British Marxism and Cultural Studies: Essays on a living tradition 9781409454816, 9781315570174

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British Marxism and Cultural Studies

A comprehensive exploration of the profound influence of Marxist ideas on the development of Cultural Studies in Britain, this volume covers a century of Marxist writing, balancing synoptic accounts of the various schools of Marxist thought with detailed analyses of the most important writers. Arguing that a recognisably Marxist tradition of cultural analysis began in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and continues unbroken to the present day, British Marxism and Cultural Studies traces the links between contemporary developments in the field and the extended tradition of which they form a part. With discussion of figures such as Jack Lindsay, C.L.R. James, Julian Stallabrass and Mike Wayne, as well as the cultural thinking of the New Left, Gramscian, Althusserian and Political Economy schools, this book shows that the history of British cultural Marxism is broader and richer than many people realise. As such, it will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, intellectual history and the history of the left. Philip Bounds holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Wales and has published widely on the intellectual history of the British left. His books include Orwell and Marxism, British Communism and the Politics of Literature and Notes from the End of History. David Berry is Senior Lecturer in Media, Communication and Culture at Southampton Solent University, UK, and the author of The Romanian Mass Media and Cultural Development and Journalism, Ethics and Society. He is co-editor of Public Policy and the Media and editor of Revisiting the Frankfurt School.

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British Marxism and Cultural Studies Essays on a living tradition Edited by Philip Bounds and David Berry

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 selection and editorial matter, Philip Bounds and David Berry; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Philip Bounds and David Berry to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-4094-5481-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-57017-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Notes on contributors Introduction: notes on a living tradition

vii 1

P H I L I P B O U N DS

1

Science, art and dissent: Jack Lindsay and the communist theory of culture

21

P H I L I P B O U N DS

2

The New Left and the emergence of Cultural Studies

44

A L A N O ’ C O N N OR

3

C.L.R. James: dialectics and the fate of the creative individual

65

D AV I D B E R RY

4

From folk to jazz: Eric Hobsbawm, British communism and Cultural Studies

87

P H I L I P B O U N DS

5

The Gramscian turn in British Cultural Studies: from the Birmingham School to cultural populism

106

STEVE JONES

6

Blind spots: re-reading Althusser and Lacan in Cultural Studies

132

JASON BARKER

7

Profit and power: British Marxists on the political economy of the media

153

E N D A B R O P H Y AND VI NCE NT MOS CO

8

Them and Us in contemporary Cultural Studies: Julian Stallabrass, Mike Wayne, Ben Watson

182

D AV I D R E N TO N

Index

201

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Contributors

Jason Barker is a theorist, director, screenwriter and producer and is Professor of Cultural Studies at Kyung Hee University, South Korea. He is the author of Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction (2002) and director of Marx Reloaded (2010) and editor with G.M. Goshgarian of Other Althussers (2015). David Berry is Senior Lecturer in Media, Communication and Culture at Southampton Solent University, UK. His books include Journalism, Ethics and Society (2008), The Romanian Mass Media and Cultural Development (2004) and Radical Mass Media Criticism (edited with John Theobald 2006). Philip Bounds holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Wales and has published widely on the intellectual history of the British left. His books include Orwell and Marxism (2009), British Communism and the Politics of Literature (2012), Notes from the End of History (2014) and Cultural Studies (1999). Enda Brophy is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Canada. His book Language Put to Work: The Making of Global Call Centre Labour will be published with Palgrave Macmillan. Steve Jones is Principal Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Nottingham Trent University, UK. He is the author of Antonio Gramsci (2006). Vincent Mosco is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Queen’s University, Canada. His books include To the Cloud (2014), The Political Economy of Communication (2009), The Laboring of Communication (with Catherine McKercher [2008]) and The Digital Sublime (2004). Alan O’Connor is Director of the PhD Programme in Cultural Studies at Trent University, Canada. He has written and edited three books about Raymond Williams. His most recent book is Punk Record Labels and the Struggle for Autonomy (2008). His current research is in the underground arts scene in a small Ontario city. David Renton is a historian and barrister who has published widely on the history of Marxism. His numerous books include Classical Marxism (2002), Dissident Marxism (2004) and C.L.R. James: Cricket’s Philosopher King (2007).

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Introduction Notes on a living tradition Philip Bounds

It turns out that rumours of Marxism’s death have been greatly exaggerated. More than two decades have elapsed since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its client states in Eastern Europe precipitated the biggest crisis in Marxism’s history. The consensus in the developed world for much of the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century was that Marxist ideas had been exploded at the level of both theory and practice. These days it is much less easy to make this case with any degree of confidence. In 2008 the world capitalist economy lurched into its most serious downturn since the 1930s. The failure of governments in Europe and elsewhere to bring it to an end has engendered a fresh interest in Marxist ideas. Marxism has once again become a prominent element in the mainstream culture of the advanced capitalist world, seen by many commentators as a potentially crucial tool in diagnosing the excesses of neoliberalism. The more dramatic symptoms of its renewed influence are well known. A semi-Marxist party has recently been elected to power in Greece. Das Kapital is now one of the bestselling texts in Germany. Neoliberal economists such as Nouriel Roubini admit that Marx’s theory of capitalist crisis has a lot going for it. Even George Soros, Europe’s most celebrated (or notorious) financier, disarmingly acknowledges ‘That man [Marx] discovered something about capitalism 150 years ago that we must take notice of’ (quoted in Hobsbawm 2011: 6). The resurgence of interest in Marxism is also having an impact in the academy. After a lengthy period in which the humanities and social sciences were said to have transcended the influence of Marxism, we are now witnessing a fresh wave of Marxist scholarship. The present book seeks to augment this flurry of scholarly activity in the particular field of Cultural Studies. Its primary purpose is to chart the contribution of Marxism to the great tradition of British Cultural Studies. Its goal is not merely to outline the main forms of British cultural Marxism but to offer a fresh perspective on their historical development. There is now a great deal of excellent scholarly writing on the history of British Cultural Studies. The work of such authors as Graeme Turner, Dennis Dworkin and John Storey – to name only three – shines a powerful light on the origins, conventions and evolution of the discipline (see, inter alia, Turner 1990; Dworkin 1997; Storey 2003). Nevertheless, there is perhaps a sense in which much of the existing work makes the history of British Cultural Studies seem less interesting than it

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actually was. This is for several reasons. Perhaps the most fundamental is that it gives too restricted a sense of the Marxist contribution to Cultural Studies. The consensus among many writers is that the Marxist influence on Cultural Studies first made itself felt in the work of E. P. Thompson in the 1950s; reached its apogee with the Gramscian, Althusserian and political-economy schools in the 1970s; and tailed off in the 1980s after the brief flaring of ‘cultural populism’. The problem with this version of history is that it obscures the fact that British Marxists have been making important contributions to what can broadly be called Cultural Studies since the end of the nineteenth century. It also makes British cultural Marxism seem like an excessively academic and elitist affair. While it is true that the celebrated writers of the fifties, sixties and seventies rarely found an audience outside the academy, an earlier generation of thinkers – Morris, Lindsay, James – were much better known to a popular readership. Another problem with the established narrative is that it ignores the influence of Marxism over the last twenty-five years. It is often said that Marxism ceased to play an important role in Cultural Studies because it failed to come to terms with postmodernism, post-structuralism and other cutting-edge ideologies of the late-capitalist age. In fact a number of Marxist writers have successfully negotiated the political crisis of the last two decades, absorbing the insights of Foucault, Lyotard or Lacan while never losing sight of what Fredric Jameson has famously called the ‘untranscendable horizon’ of Marxism (Jameson 1981: 10). Others have tried to resist the postmodern and poststructural offensives by showing that Marxism needs no assistance from Parisian modishness to register the most important developments in contemporary culture. Marxists are as active in Cultural Studies now as they ever were. This book recalls the contribution of most of the canonical names while also seeking to show that the story of British cultural Marxism is broader than many people imagine.

The prehistory of British Cultural Studies The origins of Marxist Cultural Studies in Britain coincide with the introduction of Marxism into the British Labour Movement. As soon as Marxism became a recognizable trend in British life in the early 1880s, a small number of writers began to use what they tended to call the ‘materialist conception of history’ to address cultural issues. Most of the really important pioneers of cultural Marxism were associated with the Socialist League, the tiny but intellectually fertile organisation which broke away from H. M. Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation in 1884. Easily the most distinctive cultural theorist in the Socialist League was the great William Morris, whose work combined the anti-industrial prejudices of John Ruskin and the millennial fervour of Karl Marx in an unstable but highly influential synthesis (Morris 1968). The defining characteristic of Morris’s work was its attempt to link the quality of high culture with the fortunes of productive labour. Appalled by what he took to be the haemorrhaging of aesthetic quality from the painting, sculpture and architecture of Victorian Britain, Morris concluded that the crisis of high culture was inextricably linked to the growth of alienated labour in the British economy. No society could sustain a vigorous high culture

Introduction 3 if its common people were deprived of aesthetic and intellectual satisfaction in their work. The problem with Victorian society was that industrial capitalism had reduced the individual worker to what Marx and Engels had famously called an ‘appendage of the machine’ (Marx and Engels 1958: 40), creating a pervasive air of cultural gloom which inevitably had a demoralising effect on its artists. Morris’s solution to the problem – a solution canvassed in a series of classic essays and in the great utopian novel News from Nowhere (1891) – was to call for the abolition of alienated labour through the establishment of a socialist society. Once production for use had replaced the anarchy of the marketplace, it would once again be possible for the British economy to be organised around the sort of handicraft techniques which Ruskin had identified as the sine qua non of ‘joy in labour’. Debate has raged over whether Morris’s sentimental attachment to pre-industrial forms of labour is truly compatible with an Enlightenment ideology like Marxism. What is not in doubt is that Morris regarded himself as a Marxist to the core. The other cultural critics associated with the Socialist League were by no means as important as Morris, but their contribution to the development of British cultural Marxism should not be overlooked. Writers such as Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling and Ernest Belfort Bax played a similar role in Britain to that played by Plekhanov, Kautsky, Lafargue and Mehring elsewhere in Europe. Like their European counterparts, they set out to explore what a later generation would call the ‘polysemic’ qualities of culture by showing how cultural texts frequently reinforce and subvert the status quo at one and the same time. For example, Marx and Aveling famously portrayed the poet Shelley as an Enlightenment liberal whose liberalism contained elements of incipient socialism (Aveling and Marx Aveling 1983). The problem with the work of the Socialist League’s critics was not that it lacked sophistication but that it exerted so little influence. After Morris’s death in 1896, the story of British cultural Marxism went cold for almost thirty years. It was only with the foundation of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1920 that British Marxists once again addressed cultural themes in any depth. The rich strain of cultural Marxism associated with the CPGB in the 1920s and 1930s has been documented in a number of books, articles and chapters (see, inter alia, Behrend 1998; Paananen 2000; Bounds 2009, 2012). In this book it is represented by Philip Bounds’s chapter on the early work of Jack Lindsay. Lindsay’s work has been singled out for examination for two reasons. The first is that it has still not received the academic attention that it deserves. The second is that, in spite of its idiosyncrasy, it vividly embodies many of the core assumptions about culture to which British communists adhered in the twenty or thirty years after 1930. Formulating his most important ideas as the crisis of the 1930s slowly came to the boil, Lindsay tried to provide a theoretical underpinning for one of the most important communist tenets of the so-called Popular Front period – that is, the belief that the culture of the subaltern classes in Britain and elsewhere had always been characterized by a deep commitment to egalitarian values. In his characteristically wide-ranging book A Short History of Culture (Lindsay 1939), Lindsay traced the origins of working-class egalitarianism to the long and traumatic shift from primitive communism to class society. In the classless societies of prehistory – or so

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Lindsay argued – men and women had been bound together by a powerful sense of community. This gave them the confidence they needed to throw themselves into the battle against nature, lay the foundations of a scientific culture and create outward-looking artistic forms which stimulated economic activity. However, the advent of class societies led to a wholesale dilution of the communitarian outlook. Divided between those who worked for a living and those who lived off the proceeds of other people’s labour, the new societies were no longer cohesive enough to advance scientific knowledge on a sustained basis. Since the late Neolithic period, the scientific impulse has largely been nurtured by the lower orders, who have retained enough communitarian feeling to embolden them in the face of the natural world. By contrast, the various ruling classes of the last 7000 years have often been scandalously indifferent to the scientific project. The most salient consequence has been the emergence among the labouring masses of an egalitarian, avowedly rebellious and quasi-communist culture. Successive generations of slaves, peasants and working people have expressed their opposition to the anti-scientific philistinism of the ruling groups by forging a culture that implicitly harks back to the classless ethos of prehistory. Insofar as class societies have seen an advance in human knowledge, it is largely because intermediate strata have been inspired in their intellectual and aesthetic efforts by popular culture’s messianic egalitarianism. There is little truth in the idea that modern science and art reflect the culture of the ruling classes, or so Lindsay heretically insisted. Men like Shakespeare, Newton or Dickens were middle-class dissidents whose emotional lives acquired their distinctive flavour from the outlook of ordinary people.

Founding fathers and neglected mavericks Many historians insist that communist theory was of little relevance to the development of Cultural Studies in Britain. Indeed, they argue that the ‘founding fathers’ of Cultural Studies went out of their way to distance themselves from communist orthodoxy. Seeking to purge the Labour Movement of Stalinism after the traumas of 1956, men such as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and E. P. Thompson are said to have decisively rejected cultural communism while formulating the main cultural principles of the so-called New Left. But how persuasive is this long-established orthodoxy? As Francis Mulhern and others have pointed out, the relationship between the founding fathers and their communist forebears was one of dialogue rather than outright rejection (Mulhern 2009). Preoccupied with such topics as the egalitarian dimension of working-class culture, the nature of common culture and the relationship between art and everyday life, Williams, Thompson and their peers often echoed communist theory while seeking to transcend its undoubted crudities (see, inter alia, Williams 1966, 1979, 1984; Thompson 1968). They also responded to a far wider range of contemporary concerns than has sometimes been recognized. A sense of the sheer complexity of the relationship between Cultural Studies and the New Left is well captured in Alan O’Connor’s chapter in this book. One of O’Connor’s arguments is that Cultural Studies had its roots in the New Left’s response to a bewildering variety of economic, cultural

Introduction 5 and political trends in the Britain of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The rise of the notion of ‘classlessness’, revisionist ideas about the changing face of post-war capitalism, the emergence of a distinctive youth culture, debates about the need to expand educational provision, anxieties about the cultural effects of television, and the dramatic efflorescence of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – these and other developments called forth strong responses from the New Left and shaped the context in which Cultural Studies came to maturity. Controversially, O’Connor argues that Cultural Studies can in some senses be regarded as a response to political failure. Between 1958 and 1963, the New Left made an important contribution to British life, intervening in the most urgent debates and finding a wide and receptive audience. It was only when its public influence began to decline – a decline symbolized by the transformation of New Left Review into a highly specialized journal under Perry Anderson’s editorship – that the establishment of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) effectively put Cultural Studies on the intellectual map. According to this reading, Cultural Studies represented a retreat into the academy at the moment when the New Left’s political project began to go wrong. Its purpose was to think through the cultural issues which had begun to emerge during the New Left’s brief period of public visibility. Most historical accounts of British Cultural Studies go straight from the pioneering efforts of the New Left to the more theoretically sophisticated work of the 1970s and 1980s, much of it undertaken under the influence of continental Marxists such as Gramsci, Althusser and Brecht. The problem with this approach is that it ignores several strains of cultural Marxism which developed either outside or on the margins of the academy in the 1950s and 1960s. Among the most important of these was a Trotskyist strain of cultural criticism associated in particular with C.L.R. James. Although James had broken with Trotskyism by the time he returned to Britain from the United States in 1953, his writings on culture were indelibly marked by the preoccupations of the various Trotskyist organisations to which he had once belonged.1 Rooted in ideas that had first circulated among the ForrestJohnson faction of the American Workers’ Party, James’s understanding of popular culture was steeped in the Hegelian humanism of the early Marx. James was comparatively uninterested in the capacity of film, sport or popular music to reinforce support for bourgeois society. Instead he approached mass culture with more enthusiasm than any other Marxist critic of the day, insisting that its cardinal virtue was that it gave powerful but inchoate expression to the desire for a life untainted by alienation. James’s argument was that even the meanest products of the culture industry sometimes hold out the thrilling prospect of freedom, personal autonomy, aesthetic fulfilment and collective belonging. This vision of popular culture as a form of redemption was sketched out with particular force in the chapter entitled ‘What Is Art?’ in Beyond a Boundary (1963), James’s path-breaking book about cricket. The contest between batsman and bowler is implicitly portrayed in ‘What Is Art?’ as an allegory on the overcoming of alienated labour. Although batsman and bowler both give the impression of being involved in a highly individualized battle of wills, their identities are wholly bound up with their membership of a team. Acting on behalf of his fellows – never allowing his personal interests to

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eclipse the best interests of the side he represents – each of them tries to get the better of his opponent by using a rare blend of physical dexterity and cerebral acuity to impose his mastery on the game. Indeed, the greatest cricketers are able in their most inspired moments to achieve a state of what modernist critics like Roger Fry had called ‘significant form’ – that is, a state of such overwhelming physical elegance and integration that the spectator tends to look beyond the characteristics of a particular body towards more abstract characteristics of line, colour and movement.2 In seeking to dominate the game by putting his advanced skills at the service of his team – this at least was James’s implied point – the cricketer gestures towards an age in which a combination of advanced technology, public ownership and popular democracy enables the individual to experience creative fulfilment in his work (James 1986: 191–206). David Berry’s chapter in this book surveys James’s ideas about popular culture while also sketching in their philosophical background. Noting that James’s work on philosophy is rarely linked to his work as a cultural critic, Berry argues that the writings on popular culture were deeply informed by a profound understanding of dialectics. The gap between a book like Notes on Dialectics and a book like Beyond a Boundary was by no means as wide as many writers have assumed. According to Berry, most of James’s work from the 1940s onwards sings from the same Hegelian hymn sheet. If the 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of a Trotskyist strain of Cultural Studies, they also witnessed important developments in the cultural politics of British communism. Alarmed by the rise of consumerism and the erosion of traditional forms of working-class life, British communists spent much of the early post-war period trying to establish an alternative popular culture based on progressive values. Their vigorous campaign against the new consumerist dispensation contained two main elements. The first was an outright rejection of American mass culture, whose violent, materialistic and sexually explicit contents were regarded as symptoms of a sinister international effort to reconcile the popular mind to the ambitions of US imperialism. The second was an endearing but highly unrealistic attempt to turn folk music and other pre-industrial forms into the basis of a new culture of popular resistance. It is understandable that the work of the Communist Party’s post-war cultural spokespersons should have been largely ignored by historians of Cultural Studies. As interesting and insightful as they sometimes were, the writings of A. L. Lloyd, Sam Aaronovitch and others often seemed purblind and bigoted in their approach to contemporary popular forms. Nevertheless, it needs to be recognized that the CPGB’s cultural offensive prompted some British communists to think about the emerging consumer order in considerable depth. The central figure in this regard was the historian Eric Hobsbawm, whose neglected writings on jazz outstripped not merely Lloyd and Aaronovitch but also Williams, Hoggart and Thompson in their sensitivity to popular pleasures. In chapter 4 of this book, Philip Bounds portrays Hobsbawm’s The Jazz Scene (1959) as a key transitional text in the development of British Cultural Studies. The argument of the chapter is that The Jazz Scene adopted a curiously Janus-faced attitude towards communist cultural orthodoxy. On the one hand, still residually loyal to the CPGB, Hobsbawm retained some of the folk revivalists’ main ideas and sought to apply them to the

Introduction 7 analysis of jazz. On the other hand, exasperated by the element of dogmatic anticommercialism in the work of his contemporaries, he took a noticeably tolerant attitude towards the output of the American culture industry (Hobsbawm 1989). In so doing, he prefigured many of the ideas that began to creep into Cultural Studies in the 1970s.

The Marxist heyday There is no doubt that British Cultural Studies changed fundamentally when it fell under the influence of continental Marxism in the late 1960s. The work of such thinkers as Gramsci, Althusser and Benjamin prompted its British readers to embrace a theory of culture that was simultaneously more radical and more forbiddingly abstract than anything to be found in The Uses of Literacy or even The Long Revolution. Even so, there is perhaps a tendency for historians of Cultural Studies to overstate the novelty of the various writers, schools and trends which have emerged over the last forty years. While the influence of continental theory certainly prompted Anglo-Marxists to address a wide range of new concepts, themes and subject matters, it also encouraged them to think in unparalleled depth about themes they had already addressed. This was particularly true of the so-called Gramscian turn in Cultural Studies which occurred at the CCCS and elsewhere in the 1970s. By the time Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks became the central influence on the work of the Birmingham thinkers, British Marxists had already spent eighty years writing about the ideological complexities of capitalist culture. It was not so much Stuart Hall or Dick Hebdige as William Morris, Jack Lindsay and Eric Hobsbawm who first registered the ‘polysemic’ qualities of culture, insisting that all societies are marked by ideological tensions requiring subtle management. The great advantage of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony was that it enabled British Marxists to put their intuitions about cultural complexity on a firm theoretical footing. According to Gramsci, society’s cultural forms are every bit as contradictory as the social structures to which they refer. Different class positions necessarily give rise to different ways of looking at the world. If a ruling class wishes to win support for its dominant role in society, it cannot confine itself to making uniformly positive statements about the system over which it presides. It must also make ‘strategic concessions’ to the outlook of subordinate groups. Because exploitation and oppression are the stuff of everyday life for the vast majority of people, popular texts must acknowledge the existence of social discontent and somehow seek to defuse it. The ultimate role of culture and ideology is thus to drain popular discontent of its subversive potential, primarily by persuading people that the causes of their unhappiness can all be addressed within the confines of the prevailing system. A striking example from contemporary political discourse relates to the issue of ‘austerity’. While neoliberal spokespersons freely acknowledge that cuts in public expenditure are causing problems for working people, they simultaneously aim to forestall political anger by claiming that short-term suffering will pave the way for a massive expansion of economic opportunity once market mechanisms have been reinvigorated. In so doing they confirm Gramsci’s observation that ‘hegemony

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presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised’ (Gramsci 1976: 161). Gramsci’s ideas enabled the CCCS and its followers to conceive of popular culture as a site of ideological and political struggle. Recognizing the polysemic complexity of newspapers, television programmes, popular songs or films, the Birmingham Marxists insisted that popular texts are susceptible to a range of different interpretations. Although they are frequently ‘decoded’ in a way that reinforces the power of society’s ruling groups, they occasionally yield to more ‘negotiated’ or even ‘oppositional’ readings. This notion of cultural struggle underpinned the CCCS’s three most important achievements: first, its efforts to analyse the media according to the so-called encoding/decoding model (Hall 1980); second, its theory of youth subcultures (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979); and third, its pathbreaking attempt to explain the breakdown of the post-war consensus and the rise of the New Right (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts 1978). All these matters are examined in the very comprehensive chapter in this book by Steve Jones. Jones also examines the strange mutation of Gramscianism to which Jim McGuigan applied the term ‘cultural populism’ (McGuigan 1992). As the 1970s gave way to the Thatcherite 1980s, the cautious optimism of the Birmingham School was slowly displaced by a highly celebratory approach to popular culture. Emboldened by the idea that audiences could sometimes reject or modify the traces of bourgeois ideology in popular texts, a new generation of writers began to extol the ‘popular creativity’ which they everywhere claimed to perceive in the media cultures of the advanced capitalist world. The high priest of cultural populism was undoubtedly John Fiske, a prolific and fluent writer who began the 1980s as a lecturer at the Polytechnic of Wales and ended them in a prestigious professorial post at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Although Fiske was as much influenced by Bakhtin, de Certeau or Barthes as by Gramsci and the Birmingham School, his essential move was to take the Gramscian idea of the oppositional reading to dizzying and phantasmagoric new heights. His core argument was that society’s subordinate groups invariably seek to remake popular texts in the image of their own subversive instincts. Appalled by the culture industry’s efforts to win their support for the status quo, the ‘people’ respond with a well-nigh physical sense of loathing to the compacted elements of racism, sexism, homophobia and freemarket sophistry which weigh down popular texts. This provides them with the energy they need to indulge in ‘producerly’ forms of subversion, mentally reordering the elements of the text so that they express a progressive orientation (see, in particular, Fiske 1989). Fiske had little time for the idea that popular culture serves primarily as a form of social cement. His far more optimistic belief was that we were all now living in a ‘semiotic democracy’ (Fiske 1987: 76). Although the new attitude towards popular culture stimulated a torrent of important work, it also went some way towards tarnishing the reputation of Marxism among younger scholars in Cultural Studies. This was partly because cultural populism came to be seen as a thinly disguised species of wishful thinking. As British and American society shifted to the right with the advent of Thatcherism and Reaganism, it often seemed as if writers like Fiske, Paul Willis and Henry

Introduction 9 Jenkins were seeking to compensate for their dashed political hopes by pretending that plebeian radicalism had not so much disappeared as migrated to the sphere of culture. The standing of Marxism among scholars was also undermined by the belief that Western societies were entering a new and highly unstable phase of their cultural evolution. Originating in the early 1970s and coming to lurid fruition in the 1980s, the doctrine of postmodernism held that the age of the great Enlightenment ideologies was now drawing to a close. With their emphasis on the possibilities of universal liberation and their ‘totalising’ approach to social theory, ‘metanarratives’ such as Marxism, liberalism and Hegelianism were deemed to be out of sync with the more disenchanted and pluralistic outlook of the consumer age (Lyotard 1986). No two thinkers could agree about the characteristics of the new postmodern order, but the more optimistic among them insisted that the emerging culture would at last allow the marginalized voices of women, non-whites and LGBT people to be heard.3 The natural consequence was that Cultural Studies began to move away from a Marxist emphasis on class towards a broader focus on gender, race and sexuality.4 If Gramscianism was the most important influence on British Cultural Studies in the 1970s and 1980s, Marxists from other schools also made a striking contribution to the field. Of particular importance were the resoundingly doctrinal group of Althusserians associated with the journal Screen and the much more accessible writers who turned their minds to the political economy of culture.5 Screen theorists such as Colin MacCabe, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen were among the first British writers to show that Marxism could come to terms with emerging trends in post-structuralist thought. Influenced not merely by Althusser but also by the likes of Lacan, Derrida and Barthes, they took pains to distance themselves from the Hegelian assumptions which Althusser had famously condemned in the work of the early Marx. Capitalist society was treated in the pages of Screen not as an expressive totality but as a decentred structure governed by the laws of structural causality. Ideology was seen as a material force which not only reflected the existing relations of production but shaped the forms of subjectivity which capitalist society required. It was also seen in starkly non-Gramscian terms as a sort of emotional and intellectual prison house, imposing itself on the passive minds of the populace through the process of what Althusser called ‘interpellation’ (Althusser 1971). At the heart of Screen‘s Althusserianism was a suggestive but inflexible distinction between mainstream films of the Hollywood type and ‘counter cinema’ of the sort pioneered by Jean-Luc Godard. Invoking the idea of the ‘classic realist text’, MacCabe and Mulvey excoriated commercial films for their capacity to reconcile their viewers to the oppressive norms of capitalism and patriarchy. By contrast, they extolled the efforts of Godard and his followers to revive a Brechtian aesthetic that could provoke oppressed groups into questioning the tenets of bourgeois ideology (see, inter alia, MacCabe 1974; Mulvey 1975; see also Wollen 1972). The Screen theorists were largely uninterested in the Gramscian idea that popular texts constituted a site of ideological struggle. Instead they seemed to take it for granted that commercial films were dangerously reactionary whereas Godardian experimentalism was steeped in political virtue.

