HISTORY OF CULTURAL THEORY - Two Models

'Culturalists'

The first studies of culture in its widest possible sense of 'way of life' were made in the late 1950s and early 1960s by British critics and historians strongly influenced by Marxism and the U.S. anthropological school of Malinowski and others. These 'Culturalists' included Raymond Williams (1921-88) Culture and Society (1958); The Long Revolution (1962) Richard Hoggart (born 1918) The Uses of Literacy (1957) E. P. Thompson (1924-93) The Making of the English Working Class (1963). The culturalists' work involved a revaluation of words like 'democracy', 'art', 'culture', 'literature'. To a great extent their work was based on oppositions such as elite ('top down') and popular ('bottom-up') culture. High culture was text and performance-based; the popular was process and practice-based. Since popular culture can also have a 'top-down' element, as in tabloids run by millionaire newspaper proprietors, culturalists further divided it up into mass and vernacular, or culture for and by the people. Culture, like the nation itself, was not a state but a process. Vernacular culture was 'organic', differentiated, based on community, while, according to Hoggart, most 'external' culture is phoney. In general, they were hostile to theory, preferring empirical methods in a search for patterns of cultural relations. Because of the basic humanism and radicalism of their work, many of the culturalists' ideas are still very widely held.

Structuralists and Post-structuralists

For the structuralists and post-structuralists who followed them and are still influential today, the key site is language. They differed in method: structuralists maintained that culture can only be understood in relations, not in texts. Post-structuralists, pre-eminently Jacques Derrida, maintained that these relations are not truly binary but hierarchical and based on difference. Louis Althusser pointed to the role of ideological state apparatuses through invisible 'institutions' like the family, law, and education, which are as important as economic institutions. Roland Barthes, in Mythologies (1957), emphasised that commodities are consumed as much for their meanings, identities and pleasures as for their material function. From 1964, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies studied subcultures, emerging alternative ideologies, texts of meanings challenging the dominant culture, the culture of the subordinate who resent their subordination. Stuart Hall, head of the Centre, showed how resistance to the status quo is expressed through rituals. John Fiske maintained that popular culture is made by disempowered people out of the resources, discursive and material, provided by the social system that disempowers them (Understanding Popular Culture (1989).

Other Key Source Texts

Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979)
Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements (1978)
Angela McRobbie, Gender and Generation (1984)

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