as a starting point for media and cultural studies requires us to understand it

And in this media studies (as an aspect of cultural studies) rediscovers itself as a humanistic field of enquiry.

The easiest way to dismiss experience is to tag it as ‘subjective’. Indeed it is, but that is not all it is. If experience were merely subjective (i.e. uniquely, in each case, mine and no one else’s), then there would be nothing to be said (more exactly, nothing sayable) about it. It would be a private and incommunicable matter that had no language to give expression to it. But evidently this is not the case. Experience is shared and shareable. There are many familiar kinds of experiences-in-common in ordinary daily life: the football game, the movie, the family wedding that we went to (or that wedding we watched on TV), all these are obvious examples of common (public) experiences that we share with others. Of course, we do not all have the same experience of the game, the wedding, the movie. One half of the crowd at the football game has a good experience while the other half (whose side has lost) has a bad experience. Members of the wedding may have very different private feelings depending on their relationship to one or other of the happy couple. This is the dialectics of experience: it is very often, at one and the same time, experience-in-common and uniquely, in each case, mine.

I did not choose my life. I did not choose to be born, nor the being that I get to find as mine: being male, white, and British in my case. All of us must come to terms with the fore-given conditions of our existence in the specific situation in which we find ourselves. These two things – the conditions of existence and the nature of situation we are in – constitute the common ground of the experience of being alive and living in the world in every particular instance. The condition that all of us share is death – not someone else’s, but mine. Death is the ownmost condition of existence, the one sure and certain gift of a given life, the life that I own as mine. And following directly from this, the experiential structure of an unfolding life is what each and all of us live through (work through) as we move from infancy through childhood, youth, and adulthood toward old age and death. In life, we must come to terms with the existential givens that come at birth: our given sexuality perhaps above all. As we go through life, we must come to terms with the life-choices we confront along the way: making a living, a life-partner, to have children – or not. And all this is the shared common experience and fate of that single, common historical humanity of which each one of us is a unique, particular, and perishable instance.

Experience is where thinking (as distinct from theorizing) begins. Experience + reflection = understanding. Stefan Collini (2012) has devised this elegant equation to distinguish the humanities from the sciences whose business is knowledge (p. 77). Science is an epistemology, the humanities are not – or, rather, the knowledge with which each is concerned is essentially different: knowledge as fact as distinct from knowledge as understanding. Today, we know a great deal more than the Greeks who invented the Western episteme two and a half thousand years ago. But are we any the wiser? Do we understand how to live any better than they did? Knowledge accumulates incrementally in and through the historical time of longue durée. The world today contains ancient pre-historic knowledges, technologies, and skills still basically relevant to human life which coexist with very new things like smart-phones unimaginable a generation ago. Knowledge is science. It is in principle transferrable from anyone to anyone. I tell you that 2 + 2 = 4 and now you know. I have transferred this basic mathematical fact to you and now you have it. You own it. It is yours. I tell you I am happy. But this experiential fact does not transfer. I do not know your happiness as I know that two and two make four because you tell me so. You have shared your knowledge and transferred it to me, but not your experience. I understand your feeling of happiness. But I do not share it. It does not become mine. Knowledge transfers from one person to another and from one generation to the next. Experience does not. Each individual life is a uniquely new experience to be gone through afresh – and always as if for the first and last time. The generations do not learn from each other’s experience. It does not accumulate as knowledge does, and this accounts for the curious ruptures and amnesias of generational time. Each new generation of media and communication studies has rejected or abandoned its parent. The new generation in the United States turned against its parent culture (the sociology of mass communication) at exactly the same time that CS2 was turning against CS1 in the United Kingdom. While Hall was taking leave of Hoggart and Williams, Todd Gitlin (1978) had just severed connections with Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz. We, the living, accumulate knowledge from the past but not its experience. But then experience, unlike factual knowledge, is a live and living (existential) phenomenon. When people die, their lived experience dies with them, and survives only in the afterlife of what some rare individuals (painters, musicians, poets, novelists, etc.) leave behind as their personal testimony and witness to their own life and time. That is why the studies of the arts and literature are humanistic disciplines. They are about life and experience, and so is television.

Stuart Hall’s essay, the grit in my oyster, has provoked me to thinking. A provocation in the best sense of the word: a challenge that has forced me to clarify and justify my own foundational vocabulary: life, world, experience. My response to Hall’s two paradigms is as much homage as critique. I learnt to think for the first time about theory (and politics) as a result of my experience of attending Hall’s legendary Monday morning theory seminar at Birmingham for a year in the mid-1970s. I had read English at Wadham in the early 1960s, at a time when Oxford’s 3-year undergraduate course in literature was quite untroubled, from beginning to end, by any theoretical or political considerations whatsoever. They were new ones on me as I listened to Stuart Hall engaging with them both each week. The two paradigms essay is but one sample of writing from an astonishingly productive period in his academic working life. It was a then necessary momentary pause to reflect on the state of the field in those troubled, fractious times. Hall has spoken of wrestling with angels as he grappled with the perplexities of finding adequate theoretical foundations for the then new enterprise of CS taking shape under his direction at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in the 1970s. I sometimes think of him in those days as having two angels whispering in his ears – the good angel, Gramsci, and the bad angel, Althusser. Sometimes, he listens more to one than the other, and it is Althusser (with a passing nod at Gramsci) who has his ear in the two paradigms essay. But even as experience is expelled from the front door of the Theory house he’s building in the piece, it has nipped round and re-entered through the back door. Born again audience studies (see Curran et al., 1996) has been one of the most fruitful and productive lines of media research that has come out of Birmingham.

Now and then, I think of God as a psychoanalyst. (He looks rather like Sigmund Freud.) The patient on the couch is always the Present (who speaks for all who are alive and living in the world at the time). Generation after generation, the Present enters, lies down, and starts telling God of its experiences. And always it says the same thing. That it doesn’t understand what’s going on in its life and things aren’t working out and it doesn’t know what to do. God is very, very bored with the way that History (which is made in and by the Present) endlessly repeats itself. His advice is always the same: life (and history) is lived going forward, but understood backward (God is quoting Kierkegaard of whom He is rather fond). To understand life, you must reflect on your own experience of it. Only in the past does the Present begin to make sense. It is with that thought in mind that I have revisited Stuart Hall’s essay which it was my pleasure to prepare for the very first issue of Media, Culture & Society (MCS) that I ever edited, back in the day, a generation ago from now.