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Jason Barker’s chapter on British Althusserianism in the present book is not a general survey but a full-tilt work of historical reinterpretation. Its central argument is that many British cultural theorists have misunderstood the work of Althusser and the nature of its debt to Lacanianism. According to Barker, Althusser has been persistently misinterpreted in Britain as an exponent of structuralism and functionalism. Commentators such as Hall, Mulvey and Eagleton have grossly overstated the element of pessimism in his work, insisting that his main concern is to elucidate the way that modern society’s economic, political and cultural levels all work together to suppress contradiction and secure the rule of the bourgeoisie. By contrast, Barker argues that Althusser’s most important writings were marked by a well-nigh Maoist emphasis on contradiction and complexity. Aware of the way that different forms of economic organisation can coexist in the same social space, he drew a stark distinction between ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’ ideologies and recognized that no ideology could ever ‘resolve totally its own contradictions’. Barker seeks to substantiate his case in two ways. In the first place he skilfully reconstructs the historical context in which Althusser developed his main ideas, pointing out that Althusserianism is best conceived as a form of ‘rebel theory’ whose purpose was to undermine the French Communist Party’s most encrusted orthodoxies. His other move is to show how a misunderstanding of Althusser and Lacan distorted the arguments of Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, perhaps the single most famous essay published in Screen in the 1970s. Barker is not denying that there is much of value in the work of the Screen theorists and other British exponents of Althusserianism, but his argument is still a startling one. Perhaps, or so he avers, we have to face up to the fact that some of the most stimulating Marxist theory of the last forty years was rooted in a profound misunderstanding of the texts that allegedly inspired it. The so-called political economy approach to the analysis of the media is often seen as an alternative to Gramscianism, Althusserianism and the various other forms of Cultural Studies. In their chapter on the British contribution to the political economy approach, Vincent Mosco and Enda Brophy endorse the idea that political economy and Cultural Studies are significantly different while also drawing attention to some important areas of similarity. The early part of their chapter examines the ideas which most obviously distinguish the political economy approach from other forms of cultural Marxism. Focusing on work produced at the Universities of Leicester and Westminster in the 1970s,6 Mosco and Brophy remind us that its main purpose was to explore the impact of the media’s economic structures and internal organisation on their political, ideological and social practices. The enduring belief of writers such as Graham Murdock, Peter Golding and Nicholas Garnham was that increased ‘concentration’ of media ownership leads to a dangerous narrowing of the media’s ideological range. Transformed into unwieldy behemoths by the interlinking processes of vertical integration, horizontal integration and internationalisation, media companies of a certain size have virtually no choice but to disseminate ideas congenial to the status quo. The dominance of the big bourgeoisie invariably gives rise to the spread of bourgeois ideology.

Introduction 11 In spite of their pessimism about the mainstream media, the leading members of the political economy school gave a lot of thought to how the media culture of advanced capitalist societies could be reorganised along more democratic lines. In so doing they helped to refute the charge that Marxist Cultural Studies made no contribution to the struggle for political change. Their most important work focused on the democratic possibilities of the public sector. Writers from the political economy school have advanced countless proposals over the last forty years for harnessing the potential of publicly owned media companies and transforming them into crucibles of ideological pluralism, political participation and workers’ control. Much of this work has been influenced by the ideas of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, whose concept of ‘communicative action’ has provided British writing on media reform with a much-needed normative foundation. At various times a number of Britain’s leading radical politicians have endorsed the political economy school’s proposals for media reform (see, for instance, Benn 1982). Indeed, there was a period in the 1970s and 1980s when ideas generated by Nicholas Garnham, James Curran and others were officially adopted by the Labour Party. Apart from providing an overview of this crucial body of work on the public sector, Mosco and Brophy also draw our attention to more recent prescriptive writing from the political economy school. At a time when so many creative workers exist on the ‘precarious margins’ of the culture industry, political economists across the world are helping to identify effective modes of resistance to a savagely deregulated media landscape. Their support for the emerging forms of transnational union organisation serve as a powerful riposte to the more parochial concerns of some of their peers.

Contemporary voices Buffeted by the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’, the rise of postmodern cynicism and the sheer intellectual vitality of the new social movements, Marxism ceased to play an important role in British Cultural Studies in the early 1990s. That at least is what most writers on Cultural Studies seem to believe. But it is only necessary to take a cursory glance at the recent history of the field to realize that things are more complicated than that. No one could reasonably deny that Marxism currently exists on the margin of Cultural Studies – something that would have seemed unthinkable in the 1970s – but the fact remains that British Marxists have continued to make a significant contribution to the analysis of culture over the last twenty-five years. It would take an entire volume to map the contours of what has become a vigorous and diverse intellectual subculture. In this book the fertility of contemporary cultural Marxism is represented by David Renton’s wide-ranging survey of the work of Julian Stallabrass, Ben Watson and Mike Wayne. Perhaps the most widely read Marxist critics of their generation, Stallabrass, Watson and Wayne evince the sort of exhilarating system-building ambition which is rarely to be found in the work of their non-Marxist contemporaries. However, it can scarcely be emphasized enough that theirs are only three voices in an extraordinarily rich canon of Marxist scholarship. Many other writers will have to be

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singled out for attention when a comprehensive history of Cultural Studies since the early 1990s is finally written. One highly selective but useful way of engaging with this history is to see it as evolving through three distinct moments. The first of these moments dates from the early 1990s and was characterized by a stinging critique of the prevailing academic theories of culture. Aware that Marxism had been discredited by cultural populism and marginalized by postmodernism, a number of writers tried to shore up its defences by turning their fire on the fashionable ideologies of the day. The most influential in a crowded field were probably Jim McGuigan and Terry Eagleton, the latter just beginning his metamorphosis from literary critic into all-round cultural provocateur. In his devastating attack on cultural populism, McGuigan tried to discredit the work of people like Fiske and Willis by casting doubt on its radical credentials. His most ingenious argument was that cultural populism owed as much to the pro-market sophistries of the New Right as to the anti-capitalist tenets of the Marxist Left. While not denying that cultural populism was loosely descended from the ideas of Gramsci, Bakhtin and Barthes (among many others), he also claimed that its emphasis on active consumption paralleled the New Right’s belief in the efficiency of the free market. In positing a sort of consumer utopia in which ordinary people bent the products of the culture industry to their own ideological requirements, cultural populism betrayed a well-nigh Thatcherite faith in the capacity of the market to adapt to human needs. There was no need for the left to be embarrassed by Fiske and his acolytes because ultimately they were displaced thinkers of the right. Behind their radical façade lurked the bourgeois fundamentalism of von Mises, Hayek and Friedman (McGuigan 1992). In a similar vein, Terry Eagleton set out to puncture the prestige of postmodern culture by claiming that its reach was not quite as great as many people had feared. Many Marxists, taking their lead from the magisterial work of Fredric Jameson, thought of postmodernism as the all-pervasive ‘cultural logic’ of what they optimistically called ‘late capitalism’. Eagleton’s argument was that it could more accurately be seen as the minority culture of an embattled radical elite. According to this reading, the central themes of postmodern culture arose from the inability of the student movement to overthrow capitalism in the period of high political crisis in the late 1960s. Devastated by their failure to abolish market relations and usher in a new era of socialist plenty, the veterans of 1968 forged an anti-totalising, anti-foundationalist and anti-authoritarian culture which tacitly assumed that society could only be reformed at its margins. Postmodernism was not so much a society-wide phenomenon as a political consolation prize for embittered radicals. It was certainly regressive but the Marxist left was wrong to feel cowed by it. In the final analysis, its writ only ran as far as the naive bourgeois intellectuals who had manned the barricades at the Sorbonne or the LSE (Eagleton 1996; see also Smith 2008). The settling of scores with cultural populism and postmodernism paved the way for a minor renaissance of Marxist writing on mass culture. It is clear in retrospect that the second moment in the recent evolution of British cultural Marxism stretched from the mid-1990s to the early years of the new century. Its most

Introduction 13 stimulating products were Julian Stallabrass’s epic Gargantua (1996) and two wildly idiosyncratic books by Ben Watson: Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (1994) and Art, Class and Cleavage (1998). The thing that most obviously bound these very different writers together was an outright rejection of cultural populism. Stallabrass and Watson both sought to neutralize facile notions of semiotic democracy with a bracing injection of Adornian pessimism. Both of them regarded the culture industry as a purveyor of standardized, authoritarian and pseudo-individualising entertainments whose very ubiquity enabled them to reconcile their consumers to the status quo. Indeed, as Perry Anderson has pointed out, Gargantua was effectively a response to Fredric Jameson’s plea for an updated version of Adorno’s classic essay ‘The Culture Industry as Mass Deception’ (Anderson 1998: 122). At a time when many cultural critics were extolling the subversive potential of participatory media, Stallabrass argued that the ostensibly active role adopted by consumers of the new digital media served only to reinforce their enslavement to bourgeois ideology. Sucked into a digital universe in which the distinction between creator and audience had apparently broken down, the young people who gorged themselves on video games or immersed themselves in internet chat rooms had lost the ability to distance themselves from the hegemonic ideologies to which they were exposed. Stallabrass’s most famous version of this argument was sketched out in his virtuoso chapter on video games, which he interpreted as an idealised allegory on late capitalism’s distinctive laws of motion (Stallabrass 1996: 84–112). Although the player of a video game is encouraged to think of himself as a hero, he bears a much closer resemblance to an alienated worker on a Fordist production line. Subsumed in a hyperreal universe – his every movement dictated by the rhythm of the game – he exemplifies the way that technology comes to enslave humanity in a highly rationalized, Weberian dystopia. His progress through the electronic landscapes that fascinate him is wholly dependent on his capacity to engage in symbolic acts of exchange. There is no escaping the logic of the commodity in a world where nothing can ever be had for free. Stallabrass goes on to argue that video games often conflate space and time in a way that parallels capital’s endless quest for territorial expansion. As the player moves from one stage of the game to the next – seemingly heedless of the fact that the action is unfolding within the confines of a single screen – his influence extends across an ever-expanding virtual landscape. Indeed, some of the more violent games come close to providing rudimentary training in the military techniques by which imperialism expands across the globe. In a mordant passage which recalls the argument of Raymond Williams’s great essay ‘Distance’ (Williams 1989), Stallabrass notes that certain games require the player to simulate ferocious acts of violence but fail to represent their likely real-world consequences. Men and women are mown down by virtual machine guns but blood and severed limbs make no appearance. The result is a culture slowly becoming desensitized to the violence on which the world system depends.7 Although Ben Watson shares Stallabrass’s Adornian distrust of the culture industry, his writings tend to focus on those rare but potent moments when aesthetic texts seek to subvert mainstream culture from within. At the heart of his

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project is the attempt to define the principles of what he calls ‘Materialist Esthetix’. (The eccentric spelling of ‘esthetix’ is entirely typical of the wilfully idiosyncratic, deeply eloquent and occasionally rather self-regarding language which distinguishes Watson from his less colourful contemporaries.) As the title of his second book makes clear, Watson is especially interested in the cultural effects of ‘Cleavage’. A moment of Cleavage can be said to occur when the predictable and standardized structures of cultural texts are suddenly destabilized by an irruption of ‘repugnant’ material from the depths of the unconscious. Revelling in what he calls ‘break-outs of quotidian vulgarity’ (Watson 1998: 8), Watson celebrates those occasions on which erotic, scatological or even psychotic desires assert themselves with such force that finely crafted cultural forms can no longer contain them: Only a poetics of struggle, an aesthetics of Cleavage, is capable of appreciating that it is the moment where circulation doesn’t work that requires our hot attention. The moment when the extraneous world shut out by the crystalline semiotics of a ‘viable genre’ comes rushing in as the system implodes. These are the moments Materialist Esthetix longs for: the cleverness of Cleavage in the actual – the Sex Pistols on the Bill Grundy Show, the KLF throwing sheep’s blood at the Brit Award guests, J.H. Prynne denouncing the essayists in the De Kooning catalogue at the Tate Gallery, Iggy Pop tirading beyond camera-shot on The White Room, a Conference of Critical Musicology aghast at the idea of actually criticising anyone, Descension provoking Sonic Youth’s Forum teens to riot. This book in your hand. (Watson 1998: 14–15)8 Watson’s reasons for endorsing the aesthetics of Cleavage cannot be summarized briefly, but two of his most stimulating ideas signal his debt to the Freudo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School with particular clarity. The first is his belief that Cleavage has the potential to restore our understanding of the material foundations of cultural practices (see, for instance, Watson 1994: xiv–xv, 1998: 8–9). Tracing the evolution of attitudes towards art in the period since the Middle Ages, Watson argues that art has been obliged in secular societies to function as a sort of surrogate religion. In an age when the authority of the church is increasingly called into question, the aesthetic sphere is seen as a strictly immaterial space in which spiritual concerns can be evoked and explored. The great virtue of Cleavage is that its bracing deployment of the ‘erotic and emetic’ serves to puncture art’s spiritual pretensions and forcibly alert us to the bodily (and hence economic) roots of all culture. At the same time, the aesthetics of Cleavage are in no way complicit with a postmodern emphasis on cultural fragmentation. Its challenge to standardized forms serves not to fragment consciousness but to provoke the individual into a new awareness of social totality. Suddenly aware of the extent to which culture is governed by predictable and cohesive forms, the man or woman whose thought processes have been transfigured by the aesthetics of Cleavage strives to understand society as an interrelated but contradictory whole (Watson 1998: 20–21). Watson summarizes his case with what is certainly the drollest aphorism ever to

Introduction 15 appear in a work of British Cultural Studies: ‘When the shit hits the fan, enlightenment smiles’ (Watson 1998: 8). Stallabrass and Wayne produced their earliest books at a time when the British left was at its lowest ebb since the mid-Victorian period. The third moment in the recent evolution of British cultural Marxism has unfolded at a more politically propitious time. Although Marxism is still very much a minority trend in British politics, it has drawn sustenance over the last fifteen years from the emergence of the anti-globalisation movement, international efforts to resist imperialist intervention in the Middle East and the slow but steady growth of an anti-austerity left in the wake of the recent financial crisis. The writers who today sustain a Marxist voice in Cultural Studies are a strikingly heterogeneous bunch, united neither by doctrine nor by academic location. Their pluralism is a sign that Marxism has weathered the storms of the 1990s and now feels comfortable addressing the broad sweep of contemporary cultural history. Perhaps the easiest way to get a feel for recent trends in Marxist Cultural Studies is to examine the books included in Pluto Press’s pioneering Marxism and Culture series. Edited by Mike Wayne and Esther Leslie – two insightful prolific writers associated with the Socialist Workers Party – the books in this series throw considerable light on wider developments in the field. They are essentially of two types. The first cluster of texts employs a diverse range of Marxist approaches to provide minutely detailed readings of particular cultural phenomena. Echoing the almost obsessive pointillisme of Stallabrass and Watson, the principal volumes include Michael Roberts’s book on everyday life, edited volumes on science fiction and Marxist art history, Andy Merrifield’s spirited attempt to revive the utopian dimension of Marxism, Gregory Sholette’s study of the interrelationship between mainstream and marginal artists, Robert T. Tally’s critical account of the work of Fredric Jameson, and Frances Stracey’s revisionist history of the Situationist International (Hemingway 2006; Roberts 2006; Bould and Miéville 2009; Merrifield 2011; Sholette 2011; Stracey 2014; Tally 2014). By contrast, Mike Wayne has opted for a much broader focus and essayed nothing less than a synoptic reconstruction of the Marxist theory of the media. Wayne has developed his ideas across a number of books – some of them belonging to the Marxism and Culture series and others not – but his most stimulating text remains the early Marxism and Media Studies: Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends (2003). At the heart of the book is a highly ambitious attempt to integrate the diverse elements of media culture into a unified theory. Seeking to transcend the perceived tension between the political-economy school and Cultural Studies, Wayne examines the way that the financing, production, regulation and consumption of media texts fit together to form a circuit that is at once coherent and riven with conflict. There is no trace in Marxism and Media Studies of the deep pessimism associated with the political-economy school or the self-deluding optimism associated with cultural populism. Each element of the media circuit is portrayed as inherently contradictory, containing possibilities for the subversion of the existing order as well as its reinforcement. Wayne’s book acquires much of its distinctiveness from its efforts to update cultural theory to take account of the emergence of new media. This is particularly evident in its analysis of the impact

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of information technology on contemporary capitalism. Aiming to modernize the established categories of Marxist economics by invoking Manuel Castells’s idea of the ‘mode of development’, Wayne argues that the digitalisation of the market economy has powerfully exacerbated the tension between modern technology and what Marx might have called its ‘capitalist integument’ (Marx 1906: 837). The internet is the most immediate, geographically expansive and participatory mode of communication in the whole of human history. Its sheer interconnectedness puts it at odds with a capitalist system still mired in competition, hierarchy and mindless accumulation. The result is that the tension between the means and relations of production has now reached a point of unprecedented crisis. Far from reinforcing the rule of capital, new media make it increasingly clear that humanity can only realize the potential of modern technology by breaking decisively with market relations: The networking logic of the Internet and the World Wide Web are the product of the cumulative development of the forces of production generally and the forces of communication specifically (telephone lines, transistors, mathematics) not an accidental property of a discrete technology. This is so not only at a hardware level, but, also, indeed more so, at the cultural level of the media which are all about communication, the exchange of ideas and co-operation, values which can only be reconciled with capital if that exchange has an exchange value or if it takes place within the parameters of the company, sealed off from potential competitors. The whole development of new media technology and specifically the technology of the Internet cuts against the social relations of capital, as the Open Source movement . . . testifies. (Wayne 2003: 49) A book like Marxism and Media Studies could not have been written at a time of theoretical or political retreat. Synoptic, subtle and profoundly impatient with the theoretical cul-de-sacs of the past, it summarizes the entire Marxist tradition of media criticism while proposing a new model of how the media function in an age of capitalist globalisation. Its mere existence proves that Marxist scholars in Britain have begun to rediscover their confidence after the crippling blows of the last thirty years. It is the obvious place to start for anyone requiring proof that Marxism still has a decisive role to play in the field of Cultural Studies. Read in conjunction with an array of other texts by Wayne and his contemporaries, it establishes beyond any doubt that Marxism is once again a power in the land.

Conclusion Historical accounts of the Marxist contribution to British Cultural Studies tend to focus on a period of about twenty-five years from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s. Their guiding assumption is that this was the only period in which British cultural Marxism can truly be said to have flourished. Earlier Marxist interventions in cultural debates are usually condemned for their crudity, not least because of their perceived tendency to portray the popular audience as what Dennis Dworkin calls

Introduction 17 ‘passive dupes’ (Dworkin 1997: 172). A related assumption is that the Marxist contribution to Cultural Studies began to wane in the 1980s and has now dwindled almost to nothing. In no sense would the present book seek to deny the extraordinary achievements of the generation of Marxists who transformed Cultural Studies from the 1960s onwards. The names of such crucial figures as Williams, Hall, Mulvey, Golding, Murdock and Hebdige are as prominent in these pages as in any other history of Cultural Studies, even though several of our contributors seek to challenge the more encrusted interpretations of their work. Nevertheless, it is increasingly clear that the Marxist tradition in British Cultural Studies is much less attenuated than many people believe. Several chapters in this book pay close attention to neglected schools of Marxist analysis, some of them Trotskyist and others more specifically communist. In defiance of the view that cultural Marxism only came of theoretical age in the 1960s, it is argued that the work of pioneering thinkers like Jack Lindsay, C.L.R. James and Eric Hobsbawm frequently anticipated the concerns of the more celebrated later writers. It is also argued that British cultural Marxism has survived the traumas of the postmodern age and continues to attract thinkers of weight and significance. Our attempt to provide a fresh perspective on the history of Cultural Studies is by no means a purely antiquarian one. At a time when Marxism is re-emerging as a powerful force in the academy, it is important that the full scope of its history should be made clear. British Marxists have been at the forefront of analysing culture for well over a century. It falls to a new generation of scholar-activists to carry forward a great and living tradition.

Notes 1 There is now a large body of scholarly writing on James’s work. Among the most useful introductions to his cultural criticism are Bogues 1997; Buhle 1997; Renton 2007. 2 Strangely enough, James invoked the work of Bernhard Berenson rather than Roger Fry when discussing the idea of significant form. See James 1986: 195–196. 3 Among the torrent of guides to the development of postmodern theory, the most useful are probably Rose 1991 and Anderson 1998. 4 This is not to say that issues relating to gender, race and sexuality were a matter of indifference to Marxist and Marxisant scholars in Cultural Studies. As the new social movements became increasingly influential in the 1970s and 1980s, many British Marxists subjected the cultural dimensions of sexism, racism and homophobia to close analysis. A preliminary reading list of the most important work in this area might include Mulvey 1975; Hobson 1980, 1982; Hall 1981; McRobbie 1982; Gilroy 1987; Dyer 1977; Dyer 1992; Gilroy 1993; Shiach 1998. However, there is no doubt that Marxism has played a less important role in the analysis of gender, class and race than the various forms of post-structuralist thought. If students in Cultural Studies are now more likely to invoke the concept of discourse than that of the mode of production, it is largely because of the influence of such thinkers as Barthes, Derrida and Foucault. 5 It is, of course, a gross oversimplification to portray the Birmingham thinkers as outand-out Gramscians and the Screen theorists as out-and-out Althusserians. Apart from anything else, Althusser exerted a big influence on the Birmingham School for much

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of the 1970s. Nevertheless, it is probably fair to say that the Birmingham School owed its primary theoretical loyalty to Gramsci, whereas Screen drew more inspiration from Althusser. For stimulating assessments of Althusser’s influence on the Birmingham School, see Steve Jones’s chapter in this book and Sparks 1996. 6 The University of Westminster was known in the 1970s as the Polytechnic of Central London. 7 Stallabrass’s belief that video games desensitize their users to real-world violence sharply distinguishes him from those libertarian Marxists who have resisted the idea that the mass media promote violent attitudes. Among the most important members of the anticensorship school of British left-libertarians are Martin Barker and Julian Petley. See, inter alia, Barker 1984a,b; Barker and Petley 2001. 8 Conspicuous by his absence from this list is Watson’s beloved Frank Zappa, the subject of his astonishing first book. It seems unlikely that so sophisticated, obsessive and provocative a study of a rock musician will ever appear again – unless Watson writes it himself.

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Introduction 19 Gilroy, P. 1987. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson. Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Gramsci, A. 1976. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, S. 1980. Encoding/decoding, in Culture, Media, Language, edited by S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis. London: Hutchinson, 128–138. Hall, S. 1981. The whites of their eyes: Racist ideologies and the media, in Silver Linings: Some Strategies for the Eighties, edited by G. Bridges and R. Brunt. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 28–52. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan. Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds.) 1976. Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson. Hebdige, D. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Hemingway, A. (ed.) 2006. Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left. London: Pluto. Hobsbawm, E.J. 1989. The Jazz Scene. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hobsbawm, E.J. 2011. How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism. London: Little, Brown. Hobson, D. 1980. Housewives and the mass media, in Culture, Media, Language, edited by S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis. London: Hutchinson, 105–114. Hobson, D. 1982. Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera. London: Methuen. James, C.L.R. 1986. Beyond a Boundary. London: Stanley Paul. Jameson, F. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. New York: Cornell University Press. Lindsay, J. 1939. A Short History of Culture. London: Gollancz. Lyotard, J.F. 1986. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marx, K. 1906. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. Marx, K. and Engels, F. 1958. Manifesto of the communist party, in Selected Works in Two Volumes, Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 21–65. MacCabe, C. 1974. Realism and the cinema: Notes on some Brechtian theses. Screen, 15(2), 7–27. McGuigan, J. 1992. Cultural Populism. London: Routledge. McRobbie, A. 1982. Jackie: An ideology of adolescent femininity, in Popular Culture: Past and Present, edited by B. Waites, T. Bennett and G. Martin. London: Croom Helm, 262–283. Merrifield, A. 2011. Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination. London: Pluto. Morris, W. 1968. Selected Writings and Designs, edited by A. Briggs. Harmondsworth: Pelican. Mulhern, F. 2009. Culture and society, then and now. New Left Review, 55, 31–45. Mulvey, L. 1975. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18. Paananen, V.N. (ed.) 2000. British Marxist Criticism. New York: Garland Publishing. Renton, D. 2007. C.L.R. James: Cricket’s Philosopher King. London: Haus. Roberts, M. 2006. Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory. London: Pluto.

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Rose, M. 1991. The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial: A Critical Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shiach, M. 1998. Feminism and popular culture, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, second edition, edited by J. Storey. London: Prentice Hall, 333–341. Sholette, R. 2011. Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. London: Pluto. Smith, J. 2008. Terry Eagleton. Oxford: Polity. Sparks, C. 1996. Stuart Hall, cultural studies and Marxism, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by D. Morley and K. Chen. London: Routledge, 71–102. Stallabrass, J. 1996. Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture. London: Verso. Storey, J. 2003. Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Stracey, F. 2014. Constructed Situations: A New History of the Situationist International. London: Pluto. Tally, R. 2014. Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism. London: Pluto. Thompson, E.P. 1968. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Pelican. Turner, G. 1990. British Cultural Studies: An Introduction. London: Unwin Hyman. Watson, B. 1994. Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. London: Quartet. Watson, B. 1998. Art, Class and Cleavage: Quantulumcunque Concerning Materialist Esthetix. London: Quartet. Wayne, M. 2003. Marxism and Media Studies: Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends. London: Pluto. Williams, R. 1966. Communications. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Williams, R. 1979. Culture and Society 1780–1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Williams, R. 1984. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Williams, R. 1989. Distance, in Raymond Williams on Television, edited by A O’Connor. London: Routledge, 13–21. Wollen, P. 1972. Godard and counter-cinema: Vent d’Est. Afterimage, 4, 6–17.

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Science, art and dissent Jack Lindsay and the communist theory of culture Philip Bounds

Opinions differ as to which writers should be included in any historical survey of British Cultural Studies. Many people still believe that Cultural Studies in Britain only really got underway in the late 1950s with the work of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams. Others argue that the tradition began much earlier – perhaps with the work of Eliot, Leavis and Richards in the inter-war period or with the prophetic writings of Ruskin and Morris in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, one of the most stimulating characteristics of recent work on the history of Cultural Studies is that it often identifies ‘neglected’ figures from the past who have been unjustly excluded from the subject’s hall of fame. Scarcely a year goes by without historians identifying a crop of new writers – some well known in other fields, others utterly obscure – whose insights into culture make it necessary to expand our sense of what Cultural Studies has been and where it is going. Over the last few years a number of scholars have argued that British communism played a much bigger role in the development of Cultural Studies than most people realize. The most persuasive exponent of this line is probably Francis Mulhern, whose essay ‘Culture and Society, Then and Now’ (2009) seeks to reshape our understanding of the early work of Raymond Williams. Rejecting the idea that books such as Culture and Society and The Long Revolution should essentially be seen as examples of ‘Left Leavisism’, Mulhern insists that it was writers associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who exerted by far the biggest influence on Williams’s early work. In no sense is he suggesting that Williams simply imported communist ideas into Cultural Studies in a slavish or uncritical fashion. His point is that Williams forged a new style of cultural criticism by entering into a sustained dialogue with communist orthodoxy, refurbishing some of its central precepts while rejecting others. The passage in which he initially floats this idea is so important that it deserves to be quoted at length: The book’s most telling associations, its formative associations, were with the Communist Party. This was something already fading from wider recognition by the middle 1950s, as Atlanticism consolidated its hold. With the adoption and re-narration of Culture and Society by the early New Left, it became hard to imagine. The cultural vision corresponding to the Communist Party’s new political programme, The British Road to Socialism, was a

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A comprehensive examination of the influence of British communism on Cultural Studies would be a major intellectual undertaking, not least because the CPGB’s impact on British cultural debates did not end in the 1950s. There were various occasions in the subsequent three decades when British communists either anticipated or played a major role in formulating the most important trends in cultural analysis. The purpose of the present chapter is a relatively modest one. Prompted in part by Mulhern’s recognition of the importance of the Anglo-Australian communist Jack Lindsay (1901–1990), I attempt to outline the main principles underpinning the extraordinary theory of culture which formed the basis of Lindsay’s gargantuan literary output. There are two reasons in particular why Lindsay’s work singles itself out for examination. The first is that it is highly representative of communist cultural thinking in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Although Lindsay was not the best known or most widely read communist critic of the age, his work gives peculiarly vivid expression to the CPGB’s most important cultural shibboleths in the period between the rise of Hitler and the onset of the Cold War. It thus embodies in capsule form the sort of intellectual culture in which Williams and other pioneers of Cultural Studies cut their teeth. The other main reason for engaging with it is that it still stands up in its own right. Totalising, polymathic and suggestive – traversing continents and historical epochs with enviable ease – Lindsay’s theory of culture sometimes makes the work of Eliot, Leavis and other contemporaries seem drab and unambitious by comparison. There is a sense in which Lindsay has been a victim of his own productivity. The author of more than 150 books as well as hundreds of articles, he wrote so much that his contemporaries tended to ignore his work rather than engage with it. It was only towards the end of his life that a handful of scholars began to recognize him for what he was: one of the most important members of the talented generation of literary intellectuals associated with the CPGB in the 1930s.1 The current scholarly consensus, exemplified by the writings of Joel R. Brouwer and Victor N. Paananen, holds that the most significant aspect of Lindsay’s work is his attempt to theorize culture as a form of ‘productive activity’ (Brouwer 1994; Paananen 2000: 51–100).

