Cultural studies originated in the educational sector, more particularly in adult education, as noted by Raymond Williams, one of the subject’s early theorists: “But we are beginning, I am afraid, to see encyclopedia articles dating the birth of Cultural Studies from this or that book in the late fifties. Don’t believe a word of it. That shift of perspective about the teaching of arts and literature and their relation to history and contemporary society began in Adult Education, it didn’t happen anywhere else.” (1) Another theorist of key importance for cultural studies, Stuart Hall, taught at the Open University, a distance university that also operated through the BBC Night Programme. It was specifically these lecturers’ experiences of extramural teaching that provided the basis for the first seminal texts of cultural studies, such as Raymond Williams' book of 1958, Culture and Society 1780–1950, and Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, published in 1957. The politicization of cultural education gave rise to a new paradigm: “The emergence of cultural studies theory can be traced back to the debate around the traditional concept of culture in the New Left. (...) Towards the end of the 1950s, Hoggart and Williams became aware of the growing incursion of popular elements into the cultural and creative industries, and adopted worker culture as the focus of their research. For this young generation, conservative approaches to cultural theory no longer had the requisite explicative power. In their analyses, they continued the tradition of cultural criticism originating from British literary criticism, but further extending it through their democratization of the concept of culture. Williams in particular set out to highlight the diversity of cultures present within society, and to develop a process-based concept of culture. The resulting new perspective on cultural development was designed to allow culture to be understood as a cohesive process, as a “whole way of life”, which explicitly included everyday experience. This “culturalism” approach required meaning-producing processes to be analysed just as seriously as the forms of so-called ‘high’ culture, and hence the elimination of the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.
Today, cultural studies form a theoretical domain and an intellectual practice informed by cultural sociology, psychoanalytical and political approaches, as decisively reformulated from a feminist and postcolonial perspective. The subject has significantly impacted the production of knowledge in recent decades, a production of knowledge that always adopts the (political) question of power relations as the starting point for the analysis of identity constructs and articulations – which are clearly of a hierarchizing nature – in the awareness that culture not only conveys these powerful assignment processes (in terms of race, class and gender), but actually produces them.
1 Quoted in Lindner 2000:34.
Selected literature (in order of publication)
- Will Brooker: Cultural Studies. London 1998: Hodder & Stoughton.
- Engelmann, Jan (ed.): Die kleinen Unterschiede: Der Cultural Studies-Reader. Frankfurt a. M./New York 1999.
- Roger Bromley, Udo Göttlich, Carsten Winter (eds.): Cultural Studies - Grundlagentexte zur Einführung, Dietrich zu Klampen Verlag, Lüneburg 1999.
- Hörning, Karl H. & Rainer Winter (eds.): Widerspenstige Kulturen. Cultural Studies als Herausforderung. Frankfurt a. M. 1999: Suhrkamp.
- Stuart Hall: Cultural Studies. Ein politisches Theorieprojekt. Hamburg 2000.
- Rolf Lindner: Die Stunde der Cultural Studies. Vienna 2000.
- Hanjo Berressem, Dagmar Buchwald, Heide Volkening (eds.): Grenzüberschreibungen: Feminismus und Cultural Studies. Bielefeld 2001.
- Oliver Marchart: Warum Cultural Studies vieles sind, aber nicht alles. Zum Kultur- und Medienbegriff der Cultural Studies. Medienheft 19, 2003. (Download)
- Simon During: A Critical Introduction. London 2005.
- Doris Bachmann-Medick: Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek 2006.
- Paul Mecheril, Monima Witsch (eds.): Cultural Studies und Pädagogik. Kritische Artikulationen. Bielefeld, 2006; Chris Barker: Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. London 2007.