Jack Lindsay’s theory of culture 23 Impatient with the crude Marxist habit of segregating the economic ‘base’ from the ideological ‘superstructure’, Lindsay allegedly anticipates the theoretical breakthroughs of the 1970s by showing how cultural activity not only ‘reflects’ economic production but also plays a direct role in pushing it forward. It is this which makes him what Paananen has called ‘the major British Marxist thinker between [Christopher] Caudwell and [Raymond] Williams’ (Paananen 2000: 56). This chapter focuses on Lindsay’s cultural writings in the nine years between his conversion to Marxism in 1936 and the end of the Second World War in 1945.2 Nearly all the most important ideas of his maturity received their initial formulation at this time. Its aim is to build on the pioneering efforts of Paananen, Brouwer and others by providing a detailed examination of the origins of Lindsay’s theory of culture. Its main argument is that the theoretical system for which Lindsay is currently best known was actually a drastic condensation of a much more ambitious (and in many respects much more impressive) theory of culture first formulated in the overlooked text A Short History of Culture in 1939.3 In effect, Lindsay disseminated his ideas about culture in two distinct but related versions. The first version encompassed the entire history of human society and was rooted in a complex argument about the nature of primitive communism. The second version extracted a number of simple ideas from the first version and reformulated them in language that owed a clear debt to the wider critical movements of the day. Moreover, Lindsay’s ideas were heavily influenced by contemporary trends in British communist ideology – something that has not always been recognized in the scholarly literature, which tends to portray him as a sort of isolated pioneer. Quite apart from drawing on the theoretical insights of some of the major communist thinkers of the day, Lindsay was deeply affected by the CPGB’s cultural policy in the second half of the 1930s and much of his work can be seen as a response to it. Any attempt to understand his theory of culture must relate it to this wider intellectual and political context, even if this means acknowledging that not all his ideas are necessarily as original as they seem.

Culture and the Popular Front Jack Lindsay announced his conversion to Marxism in 1936, nearly ten years after establishing a minor role for himself in British cultural life as a critic and historian of Nietzschean persuasion.4 Although he delayed joining the CPGB until 1941, he immediately began contributing to Left Review and was soon regarded as an authoritative exponent of communist cultural doctrine. The single biggest influence on his work in the three or four years before the outbreak of the Second World War was the so-called Popular Front strategy. First adopted by the Communist International or ‘Comintern’ at its Seventh Congress in Moscow in 1935, the Popular Front strategy broke decisively with the highly sectarian policies which communists had pursued in the first half of the 1930s. Its cardinal principle was that the world communist movement should resist the rise of fascism by entering into alliances not merely with other forces on the left but also with liberals, progressive conservatives and anyone else who had an interest in defending

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democratic politics. In a highly influential address to the Seventh Congress entitled ‘The Working Class against Fascism’, the Comintern’s president, Georgi Dimitrov, insisted that fascism had to be defeated in the sphere of culture as well as the sphere of politics. His argument was that fascist organisations in Europe and elsewhere had gained an advantage over the left by portraying themselves as the sole legitimate inheritors of their respective national traditions. For example, Mussolini had won the support of ordinary Italians by claiming the mantle of Garibaldi, while the French fascists continually identified themselves with Joan of Arc. The only option for the communists was to try to outflank the fascists by launching a sort of parallel project from the left, or so Dimitrov claimed. Instead of allowing the likes of Hitler, Mussolini or Pilsudski to bend symbols of national identity to their own advantage, communists should try to show that the historical instincts of ordinary people had always had more in common with the politics of the radical left than with those of the authoritarian right. The best way of doing this was to draw public attention to the entrenched traditions of popular radicalism in every major country in the world. Moreover, in order to strengthen their reputation as defenders of democracy, communists should emphasize the crucial role of popular radicalism in establishing such things as free elections, freedom of speech and the rule of law. Communists who do nothing to enlighten the masses on the past of their people . . . voluntarily hand over to the fascist falsifiers all that is valuable in the historical past of the nation. . . . The proletariat of all countries has shed much of its blood to win bourgeois-democratic liberties, and will naturally fight with all its strength to retain them. (Dimitrov 1935: 70/98–99) Dimitrov’s speech had a dramatic impact on the British communists.5 The last few years of the 1930s witnessed an outpouring of work on what was usually called the ‘English radical tradition’, some of it concerned with the history of plebeian revolt and some of it with the work of anti-establishment writers, thinkers and artists. Important monographs on Bunyan, Dickens and William Morris accompanied a flurry of lengthy essays in Left Review and a flood of shorter articles in the Daily Worker.6 The role of Jack Lindsay in this collective effort to reshape public understanding of British history was especially important. Along with the poet and essayist Edgell Rickword, with whom he edited the seminal anthology Volunteers for Liberty (1939),7 Lindsay did more than anyone else to define the general principles by which the history of the English radical tradition was interpreted. His efforts in this regard culminated just before the outbreak of the war with the publication of a sixty-page pamphlet entitled England, My England (1939a). Written in an openly propagandistic style, England, My England sketches the history of plebeian radicalism in Britain from the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 through to the founding of the CPGB in 1920. All the movements it examined are held to have a few important features in common. The first is that their ultimate goal was the establishment of communism – something which Lindsay sums up epigrammatically with his claim that ‘Communism is English’ (Lindsay 1939a: 64).

Jack Lindsay’s theory of culture 25 While Lindsay acknowledges that movements such as the Levellers, the Diggers and the Chartists were spurred into action by a range of historical injustices, he insists that their favoured solution to poverty, oppression and cultural deprivation was the institution of a classless society based on the common ownership of the means of production. This thesis is linked to an equally startling claim about the historical effects of plebeian revolt. Echoing Dimitrov’s point about the origins of ‘bourgeois-democratic liberties’, Lindsay admits that the English people had failed to establish communism but argues that the long-term result of their efforts was the emergence of political democracy. Contrary to what the purveyors of the so-called Whig interpretation of history might have said, Britain’s parliamentary system had not been created by feudal or bourgeois elites. The sole responsibility for its existence lay with the labouring masses, who knew instinctively that they could only advance the cause of communism by first securing such elementary safeguards against tyranny as free elections, the rule of law and the right to free speech. Many people believed that the CPGB could not entirely be trusted in its new role of defending parliamentary democracy against fascism. When Lindsay ascribed the very existence of ‘English freedom’ to the enduring tradition of popular revolt, he was trying to prove that their anxieties were misplaced. If Lindsay’s basic arguments about popular radicalism are gross oversimplifications of a sort which no modern historian would endorse, England, My England also contains some slightly more sophisticated ideas. The most interesting of these concerns the role of ideology in history. Although Lindsay is careful to identify the material causes that had provoked ordinary people into rising up against their rulers, he seems inclined to explain their adherence to communist principles in terms of their response to ideas. His implicit point is that the masses had sustained their communist faith by reading society’s dominant ideas against the grain. A range of belief systems had been used over the centuries to inculcate support for the status quo, but each of them (or so Lindsay appears to believe) contained ambiguities that allowed radical thinkers to inflect them to the left. The most obvious example was Christianity. Although the British elite had persistently justified the miseries of class society by invoking the hierarchical dimensions of Christian thinking, the scriptures contained enough egalitarian sentiment to be readily susceptible to a more radical reading. As Lindsay pointed out, John Ball had skilfully co-opted Christianity’s main creation myth at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt by posing the legendary question ‘Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve?’ (quoted in Lindsay 1939a: 10). Subsequent English radicals drew attention to Christ’s contempt for the Roman elite and his love of the common people. It is this emphasis on what cultural theorists would call the ‘polysemic’ nature of ideology – an emphasis shared by many other communist writers in the 1930s – that has prompted certain commentators to detect a quasi-Gramscian strain in the CPGB’s brand of cultural Marxism. England, My England provides a rare example of Lindsay functioning more as a propagandist than as a serious scholar. While its simplistic vision of the history of English radicalism was widely shared by communists in the 1930s, there were a number of writers who tried to approach the subject from a more nuanced

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perspective. T. A. Jackson, Alick West and A. L. Morton were among those who challenged the assumption that popular revolt had always and everywhere been associated with a desire for communism. However, the most sophisticated and questioning response to Popular Front orthodoxy was probably that of Lindsay himself. As early as 1937, in a fine book on John Bunyan which succeeded in raising the ire of F. R. Leavis,8 Lindsay casts doubt on the idea that dominant ideologies can be bent to radical purposes as easily as he implied elsewhere. Drawing in particular on Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding (1666), Lindsay portrays Bunyan as a man of deep radical instincts whose interpretation of Christianity allowed him to attack emergent capitalism while at the same time reconciling himself to its existence. Under no doubt that Christianity was basically a communist religion, Bunyan nevertheless believed that it was impossible to build an egalitarian society in the here and now. This led him to posit an absolute distinction between what he termed the sphere of ‘Grace’ and the sphere of ‘Law’. Whereas believers could expect to enjoy an egalitarian paradise once they entered the Kingdom of Heaven, or so Bunyan allegedly believed, they had no choice but to tolerate the injustices of capitalism in their earthly lives. Indeed, Lindsay goes so far as to categorize books like Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and The Life and Death of Mr Badman (1680) as manuals of petit-bourgeois morality. In spite of what the communists had said about the militant instincts of the English people, it was evidently possible for a man like Bunyan to cherish the communist ideal with one part of his mind while working to legitimize the rule of Mammon with the other. Having registered his first doubts about an orthodoxy he had done much to create, Lindsay now went on to subject the main cultural principles of the Popular Front to a fully fledged theoretical analysis. As we shall see in the next section, the result was one of the most remarkable books ever produced by a British communist.

Lindsay’s theory of culture: version one Most of the communist intellectuals who wrote about the English radical tradition took a historical and empirical approach to the subject, seeking to substantiate the claim that Britain’s most famous plebeian movements (as well as the writers and thinkers who followed in their wake) had been motivated by communist sympathies. The only British writer who addressed the theoretical implications of Dimitrov’s position on popular radicalism was Jack Lindsay. After sketching the history of plebeian revolt in works such as England, My England, Lindsay set out to examine a range of issues which his contemporaries preferred to elide. Why exactly had ordinary people first acquired a communist outlook? How was this outlook expressed in their cultural forms? In what way did popular culture come to exert an influence on elite culture? Lindsay first wrestled with these questions in his monumentally ambitious A Short History of Culture (1939b), perhaps the most important book he ever wrote.9 Starting in the Stone Age and tracing the story forward to the birth of literary modernism, Lindsay takes fewer than 400 pages to adumbrate a total theory of culture which applies not merely to the West but to the rest of the world as well. His essential argument is compellingly simple but worked

Jack Lindsay’s theory of culture 27 out with considerable attention to detail. Since the dawn of class society, or so it is claimed, the common people have sustained an egalitarian culture by drawing on folk memories of the age of primitive communism. Whether or not its origins are fully understood, the popular culture of all civilised nations has its roots in the classless societies of prehistory. At the core of A Short History of Culture is a startlingly counterintuitive argument about the nature of primitive communism.10 Rejecting the assumption that primitive societies were mired in scientific ignorance, Lindsay insists that their defining characteristic was a desire to boost their productive capacities through the sustained investigation of the natural world. The peoples of the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and early Neolithic periods were by no means as helpless, intellectually unsophisticated or superstitious as we now tend to suppose. Their signal contribution to human history was the development of a broadly ‘scientific’ outlook which enabled them to make great strides in understanding and controlling nature.11 Moreover, their scientific achievements were largely a consequence of the egalitarian structure of the societies in which they lived. Because primitive societies were simultaneously classless and organised along democratic lines (a claim which Lindsay takes for granted and never seeks to prove), they were permeated by a deep sense of unity which gave them the resolve they needed to confront nature creatively. In the single most resonant sentence in his book, Lindsay summarizes his belief that the scientific mentality has its roots in prehistory by asserting that the ‘creative bases of civilisation were laid by communal efforts’ (Lindsay 1939b: 98). Lindsay’s argument about the scientific orientation of primitive societies encompasses three related claims. The first is that primitive men and women conceived many of the general ideas about the natural world which have since proved crucial to the scientific project. The most fundamental of these were the linked concepts of causation and the uniformity of nature. According to Lindsay, the assumption that events in the natural world have identifiable causes of a broadly uniform kind first emerged when human beings began to use tools. As soon as our Palaeolithic ancestors were able to effect qualitative changes in the physical world by performing ‘purposive act[s]’ with sticks and stones (as opposed to simply taking advantage of what the surface of the earth provided without human intervention), they were able to grasp the idea that particular acts give rise to predictable consequences: ‘The point of contact with the world in work, in the making and using of tools, was the focusing point of mind from which conscious reasoning was born’ (Lindsay 1939b: 24). Their nascent sense of the uniformity of nature was powerfully reinforced by the prevailing forms of collective consciousness. Possessed of a deep and enduring sense of social cohesion because of the egalitarian structures of the societies in which they lived, the earliest toolmakers unconsciously projected their own feelings of unity onto nature as a whole. It is therefore quite wrong to trace modern ideas of causality to the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. They actually began to emerge more than 200,000 years earlier when society had yet to be tainted by inequality.12 Lindsay’s second claim about the links between primitive communism and scientific activity is a more specifically cultural one. Having argued that Palaeolithic

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societies gave birth to many of science’s founding concepts, he now insists that the main goal of their artistic and expressive forms was to enhance economic efficiency. Although humanity’s earliest experiments with music, verse and painting were dominated by religious or magical imagery, their deeper purpose was to inspire people into executing their productive tasks as effectively as possible. Lindsay pays particular attention to early styles of dancing, which he appears to regard as primitive communism’s most important cultural form and the ‘prototype of all art’ (Lindsay 1939b: 41). At the heart of his argument is an analysis of the role of rhythm in economic and aesthetic activity. Since human beings have always (contra Rousseau) pursued economic goals collectively, they are endowed with a profound sense of the need to co-ordinate their activities as closely as possible. The distinctive feature of dancing is that its rhythmic conventions boost human co-ordination to a level impossible to achieve in everyday life. When primitive men and women joined together to dance in intricate patterns, they participated in an idealised representation of productive activity which augmented both their sense of community and their feelings of mastery over themselves. This enabled them to return to their real economic activities with renewed feelings of energy and purpose: Hence there awoke in man a delight in rhythm for its own sake as an expression of his growing mastery of self and the world. The dance arose as the rhythmic miming of activities felt to be productively significant. . . . By miming the processes calculated to produce plenty and fertility, men felt that they were exercising control of the hidden sources of life. (Lindsay 1939b: 27) Echoing the famous anthropological passages in the work of his great contemporary Christopher Caudwell,13 Lindsay argues that primitive art forms fulfilled an important economic function in spite of being misunderstood by the people who created them. The men and women who participated in primitive dance rituals tended to interpret them in naively magical terms. They believed that merely by imitating economic activity in an aesthetically heightened form they could exercise a direct mental influence over their environment. However, these magical illusions in no way deprived their dancing of its economic significance. In a dramatic illustration of the tendency of consciousness to lag behind social being, its capacity to inspire and energize the primitive community operated quite independently of the metaphysical absurdities by which it was hedged about. The idea that primitive society’s cultural and artistic forms subserved an economic function was by no means new. As we shall see, Lindsay invokes the work of a number of anthropologists, historians and Marxist thinkers in support of his argument. Where A Short History of Culture is more original is in its insistence that primitive art forms occasionally served not merely to energize economic activity but to open up the possibility of new scientific discoveries. Lindsay ascribes particular importance to the role of the communal dance in shaping the founding principles of geometry, especially the world-changing realization that an

Jack Lindsay’s theory of culture 29 understanding of circular motion provided the basis for ‘the forms of technical advance’ (Lindsay 1939b: 78). The argument at this point is extremely compressed and sketches a complex relationship between humanity’s biological, cultural and economic experience. Lindsay’s starting point is the assumption that circular forms have always occupied a privileged place in human consciousness because of their predominance in the so-called ‘birth memory’. Women who undergo the trauma of giving birth (as well as the men who witness them giving birth) are haunted by an image of the womb’s ‘revolving movement’ and the role it plays in the reproduction of the species. Their abiding sense of the significance of circles was initially expressed in the communal dance, which often ‘use[d] the circle or the turn-about as expression of a new-life’ (Lindsay 1939b: 78). It was only through objectifying them in their cultural practices that men and women gained enough emotional distance from circular forms to appreciate their importance in understanding the natural world. After that it was only a matter of time before the invention of the beehive hut, the wheel and other epoch-making economic breakthroughs: ‘Thousands of years of communal dancing lay behind the achieved power to project, first in drawings, and then in technical invention, the structural bases of line and curve’ (Lindsay 1939b: 80). This was a case not of culture imitating science but of science taking its lead from culture. There can scarcely be a more powerful example of the superstructure ‘reacting back’ on the base in the entire history of Marxist criticism. A Short History of Culture‘s third argument about the role of science under primitive communism pertains to the sphere of ideology. Implicitly rejecting the idea that primitive belief systems served merely to legitimize the existing forms of social organisation, Lindsay insists that their more fundamental purpose was to facilitate productive activity by resolving – or appearing to resolve – the ethical problems arising from it. He illustrates this line of reasoning in an early chapter on the ideology of totemism, which (as he points out) achieved its ‘purest’ expression ‘among the North American Indians and the Australian aboriginals’ (Lindsay 1939b: 55). Drawing heavily on the writings of Sir James Fraser, Lindsay argues that totemism was essentially a response to the pervasive sense of anxiety engendered by primitive animism. Because primitive communities believed that nature was suffused by spiritual forces, they were terrified by the prospect that their consumption of natural resources would lead to condign punishment. Merely to eat a fish or a plant was to risk provoking nature into taking its revenge. The totemic answer to the problem – a problem which threatened the very foundations of economic activity – was to propitiate hostile spiritual forces by singling out a particular aspect of the natural world for special treatment. By prescribing a worshipful attitude towards a certain type of plant, animal or fish (and by imposing a strict ban on its consumption), primitive communities furnished themselves with a ‘moral alibi’ which enabled them to pursue their wider productive tasks with a clear conscience. Other ideologies from the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic periods played a similarly constructive role.14 However misguided their understanding of the universe might have been, the ideas which circulated under primitive communism had one thing in common. Their goal was to unleash humanity’s economic potential.

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Lindsay’s portrait of the classless societies of prehistory extends over nearly a hundred pages. At the end of it we are left in no doubt that he sees primitive communism as a unified, egalitarian and intellectually fertile social formation whose primary concern was the accumulation of scientific knowledge. The rest of his book explores developments in human culture in the thousands of years since the emergence of classes. Whereas Engels famously described the dissolution of primitive communism as a ‘world-historic defeat of the female sex’ (Engels 2004: 67), Lindsay understands it in even more resoundingly apocalyptic terms. His central argument is that the emergence of classes delivered a grave but not fatal blow to the spirit of scientific enquiry. By virtue of their egalitarian structures, primitive societies were sufficiently unified to take the battle against nature in their stride. The problem with slave-owning, feudal and capitalist societies is that their class divisions make them too fissiparous to continue the battle effectively. But this is not to say that the urge to investigate, understand and control nature disappears altogether once prehistory draws to an end. What tends to happen in hierarchical societies is that attitudes towards science bifurcate along lines of class. In stark defiance of Marxist orthodoxy, Lindsay argues that ruling classes in all parts of the world have usually been indifferent and sometimes actively hostile to scientific endeavour. Cushioned by privilege and naturally suspicious of change, those who live off the labour of others have no desire to risk social instability by encouraging the development of new forms of knowledge. It is only among the plebeian and intermediate classes that enthusiasm for science has really survived, or so Lindsay insists. Since the culture of ordinary people has always retained some of its original unity – and since many of their artistic forms are descended from the rhythmically dynamic and outward-looking forms of prehistory – it has generally been slaves, peasants and industrial workers who have nurtured humanity’s Promethean instincts most assiduously. The wretched of the earth have proved better guardians of material culture than the great and the good: As soon as society divides into classes there cannot be a free movement between mass-impulsion and individual creativeness. . . . Roughly, there are two major tendencies. The masses drawn together in productive union move towards the creation of centres of new life, new dynamics of form. The ruling or possessing class tend to obstruct this movement, since what they want is not the new creative quality but the indefinite multiplication of quantities. (Lindsay 1939b: 188–189) It is at this stage of the argument that the relevance of A Short History of Culture to the concerns of the Popular Front is thrown into vivid relief. Having extolled the subaltern classes for their stubborn commitment to the scientific enterprise, Lindsay goes on to explore the wider cultural consequences of the disappearance of primitive communism. As soon as class societies came into existence, ordinary people responded to the experience of economic, cultural and ideological domination by cultivating a pervasive spirit of radical protest. Appalled by the decline of the scientific outlook and the existential traumas associated with inequality, the heirs of the

Jack Lindsay’s theory of culture 31 primitive tribes incorporated their hatred of the ruling class and their yearning for the re-establishment of communism into a culture that eventually spanned the globe. In spite of brutal attempts to suppress it this culture still exists. The scope of Lindsay’s argument is breathtaking in its inclusiveness. His book tends to portray every important cultural, religious or intellectual development in the last 5000 years as a howl of protest against the status quo. It is not merely Christianity that has its roots in the desire to sustain the communist ideal. The same can be said of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. Moreover, the radical instincts of the masses have generally expressed themselves with a surprising degree of aesthetic continuity. In a series of brief but brilliantly schematic chapters, starting with ‘All in a Maze’ and culminating thirty pages later in ‘Resurrection’, Lindsay argues that the dominant motifs of popular culture can all be traced back to the earliest days of class society (Lindsay 1939b: 121–122). From about 3000 BC onwards the masses developed a series of images, archetypes and myths which served as a sort of shorthand for their communist beliefs and underscored all subsequent forms of cultural expression. Popular culture has changed superficially over the centuries but images of mazes, culture heroes, sudden transformations, reversals and resurrections are still at its heart. One example of this plebeian image-making is likely to seem especially significant to anyone familiar with contemporary developments in Cultural Studies. In a chapter entitled ‘Reversals’, Lindsay describes the emergence of what we would now call ‘carnivalesque’ forms of culture (Lindsay 1939b: 140–141). His account of the politics of carnival is scarcely as wide-ranging or as sophisticated as those of Bakhtin, Lefebvre or Debord (to name just three of the cultural theorists with whom the concept is now associated), but it does raise a number of similar points. Taking the Roman Saturnalia and the Greek Kronia as his main examples, Lindsay argues that carnival usually combines the inversion of class hierarchies with a nostalgic and unashamedly utopian invocation of the communist past.15 Overseen by gods like Kronos and Saturn who represented the ‘clan-leadership of days when there was perfect equality’ (Lindsay 1939b: 140), the carnivals of the ancient world briefly suspended the laws of everyday life and enabled the oppressed to exercise symbolic power over the ruling class. Slaves, peasants and other members of the dispossessed indulged their most orgiastic appetites while kings, slave-owners and aristocrats did their bidding. This spectacle of hierarchies overturned and sumptuary needs fulfilled was invariably linked to the ‘Golden Age’ before the rise of classes, though Lindsay makes it clear that carnival’s vision of primitive communism was a heavily exaggerated one: ‘They [i.e. carnivals] always attribute to the lost communal days a glorious state of plenty and delight. That is, they invest the lost social relationships . . . with possibilities of productive control which are in fact emerging from the class-struggle of their own day’ (Lindsay 1939b: 140). In a tantalisingly brief passage which says as much about the present day as it does about the 1930s, Lindsay implies that in capitalist society the carnivalesque spirit receives its most powerful expression in the area of sport. Desperate to end inequality but not knowing how to go about doing it, the masses derive ‘immense emotional relief’ from watching talented sportsmen who owe their pre-eminence solely to their own efforts (Lindsay 1939b: 141).

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The last important component of A Short History of Culture is a theory about the nature and provenance of high culture – that is, the body of work in science and the arts that contains what Matthew Arnold famously called ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’ (Arnold 1993: 190). Lindsay’s argument is based on a stark contrast between plebeian culture and the culture of the upper classes. Having praised the former for its devotion to science and its indomitable spirit of revolt, Lindsay goes on to condemn the latter for its indifference to science and its spiritual frigidity: ‘We find a ruling class with a culture devoid of any human depth or dramatic structure, asking at most the flat elaboration of a set tradition’ (Lindsay 1939b: 377). In no sense can high culture be regarded as the property of those who possess economic power. Contrary to what the likes of T. S. Eliot or Ortega y Gasset might have said, it is simply not true that the greatest works of art or the most important scientific discoveries have been produced in the upper reaches of society. The real source of progress in high culture lies further down the social scale, not so much in the efforts of the plebeian classes (whose members are too busy working to engage in artistic activity or scientific research) but in those comparatively rare moments when intermediate strata find themselves galvanized by popular culture. In periods when the influence of labouring men and women is at its most pronounced (chiefly though not exclusively at times of intensified class struggle), it is common for the ‘middling sort of people’ to be inspired by their example into pursuing new heights of cultural achievement. Affluent enough to devote themselves to science, art or thought but free from the soul-destroying influence of the upper classes, intellectual workers associated with the ‘traders, organisers, industrialists [and] small-producers’ break new cultural ground by drawing on the active, outward-looking and communitarian ethos of the class immediately below them. All the most important developments in art, thought or science can thus be ascribed in the last instance (to use an Althusserian phrase) to the influence of the class struggle. Slaves, peasants and workers have not been directly responsible for creating high culture, but the greatest artists, scientists and thinkers have been suffused by their spirit. Lindsay illustrates his theory of high culture on successive occasions in the last 250 pages of his book, though rarely in much detail. His most highly developed example is the work of William Shakespeare, which he examines in two comparatively lengthy chapters.16 Drawing on the writings of the Soviet critic A. A. Smirnov and the English communist T. A. Jackson,17 Lindsay portrays Shakespeare as a representative of the so-called ‘burgess’ class in the period of emergent capitalism. In the ‘optimistic’ phase of his career, roughly between 1593 and the early years of the seventeenth century, his plays voiced their support for the established (though also unstable) alliance between the burgess class and the absolutist state. Anxious that the rise of capitalism would weaken social cohesion, Shakespeare tried to show that the forces of economic individualism could be harnessed for progressive purposes by the communitarian energies of Elizabethan statecraft. There is an especially vivid exploration of this theme in Romeo and Juliet, whose title characters embody the new ideal of personal liberty while retaining the sense of mutual obligation on which any social order necessarily depends. Nevertheless,

Jack Lindsay’s theory of culture 33 in spite of his reverence for the Elizabethan state, Shakespeare could only imbue his early plays with the requisite sense of unity by drawing on the energies of popular consciousness. In Lindsay’s opinion, the plays of the 1590s are riddled with allusions to the archetypal themes of folk culture. Romeo and Juliet makes copious use of maze imagery. Love’s Labour’s Lost, Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It employ the archetype of the fool to perform a series of carnivalesque inversions. The paradox is an intriguing one: in order to create an art that could advance the interests of the bourgeoisie, Shakespeare had to assimilate the influence of popular forms whose essential characteristic was a yearning for communism. In so doing he exemplified something that is true of all great art in the age of class inequality: ‘[T]here is an objectivity of vision in all great poets or artists which makes them something more, in class-society, than the mouthpiece of the dominant class, even when that class is doing essential work in developing productivity. By responding to the constructive side of the class-activity, they respond essentially to the mass basis’ (Lindsay 1939b: 314).

The influence of British communism Primitive societies were organised along communist lines and oriented towards the accumulation of scientific knowledge. The emergence of classes shattered the ‘emotional unity’ of society, creating a situation in which the plebeian classes remained enthusiastic about scientific advance while the governing classes became indifferent to it. Ordinary people responded to the breakdown of primitive communism by creating a culture of radical protest. High culture has never been the exclusive property of the ruling classes but tends only to flourish when the members of intermediate groups fall under the influence of popular consciousness. Taken together, these four propositions are the basis on which Lindsay’s theory of culture rests. The theory as a whole is so original – and based on such an encyclopaedic knowledge of cultural history – that it is tempting to regard Lindsay as its only begetter. In fact, A Short History of Culture was powerfully influenced by many of the dominant intellectual trends in the communist circles in which its author had begun to move. The way that Lindsay responded to those influences tells us a great deal not only about his understanding of communist ideas but also about his willingness to modify or question them when he thought it necessary. It also reminds us that the recent tendency to portray him as a sort of isolated pioneer has perhaps been overplayed. As we have seen, Lindsay’s theory of culture grew out of his engagement with the cultural politics of the Popular Front. Unlike the majority of his Marxist contemporaries, Lindsay wanted to provide a theoretical explanation for the claim that the plebeian classes in Britain and elsewhere had long harboured communist sympathies. However, A Short History of Culture can also be read as a defence of the Popular Front against one of the criticisms to which it was most frequently exposed. In the 1930s it was common for left-wing opponents of the world communist movement to equate the Popular Front with a wholesale abandonment of class politics. According to Leon Trotsky, the most forceful Marxist critic of

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the strategy enunciated at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, it would not be possible to construct an anti-fascist alliance between the working class and the ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie without the ‘substitution of class collaboration for class struggle’ (Trotsky 1935).18 Anti-fascists from the upper echelons of society would never collaborate with working people unless the trade unions and socialist parties played down their opposition to capitalism. There is some evidence that individual communists entertained similar doubts about the consequences of their new strategy, though most of them remained loyal to the party line in public.19 Looked at from one angle, the interesting thing about A Short History of Culture is that it seems to provide an implicit riposte to these Trotskyist anxieties. When Lindsay describes high culture as the consequence of intermediate strata falling under the influence of popular culture, he is not simply showing that cross-class alliances have played a progressive role throughout the history of class society. He is also claiming that the most distinguished artists, scientists and thinkers have derived enormous inspiration from the communist elements in popular consciousness. In seeking guidance from plebeian culture, they have had no choice but to take its vision of a classless society seriously. The political implications of this argument would surely have been clear to the contemporary reader. If the likes of Aeschylus, Dante and Shakespeare responded positively to the idea of a classless society, there is no reason (or so Lindsay seems to imply) why the democratic bourgeoisie should wish to wean the modern working class from its commitment to egalitarianism. The Popular Front is not a betrayal of socialism but a step towards its realization. Among the most influential Marxist and semi-Marxist intellectuals at the time of the Popular Front were the extremely distinguished thinkers allied with the so-called Social Relations of Science Movement (SRSM).20 Informally led by communist scientists such as J. D. Bernal, J.B.S. Haldane and Joseph Needham, the SRSM believed that capitalism had become inimical to the advance of science and that only the advent of socialism could rescue scientific research from its impasse. Although Lindsay was never formally associated with the movement, there are some fairly obvious ways in which his theory of culture reflects the influence of its thinking. In seeking to emphasize the scientific credentials of primitive communism, Lindsay is clearly providing a sort of historical undergirding to the claim that socialist revolution represents the only hope for the future of science. This becomes especially clear when he draws an explicit link between past and present while summarising his theory towards the end of the book: ‘[W]e see throughout history that the degree to which the group advances towards mastery of Nature is reflected broadly in the degree of unity and equality within the group. The full and stable equality of man with Nature involves the creation of worldcommunism’ (Lindsay 1939b: 376). Nevertheless, Lindsay’s ideas about the crisis in science differ from those of the SRSM is one important respect. Bernal and his co-thinkers usually explained the fate of science in the modern age by invoking the structure of the capitalist economy. Their chief argument was that market conditions frequently make it impossible for firms to utilize the latest advances in technology and that this squandering of scientific knowledge (along with a range

Jack Lindsay’s theory of culture 35 of other structural factors) engenders an intellectually demoralising emphasis on the importance of ‘pure’ rather than ‘applied’ research.21 No longer interested in solving society’s most pressing practical problems, scientists waste their intellectual capital by engaging with issues that are at best of purely theoretical interest. By contrast, Lindsay draws our attention to what might be termed the existential dimensions of the problem. Insisting that a successful scientific culture has to be rooted in deep feelings of human unity, he argues that class societies are simply too emotionally fragmented to allow science to flourish. There is perhaps a sense in which his emphasis on emotion rather than structure reflects his feelings of unease with a certain strain of scientific chauvinism at the heart of the SRSM, especially its tendency to glorify the power of reason and downplay the importance of other, non-intellective, forms of experience.22 In arguing that scientific investigation is rooted as much in feeling as in thought, Lindsay is implicitly taking a stand against the innumerable modern thinkers who portray instrumental reason as a mode of cognition to which people in non-scientific fields should aspire. Lindsay’s other big debt in A Short History of Culture is to a lengthy tradition of anthropological writing on the role of culture in primitive societies. As James Borg has shown in an important article, Lindsay became interested in anthropology at the age of thirteen, and his early writings were powerfully influenced by the work of such non-Marxist thinkers as Jane Harrison, E. B. Tylor and Sir James Frazer (Borg 1984).23 However, there is no doubt that the decisive influence on his mature work was the Marxist and Marxisant school of anthropological speculation which arguably began with a handful of throwaway remarks in The German Ideology (1845). A Short History of Culture owes a particular debt to the ideas of the Anglo-Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, whose work still enjoys a high reputation among a number of contemporary Marxists.24 In his classic study Man Makes Himself (1936), Childe argues that the most important scientific discoveries in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution had largely been made in the classless societies of prehistory. World-changing breakthroughs such as the invention of the plough, irrigation and the wheel were the fruits of primitive communism and the early agricultural settlements, not the class-stratified and more celebrated civilisations which came afterwards (Childe 1956). Lindsay openly admitted that Childe’s painstaking reconstruction of Palaeolithic and Neolithic societies provided the basis for his own account of primitive communism, but in no sense did he simply reproduce his colleague’s argument uncritically. While both men agreed that primitive communism’s technical creativity arose from the absence of classes, they differed fundamentally about the cultural function of religion. Childe believed that religious and quasi-religious thinking had always been the enemy of scientific inquiry, and he insisted that the great virtue of classless societies was that they were much less prone to religious credulity than their hierarchical counterparts. As he put it in the closing pages of Man Makes Himself, primitive communism was scientifically fertile because there was no ruling class whose privileges required supernatural sanction. By contrast, Lindsay refused to see religion as the mortal foe of primitive science and emphasized its role in boosting knowledge of nature. In his writings on totemism, primitive dance rituals and other aspects of early culture,

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he makes it clear that ostensibly religious forms often had a massive impact on humanity’s economic development, regardless of the fact that its understanding of the universe was weighed down by theistic or magical illusions. In this sense his book owed less to Childe than to the Marxist school of anthropological aesthetics which began with G. V. Plekhanov and came to fruition in Britain in the work of Christopher Caudwell and Alick West. Although it is not cited in A Short History of Culture, Caudwell’s famous chapter on primitive rituals in Illusion and Reality (1937) seems to have had a particular influence on Lindsay’s ideas. Moreover, in refusing to ignore religion’s contribution to intellectual history, Lindsay’s book exemplified the desire of British communists to entice progressive Christians into the Popular Front.

Lindsay’s theory of culture: version two Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Lindsay published a brief article entitled ‘The Aesthetic Fact’ in the American journal Dialectics. The article contained the first tentative formulation of the theory of culture for which Lindsay is now best known. Lindsay went on to refine the theory in his pamphlet Perspective for Poetry (1944) and in a discussion paper read to a meeting of British communists in 1945.25 At first sight his new conception of cultural activity seems very different to the one outlined in A Short History of Culture. Eschewing the complex historical structure of his earlier writings, Lindsay speculates about the social function of culture in highly abstract language that rarely distinguishes between one cultural epoch and another. His starting point is his deep sense of dissatisfaction with the venerable Marxist distinction between base and superstructure. In opposition to the idea that culture is best interpreted as a mere ‘reflection’ of economic activity, he argues for a more ‘dialectical’ conception which recognizes the crucial role of what can broadly be called ‘art’ in generating economic progress: ‘For humanity, culture is just as essential as production. Every advance in production is in dialectical unity with an advance in culture’ (Lindsay 2000: 398).26 How does Lindsay account for the economic importance of culture? His essential argument is that cultural activity uses form (or what he insists on calling ‘Form’) to effect a symbolic resolution of the tensions impeding productive efficiency. All economic activity is characterized by a pattern of binary ‘conflicts’ which prevents the individual labourers from bringing his entire stock of energy to bear on his particular tasks, or so the argument goes. Just as the labourer’s subjective outlook is often out of balance with the ineluctable realities of the material world, so his desire to participate in the life of the community is frequently undermined by a tendency towards self-consciousness. These conflicts between ‘inner and outer’, ‘personal and social’ and ‘self and audience’ complicate economic activity in all periods of history. The highest function of art and other manifestations of culture is to create a beautiful illusion of what human activity might be like if the conflicts were to lose their disruptive force. It does so by using the disciplining power of form (exemplified by the rhythms of the communal dance) to resolve each of them in favour of one or other of its component terms:

Jack Lindsay’s theory of culture 37 It is precisely this conflict of opposites within the content which creates the Form. The Form is the resolution of the inner conflict. It is the act in which the opposites achieve unity. Within the content are always elements of inner and outer, personal and social, self and audience, and so on. These opposites become poetry, become aesthetically realised (as distinct from being intellectually realised, etc.) only through the Act which is the Form. The form can only be conceived, then, in terms of the conflict which it resolves. (Lindsay 1944: 28) It is important to note that Lindsay is talking here about the resolution of conflicts and not their mere reconciliation. Culture is not in the business of striking a more equal balance between the binary elements in any given conflict. Its purpose is to allow one element to achieve something approaching dominance over the other, in the process unleashing a wave of productive energy. Having immersed itself in cultural activity – having seen the inner dominate the outer and the social achieving predominance over the personal – the community returns to its economic tasks with a renewed desire to exert control over the natural world. The force of its desire has a more than merely superficial impact on economic development. At the very least it enthuses the people into discharging their productive tasks more efficiently. At other times it creates a hunger for new scientific knowledge. The technological developments which drive history forward are ultimately inspired by the passions unleashed in the sphere of culture. In other words, Marxists can only understand the historical process accurately if they recognize that the superstructure frequently runs ahead of the base. Lindsay’s repeated references to Form and the resolution of conflicts give his writings from ‘The Aesthetic Fact’ onwards a completely different feel to that of A Short History of Culture, so it is hardly surprising that the continuities between his two theories of culture have largely gone unnoticed. It should nevertheless be clear that the second theory is in large measure an abridgement of the first. As Lindsay comes close to acknowledging in a throwaway line in ‘The Aesthetic Fact’, his lengthy description of the communal dance in A Short History of Culture serves as the basis for the more abstract pronouncements on aesthetics in his later writings.27 He evidently regards the communal dance as the clearest and most emphatic example of how culture tends to work, seeing its use of rhythm to aestheticize the movements of the labouring body as the ne plus ultra of Form’s capacity to resolve the conflict between inner and outer, personal and social, self and audience. This raises an important question: if the theory of culture outlined in works like ‘The Aesthetic Fact’ is largely a condensation of the ideas contained in A Short History of Culture, why did Lindsay feel the need to disseminate it in the first place? At one level he probably did so for purely pragmatic reasons. The original theory was so labyrinthine (and based on so many questionable assumptions about the nature of primitive societies) that it practically defied the reader to follow its twists and turns. In reducing it to a set of concise propositions about the relationship between culture and ‘productive activity’, Lindsay was bowdlerising himself in order to make a Marxist perspective seem accessible to a non-Marxist audience. At the

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same time he was also making a tactical response to some of the most important trends in the wider literary culture. At the end of the 1930s the most influential critical ideas in Britain were probably those of I. A. Richards, whose seminal books on Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Science and Poetry (1926) and Practical Criticism (1929) exerted a massive influence not only on F. R. Leavis and his followers but also on the American New Critics. The most interesting thing about Richards’s work was that it put issues of form and the reconciliation of conflicting forces at the heart of English criticism. As is well known, Richards believed that the human mind had become increasingly disordered in the three centuries since the scientific revolution. Deprived of their religious faith and its comforting vision of a coherent universe, ordinary people found themselves in the grip of conflicting ‘impulses’ which robbed them of their capacity to act effectively. The great virtue of literature in general and poetry in particular was that it employed formal means to bring a measure of order to human experience, thereby equipping its readers to resist the horrors of mental chaos. According to Richards, the function of poetry was ultimately a ‘coenaesthetic’ one – that is, its role in the life of the discerning reader was the ‘resolution, inter-animation and balancing of impulses’ (quoted in Wellek 1986: 222). When Lindsay appropriated some of the key terms in Richards’s critical system and imbued them with a Marxist flavour, he was effectively engaged in a Gramscian strategy of trying to win over his ideological opponents by subtly reworking their own beliefs. However, he was by no means the only British communist of the 1930s who responded to Richards in this way. It was Lindsay’s friend Alick West who first attempted a Marxist reformulation of Richards’s ideas in his classic work Crisis and Criticism (1937).28 West’s starting point is a highly original argument about the similarities between literary creativity and material production. In the final analysis, or so he argues, the ‘good writer’ is inspired to create by an unconscious desire to emulate the grandeur of economic activity: ‘In some way, of which at present we know very little, he actively feels the productive energy of society and identifies himself with it’ (West 1975: 86). The upshot of all this is that works of literature effectively mimic and transfigure the characteristics of material labour at the level of both content and form. All forms of production are marked by a series of ‘conflicts’ or ‘contrasts’ such as those between ‘energy and inertia’ (i.e. the desire to engage in productive activity and the desire to abstain from it) and ‘inclusion and exclusion’ (i.e. the feeling of belonging to the productive group and the feeling of being excluded from it). The secret of literary form is that it reproduces these conflicting patterns and uses them to confer aesthetic significance on whatever it is that the writer wishes to represent. In doing so, it goes a long way towards ‘unit[ing]’ the various ‘contradictions and conflicts’ that impede productive activity, inspiring the reader with the ‘sensation of a more harmonized organism than the social organism actually is’ (West 1975: 89). Like Lindsay, West rejects the idea that literature merely reflects the economic base. In seeking to unite the contradictions that prevent individual labourers from fully committing themselves to their tasks, great works play their role in boosting productive efficiency by ‘organising social energy in a particular activity’ (West 1975: 85).

Jack Lindsay’s theory of culture 39 The similarities between the ideas of Crisis and Criticism and those contained in articles such as ‘The Aesthetic Fact’ are extremely pronounced. In their efforts to provide a Marxist alternative to Richards’s theoretical system, West and Lindsay both talk in terms of literary form energising productive activity by uniting or resolving the structural tensions at the heart of economic life. Moreover, it seems unlikely that the two men arrived at such similar conclusions by separate routes. We know for sure that Lindsay engaged seriously with West’s work in the months after his conversion to Marxism. In March 1937 he gave Crisis and Criticism a favourable notice in Left Review, endorsing the idea that literature evokes social experience in ‘the palimpsest of language where one can read the whole involved conflict of man’s social history’ (Lindsay 1937b: 116). I would suggest that this has serious consequences for our assessment of Lindsay’s work. If Lindsay is to retain his reputation as one of British communism’s most important thinkers, it cannot be because of a theory of culture whose essential premises had been so starkly foreshadowed by another writer. As I have tried to show in this chapter, Lindsay’s most distinguished contribution to Marxist theory was the intricate, shamelessly speculative but utterly ingenious body of ideas contained in A Short History of Culture. His second theory of culture only really makes sense when seen against the backdrop of the first. Determined to simplify A Short History of Culture for an audience that had neither the time nor the inclination to absorb it in full, Lindsay seems to have clarified the essence of his ideas by viewing them through a theoretical system first proposed by West. What his second theory of culture really illustrates is not so much his originality as his restless capacity to absorb and restate the ideas of other people. In the 1930s it was common for British communists to express the hope that intellectual labour would one day be divested of its individualism. Many writers expressed the belief that ideas, works of art and other aspects of culture should be regarded not as private property but as collective resources to be passed on from one person to another in a continuous process of transformation. The use to which Lindsay put West’s ideas suggests that this ideal of cultural collaboration was sometimes realized.

Conclusion In this chapter I have suggested that the scholarly consensus about Jack Lindsay’s work needs to be modified. Although writers like Paananen and Brouwer are right to emphasize the importance of what I have termed the second version of Lindsay’s theory of culture, it needs to be recognized that he also outlined a much broader theory of culture from which his best-known ideas ultimately derive. There is no need to justify a detailed examination of Lindsay’s work by pointing to his influence on other writers. His theory of culture is a remarkable, highly innovative and shockingly neglected achievement which stands on its own. Nevertheless – to return to the issue with which this chapter began – the question of his influence is by no means unimportant. In what way can his work help us to understand the wider history of Cultural Studies in Britain?

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Although Lindsay’s theory of culture is in some respects highly idiosyncratic, it clearly reflects many of the CPGB’s most deeply entrenched assumptions about cultural matters. Indeed, there is a sense in which it throws these assumptions into particularly vivid relief by embedding them in such a rich theoretical context. In so doing, it provides a valuable shorthand guide to the sort of communist thinking which shaped the early work of Williams, Thompson and the other founding fathers of British Cultural Studies. There are three cultural axioms in particular which link a book like A Short History of Culture to books like Culture and Society, The Long Revolution and Communications. The first emphasizes the central role of communitarianism in the culture of labouring men and women. Lindsay’s argument is that the close-knit, cooperative and egalitarian texture of plebeian consciousness has played a major role in fuelling human creativity. Williams clearly echoes this idea in his early work when he claims that the British working class’s main contributions to modern culture are the trade unions, the Labour Party and other collectivist institutions. Closely related to the emphasis on community is an argument about the nature of common culture. In his attempt to analyse the origins of high culture, Lindsay claims that artists, scientists and other cultural workers have always been inspired by the communitarian impulses radiating outwards from the plebeian classes. Progress in the arts and sciences occurs only because plebeian values have repeatedly galvanized the minds of society’s most creative individuals, most of whom are drawn from the middle and upper classes. There is a clear parallel between this argument and Williams’s celebrated thesis, elucidated with particular force in the ‘Conclusion’ to Culture and Society, that a socialist society should aspire to create a common culture rooted in working-class values. Lindsay also anticipates the work of the early Williams in his comments on the nature of art. Implicit in books like A Short History of Culture is the belief that works of art effectively reinforce plebeian values by articulating them with unusual force and clarity. This is precisely the assumption that Williams explores in his studies of individual literary and theatrical forms, insisting – to cite the most obvious example – that the realist novel with its emphasis on ‘knowable communities’ will play a major role in sustaining workingclass values during the transition to a common culture. The ideas which Lindsay outlined in his early work were widely shared by British communists in the thirties, forties and fifties. Implicitly or explicitly, they dominated the left-wing subcultures in which the pioneers of Cultural Studies acquired their earliest beliefs. They were part of the received radical wisdom to which writers like Williams and Thompson responded in books such as Culture and Society and The Making of the English Working Class. The evolution of Cultural Studies in Britain cannot be fully understood until they are written back into the historical record.

Notes 1 Two collections of essays on Lindsay’s work appeared in the early 1980s. See Mackie 1984 and Smith 1984. For the generation of literary and cultural critics associated with the CPGB in the 1930s, see, inter alia, Prakash 1994; Paananen 2000; Bounds 2009, 2012.

Jack Lindsay’s theory of culture 41 2 There is no space in this chapter in which to examine Lindsay’s creative writings from the same period. I have also been unable to examine his pioneering efforts to fuse Marxist and Freudian ideas in Anatomy of Spirit (1937). 3 The only scholar of British communism who has written about A Short History of Culture is Hanna Behrend, who devotes about half a page to it in an essay on Marxist literary criticism in the 1930s. See Behrend 1998: 116. 4 For an overview of Lindsay’s ideas in the period before his conversion to Marxism, see, inter alia, Lindsay 1928. 5 For the impact of Dimitrov’s speech on the cultural politics of British communism, see, inter alia, Fyrth 1985; Heinemann 1988; Bounds 2012: 180–181;. 6 For British communist writing on the history of the English radical tradition, see Bounds 2012: 179–233. 7 See Lindsay and Rickword 1939. The title of this book was later changed to Spokesmen for Liberty. 8 See Lindsay 1969. For Leavis’s hostile response to Lindsay’s book, see Leavis 1963. 9 A Short History of Culture should not be confused with Lindsay’s later book A Short History of Culture from Prehistory to the Renascence (London: Studio Books, 1962). The latter work explored many of the same ideas as the earlier book but is otherwise entirely different. 10 It is worth noting that Lindsay never uses the term ‘primitive communism’ and eschews most other forms of Marxist jargon. This strongly suggests that, in line with the ecumenical ethos of the Popular Front, he was aiming his book as much at non-aligned intellectuals as at fellow communists. 11 In this chapter I use the term ‘science’ very loosely to denote any activity intended to augment humanity’s knowledge of or control over the natural world. 12 Lindsay is not claiming that primitive communities necessarily understood the concept of causality in material terms – on the contrary, they often ascribed events in the natural world to spiritual or magical causes. But what was important from Lindsay’s perspective was the fact that the emergence of tools forced people to recognize that similar causes always (or at least usually) give rise to similar effects. 13 See, in particular, Caudwell 1977: Chapter 1. 14 See, for instance, Lindsay’s analysis of the symbolic importance of trees and stones in the period between the decline of totemism and the invention of gods (Lindsay 1939b: 67–68). 15 It is important to note that Lindsay never uses the terms ‘carnival’ or ‘carnivalesque’ himself. 16 See Lindsay 1939b: 313–325. These two chapters contained material that had previously appeared in Lindsay’s essay ‘William Shakespeare’ in Left Review. See Lindsay 1937b. 17 See Smirnov 1936 and Jackson 1936. For an abridged version of Jackson’s article, see Jackson 1964. The full text of Smirnov’s book is currently available at the Marxists Internet Archive (www.marxists.org). 18 Trotsky’s article is currently available at the Marxists Internet Archive. 19 The most interesting communist critic of the Popular Front in Britain was probably the literary theorist Alick West, who confessed to his doubts about the strategy in his great memoir One Man in His Time (West 1969). 20 There is now quite a large secondary literature on the SRSM. For a detailed overview of the movement, see Werskey 1988. There is an especially useful account of the ideas of the SRSM in chapter 5 of Roberts 1997.

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21 The ideas of the SRSM received their most authoritative formulation in Bernal 1939. Bernal usefully summarized his argument about the relationship between capitalism and science in Bernal 1937. 22 Not all the members of the SRSM believed that scientific method provided a model for people working in other disciplines. The great Joseph Needham went out of his way to distinguish scientific method from the conventions appropriate to work in the humanities and social sciences. For a brief but penetrating account of this aspect of Needham’s thinking, see Cowling 2001: 344–345. 23 As Borg points out, Lindsay was especially influenced by the so-called Cambridge Ritualists. 24 For a recent Marxist encomium to Childe, see Faulkner 2007. 25 The discussion paper has never been published in full, but the most important passages appeared in a chapter entitled ‘Symmetry, Asymmetry, Structure, Dominance’ in Lindsay’s book The Crisis in Marxism (Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker Press, 1981). The chapter was republished in Paananen 2000: 395–410. 26 The two sentences quoted here are both taken from Lindsay’s unpublished discussion paper from 1945. The italics are Lindsay’s. 27 In ‘The Aesthetic Fact’, Lindsay writes, ‘It must be enough to point out the close dynamic relation between the Form of art and science on one side, and on the other the Rhythm of labour-process and the communal dance’ (see Lindsay 2000: 396). 28 Christopher Pawling is being slightly reductive when he says that ‘Crisis and Criticism is clearly a reply to Principles of Literary Criticism’, but he is right to emphasize Richards’s influence on West. Pawling also points out that Richards exerted a powerful influence on the work of Christopher Caudwell. See Pawling 1989: 28.

Bibliography Arnold, M. 1993. Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, edited by S. Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 53–211. Behrend, H. 1998. An intellectual irrelevance? Marxist literary criticism in the 1930s, in A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain, edited by A. Croft. London: Pluto Press, 106–122. Bernal, J.D. 1937. Science and civilisation, in The Mind in Chains: Socialism and the Cultural Revolution, edited by C. Day Lewis. London: Frederick Muller, 185–204. Bernal, J.D. 1939. The Social Function of Science. London: Routledge. Borg, J. 1984. Passage of Pegasus: The cultural anthropology of Jack Lindsay, in Culture and History: Essays Presented to Jack Lindsay, edited by B. Smith. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 229–259. Bounds, P. 2009. Orwell and Marxism: The Political and Cultural Thinking of George Orwell. London: I.B. Tauris. Bounds, P. 2012. British Communism and the Politics of Literature, 1928–1939. London: Merlin Press. Brouwer, J.R. 1994. The origins of Jack Lindsay’s contribution to British Marxist thought. Nature, Society and Thought, 7(3), 261–279. Caudwell, C. 1977. Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Childe, V. Gordon. 1956. Man Makes Himself. London: Watts. Cowling, M. 2001. Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jack Lindsay’s theory of culture 43 Dimitrov, G. 1935. The Working Class Against Fascism. London: Martin Lawrence. Engels, F. 2004. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Chippendale, New South Wales: Resistance Books. Faulkner, N. 2007. Childe and Marxist archaeology. International Socialism, 116, 81–106. Fyrth, J. (ed.) 1985. Britain, Fascism and the Popular Front. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Heinemann, M. 1988. Left Review, New Writing and the broad alliance against fascism, in Visions and Blueprints: Avant-Garde Culture and Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe, edited by E. Timms and P. Collier. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 113–137. Jackson, T.A. 1936. Marx and Shakespeare. International Literature, 2, 75–97. Jackson, T.A. 1964. Marx and Shakespeare. Labour Monthly, XLVI(4), 165–173. Leavis, F. R. 1963. Bunyan through modern eyes, in The Common Pursuit. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 204–210. Lindsay, J. 1928. The modern consciousness: An essay towards an integration. The London Aphrodite, 1, 3–24. Lindsay, J. 1937a. William Shakespeare. Left Review, 3(6), 333–339. Lindsay, J. 1937b. Writer and society. Left Review, 3(2), 115–116. Lindsay, J. 1939a. England My England: A Pageant of the English People. London: Fore Publications. Lindsay, J. 1939b. A Short History of Culture. London: Gollancz. Lindsay, J. 1944. Perspective for Poetry. London: Fore Publications. Lindsay, J. 1969. John Bunyan: Maker of Myths. New York: Augustus M. Kelley. Lindsay, J. 2000. Symmetry, asymmetry, structure, dominance, in British Marxist Criticism, edited by V.N. Paananen. New York, Garland Publishing, 395–410. Lindsay, J. and Rickword, E. (eds.) 1939. Volunteers for Liberty. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Mackie, R. (ed.) 1984. Jack Lindsay: The Thirties and Forties. London: University of London Australian Studies Centre. Mulhern, F. 2009. Culture and society, then and now. New Left Review, 55, 31–45. Paananen, V.N. (ed.) 2000. British Marxist Criticism. New York: Garland Publishing. Pawling, C. 1989. Christopher Caudwell: Towards a Dialectical Theory of Literature. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Prakash, A. 1994. Marxism and Literary Theory. Delhi: Academic Foundation. Roberts, Edwin A. 1997. The Anglo-Marxists: A Study in Ideology and Culture. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Smirnov, A.A. 1936. Shakespeare: A Marxist Interpretation. New York: Critics Group. Smith, B. (ed.) 1984. Culture and History: Essays Presented to Jack Lindsay. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger. Trotsky, L. 1935. On the seventh congress of the Comintern. New International, 2(6), 177–179. Wellek, R. 1986. A History of Modern Criticism 1780–1950, Vol. 5. London: Jonathan Cape. Werskey, G. 1988. The Visible College: A Collective Biography of British Scientists and Socialists of the 1930s. London: Free Association Books. West, A. 1969. One Man in His Time. London: Allen and Unwin. West, A. 1975. Crisis and Criticism and Literary Essays. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

2

The New Left and the emergence of Cultural Studies Alan O’Connor

It is all a glorious and lively muddle, changing in character continuously, full of serious differences within itself, but recognizable as a social mood absolutely different from that obtaining at the beginning of the 1950s. Raymond Williams, Partisan Review 1960b

The fundamental argument of this chapter is that the standard narratives about the emergence of Cultural Studies in Britain greatly simplify the actual history, the diversity of the work and especially the extent to which it was a retreat from a partial failure or collapse of a political movement in the years 1958 to 1963. This can be dated quite precisely at the near collapse of New Left Review, which had been formed by the amalgamation of two somewhat different activist journals, the New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review. It is at that moment that the New Left Review editor Stuart Hall left to take up a position as researcher at the newly formed Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, founded by Richard Hoggart with funding from Allen Lane of Penguin Books. (W. E. Williams of the Workers Educational Association – and an informal advisor to Allen Lane and Penguin Books – played a key role.) Richard Hoggart soon left the Birmingham Centre for work at UNESCO and later an important part in writing the Pilkington Report on the future of broadcasting in Britain. What remained of New Left Review was taken over by a group led by Perry Anderson, to loud protest and recrimination from E. P. Thompson, who had helped start the New Reasoner. And somehow retaining the respect of everyone is the figure of Raymond Williams, whose work can only partly be assimilated to Cultural Studies, and who much later described some of his reservations about what Cultural Studies had actually become (Williams 1989a). The glory days of Cultural Studies seem in historical perspective to be a kind of retreat, even if a necessary retreat, from the failure of what Christopher Booker describes as a kind of collective dream of the years from 1958 to 1963. The themes of the collective research projects carried out at the Birmingham Centre when Stuart Hall became its second director have their foundation in the unresolved problems and issues of that moment from 1958 to 1963. In a very different way, that is also true of New Left Review under Perry Anderson, in its startling historiography of social class and state power in Britain, and in the subsequent need

The New Left and Cultural Studies 45 to import Marxist theory from Europe, which New Left Review then did with enormous intelligence. E. P. Thompson continued his style of Romantic Marxism, giving rise to a whole movement of history from below (Thompson 1968) and in the 1980s returning to energetic protest against nuclear weapons. And Raymond Williams continued in dialogue with just about everyone, keeping to his personal vision and in many ways resisting assimilation to Cultural Studies, which by the 1970s had taken its own somewhat different direction.1

The new conjuncture What was this conjuncture of Britain from 1958 to 1963? Above all it was a need to rethink a leftist political project in post-war Britain. The Labour government voted into power in 1945 owed its electoral success to a wholesale refusal of civilians and soldiers to return to the poverty and unemployment of the 1930s. Winston Churchill had won the war against European fascism but was denied government in 1945 because his Conservative party was associated with the economic crises of the 1930s, poverty lines and hostility to trade unions. Once in power, the Labour government nationalized some key industries, established the National Health Service and set up a system of social insurance. However, it quickly ran out of ideas and exhausted its political project. There were tough winters, and wartime rationing continued for years. In 1951 the Conservatives under Winston Churchill regained power. The Conservatives held power though the 1950s and until the Labour victory under Harold Wilson in 1964. Some commentators thought the Conservatives the natural governing party, with Labour voted in as a kind of protest in times of political crisis.2 The emergence of the New Left was not simply a product of the crises of 1956: the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the poorly executed attempt by Britain and France to assert control over the Suez Canal.3 There was also the suppression of workers in East Germany in 1953 and ongoing anti-colonial struggles in many parts of Africa. (Both the New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review had extensive coverage of international affairs.) The need to rethink the Communism of the 1930s and 1940s had been evident for some time, even though the forms of cultural Marxism associated with the British Communist Party continued to influence socialist thinkers in the post-war period. Williams wrote Culture and Society in relative isolation from 1952 to 1956. Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy was written from 1952 to 1955, its publication delayed because of fears of legal action over its criticism of popular writers. E. P. Thompson’s monumental Williams Morris was published in 1955, and there is evidence that the chapter on the Socialist League, entitled ‘Making Socialists’, was widely read by those who formed the New Left. The emphasis was less on scientific Marxism and more on the need to create a socialist movement. Many New Leftist writers were involved in adult education, tutors for the W.E.A. The novels of Doris Lessing describe this structure of feeling, especially in London (Lessing 1994). The New Left was not a subculture, even if the editors of Universities and Left Review thought it important to state their ages (from twenty-two to twenty-seven).

46 Alan O’Connor They were also all students at Oxford. The New Left emerges and struggles within an intellectual field. It was formed in debates with intellectuals who wrote for the Spectator and New Statesman; with the authors of Penguin Specials and Fabian Society Tracts; and in articles in Encounter and Twentieth Century. There were debates about social class and how changes in working-class life might erode support for the Labour Party. There was an extensive debate about changes in capitalism and whether capitalism even existed when large corporations were operated by managers. These changes were in some sense symbolized by another debate about teenagers, youth culture and jazz. This was accompanied by a debate about educational policy and whether increased access to grammar schools would lower general standards. This was also the period in which universities began their expansion. Finally, there was a debate about television, which grew dramatically from 1958 to 1963 and was the focus of concerns about mass culture. This structure of feeling then took to the street as a movement symbolized by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, public meetings, demonstrations and its annual marches between the Aldermaston atomic weapons establishment and London’s Trafalgar Square. Our task now is to describe the various elements of the British conjuncture in more detail. The working class in transition In the late 1950s Universities and Left Review engaged in a broader debate about social class in post-war Britain. This was not so much about the changing distribution of income since 1945. Richard Titmuss had shown how tricky it was to use official statistics about the incomes of different social classes. The debate was more about observable changes in working-class life: better housing, with an inside toilet and modern kitchen, a washing machine, a black-and-white television set, and possibly even a used car. The affluent society was announced in the title of John Kenneth Galbraith’s book published in the United States in 1958. Stuart Hall wrote ‘A Sense of Classlessness’ in Universities and Left Review (1958) and was quickly reminded by Raphael Samuel (1959a) that it was misleading to take capitalism of the 1830s as described by Marx as a benchmark. (E. P. Thompson had similar points in ‘Commitment in Politics’ [1959a].) The class system has changed but is still intact. In the second part of the nineteenth century, some workers also enjoyed a higher standard of living. The status symbol then was not a television set but a piano in the front room. Hall was responding to changes in the 1950s that were described in Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1958). In the first part of that book Hoggart lovingly describes the working-class life of his boyhood in Leeds, with a strong sense of us and them (anyone in authority) and a close life centred about the mother. According to Hoggart, only a small number of working people were politically active, though most voted Labour out of habit. In the second part of the book, Hoggart changes method and does a kind of practical criticism of new kinds of magazines and popular fiction which he sees as unbending the springs of action. There was a symposium on the book in Universities and Left Review and a discussion

The New Left and Cultural Studies 47 between Hoggart and Williams in the first issues of New Left Review in 1960. Williams’s own conclusion to Culture and Society is part of this debate: It is argued, for instance, that the working class is becoming ‘bourgeois’, because it is dressing like the middle class, living in semi-detached homes, acquiring cars and washing machines and television sets. But it is not ‘bourgeois’ to possess objects of utility, nor to enjoy a high material standard of living. The working class does not become bourgeois by owning the new products. (Williams 1961a: 310) The contrast between inner-city working-class life and the new housing estates built after 1945 is the subject of a widely read book by Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (1962). Many who moved welcomed the fresh air and better housing, but the move seemed to disrupt patterns of neighbourhood life and encouraged purchases of new furniture and a television. Williams discusses these changes of standards of living and community life in the third part of The Long Revolution. There was a debate about the relevance of the Labour Party, with its emphasis on the nationalization of major industries, to this new affluent society. Michael Young was involved in the Consumers’ Association which tried to counter advertising by testing different products. It was mainly taken up by the middle class, though a similar television programme probably had a wider audience. Writers about the welfare state were soon demonstrating that its effects benefited the middle class more than it helped workers.4 Capitalism transformed? The New Left was engaged in a second debate about the kind of capitalism that emerged in the post-war period. This was in effect a debate with self-described revisionists in the Labour Party, including an argument against Galbraith’s analysis of an affluent society that needed only some increased investment in public facilities, for which Galbraith suggested a sales tax. Crosland’s The Future of Socialism (1956) argued that a managerial revolution meant that capitalism had become more responsible and oriented to the general good rather than the interests of old-fashioned factory owners. (Stuart Hall in 1959 seemed surprisingly close to accepting this position.) The argument that capitalism had changed and was now working for the general good was repeated in a Labour Party pamphlet (Industry and Society [1957]) and in a Fabian Society pamphlet by Crosland (Can Labour Win? [1960a]), and there was a debate in Encounter in 1960 about the future of the left, in response to a widely read article by Crosland in the March issue (1960b). The New Left Review responded with substantial research showing the continued influence of a relatively small number of capitalist insiders and controllers (BarrattBrown 1958–59; Universities and Left Review 1957). This work was along the lines of C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956) in the United States. Although not himself a Marxist, Mills contributed an open letter to the New Left Review welcoming

48 Alan O’Connor the publication of Out of Apathy (1960) edited by E. P. Thompson with chapters by Stuart Hall, Ralph Samuel and others.5 Daniel Bell (1960) responded with an attack on Mills in Encounter, noting his influence on younger leftists. The influence of Mills is evident in Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society (1973), incidentally one of a handful of books discussed here not to appear in Penguin. Most of us will remember it in the dark-blue paperback from Quartet Books. The New Left effectively won this debate with the revisionists about the nature of capitalism, and the case is summed up in the New Left Review book Towards Socialism (Anderson and Blackburn 1965). This is really the last moment in which the New Left in Britain is still engaged in a debate with the Labour Party.6 The New Left position of moving beyond political economy, as in Crosland’s emphasis on industry and the welfare state, had become influential by the mid1960s. A special issue of Twentieth Century (1965) on class in Britain simply assumed that education, the press, popular entertainment and television were part of the discussion. The rise of youth culture A third debate is centred about youth. Those involved in Universities and Left Review were younger than E. P. Thompson and other editors of the New Reasoner. A photo by Roger Mayne of a teddy boy and his girlfriend on the front cover of Universities and Left Review apparently led to protests about what this had to do with socialism. Stuart Hall responded in Universities and Left Review 6 (Spring 1959), and in the following issue he contributed a long review essay about Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners and teenage consumers.7 This is related to a widespread interest in jazz, including a book by Eric Hobsbawm (writing under the name of Francis Newton) reprinted as a Penguin Special in 1961. Among the advocates of youth was Ray Gosling, who contributed to debates on youth clubs and youth leaders (Gosling 1961). While the New Left had a kind of fascination with youth culture, it is impossible to separate this from a new movement in fiction, associated with lowermiddle-class writers rejecting modernist experiments for a kind of documentary novel. These include John Wain, Hurry On Down (1953); Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954); John Braine, Room at the Top (1957); Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958); and MacInnes, Absolute Beginners (1959). The conservative impulses of some of these, especially Kingsley Amis, complicate any analysis of youth culture, an issue that continues into Birmingham Centre research on subcultures in the 1970s. By the early 1960s attention had shifted from jazz to the Beatles, just starting a long relationship with the music industry and their fans. Raymond Williams argued that the new wave of novelists of the 1950s was actually repeating traditional forms of the novel. (John Wain’s Hurry On Down seems close to George Orwell’s writings of the 1930s reporting on lower-class life.) The hero who is at odds with society, or spiritually ruined by success, is central to realist fiction of the 1800s and early 1900s. The new wave of novelists was expressing a mood and did not have a solution or alternative to offer. Williams

The New Left and Cultural Studies 49 was also sharply critical of Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, which was at the time widely acclaimed as a brilliant work of philosophy.8 Education policy While the New Left was fascinated by the figure of youth as a symbol of changes in social class and culture, there was also a vigorous debate about education policy. Williams included a chapter on education in The Long Revolution (1965b), and there was a special issue of New Left Review (1961) on the topic. In the post-war period, Britain had a stratified education system with public schools for the elite, grammar schools for the professional middle class, and secondary moderns for lower-middle-class and working-class children. Changes in policy in the Education Act of 1944 made it somewhat easier for lower-class children to attend grammar schools, but the system as a whole remained stratified by social class. Even the Labour Party was afraid of abolishing the elite public schools. Proposals were made for comprehensive schools on the model of the high school in the United States (Vaizey 1962). Paul Willis’s (1977) ethnographic study of working-class boys’ resistance to schooling that they judged to be meaningless for their future is well known. But apart from the collectively written Unpopular Education (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1981), interest in the topic seems to have faded in Cultural Studies.9 Sociological studies of education show that middle-class parents use the education system in an attempt to reproduce their class position, and any radical change to it threatens that result for their children. There was a similar debate in Britain from the early 1960s about the expansion of university education. A changing economy would seem to demand new skills in science, technology and management. From a different point of view, increased access to and changes in the universities would be part of what Raymond Williams called the ‘long revolution’ in expanded culture and education. This was clearly controversial. From the start, the novelist Kingsley Amis was opposed, and later he became associated with the conservative ‘Black Papers’ on educational policy. From quite another perspective, writers such as Michael Young (1961) and Raymond Williams (1961a, 1965b) attacked the idea of a meritocracy based on success in education or of an educational ladder to be climbed by individual students. The universities were expanded, and new ones established: notably the Open University with lectures broadcast by television. The student movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s is beyond the scope of this chapter.10 But it is worth noting that an expanding university system provided institutional space for the development of Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham and of Media Studies at Leicester University. The emergence of television Television was also the subject of New Left debates about 1960.11 Its absence from The Uses of Literacy was due to the fact that the book was written in the early to mid-1950s. By the time the book appeared, broadcasting was no longer

50 Alan O’Connor mainly BBC radio: television had become a majority service. Part of the anxiety was that the Conservatives introduced commercial TV which started broadcasting in 1955 and quickly became more popular than the BBC with working-class viewers. Hoggart wrote ‘The Uses of Television’ in Encounter (1960), and Williams had written a review of Himmelweit’s Television and the Child the previous year (1959). Media became a central interest for Cultural Studies, part of the New Left argument about the importance of cultural hegemony in advanced capitalist states. Crosland did not accept this emphasis, and his review of the literature in ‘The Mass Media’ in Encounter (1962a; reprinted in his book The Conservative Enemy [1962b]) is still worth reading. Following the logic of his position, Crosland welcomed the teddy boys’ interest in fine clothes and good jazz music. The New Left played a considerable role in the Pilkington inquiry into the future of broadcasting.12 Richard Hoggart was a member of the committee and brought his scepticism about advertising and the eroding influence of television on lived experience. New Left Review was one of many organisations that submitted briefs to the committee, in this case an attractively produced pamphlet (New Left Review 1961b). As with the earlier introduction of commercial television, the leftist criticisms of advertising joined an uneasy alliance with conservative disdain for American-influenced television shows. Some of the committee’s recommendations were accepted – the BBC got a second television channel – but it was easy for the press to attack what seemed an elitist tone in the report. Many newspapers had profitable investments in commercial television. In the early 1960s, pirate radio stations broadcasting mainly pop music would force changes in BBC radio and eventually bring commercial radio, which Raymond Williams opposed but which was accepted by the Labour government of the 1960s. The new wave of satire in Britain in the early 1960s poked fun at the establishment but, other than that, had few political principles. The BBC led with That Was the Week That Was, which reached audiences of eleven or twelve million on Saturday nights in 1962 and 1963. The show which drew on undergraduate humour survived because of its success (commercial television failed to match it) and a relatively liberal director general of the BBC. It was ended just before the sensitive election year of 1964. The programme could entertain, and sometimes shock, with satire and parody, but its own values were completely unclear. In the late 1960s, Monty Python’s Flying Circus took this humour in a more surreal direction.13 The politics of nuclear disarmament The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) provided an active movement, perhaps a kind of alternative public sphere: a week-end march, sleeping rough, jazz bands. There were also numerous town-hall meetings in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with speakers against nuclear war. CND supporters were often engaged in other issues such as abolishing the death penalty and legalizing homosexuality. In David Widgery’s words, ‘The March was a student movement before its time, mobile sit-in or marching pop festival; in its midst could be found the first embers of the hashish underground and premature members of the Love Generation as well

The New Left and Cultural Studies 51 as cadres of forthcoming revolutionary parties’ (Widgery 1976: 104). The movement was a protest against the Conservative government’s position on nuclear weapons and other policies, though the Labour Party’s position on nuclear disarmament was normally not much different. CND was more important for creating a new kind of social movement than for any success in reducing nuclear weapons. Conservative commentators such as Anthony Hartley (1960) pointed out that, if Britain rejected nuclear weapons, it would have to withdraw from NATO and its special relationship with the United States. Inevitably Britain would be economically disadvantaged in a global economic system increasingly dominated by the United States. The moral objection to nuclear weapons leads into a radical position against the global hegemony of the United States. However, many supporters of CND were not willing to accept the logical outcome of a policy to ban the bomb. In 1959 Stuart Hall was not in favour of a withdrawal from NATO (Widgery 1976: 108). Historians of CND generally accept this judgement: the movement was a moral campaign and not an effective political movement.14 Raymond Williams participated for years and saw it in this way: it brought together activists who in the 1950s had retreated into professional work and personal projects, and a new generation of protesters. By 1963 the Spectator was publishing confessions of participants in a faint echo of The God That Failed.15

Understanding the public sphere The vocabulary to discuss this kind of public sphere had still mainly to be developed. The position of New Left Review was that the bourgeoisie in Britain, because of its peculiar history, had not given rise to a critical sociology. The labour movement was locked into mostly gradual reforms. This in part explains the failure of imagination of the Labour Party from 1945 to 1951. With the subsequent lack of theory, one solution was to translate European Marxism for readers in England. Cultural Studies had yet to develop the concept of hegemony from Gramsci: processes of persuasion that play a key role in the formation of political blocs. Raymond Williams argues for a ‘common culture’ in his early writing (he would turn to Gramsci in the 1970s). It is not his most successful concept, but it was certainly polemical: an intervention in conservative debates on culture in post-war Britain. Williams does not claim that the working-class produces culture in the narrow sense: art, poetry, fiction. Nor does he locate his argument in the kind of regional working-class life described by Richard Hoggart. For Williams, what working-class culture contributes is a tradition of democratic institutions. We may now see what is properly meant by ‘working-class culture’. It is not proletarian art, or council houses, or a particular use of language; it is, rather, the basic collective idea, and the institutions, manners, habits and thoughts, and intentions which proceed from this. . . . The working class, because of its position, has not, since the Industrial Revolution, produced a culture in the narrower sense. The culture which it has produced, and which it is important

52 Alan O’Connor to recognize, is the collective democratic institutions, whether in the trade unions, the co-operative movement, or a political party. (Williams 1961a: 313) What matters for Williams is the basic collective idea and not ‘traditional’ workingclass life in different regions of the country. This idea and experience of participatory democracy is as valuable as art and literature, fields in which working-class people have not normally contributed. It was an effective argument to make in the 1950s, and yet it seems to evade the issue. If the lived experience of workingclass life changes, will also this basic collective idea change? Perhaps the most sympathetic critique of Williams comes from Perry Anderson (1961: Part 2, 36), who questions whether the idea of participatory democracy is specifically socialist. He points out that some working-class institutions, including trade unions and the Labour Party, have been quite authoritarian. Furthermore the institutions of bourgeois democracy have historically been extended, as in the expansion of the right to vote. Anderson concludes that Williams’s account is too neat and formal. Working-class life may be based just as much in family and neighbourhood as in collective democratic institutions.16 Williams’s position is somewhat similar to Negt’s and Kluge’s arguments about a proletarian public sphere (originally published 1972). He shares with Negt an interest in working-class culture and education and with Kluge an interest in film production (see Dai Smith 2008). Negt and Kluge differ from Habermas in stressing the emotional aspects17 of the proletarian sphere and including audiovisual media (television). They share with Williams an interest in bringing subjugated experience into expression, though Williams never thought of working-class culture in total opposition to the dominant culture, which he points out is not simply bourgeois. The Long Revolution sets out the evidence of increased literacy, education and expanded forms of cultural expression. But there is nothing inevitable about all this: it had to be struggled for and was often resisted. The main point, I think, is that the New Left was involved in public debates in the period 1958 to 1963, often about political economy and sometimes about culture. The terms and concepts would emerge later.

The intellectual field The milieu I’ve just described can be characterized as what Pierre Bourdieu (1990) calls an ‘intellectual field’. This does not mean an enclosed discipline that might be described as Cultural Studies from Hoggart and Williams to Stuart Hall and his graduate students at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. An intellectual field includes different positions and strategies. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to describe the intellectual field from 1958 to 1963, though some of its workings have been touched on. In this respect, the edited collections of essays can be seen as competing. None of them is uniform, and each contains a variety of arguments, but they are still marking positions in a field. This was certainly the case for The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman in 1950 with contributions by Louis

The New Left and Cultural Studies 53 Fischer, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender and Richard Wright. This was very much a product of the Cold War. Declaration, edited by the young publisher Tom Maschler in 1957, is a very different book. It attempts to pull together the generation of the 1950s, including Lindsay Anderson, Doris Lessing, John Osborne, Colin Wilson and John Wain. Characterized by the rather vague project of the Angry Young Men, it nonetheless sold 25,000 copies. Conviction, edited by Norman Mackenzie of the New Statesman in 1959, is explicitly a response. The contributors were asked to address what is wrong with the Labour Left and how to revitalize socialist politics. These are the thoughtful young men, including Brian Abel-Smith, Raymond Williams, Peter Townsend and Richard Hoggart. Out of Apathy, edited by E. P. Thompson in 1960, is an explicitly New Left response and analysis and includes Raphael Samuel and Stuart Hall. Each of these three books – Declaration, Conviction and Out of Apathy – takes up positions in the intellectual field of the late 1950s and early 1960s.18 We can get some sense of the complexity of this intellectual field by examining the relations between four contemporary figures: Tony Crosland, Richard Wollheim, Kingsley Amis and Raymond Williams. C.A.R. Crosland was born in 1918 into an upper-class family. His father was a senior official at the War Office. Tony Crosland studied at Oxford (interrupted by war service) and after the war became a Labour member of parliament identified with Hugh Gaitskell and the ‘revisionists’ within the party. The Future of Socialism, published in autumn 1956, describes a ‘modernized’ programme for the Labour Party which Crosland pursued in a Fabian Society pamphlet and a widely read article entitled ‘The Future of the Left’(1960b) on the Labour defeat in the 1959 general election. In many respects the New Left that emerged in the late 1950s defines itself in opposition to Crosland.19 Crosland continues the Fabian Society tradition of policymaking; the younger generation, including Williams, have a new emphasis on culture. This difference can be seen in Crosland’s review of Dennis Potter’s The Glittering Coffin, where in spite of attempts to be sympathetic to the new generation he concludes by saying that Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell would have been completely puzzled by what Potter wanted him to do (1960c). By the same token, Crosland’s essay on media is an intelligent argument against the New Left emphasis on cultural issues (Crosland 1962a). Richard Wollheim was born in 1923, the son of an actress and theatre producer. He studied at Oxford, also interrupted by military service. At the end of the war, he graduated with a First in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He had wide-ranging interests, including psychoanalysis and art, and was more sympathetic to the New Left emphasis on cultural issues. While a lecturer at University College, London, he published a substantial Fabian Society pamphlet entitled Socialism and Culture (1961c). He wrote sympathetically about John Berger’s art criticism (1961b) and published a thoughtful essay about city life, bohemia and Colin MacInnes (May 1962). Wollheim strongly disagreed with US foreign policy and resigned from Encounter when its funding by the CIA was revealed (there had been rumours for years). His Fabian Society pamphlet was the subject of a symposium in the New Statesman with commentaries by Kingsley Amis, Frank Kermode, Raymond

54 Alan O’Connor Williams and Edward Shils (2 June 1961). Wollheim replied in the next issue and in response to Williams admitted: ‘I was born into, I suppose, the middle of the middle class, and was educated “accordingly”; I live in comfort, and most of my friends have a similar history’ (9 June 1961: 926). Wollheim also wrote a respectful review of The Long Revolution in the Spectator (1961a) in which he identifies Williams as part of the New Left and in debate against Labour Party revisionists such as Tony Crosland.20 Kingsley Amis was born in 1922 into a lower-middle-class family. His father was a clerk in a business firm, though his grandparents had been better off. Amis attended fee-paying schools and went to Oxford on a scholarship, where he was active in leftist politics. His studies were interrupted by war service, and after the war he attempted to write a thesis that took a social and historical approach to literature. He became friends with Anthony Hartley of the Spectator and frequently wrote for the weekly paper. Amis published Lucky Jim in 1954 and was quickly identified as part of a new literary movement. He published a lecture on the theme of ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals’ (Fabian Society 1957) but declined to contribute to Tom Maschler’s Declaration in the same year. Amis shared the New Left interest in popular culture, writing on jazz and science fiction (see ‘At the Jazz Band Ball’, Spectator [28 September 1956]). He was also a frequent book reviewer – for example, writing on Colin Wilson in the Spectator (15 June 1956) and reviewing Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy in 1957. He described himself as a reluctant supporter of the Labour Party in the late 1950s but a decade later took a sharp conservative turn in ‘Why Lucky Jim Turned Right’.21 There was evidence of this conservatism much earlier on the topics of university expansion and arts policy. Amis wrote a scathing review for the Spectator of Raymond Williams’s Penguin Special on Communications under the title ‘Martians Bearing Bursaries’.22 By the late 1960s Amis was associated with the right-wing Black Papers on Education, and he eventually became a supporter of the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. Raymond Williams was born in 1921 into a Welsh working-class family. His father was an agricultural labourer as a boy and then a railway worker, a supporter of the Labour Party. It was a community that respected education, though there were few books in the home. Williams went to grammar school on a scholarship and to Cambridge in 1939 to study English literature, also on a scholarship. He quickly became involved in leftist politics in the university. He was called up in July 1941 and served in an Anti-Tank Regiment. After a difficult war experience (described in Smith 2008), he returned to Cambridge to complete his degree in one year and then got a job in adult education as a tutor with the Workers’ Educational Association. Williams wrote his first published novel (Border Country [1964]) and his famous book Culture and Society in relative isolation in the 1950s. The book was in part a reaction against T. S. Eliot’s conservative essay Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1962) and drew among other sources on Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (with some influence from his wife, Joy Williams, who was a student at the London School of Economics during the war). Williams’s book was a surprising best-seller, and it connected with the New Left of the late 1950s. The

The New Left and Cultural Studies 55 younger generation liked the personal conclusion, which was invariably attacked by more conservative reviewers who otherwise admired the careful readings of figures from John Stuart Mill to George Orwell. The publication of Culture and Society in 1958 coincided with the CND, Universities and Left Review and the emergence of the New Left after the conservatism of the early 1950s.23 Williams became a book reviewer in different periodicals, especially the Manchester Guardian. He wrote a pamphlet for the Fabian Society (The Existing Alternatives in Communications [1962b]) and a Penguin Special on communications in the series Britain in the Sixties (1962a). His work provoked debate and responses from readers as diverse as Dwight Macdonald in Encounter (1961), Arnold Kettle in Marxism Today (1961) and C.A.R. Crosland in Encounter (1962a). Kingsley Amis and Raymond Williams were among five participants in a 1963 BBC television programme called ‘Time on Our Hands’, which projected the viewer twenty-five years into the future to look back on the events of the past twenty-five years.

Conclusion: from the New Left to Cultural Studies It is beyond the scope of this chapter to continue this analysis to a full study of the intellectual field from 1958 to 1963. But the main point is that figures such as these are engaged in public debate on culture and social class, changes in capitalism and education, and changes in the novel and in mass media. The argument I want to make is that by 1963 the movement we have been describing – a loose alliance between CND, the emergent New Left, a leftist criticism of the Labour Party, and sometimes quite ambiguous waves of culture from Lucky Jim to the satire boom of the early 1960s – came to a pause about 1963. There was then a kind of strategic retreat on several fronts. New Left Review hit a crisis as a general leftist magazine with articles on jazz, teenagers and documentary photography. It was taken over by Perry Anderson, the modernist design and layout was dropped, and it became something quite different: a long-term project of bringing European Marxism to Britain, and serious detailed surveys of the conjuncture in different countries. Stuart Hall retreated to a research position at Richard Hoggart’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, in a somewhat similar way to rethink the issues that had emerged in the late 1950s. The fundamental argument of this chapter is that if you look at the work done at the Birmingham Centre in the 1960s and into the 1970s as well as research on Picture Post, on popular culture and television, on youth subcultures – this research is a serious working-through of the issues of 1958 to 1963. The seeds of all the work is there. The work on youth subcultures is anticipated in Stuart Hall’s articles in Universities and Left Review. It is based on a theory of changes in capitalism and changes in working-class experience. It is precisely these changes that are invoked to produce sympathetic ‘readings’ of teddy boys, hippies and skinheads as imaginary resolutions of the real contradictions. The working class has changed? The skinheads will perform dramatic versions of a tough and perhaps sexually vulnerable working-class masculinity (Hall and Jefferson 1976). Capitalism has colonized the middle-class life world? The hippies, with a little encouragement from Marcuse (1972), will enact dramatic versions of a meaningful life. Just as

56 Alan O’Connor New Left Review withdrew from pamphlets on television policy and reports on Aldermaston, so also Cultural Studies pulled back to think through the issues of 1958 to 1963. Eventually a powerful theory of cultural hegemony would emerge. It is somewhat unfair to single out one book from a research centre that was so productive; the historical research done when Richard Johnson was director is especially unfairly neglected (Clarke, Critcher and Johnson 1979; Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1981). It could also be argued that key work was produced elsewhere. Halloran, Elliott and Murdock’s Demonstrations and Communications: A Case Study (1970) is a brilliant piece of research, published as a Penguin Special and conceived as an intervention in debates about the Vietnam War and the student movement of the late 1960s. Bennett and Woollacott’s Bond and Beyond (1987) came much later and from thoroughly professional Open University courses on popular culture. I had not realized until researching this chapter the importance of James Bond in popular culture of the early 1960s, and the intertextual relation with actual spy scandals. (In any case, I’m a fan of John Le Carré, whose breakthrough novel The Spy Who Came In from the Cold was published by Victor Gollancz in 1963.) What I want to argue is that the moment I have been describing in this chapter culminates in the collectively written Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (1978). Perhaps because it deals specifically with a political conjuncture in Britain, the book is not as well known in the United States as other research on television, subcultures and gender that travels more easily across the Atlantic. But Policing the Crisis contains all the themes we have noted: debates about transformations in capitalism in Britain, now extended beyond the 1950s into the 1970s; immigration and changes in the composition of the working class; youth, especially Afro-Caribbean youth, now abandoning their parents’ hopes of integration into Britain and affirming their own identity in music, hairstyle and dress; the student movement of the 1960s and confrontations about the Vietnam War; and the mass media now engaged in deviancy amplification about street crime. At the centre of the book (pp. 227–235) is an account of the crucial period of the 1950s. What replaces the public sphere at this time? Here Stuart Hall and his research team provide a different kind of analysis. Instead of a kind of public sphere of the late 1950s, there is a new analysis from Gramsci about cultural hegemony. Raymond Williams had also moved in this direction in the 1970s, adopting Gramsci’s notion of processes of persuasion (for Gramsci always in relation to different class cultures) and the creation of political blocs and state power. The analysis proposed by Policing the Crisis is that by the early 1970s there is a crisis in this process in Britain. The state has for a moment that would extend into the Thatcher years shifted from hegemony and persuasion to more of an emphasis on physical force or heavy policing. This analysis, drawing on all the themes we have noted from 1958 to 1963, is both a beginning and an end. It is the beginning of a new phase of public intellectual work to think through the project of Thatcherism and how to oppose it, as in the redesigned magazine Marxism Today. But in another sense the book marks the end of an intellectual project that started in the late 1950s. The evidence of this is that Policing the Crisis was not published as a Penguin paperback.24

The New Left and Cultural Studies 57

Notes 1 The temperament which enabled Williams to engage in a dialogue with the various factions on the left is well captured in the quotation which opens this chapter. 2 Useful overviews include Anderson 1965; Berlin 2009; Black 2003; Black 2010; Bogdanor and Skidelsky 1970; Booker 1969; Chun 1993; Crick 1960; Dworkin 1997; Hall 1989; Hall 1997; Hewison 1981; Marwick 1990; Sandbrook 2005; Sedgwick 1976; Thompson 1959b; Widgery 1976; Williams 1965a; Williams 1979. See also the memoirs by Hoggart 1993; Jones 1987; Lessing 1998; Samuel 2006; Saville 2003. On historical accounts of the New Left, see Williams 1968, 1970, 1976. 3 On these crises, see Hall 1989; Lessing 1998; Saville 1976; Saville 1994; Skidelsky 1970. 4 For an overview of debates about social class, see Marwick 1980. For contemporary introductions, see Bottomore 1965, 1966. Key articles in sociology include Lockwood 1960; Goldthorpe and Lockwood 1963; Little and Westergaard 1964; Westergaard 1964; Goldthorpe 1972; Agassi 1970. See also interventions by Samuel 1959a, 1959b, 1960a. John Saville summarized debates about income redistribution in the Socialist Register (1965). Savage 2005 revisits 1960s research on class. For Michael Young and community studies, see Briggs 2001. 5 For an assessment of Mills, see Rustin 1963. 6 For a critique of Galbraith, see Ralph Miliband, ‘Professor Galbraith and American Capitalism’ (1968). And from a different perspective, see Strachey (1958). For Williams about this time, see ‘The Future of Marxism’ (1961b). See also R.H.S. Crossman, ‘The Spectre of Revisionism: A Reply to Crosland’ (1960b). C.A.R. Crosland responds to New Left criticisms in The Conservative Enemy (pp. 68–96). See also C.A.R. Crosland, ‘Leftover Left to Kill’ (1958), on the New Left; and Anthony Crosland, ‘Smashing Things’ (1960c) on Dennis Potter, The Glittering Coffin. For a critique of the New Left from a Marxist perspective, see Arnold Kettle (1961). For an attack on conservative American sociology, see Raphael Samuel, ‘Lipset’s Nightmare’ (1960b). On Out of Apathy, see also A. J. Ayer (1960). There is a debate between the pollster Mark Abrams and Raphael Samuel in New Left Review. Abrams tries to link changes in working-class life with a decline in voting for the Labour Party. See Raphael Samuel, ‘Dr. Abrams and the End of Politics’ (1961); Mark Abrams, ‘Class and Politics: Another Look at the British Electorate’ (1961); also Raphael Samuel, ‘The Deference Voter’ (1960a); and Mark Abrams, ‘The Roots of Working Class Conservatism’ (1960b). See also Socialist Union (1956) by the revisionist Socialist Commentary group. 7 On Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners, see Richard Wollheim, ‘Babylon, Babylone’ (1962); and the biography of MacInnes by Gould (1983). On teen culture, see Rock and Cohen, The Teddy Boy (1970). T. R. Fyvel (1963) writes about youth in the mode of George Orwell. Willmott’s book on adolescent boys (1969) is in the tradition of community studies. Paddy Whannel reviewed The Jazz Scene in Universities and Left Review 7. 8 D. E. Cooper, ‘Looking Back on Anger’ (1970); Williams, ‘The New Party Line?’ (1957b). 9 But see Hall 1981, which is based on his contribution to the Open University E202 course Schooling and Society. 10 See E. P. Thompson (1970) on struggles at Warwick University. 11 For overviews of television, see A. Briggs 1995; L. Black 2001; Corner 1991. For contemporary accounts, see Hoggart 1961; and the thoughtful chapter on television and

58 Alan O’Connor

12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

radio by Abrams (1973). Williams 1958 is a response to Hoggart and others who blamed popular education for declining standards in the press. Twentieth Century (1959) is a special issue on television. For political debates about television, see H. H. Wilson’s Pressure Group: The Campaign for Commercial Television (1961a), a book that was abridged in the New Statesman in May and June 1961(b). Wilson documents the influence of a small number of Conservative back-benchers on the decision to adopt commercial television. Wilson was professor of politics at Princeton and also contributed an article on the 1959 election results in Britain to Monthly Review (1959). See also Mayhew’s (1959) pamphlet on commercial television. On Pilkington, see Briggs 1995; Hoggart 1993. See Carpenter 2000. Raymond Williams wrote about television satire in The Listener in 1972 and in the London Review of Books in 1980. On the CND, see Taylor 1970; Widgery 1976; Parkin 1968; Priestley 1957; Priestley 1961; Williams 1968. See also the fictional account in Jones 1978, Part Two. See Powell 1963; Greer 1963. For Williams’s revision of the idea, see ‘The Idea of a Common Culture: 1968’ in Williams 1989b: 32–38, but especially the chapter on Hegemony in Marxism and Literature (1977); see also O’Connor 1989. See Hall, ‘The Politics of Adolescence?’ (1959b), for an emphasis on expression in music, dance and even violence. In its early days the New Left Review was not an austere intellectual journal and was associated with the Partisan coffee shop which provided a venue in Soho for art, jazz, chess and conversation. The Partisan is described in Berlin 2009. For some responses to these edited books, see Ayer 1960; Briggs 1958; Crosland 1958. See Hall 1960; Williams 1960a. For an overview, see David Reisman 1997. See Wollheim 2004. All three articles are reprinted in Amis 1970. 27 April 1962, reprinted in Amis 1990: 240–244. See also Leader 2006. Williams, ‘Why Do I Demonstrate?’ (1968), reprinted in Williams 1989b: 59–64. Smith 2008 deals with his life and public career up to 1961. On Penguin Books, see Penguin Books 1985; Joicy 1993; Lewis 2005.

Bibliography Some historical materials are freely available online. Encounter, 1953–90 is available at www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter; Fabian Society Tracts are available at www2.lse.ac.uk/ library/archive/online_resources/fabianarchive/1960s.aspx; The New Reasoner is available at www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/collections/nr/index_frame.htm; Universities and Left Review is available at www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/collections/ulr/index_frame.htm [all accessed 31 July 2012]. Abrams, M. 1960a. Must Labour Lose?, with R. Rose and a commentary by R. Hinden. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Abrams, M. 1960b. New roots of working class conservativism. Encounter, May, 57–59. Abrams, M. 1961. Class and politics: Another look at the British electorate. Encounter, October, 39–43. Abrams, P. 1973. Television and radio, in Discrimination and Popular Culture, second edition, edited by D. Thomson. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 102–132. Agassi, J. B. 1970. The worker and the media. European Journal of Sociology, XI, 36–66. Amis, K. 1956. At the jazz band ball. Spectator, 28 September, 409–411.

The New Left and Cultural Studies 59 Amis, K. 1957. Socialism and the Intellectuals. London: Fabian Society. Amis, K. 1970. What Became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, K. 1990. The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction 1954–1990. London: Hutchinson. Amis, K., Kermode, F., Williams, R. and Shils, E. 1961. Definitions of culture. New Statesman, 2 June, 880–884. (Comments on Socialism and Culture by Richard Wollheim). Anderson, P. 1961. Sweden: Mr. Crosland’s dreamland: Part 1. New Left Review, 7, January–February, 4–12. Part 2. New Left Review, 9, May–June, 34–45. Anderson, P. 1965. The left in the fifties. New Left Review, 29, 3–18. Anderson, P. and Blackburn, R. (eds.) 1965. Towards Socialism. London: Fontana. Ayer, A. J. 1960. The new left. Spectator, 17 June, 885–886. (Review of Out of Apathy edited by E. P. Thompson). Barratt-Brown, M. 1958–59. The controllers. Universities and Left Review, 5, 53–61; 6, 38–41; 7, 43–49. Bell, D. 1960. Vulgar sociology. Encounter, December, 54–56. (On C. Wright Mills and the New Left.) Bennett, T. and Woollacott, J. 1987. Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Berlin, M. 2009. The Partisan Coffee House. Talk at Bishopsgate Institute, 11 June. Freely available as a podcast on iTunes. Black, L. 2001. ‘Sheep may safely graze’: Socialists, television and the people in Britain, 1949–64, in Consensus or Coercion? The State, the People and Social Cohesion in Postwar Britain, edited by L. Black et al. Gretton, Cheltenham: New Clarion Press. Black, L. 2003. The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 1951–64. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Black, L. 2010. Redefining British Politics: Culture, Consumerism and Participation 1954–70. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bogdanor, V. and Skidelsky, R. (eds.) 1970. The Age of Affluence 1951–1964. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. Booker, C. 1969. The Neophiliacs. London: Fontana. Bottomore, T. B. 1965. Class in Modern Society. London: George Allen & Unwin. Bottomore, T. B. 1966. Elites and Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Originally published 1964. Bourdieu, P. 1990. Homo Academicus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Briggs, A. 1958. The context of commitment. New Statesman, 4 October, 453–454. Briggs, A. 1995. Competition: The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. V. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Briggs, A. 2001. Michael Young: Social Entrepreneur. London: Palgrave. Carpenter, H. 2000. That Was The Satire That Was. London: Victor Gollancz. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. 1981. Unpopular Education: Schooling and Social Democracy in England Since 1944. London: Hutchinson. Chun, L. 1993. The British New Left. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Clark, J., Critcher, C. and Johnson, R. 1979. Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory. London: Hutchinson. Cooper, D. E. 1970. Looking back on anger, in The Age of Affluence, edited by V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 254–287. Corner, J. (ed.) 1991. Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History. London: British Film Institute. Crick, B. 1960. Socialist literature in the 1950s. Political Quarterly, 31(3), 361–373.

60 Alan O’Connor Crosland, C. A. R. 1956. The Future of Socialism. London: Jonathan Cape. Crosland, C. A. R. 1958. Leftover left to kill. Spectator, 24 October, 555. Review of Conviction, edited by N. Mackenzie. Crosland, C. A. R. 1960a. Can Labour Win? London: Fabian Society. Crosland, C. A. R. 1960b. The future of the left. Encounter, March, 3–12. Crosland, C. A. R. 1960c. Smashing things. Spectator, 12 February, 223. Review of The Glittering Coffin by D. Potter. Crosland, C. A. R. 1962a. The mass media. Encounter, November, 3–14. Reprinted in his The Conservative Enemy, 197–216. Crosland, C. A. R. 1962b. The Conservative Enemy. London: Jonathan Cape. Crossman, R. H. (ed.) 1950. The God that Failed. London: Hamish Hamilton. Crossman, R. H. S. 1960a. Labour in the Affluent Society. London: Fabian Society. Crossman, R. H. S. 1960b. The spectre of revisionism: A reply to Crosland. Encounter, April, 24–28. Dworkin, D. 1997. Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Eliot, T. S. 1962. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. London and Boston: Faber and Faber. Originally published 1948. Fyvel, T. R. 1963. The Insecure Offenders: Rebellious Youth in the Welfare State. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Galbraith, J. K. 1963. The Affluent Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Originally published 1958. Goldthorpe, J. H. 1972. Class, status and party in modern Britain. European Journal of Sociology, XIII, 342–373. Goldthorpe, J. H. and Lockwood, D. 1963. Affluence and the British class structure. Sociological Review, 11(2), 133–163. Gosling, R. 1961. Lady Abemarle’s Boys. London: Fabian Society. Gould, T. 1983. Inside Outsider: The Life and Times of Colin MacInnes. London: Chatto and Windus, The Hogarth Press. Greer, H. 1963. Tremble, dammit! The story of C.N.D. Spectator, 12 April, 459–462. Hall, S. 1958. A sense of classlessness. Universities and Left Review, 5, 26–32. Hall, S. 1959a. Absolute beginnings. Universities and Left Review, 7, 17–25. Hall, S. 1959b. Politics of adolescence? Universities and Left Review, 6, 2–4. Hall, S. 1960. Crosland territory. New Left Review 1(2), March–April, 2–4. Hall, S. 1981. Schooling, state and society, in Education and the State, Vol. 1, edited by R. Dale et al. Lewes, Sussex: Falmer Press, 3–30. Hall, S. 1989. The ‘first’ new left: Life and times, in Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On, edited by R. Archer et al. London and New York: Verso, 11–38. Hall, S. 1997. Raphael Samuel: 1934–96. New Left Review, 221, 119–127. Hall, S., Critcher, S., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan. Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds.) 1976. Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subculture in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson. Halloran, J. D., Elliott, P. and Murdock, G. 1970. Demonstrations and Communications: A Case Study. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Hartley, A. 1960. To an Aldermaston marcher. Encounter, June, 67–68. Hewison, R. 1981. In Anger: British Culture in the Cold War 1945–60. New York: Oxford University Press.

The New Left and Cultural Studies 61 Hoggart, R. 1958. The Uses of Literacy. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Originally published 1957. Hoggart, R. 1960. The uses of television. Encounter, January, 38–45. Reprinted in his Speaking to Each Other, 1970, 152–162. Hoggart, R. 1961. Mass communications in Britain, in The Pelican Guide to English Literature: Vol. 7 The Modern Age, edited by B. Ford. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 442–457. Hoggart, R. 1993. An Imagined Life, 1959–91. London: Chatto and Windus. Hoggart, R. and Williams, R. 1960. Working class attitudes. New Left Review, 1(1), 26–30. Recorded conversation between Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, August 1959. Joicy, N. 1993. A paperback guide to progress: Penguin Books 1935–c.1951. Twentieth Century British History, 4(1), 25–56. Jones, M. 1978. Today the Struggle. London: Quartet Books. Jones, M. 1987. Chances: An Autobiography. London and New York: Verso. Kettle, A. 1961. Culture and revolution: A consideration of the ideas of Raymond Williams and others. Marxism Today, October, 301–307. Leader, Z. 2006. The Life of Kingsley Amis. London: Jonathan Cape. Lessing, D. 1994. The Golden Notebook. New York: Harper Perennial. Originally published 1962. Lessing, D. 1998. Walking in the Shade: 1949–1962. New York: Harper Perennial. Lewis, J. 2005. Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane. London: Viking. Little, A. and Westergaard, J. 1964. The trend of class differentials in educational opportunity in England and Wales. British Journal of Sociology, 15(4), 301–316. Lockwood, D. 1960. The ‘new working class’. European Journal of Sociology, I, 248–259. Macdonald, D. 1961. Looking backward. Encounter, June, 79–84. Review of The Long Revolution by R. Williams. Mackenzie, N. (ed.) 1959. Conviction. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Marcuse, H. 1972. An Essay on Liberation. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Marwick, A. 1980. Class: Image and Reality in Britain, France and the USA Since 1930. London: Collins. Marwick, A. 1990. British Society Since 1945, second edition. London: Penguin Books. Maschler, T. (ed.) 1957. Declaration. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Mayhew, C. 1959. Commercial Television: What Is to Be Done? London: Fabian Society. Miliband, R. 1968. Professor Galbraith and American capitalism. Socialist Register, 5, 215–229. Review of The New Industrial Estate by J. K. Galbraith. Miliband, R. 1973. The State in Capitalist Society. London: Quartet Books. Originally published 1969. Mills, C. W. 1956. The Power Elite. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mills, C. W. 1960. Letter to the new left. New Left Review, 5, September–October, 18–23. Negt, O. and Kluge, A. 1993. Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Originally published 1972. New Left Review. 1961a. Which frame of mind? New Left Review, January–February, 28–48. By Kit Coppard, Tony Higgins, Paddy Whannel and Raymond Williams. New Left Review. 1961b . Special Issue on Education. New Left Review, 11, September–October. Newton, F. 1961. The Jazz Scene. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Originally published 1959.

62 Alan O’Connor O’Connor, A. 1989. Raymond Williams: Writing, Culture, Politics. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell. Parkin, F. 1968. Middle-Class Radicalism: The Social Bases of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Penguin Books. 1985. Fifty Penguin Years. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Powell, R. 1963. The Aldermaston generation. Spectator, 8 March, 289–291. Priestley, J. B. 1957. Britain and the nuclear bombs. New Statesman, 2 November, 554–556. Priestley, J. B. 1961. The fading image. New Statesman, 19 May, 785–786. Reisman, D. 1997. Antony Crosland: The Mixed Economy. London: Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press. Rock, P. and Cohen, S. 1970. The teddy boy, in The Age of Affluence 1951–1965, edited by V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 288–320. Rustin, M. 1963. The relevance of mills’ sociology. New Left Review, 21, 92–106. Samuel, R. 1959a. Class and classlessness. Universities and Left Review, 6, 44–50. Samuel, R. 1959b. The quality of life, in Where? Five Views on Labour’s Future, edited by Hugh Berrington. London: Fabian Society, 32–36. Samuel, R. 1960a. The deference voter. New Left Review, January–February, n.p. Samuel, R. 1960b. Lipset’s nightmare. New Statesman, 17 December, 983–984. Review of Political Man by Seymour Martin Lipset. Samuel, R. 1961. Dr. Abrams and the end of politics. New Left Review, September–October, 2–9. Samuel, R. 2006. The Lost World of British Communism. London and New York: Verso. Sandbrook, D. 2005. Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles. London: Little, Brown. Savage, M. 2005. Working-class identities in the 1960s: Revisiting the affluent worker study. Sociology, 39(5), 929–946. Saville, J. 1965. Labour and income redistribution. Socialist Register, 147–162. Saville, J. 1976. The Twentieth Congress and the British Communist Party. Socialist Register, 2, 1–23. Saville, J. 1994. Edward Thompson, the Communist Party and 1956. Socialist Register, 20–31. Saville, J. 2003. Memoirs From the Left. London: Merlin. Sedgwick, P. 1976. The two new lefts, in The Left in Britain 1956–1968, edited by D. Widgery. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 131–153. Skidelsky, R. 1970. Lessons of Suez, in The Age of Affluence 1951–1964, edited by V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 168–191. Smith, D. 2008. Raymond Williams: A Warrior’s Tale. Cardigan: Parthian. Socialist Union. 1956. Twentieth Century Socialism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Strachey, J. 1958. Unconventional wisdom. Encounter, October, 73–80. Review of The Affluent Society by J. K. Galbraith. Taylor, R. 1970. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, in The Age of Affluence 1951–1965, edited by V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 221–253. Thompson, D. (ed.) 1973. Discrimination and Popular Culture, second edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. First published 1964. Thompson, E. P. 1959a. Commitment in politics. Universities and Left Review, 6, 50–55. Thompson, E. P. 1959b. The new left. The New Reasoner, Summer(9), 1–17. Thompson, E. P. (ed.) 1960. Out of Apathy. London: Stevens and Sons. Thompson, E. P. 1968. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Originally published 1963. (The 1000th Pelican paperback from Penguin Books). Thompson, E. P. 1970. Warwick Ltd. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. A Penguin Education Special.

The New Left and Cultural Studies 63 Twentieth Century. 1959. Special issue on television, November. Twentieth Century. 1965. Special issue on class in Britain, Spring. Universities and Left Review. 1957. The Insiders, 64 pages. Vaizey, J. 1962. Education for Tomorrow: Britain in the Sixties. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Westergaard, J. H. 1964. Capitalism without classes? New Left Review, 10–30. Whannel, P. 1959. Jazz and its publics. Universities and Left Review, 7, 69–70. Widgery, D. 1976. The Left in Britain 1956–1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Williams, R. 1957a. Fiction and the writing public. Essays in Criticism, 7, 422–428. Review of The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart. Williams, R. 1957b. The new party line? Essays in Criticism, 7, 68–76. Review of The Outsider by Colin Wilson. Williams, R. 1957c. Working class culture. Universities and Left Review, 1(2), 29–32. Review of The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart. Williams, R. 1958. The press the people want. Universities and Left Review, 5, Autumn, 42–47. Williams, R. 1959. Arguing about television. Encounter, June, 56–59. Review of Television and the Child by H. T. Himmelweit. Williams, R. 1960a. Class and voting in Britain. Monthly Review, January, 327–334. Williams, R. 1960b. The new British left. Partisan Review, 27, 341–347. Williams, R. 1961a. Culture and Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Originally published 1958. Williams, R. 1961b. The future of Marxism. Twentieth Century, 170, 128–142. Williams, R. 1962a. Communications: Britain in the Sixties. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Williams, R. 1962b. The Existing Alternatives in Communications. London: Fabian Society. Williams, R. 1964. Border Country. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Originally published 1960. Williams, R. 1965a. The British left. New Left Review, 18–26. Williams, R. 1965b. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Originally published 1961. Williams, R. 1968. Why do I demonstrate? The Listener, 25 April, 521–523. Williams, R. 1970. An experimental tendency. The Listener, 3 December, 785–786. Review of The New Left by M. Cranston. Williams, R. 1972. Why the BBC is like Monty Python’s flying circus. The Listener, 14 December, 839–840. Williams, R. 1976. Left with nothing to celebrate. The Guardian, 22 February, 21. Review of The Left in Britain, 1956–1968 by D. Widgery. Williams, R. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, R. 1979. Politics and Letters: Interviews With New Left Review. London: New Left Books. Williams, R. 1980. Gravity’s python. London Review of Books, 4–17 December, 14. Review of From Fringe to Flying Circus by R. Wilmut. Williams, R. 1989a. The future of cultural studies, in his The Politics of Modernism, edited by T. Pinkney. London: Verso, 151–162. Williams, R. 1989b. Resources of Hope, edited by R. Gable. London and New York: Verso. Willis, P. 1977. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids get Working Class Jobs. Farnborough: Saxon House. Willmott, P. 1969. Adolescent Boys of East London. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Originally published 1966.

64 Alan O’Connor Wilson, H. H. 1959. Is conviction enough? Monthly Review, December, 291–297. Wilson, H. H. 1961a. Pressure Group: The Campaign for Commercial Television. London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, H. H. 1961b. The struggle for commercial television. New Statesman, 26 May, 834–836; 2 June, 874–877; 9 June, 916–919. Wollheim, R. 1961a. The English dream. Spectator, 10 March, 334–335. Review of The Long Revolution by R. Williams. Wollheim, R. 1961b. The sectarian imagination: On John Berger’s criticism. Encounter, June, 47–53. Wollheim, R. 1961c. Socialism and Culture. London: Fabian Society. Wollheim, R. 1962. Babylon, Babylone. Encounter, May, 25–36. Wollheim, R. 2004. Germs: A Memoir of Childhood. London: Waywiser Press. Young, M. 1961. The Rise of the Meritocracy. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Originally published 1958. Young, M. and Willmott, P. 1962. Family and Kinship in East London. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Originally published 1957.

3

C.L.R. James Dialectics and the fate of the creative individual David Berry

James’s obscurity as an intellectual is, in part, paradoxically explained by the very fact that he was, in the most pristine sense, an organic intellectual, far removed from the academy. For most of the first period in the United States, during his first stay from 1938 to 1953, he was an activist in the political underground in the Leftist movement. Often James in his functions as theorist, political journalist, and agitprop artist, wrote under the auspices of pseudonyms while he toiled in the trenches of the mass movement; James was for the most of his life without the benefit of any academic status or extensive public media exposure. (McClendon III 2005: 6)

The works of C.L.R. James have not been as widely acknowledged as many of the writers associated within the tradition of British Cultural Studies, and this lack of recognition is equally abound more broadly within Marxism. Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall are all recognizable figures, but James has oft-remained an outsider in this broader intellectual field. As McClendon makes clear in the quotation which opens this chapter, the lack of recognition afforded to James is itself of interest. As we shall see in more detail later, in my view it is partly due to James’s unorthodox theoretical approach, certainly within Marxism, towards mass culture, which to a large extent James viewed positively as a force of movement, which, in turn for James, formed an essential and critical part of the Hegelian dialectic. We will see that James had forwarded a profoundly unfashionable model of analysis and asserted a creative interpretation of mass culture in the process – not only in relation to dominant Marxist and Conservative approaches to mass culture, which viewed ‘mass’ in broadly negative terms, but almost certainly to Hoggart’s views generally, clearly demonstrated in The Uses of Literacy. The point being, and here put plainly, James’s view of mass cultural production within a capitalist economic system was two-fold, certainly complex and significantly removed from prevailing paradigms and norms. James was far more sympathetic, less hostile to cultural products which often brought disdain by others for degrading culture and imposing a false reason manufactured by commercialism, whilst simultaneously acknowledging the ‘vulgar’. Farrakh Dhondy (2001: xi) has also focused on what is in reality a scandalous lack of recognition and in my view ignorance of James’s output: ‘C.L.R. James has

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had scant attention from serious commentators on History’. And Dhondy specifically targets E.P. Thompson’s neglect of James despite the fact that Thompson was more than aware of James’s work and potential as a Marxist writer. This absence has also been detailed by Stuart Hall in ‘C.L.R. James: A Portrait’, a chapter contributed to C.L.R. James’s Caribbean edited by Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, where Hall (1996: 3), perhaps very late in the day, from the off states, ‘I will emphasize the political context in which James worked because I think that he has not been accorded his proper due’. He further acknowledges that ‘James was an extremely important political and intellectual figure who is only just beginning to be widely recognized for his achievements’. The key issue concerning the neglect and ignorance of James’s contribution to written material on culture and why James had been largely ignored was infused in Hall’s additional comments: ‘His work has never been critically and theoretically engaged as it should be’ (Hall 1996). More material has been produced on James since Hall made his comments, but one can’t help but feel that James continues to remain an outsider in Marxist theory and largely excluded from Cultural Studies more generally. C.L.R. James (Cyril Lionel Robert James), who occasionally used the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was born in Trinidad, a colony of Britain at the time in 1901, and died in the eventful year of 1989 – the year of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the former USSR and Central and Eastern Europe. There is perhaps something poetical about the end of James’s life corresponding with the end of a rancid ideology that James rightly despised – let’s call it the revenge of a Trotskyist of sorts: his death; its death. Way before the end of his life, James had set himself an objective to achieve after death which would defy science: James wished for a glorious resurrection if a social revolution occurred in the United Stated of America detailed in his work At the Rendezvous of Victory (1984). This is not surprising because James’s sympathies for American workers and the subaltern in the United States were both equally strong and affectionate. James was to all extent and purposes an awkward Marxist in the sense that he frequently deviated from many positions within the Marxist movement, which goes some way to explaining the complex character of James’s political position and certainly his approach to cultural forms and in particular how public reception of popular cultural forms developed and socially evolved. Once influenced by the revolutionary socialist Leon Trotsky, James eventually deviated only to be influenced by another revolutionary socialist, Vladimir Illyich Lenin, only then to deviate once more. As far as James was concerned, Trotsky was mistaken in his analysis of the Soviet Union when he famously described it as a ‘degenerated workers state’, preferring instead to use the term, ‘state capitalism’. James eventually rejected Lenin’s idea of the ‘vanguard party’ which would take a leading role over the proletariat towards the socialist revolution. Both these deviations are of interest because they inform us of the unique Marxist way that James eventually approached the production of cultural forms and public thinking and cultural development within a capitalist economic and political framework.

C.L.R. James on popular culture 67 As we’ll see, and in what was becoming a Jamesian tradition, James’s approach to culture in the United States was in fact a further deviation from established Marxist approaches which had dominated the field of inquiry. What, I wonder, would James’s approach to culture be in the Soviet Union once he had rejected Trotsky’s interpretation? Would it, for example, have ‘moments’ of positive evaluations, which reflected James’s positive interpretation of popular culture in the United States; if not, why not? The rejection of Lenin’s idea of the vanguard party is in terms of James’s approach to culture more complex and complicated. That said, it does explain to some extent why James would see the basis of liberation within cultural production and cultural consumption in the United States via film, TV and comic strip – consciousness of the world would be raised, some philosophical form of happiness pursued and perhaps even attained as a social reality. However, it doesn’t explain James’s frustration with the American workers’ leadership, who unlike the rank and file for James weren’t revolutionary minded and in fact were a blithering hindrance to change; if only they were revolutionary! But even if they were, what difference would it make? After all, according to James, Lenin’s idea of a revolutionary-minded vanguard party was to be rejected: contradictions – indeed ambiguities – abound. James’s approach to the creative individual and that individual’s interpretation of the moment of ‘cultural consumption’ in a capitalist context is, on the one hand, akin to established Marxist traditions such as Political Economy and writers associated with the Frankfurt School and, on the other, a departure. Creativity for Marxist traditions is a given, but stifled under capitalist relations of production. The disjuncture or rupture is based on James’s interpretation of subjective and/ or mass engagement with cultural forms. In my view such a position aligns itself not with the traditions of Marxism but rather with anarchist traditions that replace ‘class’ with the category of the ‘people’ as the focal point of consumption and change, and, despite any differences on my part, at the very least this makes James an interesting and indeed awkward Marxist to study.

Dialectics, humanity and the creative individual The working class in every country lives its own life, makes its own experiences, seeking always to create forms and realise values which may originate directly from its organic opposition to official society, but are shaped by its experiences in co-operative labour. Nowhere is this more marked than in the United States where the raucous rowdyism of Republicans and Democrats obscures and drowns out the mass search for a way of life; not a new way but simply a way, the famous ‘American Way’ being strictly an export commodity. (James 1984: 76)

In 1947 James wrote his essay titled ‘Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity’. Anthony Bogues briefly refers to this essay, insisting that James characteristically ‘invokes both Marx and Hegel in asking the question, “what is man?” ’(Bogues 2006: 160); in a similar fashion, but not identical to Schopenhauer’s

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‘Will to Live’, James also insists on human motivation to surpass suffering in the real material world; unlike Schopenhauer’s ‘Will to Live’, James’s approach has no metaphysical leaning but rather is deeply rooted in material reality; but despite these differences, motivation in creativity is central to thesis and antithesis on both counts that marches towards a conception of humanity grounded in the dialectic where ‘creativity’ becomes a central driving force of movement. As noted elsewhere, ‘Dialectics attempts to perceive movement as a contradictory unity of opposites and attempts to comprehend the dynamics of social relations in society’ (Berry 2004: xiii). Creativity – an artistic opposite of sorts – is for James a product of the inherent contradictions contained within industrial capitalism, and creativity, thus perceived, is in part a cultural reaction to the economic demands and their by-products on the creative will naturally held within the individual. Hegel called this ‘recognition’ – try suppressing it at your peril because its natural course is to set forth the true spirit of humanity – ‘the individual seeking individuality in a mechanized, socialized society, where his life is ordered and restricted at every turn’ (James 1984: 127); James used Chaplin’s tramp to epitomize this form – ‘This tramp was an individual. He defied the growing mechanization and socialization of life’ (James 1984: 133). James’s writings on culture may have been largely ignored within Marxism and Cultural Studies more generally, but James’s writings on ‘culture and dialectics’ are even more far removed to the outer reaches of intellectual debate. This requires urgent attention, and, in my view, James’s writings, on culture and dialectics, are one of the most important approaches within the Marxist discussions. Dhondy thought C.L.R.’s book titled Notes on Dialectics was a strange book that made little sense, whilst John Page urged, ‘Read it, and then re-read it’, and ‘For those who are prepared to persevere the book is rich with genuine insights and creative thinking’ (Page n.d.). The Hegelian dialectic is not for the faint-hearted; it isn’t easy to understand, and turning abstract theory into empirical application is also often fraught with difficulties, but essentially this was the task at hand for C.L.R. James acknowledges that dialectics is rooted in abstractions that attempt to understand the ‘movement of human society’, and contradictions inherent to systems are the root and branch of dialectical change; one crucial element of movement under capitalism that constitutes contradiction is the enforced mechanization of productive labour in industry, the attempted subordination of workers, the routinization of productivity that dulls the mind pitted against human creativity. The former is an external force exerting itself, in the sense it seeks to manage humanity and shape it according to a rationality dictated by surplus value with labour value merely measured as a rationalized bureaucratic means to an economic end valued only in monetary terms, but human destiny – one constructed out of our creative energies – will always resist despite the reality of conformity. Contradictory opposites are the central driving force of movement, and the dialectic is an attempt to understand ‘the immanent movement of development of the social organism’ (Berry 2004: xiii), and, as Marx in the Grundisse argued, it is ‘the organic social body within which individuals reproduce themselves, but as social individuals’ (Marx 1973: 832).

C.L.R. James on popular culture 69 Hudis (1998), with a nod towards Hegel’s ‘Three Attitudes of Thought towards Objectivity’ in the Smaller Logic, argued that the movement based on contradiction does not circumvent ‘progression’ and ‘regression’ but rather is located at the point between. As Werner Bonefeld (1992: 102) maintained, this point of entry into the dialectical process is precisely premised on ‘extreme poles of a dialectical continuum’. Marx viewed the economic element as a central driving force of ‘motion’; it is given priority – it lends itself to conditioning other realms of society. Movement and transformations are key words of the dialectic, and, whilst Marx argued that as method the dialectic would observe ‘what exists’ (Marx 1976: 103), it would also predicate thinking of what may evolve. Although it is true that contradiction is central to understanding movement and that Marx did not predict exact outcomes, it was, as Lee and Newby (1989: 119) stated, important to consider that dialectic theorizing would presume ‘human attempts to overcome contradiction’, and this in many ways sums up C.L.R.’s view of the dialectic: creativity and humanity as a process of ‘overcoming’. It is important to note that both Hegel and Marx prioritized the empirical moment – in other words, dialectical thinking was not simply about theorizing, as Hegel had noted in the History of Philosophy, where the dialectic shows the different stages and moments of development, in manner of occurrence, in particular places, in particular people or particular circumstances, the complications arising thus, and, in short, it shows us the empirical form. (Hegel 1974: 29–30) This is important to note, for three reasons: first, that the dialectic attempts to move beyond theory, and, second, because for C.L.R. the dialectic was important for placing the United States into context – in other words, to study the ‘empirical form’. The third reason, summed up below, is certainly the basis of C.L.R.’s writings on popular arts and economy, particularly in American Civilization where James comments on the ‘vulgar’ rooted in economic motivation against cultural production rooted in a reflection of the needs and thinking of citizens; this viewpoint on the contradictory character of media within any given social system can be theorized thus: In theory, the media can be many things, it can act as a conduit of enlightened thought or conversely it can restrict cultural development by emphasising the commercial imperative. It can be both occurring simultaneously and as opposites, vying for political and cultural hegemony, the dialectic! (Berry 2004: xvi) This statement is applicable to James’s writings, where he does not directly speak of the dialectic, particularly in ‘Popular Arts and Modern Society’ (1993), but constantly refers to what he considered of cultural value and meaning within the popular arts, and that which he did not; in other words the commercialized products which for James were vulgar and meaningless in cultural terms,

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formed not the opposite movement of resistance but rather defended the established order. Such contradictions and social tensions between cultural forms are discussed by James in relation to a certain Mr Patterson of the New York Daily News who had ‘accepted the idea of Dick Tracy’ by the author Chester Gould. For James, Patterson saw that Gould’s character, Dick Tracy, was a profound statement of the moment – it sums up everything that is inherent within the dialectical moment: The bitterness, the violence, the brutality, the sadism simmering in the population, the desire to revenge themselves with their own hands, to get some release for what society had done to them since 1929 – Patterson understood it perfectly. (James 1993: 121) James understood that the comic strip and other cultural forms were a reaction to the Depression and its harsh economic impact on the conditions of society. When we consider this in the context of time and movement, we begin to understand that for James the pivotal time of change is 1929; in fact his assessment of cultural products and public responses to them changes substantially, pre- and post-1929, particularly with the rise of the ‘star system’ and all it represented, which over the long slow process of time and change represents dialectical thinking which starkly contrasts with cultural products embedded in significant social meaning and context: ‘It is realism at its lowest, a complete denial of any serious creative effort on the part of the artist or the audience. It is purely primitive’ (James 1993: 144). Post-1929, we see this contrasting formation of the pursuit of individuality, so de rigueur pre-1929, and the vulgarity that money can so enthusiastically promote. Referring to the changing formation of the ‘modern masses’ post-1929, James states: They have fostered on the one hand an individualistic response to violence, murder, atrocities, crime, sadism; and on the other they have pertinaciously fostered and encouraged by their money and interest this creation of synthetic (film) characters. Through them they live vicariously, see in them examples of that free individuality which is the dominant need of the mass today. (James 1993: 146) In the continuing narrative, we see why it is important for James, in general terms, to think of dialectics in relation to creativity, and the fate of humanity in relation to the oppressive relationship between the commercialized star system and liberation: Not only in their artistic but in their public lives these stars are the real aristocracy of the country and they perform one essential function of any genuine aristocracy. They fill a psychological need of the vast masses of people who live limited lives. The whole vast creation of early Christianity

C.L.R. James on popular culture 71 with its hierarchy of saints and its precise descriptions of Heaven were a similar complement. (James 1993: 146) This remarkable observation – and once again not a mention of the dialectic can be found here – is exactly that; the contradiction from which struggle and movement proceed is further illustrated here: These synthetic film characters are a far more serious social phenomenon than the detectives who reappear in book after book and radio-drama after radio-drama. They are limited to elementary conceptions of human character by which the existing deadness of life is made more tolerable. Yet within these limitations a spark can burst into flame. (James 1993: 147; my italics) The last sentence reveals James’s view of the masses, which, despite actual social conditions, was formulated on a positive assessment of consciousness and thinking, more of which is discussed in the final section below. But for the moment James’s assessment of cultural production and consumption changed dramatically before and after the Depression. This point is extremely important to understand if we are to fully grasp James’s views and what often reads as critical fluctuations in his thought pattern; thankfully this isn’t so. Rather than offer an un-contextualized approach to ‘mass’ (that is, regardless of epoch/historical periodization), James’s approach to production and consumption contrasts sharply pre- and post-1929 – ‘the great creative days died in 1929’ (James 1993: 137), and the rise of the ‘stars’ post 29 engendered the ‘real aristocracy of the country’ who performed an essential function: ‘They fill a psychological need of the vast masses of people who have limited lives’ (James 1993: 146). These comments, contrasted with James’s positive comments on the ‘mass’ as not being ‘passive’, are a perfect example of what much later Stuart Hall called ‘conjunctural analysis’ – context please, not wild misleading universality crossing cultural contexts, space and time. And yet despite this context, the oppressive condition of cultural production and its concomitant reception, the ‘spark’ James spoke of in the human condition, to rise above what in essence was a transitional ‘dominant ideology’ was in reality waiting dormant to be culturally and critically ignited into action. Dhondy’s comments on the ‘inaccessibility’ of Notes on Dialectics were misplaced; Page on the other hand was absolutely correct: such inaccessibility is simply due to the complexities of Hegel’s approach. However, what isn’t entirely clear is whether James had taken a similar approach to both Hegel and Marx as Žižek (1999) did in ‘Hegel’s “Logic of Essence” as a Theory of Ideology’, which considered James’s emphasis on creativity or what Hegel termed ‘essence’. For instance, Žižek had argued that the well-known statement by Marx from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte – ‘Men make their own history; but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and

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transmitted from the past’ – was a negation of the freedom of the inner essence of the subject; in other words it determined the subject. I fail to see why Marx’s proclamation was deterministic; it simply was a statement of how conditions shape consciousness. Nevertheless, despite my objections to Žižek, the important point to note is why Žižek argues that any Hegelian opposition is based on ‘spontaneous self-development’ and that ‘the inner potentials of the self-development of an object and the pressure exerted on it by an external force are strictly correlative; they form the two parts of the same conjunction’ (Žižek 1999: 228). James concurred that, despite oppressive external forces and what has become known as ‘dominant ideologies’ or prevailing dominating ideas, the creative energies and the inevitable drive to change could not be distinguished and certainly not determined by external forces, but, for James, the proviso was that such theorizing was to be placed in the context of both Marx and Lenin. The Hegelian emphasis on inner essence or ‘creativity’, to use Jamesian terminology, seems at first glance to be at odds with the Leninist view towards the necessity of a vanguard party; however, it seems that James was attempting to reconcile large aspects of Lenin’s theories with Hegel (and Marx) that negates – by criticism – the validity and legitimacy of the vanguard party to act in the name of the people. It is a curious blend of Hegelian, Marxist and Leninist perspectives that is critical not only of Lenin’s idea of the vanguard party but also of Hegel’s ‘world-spirit’ which James found to be ludicrous, lamentable and laughable. The dialectic then, for James, is the movement by which the subject can and should be able to forge the conditions for creative expression. Artistic creativity is not so much a weapon to wake up the masses from their apparent slumber but rather for James is a direct cultural response to their social needs and desires rooted in forms of happiness which has its theoretical roots in ancient Athens. Characteristic of such cultural responses is a political imperative based on a sharp relationship between production/performance and social interests of which an epistemological axis is formed and is essentially democratic, soaked with intent and purpose. This point is illustrated by Sidwell in relation to Ancient Athens: The institutions and language of the polis often intrude upon and articulate these pre-polis stories. But there is a more serious problem. Occasionally, issues and events which clearly belong in the world of the audience are highlighted so strongly that it is hard not to feel that there is some political axe being ground. Yet because they are only occasional and are embedded in mythical material, it is also difficult to argue unequivocally for a political interpretation. (Sidwell 1996; my italics) Sidwell’s comments situate exactly the writings of C.L.R. James with respect to the dramatist Aeschylus in ancient Athens, which for James had its philosophical equal in cultural forms in the United States at its height leading up to the Depression of 1929. The crime novel with its characters of subversion was indicative of public feeling; the pulse had been felt, narrative turned social context into a discourse of power, and they, the people, positively received and appreciated

C.L.R. James on popular culture 73 it – just like the Athenian citizens, US citizens saw their conditions and struggles reflected in text. What lessons can we learn from James’s observations about the creativity of humans and the scientific inevitability of the dialectic learnt from Hegel, Marx and, for that matter, Trotsky? First, a useful way in which to conceptualize James’s view is to link it with the later writings of Stuart Hall, particularly ‘Notes on Deconstructing the “Popular” ’. Hall argued that the terrain on which popular culture emerges is at the point of the contestation between ‘containment’ and ‘resistance’ – the former a product of established power and dominant forces, and the latter responses by the people; Hall called this the ‘cultural dialectic’, and the very last paragraph of Hall’s work is telling: Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where socialism, a socialist culture – already fully formed – might be simply ‘expressed’. But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why ‘popular culture’ matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it. (Hall 1998: 453) Second, what happens if ‘socialism’ does not appear to be in sight? If we use Hall’s comments above and relate them to James, it is important to note that the year 1929 signified a break for James in certain forms of cultural expression, cultural democracy and dialectical-discursive relationship between producer and consumer that reflected the needs, desires and political instincts of the masses altered. Post-1929, the relationship changes with the emergence of the ‘star’ system as indicated earlier; James does not use our modern terminology; we call it ‘celebrity’, and, despite the increasing vulgarization of culture by commercial means and the apparent inculcation of the masses towards mass consumption, James’s use of the dialectic or ‘cultural dialectic’, to quote Hall, is proof of the inevitability of resistance occurring at the point of production because of the inherent contradictions and natural tensions that sporadically occur under capitalist conditions. The following also reveals that resistance cannot be muted, evidenced in ‘The Invading Socialist Society’: The unending murders, the destruction of peoples, the bestial passions, the sadism, the cruelties and the lusts, all the manifestations of barbarism of the last thirty years are unparalleled in history. But this barbarism exists only because nothing else can suppress the readiness for sacrifice, the democratic instincts and creative power of the great masses of the people. (James 2010: 44) Ignatiev in ‘The World Views of CLR James’ noted just this in relation to the notion of a ‘new society’: ‘If you want to know what the new society looks like,

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said James, study the daily activities of the working class’ (2010: 8). The ‘new society’ is a form in motion, existing within the capitalist framework; it forms out of ‘resistance’ pitted against ‘containment’; as Ignatiev further reminds us, ‘James insisted that the struggles of the working class are the chief motor in transforming society. Even before it overthrows capital, the working class compels it to new stages in its development’ (James 2010) – the ‘new society’ is incomplete, and the ‘chief motor’ of transformation is the ‘cultural dialectic’ in action; and once more, as Ignatiev states with reference to working class struggles against capital, ‘One of the places this conflict appeared was in culture’ (James 2010: 11). This in sum is the nascent or embryonic ‘blueprint’ that Marx often referred to but did not set out as a formal set of rules for any future socialist society; in effect Marx had argued that building socialism was the job of those who sought radical change based on the contemporary form – nothing was set in stone, no revolutionary guidelines – and James was pointing towards its effective dawning and realization. There are periods where to quote Hall once again ‘containment’ is efficient in negating struggle – Hall uses ‘reform’ methods to illustrate this ‘in the name of the people’ as he points out with a healthy dose of cynicism towards liberal reformers – but also containment is applied inadvertently perhaps by the installation of cultural processes by celebrities who mostly represent capital and help to perpetuate the myth that capitalistic methods are normal, but once again, because the system is susceptible to serious economic downtowns, radical cultural responses will occur. When C.L.R. wrote ‘Popular Arts and Modern Society’ in his work American Civilization, he stated in relation to the production of crime novels and gangster films, to the comic strip ‘Dick Tracy’ and to journalism the following: ‘Why did the reaction to the Depression take this particular form?’ (1993: 122). James went on to state that the reason that the New York Daily News published Dick Tracy was because its editor, ‘Mr Patterson’, had detected a ‘mood in the population, a mood which had not existed before’ (James 1993). This for James was based on a profound disillusionment with the political and economic environment (the Great Depression) and a desire for social justice and change and for the public to attain revenge in the form of characters created in film, novels and the comic strip. In this context, the important part of Sidwell’s quote above is that it reveals exactly how ‘resistance’ occurs – Aeschylus had a ‘political axe’ to grind, and so he did. We talk of austerity today (post-2008), and James would certainly place Bruce Springsteen as one example, in the same mould as Aeschylus and Dick Tracy, particularly his last album Wrecking Ball produced in 2012, which is an assault on the impact of the Depression on ordinary peoples’ lives in the United States some eighty-three years later, although the crash began earlier when the disastrous subprime mortgage scandal fuelled yet another capitalist crash. Everything in the following quote is imbued in Springsteen’s project and commentary on the barbarism of free market capitalism and his beautiful and realistic portrayal of working people and catching the ‘mood’ that C.L.R. spoke of: The dialectic is a theory of knowledge, but precisely for that reason, it is a theory of the nature of man. Hegel and Marx did not first arrive at a theory of

C.L.R. James on popular culture 75 knowledge which they applied to nature and society. They arrived at a theory of knowledge from their examination of men in society. Their first question was: What is man? What is the truth about him? Where has he come from and where is he going? They answered that question first because they knew that without any answer to that general question, they could not think about particular questions. (James 1947) It is in this context we must view Springsteen’s album as a scathing assault on the failings of capitalism and a ringing endorsement of the working classes and their ‘inevitable’ struggle. In ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’, Springsteen invites those outside in the cold economic climate to join ‘this train’ and its journey towards a better world where ‘dreams will not be thwarted’. It may strike some as the perfect idealism of Springsteen, but it reflects James’s fate of the creative individual and humanity. The album depicts greed and suffering, and the title track ‘Wrecking Ball’ is an invite to those who dare to knock down the houses of those who can no longer afford to pay. ‘This Depression’ speaks for itself, and ‘We Take Care of Our Own’ is an honest account of the collective spirit of a socialist ideal. The album’s lyrics are littered with assaults on bankers, and in ‘Jack of All Trades’ we have ‘The Banker man grows fat, working man grows thin’, followed shortly by ‘If I had a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ’em on sight’. This assault also features on ‘Shackled and Drawn’ with ‘Gambling man rolls the dice, workingman pays the bill, it’s still fat and easy up on Banker’s hill, up on Banker’s hill, the party’s going strong, down here below we’re shackled and drawn’. These lyrics are the cultural embodiment and continuation of the tradition of the crime novel and so forth, of which James spoke and of feeling the pulse of a nation, or at least in reality a large impoverished section of it. Finally, the last track, ‘We Are Alive’, in my mind reflects the vision of humanity detailed in Schiller’s poem ‘Ode to Joy’ immortalized by Beethoven; despite the realities of life and despite of speaking of ‘graveyards’ and the ‘dead’, Springsteen like Beethoven shouts loudly: ‘We are alive!’ followed by ‘And though our bodies lie alone here in the dark, our spirits rise, to carry the fire and light the spark, to stand shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart’. In ‘Jack of All Trades’ he sings: ‘There’s a new world coming, I can see the light’. Beethoven’s homage to ‘Ode to Joy’ is about producing ‘light’ from ‘darkness’, ‘humanity’ over ‘oppression’, ‘hope’ over ‘despair’ – depicted in the chorale movement in the finale. The singer, actor and socialist activist Paul Robeson sang the following as a homage to the spirit of Schiller sung to the music of Beethoven – Robeson played the lead part in James’s play ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture’ – the connections here are delicious: Build the road of Peace before us, Build it wide and deep and long; Speed the slow and check the eager, Help the weak and curb the strong. None shall push aside another.

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And the tradition stretches even further back to Shakespeare’s play The Winter’s Tale. The tyrant Leontes is depicted by Shakespeare as all that is wrong with the world, but the birth and life of the child Perdita depicts hope of humanity over barbarism. As Lucy Bailey said of her wonderful production of The Winter’s Tale at Stratford-upon-Avon 2013 in an interview with Carol Chillington Rutter where Rutter asks, ‘So the world will not end’: ‘There is innocence and there is hope’, and that is central to James’s view of humanity and the dialectical movement that is in essence premised on hope and action.

Marxism and cultural consumption To believe that the great masses of the people are merely passive recipients of what the purveyors of popular art give to them is in reality to see people as dumb slaves. (James 1993: 123)

Creative production and the cultural dialectic demand a positive reception for movement to occur. A static condition is of no use. The discussion within Marxism concerning the power of capital over the production of consciousness and what forms resistance to capital are effective – they are in essence about strategy and outcomes. When Herbert Marcuse wrote One Dimensional Man in the 1960s, he documented the power of consumption governed by capital and that the concomitant consumer society was merely a sphere of social control over people. In the 1920s, writers within the Frankfurt School, with which Marcuse was associated, concerned themselves with a central issue of Marxism – namely, workingclass consciousness and revolution. It had been noted that a new Marxist-oriented research approach to the power of capitalism to effectively reproduce itself was required. Marx had seen the possibilities for radical changes, but capitalism remained stubbornly entrenched. Could Marx have been wrong in his assessment of its demise? Was capitalism the true reflection of human nature? Had conflict between classes been eradicated as consumer societies emerged providing new senses of individual cultural identities? Writers within the Frankfurt School began to address what was in essence a powerful new phenomenon which would be the central force for systematically intensifying the iron grip of ‘commodity fetishism’ – in broad terms this was media. Its influence over cultural production and consciousness effectively legitimized, naturalized and rationalized a ‘reason’ of existence and perpetuated the myth that aspiration could overcome the settling of a horizon that only served to stifle the onward march of modernity, thus nullifying radical dissent and resistance to what became known as the ‘dominant ideology’ which reflected capital norms and enabled capitalism’s economic system to dictate the terms in which culture and politics were framed.

C.L.R. James on popular culture 77 Adorno in particular used Marx’s theory of ‘commodity fetishism’ to explain how economic capital was able to reproduce itself successfully within the realm of culture, falsely, but convincingly providing a sense of liberation, freedom and individualism. Commodity fetishism was wrongly seen by people as an expression of free will and above all else persuasive in negating alternatives to a capitalist society as it skilfully seduced its victims into a state of narcosis; the opium of the people was seen as a consequence of cultural products. The psychoanalyst Edward Bernay had in the 1920s taken this model to an extreme by providing evidence that advertising could persuade people to succumb to media messages in a trance-like state by persuading people to purchase commodities. Similarly, Frank Zappa in Bongo Fury, commenting on celebrating 200 years of American independence, said that ‘they’re gonna sell you things you shouldn’t ought to buy’ – a warning to beware of the power of persuasion for commercial purposes, equally demonstrated in Zappa’s Slime. Vance Packard wrote of similar psychological effects in The Hidden Persuaders, and Louis Althusser’s ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ was a continuation of this theme as media could ‘interpellate’ subjects, thus locking them into an ideological ‘iron cage’, to use a Weberian term. C.L.R. James saw the relationship between capital, culture and consciousness very differently, and this significant departure was similar to the renegade Frankfurt School writers Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, who saw positive moments and times of vivid and real liberation in the much-maligned space of mass culture. Unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, Benjamin and Kracauer viewed cultural production under capitalist conditions as multifarious and varying in the dispersion of consciousness. As Alleyne (2006) reminds us, James differed from Adorno and Horkheimer: In contrast [with Adorno and Horkheimer], James has, with the posthumous publication of a manuscript he wrote in the 1940s (American Civilization), been looked at anew as an insightful commentator on US popular culture of the 1940s, possessing a prescient vision in his favourable assessment of the democratising potential of mass-circulation forms like the cinema, the comic strip and mass-circulation magazines. (Alleyne 2006: 188) I do not really subscribe to Alleyne’s use of ‘popular culture’ – mass culture is far more appropriate; however, C.L.R.’s position reflects Bourdieu’s theory of ‘cultural capital’ with a twist; a level of revolutionary consciousness from cultural forms within a capitalist context lends itself to an understanding of James’s approach to cultural forms, cultural dialectics and transformation. We have seen how the dialectic played such an important part in James’s assessment of the American empirical form, and this thinking is also intrinsically linked to James’s view on the consumption of cultural products by the masses. When James spoke about the ‘limitations’ of the star system and what it conveyed and represented and how it may be received, he also spoke of a ‘spark’ which could always ignite, which would in effect throw matters into chaos, which would further

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create a disengagement from established-dominating norms, creating movement out of contradiction. How is this possible, and why is it important to consider this in relation to a discussion on the dialectic? And perhaps more importantly, how does the ‘revolutionary edge’ of the working class sit with the more vulgar cultural moments that James identified? For surely such reactionary forces, from the working class, radically impact upon the inevitable revolutionary process and progress of the cultural dialectic. At the very least such vulgar cultural forms, consumed, act as a brake or obstacle to transformation which must be overcome, or perhaps they represent something far more problematic to the dialectic and reversal/opposition to the ‘interests’ of the working class? The contradiction evident in the consumption of cultural forms manifests also as a contradiction in James’s assessment. Reading James’s works and what others have written about James, one could conclude that James had not settled on the idea that mass culture is a determinate form of cultural and political resistance. Whilst it is true that James’s Marxism differed from what has become the established dominant Marxist perspective on mass culture, mostly perceiving mass culture in negative terms – as a form that conforms to rather than confronts capitalist norms – it is also true that strong elements of the latter are evident in James’s theory towards mass culture. I say had ‘not settled’ in that James was in my view conflicted over mass cultural forms within a capitalist context of economic production, for, whilst it is true that James’s enthusiasm for mass culture in the United States is apparent in his work American Civilization, it is also true that the way in which media discourse may influence perspectives – and truth – was not always fully appreciated by James. What are we to make of this apparent paradox in James’s works? What has become the established Marxist view is that, broadly speaking, mass culture is to be viewed with very large doses of suspicion and doubt and therefore viewed in mostly negative terms; this is a relationship of harm and hindrance, not freedom; it is what Marcuse referred to as ‘affirmative culture’ – that which replicates the status quo by affirming its hegemony and thus negating opposition in the form of radical dissent in any meaningful way. Marcuse, a central figure within the Frankfurt School, is seen by many as just another pessimist, like Adorno and Horkheimer, unlike James who mostly viewed mass culture in more optimistic terms. This apparent optimism for the possibilities of liberation from and within mass culture or even using mass culture as a reasonable basis to be able to think about alternatives ways of living is summed-up by Dhondy (2001: 74) stating that James did not share the ‘pessimism of other leftwingers like Herbert Marcuse’. James’s ‘enthusiasm’ for Hollywood, for example, certainly was positive beyond Marcuse, but such positive evaluations in terms of possibilities of self-emancipation were riddled with a focused critique of the limits of production, and thus contradictions emerge within James’s works. For example, take James’s take on the Hollywood blockbuster Gone with the Wind, where James clearly demonstrates his disgust at the narrative: It is the duty of all revolutionaries wherever possible to point out the gross historical falsifications of this picture, and to do all in their power to counteract

C.L.R. James on popular culture 79 the pernicious influence that it is likely to have on the minds of the people, who, knowing no better, may be tempted to accept this as history. (Socialist Appeal, 30 December 1939) If we contrast this with Dhondy (‘He fell for the drama of Gone with the Wind. He loved it’ [2001: 72]), what are we to think? Add to this, James viewed mass culture at least in the context of the United States in broadly positive terms, arguing, as did Walter Benjamin in a European context, that mass cultural forms such as cinema had democratizing potentials; US citizens for James displayed a heightened sense of freedom as an expression of individualism, and such form allowed for positive viewing of cinema or readings of text even. However, James’s comments above on Gone with the Wind clearly display contradictory positions between the democratizing potential of mass cultural forms and the possibility of the production of false consciousness. The contradiction between James’s positive view of ‘freedom’ and ‘individuality’ of US citizens and false consciousness cannot be reconciled in my view. What does this tell us then about James’s view of mass culture? Writing under the pseudonym J. R. Johnson a month later in January 1940, James wrote: ‘To conclude, the film (Gone with the Wind) is dangerous and must be exposed and boycotted’, yet the project of modernity whilst being violently contradictory for James was a form worth preserving, for what modernity had unleashed, in part, was the potential for social change and social justice. Alleyne (2006) has argued that this view of modernity was driven by James’s philosophical view concerning ‘critical humanism’, stating that ‘James’s work was humanist because it centred on human needs and creative potential, and was universalist because it sought to articulate a vision of history that encompassed all humanity’ (Alleyne 2006: 175). This ‘faith’ over ‘reality’ is equally summed-up by Dhondy’s (2001: 74) statement: ‘For James, the American workers remained on the side of the angels but rarely won prizes for harp-playing’. Alleyne may well be right, but was James’s faith and belief an obstacle to scientific and rational analysis of mass culture in the United States? In the ‘Introductory’ to James’s work American Civilization, he states right from the off the following: The American civilization is identified in the consciousness of the world with two phases of development of world history. The first is the Declaration of Independence. The second is mass production. Washington and Henry Ford are the symbols of American civilization. And on the whole this instinctive judgment is correct. (1993: 27) James then proposes that, in order to produce a substantial and effective understanding of the United States, four concepts require priority; these are ‘liberty, freedom, individuality, and the pursuit of happiness’ (James 1993: 30), and it is to de Tocqueville’s book Democracy in America that James turns to base his understanding of the then current times, and James shrewdly declares that the differences between ‘possibilities’ and the ‘realities’ must be clearly distinguished

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but on the basis that America is unique in that the aforementioned concepts have a concrete reality in everyday existence – as James said: ‘Americans lived it’ (James 1993: 31). James’s view on consumption at first glance appears to contrast starkly with Adorno’s assessment of mass culture, but there are similarities mainly because I feel he had not completely settled on the assessment of reactionary working-class elements who simply consumed with grotesque satisfaction the vulgarity James identified. For instance, the recognition by James that popular music and popular film contained vulgarity not worthy of attaining the divine status of ‘culture’ is, like Adorno, a further recognition of concerns over the epistemological value of culture. In other words, James was demonstrating a moral position over what he considered to be ‘low’ and ‘high’ culture – that with and without value, meaning and moreover the power to install a consciousness of resistance; Adorno differed only in perspective, not in the recognition of the separation of value and meaning in cultural content. James’s enthusiasm for moments of high value continues thus: ‘In this sphere the American people have taken the lead and dominated the world as surely as the great artistic and literary schools of Europe dominated the intellectual world of their time’(James 1993: 36). Marxism – as a place of theorizing Marx, and despite the stereotypes, misunderstandings and deliberate false allegations – has since its inception been defined by different interpretations of Marx and different theoretical applications and approaches to concrete reality, but it is not an exaggeration to argue that James’s Marxist critique is to be characterized as occupying an alternative Marxist space, which in my view is unique in its cultural analysis. There is no doubt in my mind that James offers a fascinating – alternative – approach to cultural forms: fascinating not only because it departs from many Marxist analyses of culture under capitalism but also because James’s analysis forces one to consider James’s Marxist credentials in the first instance. Long-term objectives – that is, the success of a workers’ revolution and the beginnings of socialism – no doubt correspond to the writings of Marx; it is the possibilities of James’s enthusiasm and positive evaluation of popular culture that are worrisome in that he inadvertently miscalculates the power of media to seduce and to condemn large swathes of the population into a state of cultural paralysis. James’s analysis of film, radio and the comic strip is an attempt to rescue American cultural forms from what he considers to be a misguided analysis by many commentators. The ‘popular arts’ (James 1993: 35) for James is the space where a serious intellectualizing of form and mind occur, despite America’s lack of ‘authoritative’ intellectual giants (as compared to Europe). James argues that this cultural space is not to be conceived in terms of ‘shoddiness’; its forms are not entirely vulgar, and neither are they to be summarily dismissed as mere ‘entertainment’ (James 1993). This cultural space for James is also unique in world history for it defines the ‘traits’ which emerge or are based on the concepts mentioned above. Nowhere, for James, is this space between production and consumption, so

C.L.R. James on popular culture 81 symbiotically, almost naturally entwined (evolving as one), but this is not a perception based entirely on the encoding-decoding model – for that assumes production is a powerful, influencing force that has many negative characteristics – but rather an understanding of many of the requirements and traits US citizens hanker for at the point of production. It’s enough to make many Marxists sit up and take notice, decry as Marxist heresy or just ignore it as the writings of a Marxist who had lost his way. James’s observations and analysis led him to consider the way in which the ‘great masses of the people’ entered into what he termed a ‘co-relation’ with the production of popular cultural forms and content. Such was James’s conviction that he was offended by the use of the term ‘entertainment industry’ to describe form and content which for C.L.R. had depth, value and meaning, for it implied a lightness, vapidity; it was of no cultural value, and the consequence of that term was the negation of thinking. For C.L.R. the so-called ‘entertainment industry’ was ‘in reality one of the most powerful social and psychological manifestations of the American life and character’ (James 1993: 37), and he spoke of locating ‘the tremendous social manifestation hidden behind what is called “entertainment” ’ (James 1993: 117). A cynic would say that this only reinforces what we know about American culture – that is, the ability to produce trash and think inwards; James would say this is not only a gross stereotype but a gross misunderstanding of the actual-concrete cultural relations of production and consumption in America. The liberating moments in text or visual culture such as cinema are central to James’s approach to Marxist theory. But perhaps what is most controversial about James’s writings on mass culture is the value of mass consumption. This is controversial because James’s approach to mass culture and the cultural dialectic was to all extent and purposes revolutionary, but he failed in my view to offer a satisfactory account of how the commercialized-vulgar mass cultural forms sought to negate the dialectic other than simply comment on their vulgarity. There are however significant similarities between James’s assessment of mass culture and that of the Latin American anarchist cultural critics Néstor García Canclini and Jésus Martín-Barbero. It is important to discuss this connection not least because the latter two, perhaps more so Martín-Barbero, were scathing of the Frankfurt School’s assessment of mass culture, which they felt was crude, but also in my view because of the similarities between the three of them towards the concept of the ‘people’, which, for anarchists, is a preferred concept to ‘class’ in their assessments – James in my view at times replaced ‘class’ with the category ‘people’, inadvertently or otherwise, which James used to formulate his understanding of mass culture and resistance, and this is summarized as James’s ‘nonclass differentiation’ (Alleyne 2006: 189). One particular phrase applied to cultural products by Canclini which I think is useful in this context – although I admit is somewhat baffling – is Canclini’s claim that ‘consumption is good for thinking’. ‘Consumption’ for Canclini was theoretically distinguished from and opposed to ‘commercialization’, of which he was critical; Canclini saw them differently. For my mind, and here I bear in mind the

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ambiguities within James’s works concerning mass culture, James shared much with Canclini and therefore would have looked favourably on Canclini’s phrase, reading and interpreting it with various positive-epistemological accentuations, which is based on bringing benefits to consumers in terms of how consciousness develops. Obviously this process of ‘consumption’ and ‘thinking’ is profoundly complex – one which social psychologists are interested in, as well as scholars of media and culture and the way in which production shapes or influences the way we think and behave. To a certain extent – and certainly on one level and interpretation of James – whilst James was perfectly aware of the way capitalism privileges some over the many, he nevertheless argued that there were ways in which to navigate around such cultural inequalities by offering an optimistic view of culture, coupled with an individualistic consciousness, which permitted consumers or citizens with a degree of sobering control over the products consumed. The similarity to the notion that ‘consumption is good for thinking’ is located here: During the last thirty years, mass production has created a vast populace, literate, technically trained, conscious of itself and of its inherent right to enjoy all the possibilities of the society to the extent of its means. (James 1993: 36) However, if there is a tentative departure, it is here: No such social force has existed in any society with such ideas and aspirations since the citizens of Athens and the farmers around trooped into the city to see the plays of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschlyus and decide on the prizewinners by their votes. (James 1993: 36) What I mean by ‘departure’ is that James’s argument is absolutely specific to the United States, whilst Canclini’s and Martín-Barbero’s use of the terms ‘hybrid cultures’ and mestizaje are specifically applied to nations within the Latin American contexts with very different histories and certainly exposed to imperialistic influences, not least by the United States itself. But James does not stop there, because this, in relation to the United States, directly follows, and so astonishing and complex is James analysis it requires a full declaration: The modern populace decides not by votes but by the tickets it buys and the money it pays. The result has been a new extension of aesthetic premises. The popular film, the radio, the gramophone, the comic strip, the popular daily paper and far more the popular periodical constitute a form of art and media of social communication which through mass production and the type of audience produced in the United States constitute a departure in the twentieth

C.L.R. James on popular culture 83 century as new in civilization as the art of printing in the fifteenth. It has transformed the production of art. (James 1993: 36) James continues to acknowledge that within the cultural sphere or the entertainment industry – James disliked the latter term – such as film and music there had been the production of an ‘ephemeral vulgarity on a colossal scale’ (James 1993: 36). However, for James the reality of the industrial scale of popular vulgar expression was accompanied by cultural forms of a much higher value which were hitherto ‘unknown in the history of civilization’. Moreover, James’s assessment of mass culture, power and consumption is linked to the anarchist writers in other ways, particularly concerning the ownership of the means of communication: New content, new principles, new forms, new conventions are in the process of creation with the masses of the people in the United States as first and decisive arbiter. The men who seek to supply this imperative social need as a rule, and rightly, do not consider themselves artists. They are business men. They find their performers where they can get them. They are careful to observe in matter and manner the limitations of the economic and financial powers upon whom their business depends. But they are as dependent upon the mass audience for their success as were Euripides and Sophocles for their prizes, a situation unique in the modern world. (James 1993: 36) Canclini and Martín-Barbero had argued that what business had in its favour was merely technological ownership, which hardly transferred to cultural dictatorship, and that despite the ownership of technology the ‘people’ were principally responsible for the creation of artistic forms (drama etc.). In Martín-Barbero’s criticism of many of the Frankfurt School writers, he also argued that the real point of assessment was to appreciate the dialectical-discursive relationship between the writer and reader and their shared interests; Martín-Barbero goes on to use melodrama as a clear example of this relationship, and rather than it being a relationship of object domination by capital, in fact the opposite is true – that is, the people could see their lives and interests portrayed at the point of production. To briefly return to my point above, James’s viewpoint on culture invariably impacted upon his Marxist strategy and outcomes that shared more with anarchism than it does with many of the influential strands of Marxism, and the anarchist notion of the ‘people’ is far more appropriate to use as a category for understanding social change according to James than the classical Marxist notion of class. But moreover, James’s criticism of the Leninist vanguard party was also in my view characteristic of anarchist leanings. Perhaps it is tempting to use the term Marxisant to describe James as a writer rather than a Marxist writer. Marxisant or Marxisante (fem) is a French word – or, to be precise, a French adjective and name (adjective et nom) to describe an

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individual that is influenced by Marxism (influencé par le marxisme) or close to Marxism (proche du marxisme). However, it is worth adding that Marxism is not to be confused with the actual writings of Marx, but rather as Étienne Balibar has reminded us that the former term ‘Marxism’ is what emerged by writers and activists who were influenced by Marx, and these indeed were varied and offered distinct interpretations of the works of Marx. To what extent Marxisant therefore becomes useful in general terms is difficult to ascertain, because if James was influenced by Marx, as he certainly was, he was a Marxist writer with a unique way of interpreting culture, its production and its final aims. James’s view that popular cultural forms have democratizing potential is deeply embedded within the wider view of the ‘people’. But why does this democratizing potential occur in a system dominated by powerful elites that seek to secure their own economic, political, social and cultural interests? It seems that James’s reading of Hegel may have influenced him not only in terms of the dialectic but also in terms of Hegel’s idea of ‘recognition’. In other words, Hegel had argued that despite any oppression, humans sought ‘recognition’ as a process of attaining humanity, and once again perhaps this is why James argued that it is our fate to do so, creatively or otherwise, to realize our true selves and create a system that is not governed by crude financial interests.

Happiness: a conclusion Staying briefly with Hegel, we should consider the additional concept of ‘happiness’ in relation to the Hegelian idea of ‘recognition’, which reveals the influence of Marx in terms of how labour can transform reality through dialectical movement. Moreover, for James, happiness – connected to labour – is central to movement beyond the present. In many respects, the Jamesian view of consumption can aid this process through the concrete realization of social conditions and what future may lie beyond the present condition, or the possibilities that may be attained. In James’s chapter titled ‘The Struggle for Happiness’, it is clear that he aligns his views concerning happiness with Marx recognizing how labour can transform reality, thus placing happiness within productive labour, but free from the fettered labour under capital. This notion of happiness differs greatly from Kant’s notion that the highest good is bound to the combined relationship of virtue and happiness – virtue makes happiness, not for Marx or James for that matter. James refers to a ‘fundamental conflict’ (James 1993: 167) that is at the centre of the lives of American workers, in which struggle forms and develops into contradictory positions and realizations: ‘Workers accept the traditional principles of American democracy’ (James 1993: 166–167). James writes of workers who are immersed into the great US project of ‘American industry’ (James 1993), but – and the image of Chaplin’s worker here emerges sliding haplessly through the mechanized industrial cogs of mass production – according to James, US workers feel, despite their allegiances to the US industrial project, nothing but ‘cog(s) in a great machine’ (James 1993: 167).

C.L.R. James on popular culture 85 Happiness or the struggle for happiness is based not necessarily in attaining pleasure, particularly the pleasure that may be attained from consumptive engagement, but rather in activity and thinking, praxis. Despite its Marxist location, this perception of how happiness can be attained is rooted once again in Ancient Athens, particularly the works of Aristotle. Happiness for Aristotle, as Kain (1993: 203) rightly states, is rooted in a ‘well-performed activity. . . . Moreover, for Aristotle, the higher the activity – the more it accords with our essence – the higher the satisfaction or happiness it will produce’. The conflict James spoke above of was in his view ‘staggering in its scope and implications’ (James 1993: 168) and discusses how revulsion at actual social conditions had fermented for years before exploding in France with the revolution of 1789: ‘[H]istorians after the event could go back and trace the stages by which this growing passion was developed’ (James 1993). Such fermentation certainly entails thinking critically, and over a long period of time, and, once again, it is easy to see the theoretical connection between James and Néstor García Canclini, mentioned above, where James references André Siegfried’s book America Comes of Age, and here I highlight a particular resonant passage from Siegfried’s work where the latter discusses how the ‘center of gravity’ radically changes under the conditions of ‘mass production’ with ‘money’ and ‘leisure’ at the ‘disposal’ of the individual in a way previously unknown. This for Siegfried determines a new social relationship between production and consumption: ‘Can it be possible that the personality of the individual can recover itself in consumption after being so crippled and weakened in production?’ (James 1993: 173). For James, the solution, which he states for many will be seen as ‘Utopian’ (James 1993: 171), in that the ‘creative energies of modern man’ will burst forth, ‘the sense of personality’ or the Hegelian notion of ‘recognition’ and the seeking of ‘happiness’ is an inevitable psychological development for human kind, and as James states, with one eye firmly on Marx’s notion of materialist conception of history, ‘the fate of Rome and of medieval Europe will be our fate’ (my italics).

Bibliography Alleyne, B. 2006. C.L.R. James, critical humanist, in Beyond Boundaries: C.L.R. James and Postnational Studies, edited by C. Gair. London: Pluto Press, 175–196. Bailey, L. 2013. Interview with Carol Chillington Rutter, in RSC Programme of The Winter’s Tale. Berry, D. 2004. The Romanian Mass Media and Cultural Development. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bogues, A. 2006. C.L.R. James and the politics of the subject, culture and desire, in Beyond Boundaries: C.L.R. James and Postnational Studies, edited by C. Gair. London: Pluto Press, 157–174. Bonefeld, W., Gunn, R. and Pyschopedis, K. 1992. Open Marxism: Volume 1, Dialectics and History. London: Pluto Press. Dhondy, F. 2001. C.L.R. James: Cricket, the Caribbean and World Revolution. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Hall, S. 1996. C.L.R. James: A portrait, in C.L.R. James’s Caribbean, edited by P. Henry and P. Buhle. Durham: Duke University Press, 3–16.

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Hall, S. 1998. Notes on deconstructing ‘the popular’, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by J. Storey. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 442–453. Hegel, G.W.F. 1974. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, translated by E.S. Haldane and F.H. Simson. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hudis, P. 1998. Dialectics, ‘the party’ and the problem of the new society. Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, 3, 95–118. Ignatiev, N. 2010. ‘Introduction’ to A New Notion: Two Works By C.L.R. James: ‘Every Cook Can Govern’ and ‘The Invading Socialist Society’. Oakland, CA: PM Press. James, C.L.R. 1947. Dialectical materialism and the fate of humanity. Available at www. marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/diamat/diamat47.htm. James, C.L.R. 1984. New society: New people, in At the Rendezvous of Victory. London: Allison and Busby Limited. James, C.L.R. 1993. American Civilization. London: Blackwell. James, C.L.R. 2010. A New Notion: Two Works By C.L.R. James: ‘Every Cook Can Govern’ and ‘The Invading Socialist Society’. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Kain, P.J. 1993. Marx and Modern Political Theory: From Hobbes to Contemporary Feminism. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. Lee, D. and Newby, H. 1989. The Problems with Sociology. London: Routledge. Marx, K. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, translated by M. Nicolaus. Penguin: Harmondsworth. Marx, K. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, translated by B. Fowkes. London: New Left Books. McClendon, J.H. 2005. C.L.R. James’s Notes on Dialectics: Left Hegelianism or MarxismLeninism? Maryland: Lexington Books. Page, J. n.d. C.L.R. James: Notes on dialectics – Review by John Page. Available at www. clrjameslegacyproject.org.uk/2012/01/clr-james-notes-on-dialectics-review-by.html. Sidwell, K. 1996. The politics of Aeschylus’ Eumenides. Classics Ireland, 3. Available at www.ucd.ie/~classics/96/Sidwell96.html. Žižek, S. 1999. Hegel’s ‘Logic of Essence’ as a theory of ideology’, in The Žižek Reader, edited by E. Wright and E. Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 225–250.

4

From folk to jazz Eric Hobsbawm, British communism and Cultural Studies Philip Bounds

Historians of British Cultural Studies generally agree that Marxist writings on popular culture acquired a new sophistication in the 1970s (see, inter alia, Turner 1990; Dworkin 1997).1 Before that time – or so the argument goes – British Marxists tended to think of forms such as film, television and popular music in terms derived from mass-culture theory. Their main assumption was that popular texts served largely as a prop of the capitalist system, injecting ‘bourgeois ideology’ into the brainwashed minds of a passive and uncritical audience. Allegedly this situation only came to an end when British Marxists were exposed to the influence of their more sophisticated European counterparts. Orthodoxy tells us that it was the example of such thinkers as Gramsci, Althusser, Marcuse and Benjamin that paved the way for the great flowering of British Cultural Studies that occurred after Stuart Hall became director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham in 1969. None of the British Marxists who wrote about popular culture earlier than that need detain us for very long, or so it is widely assumed.2 It can hardly be denied that the orthodox histories of British Cultural Studies contain more than a grain of truth. No one would seriously dispute the idea that Marxist approaches to popular culture became infinitely more impressive once the great theoretical breakthroughs of the 1970s had been achieved. Nevertheless, it is not entirely fair that earlier British Marxists have been written out of the historical record.3 The surprising but largely unacknowledged truth is that many of them grappled with embryonic versions of precisely the same ideas for which later writers got all the credit. The assumption that popular texts are ‘polysemic’, the notion that audiences respond actively to the messages to which they are exposed, the claim that popular culture involves a ‘cultural struggle’ between different classes – these and other mainstays of Cultural Studies first appeared in Marxist writings in the 1930s and reappeared spasmodically in the twenty-five years after the war. Moreover, many of them developed out of a conscious effort to transcend the limitations of the cruder forms of Marxist criticism to which historians of Cultural Studies have drawn our attention. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate this process with reference to a single text, E. J. Hobsbawm’s classic but strangely neglected study The Jazz Scene (1959). Hobsbawm’s book selects itself for two reasons. The first is that it is easily the most distinguished piece of British Marxist writing on the popular arts in the period before the 1970s.4 The

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second is that it shines a powerful light on the wider Marxist culture of its day. Steeped in communist cultural theory but increasingly aware of its weaknesses, Hobsbawm set out to wean British Marxists off the jaundiced assumptions about mainstream culture that had defined their writings in the post-war era. In doing so, he foreshadowed some of the most important ideas developed by subsequent Marxist writers on popular culture.

The cultural politics of British communism Eric Hobsbawm began writing about jazz professionally when he became the New Statesman‘s jazz columnist in 1956 – a position he held for about a decade.5 The Jazz Scene was commissioned by MacGibbon and Kee almost as soon as the column began and seems to have been written fairly quickly. (The first two editions of the book were published under the pseudonym ‘Francis Newton’, the same name Hobsbawm used for all his columns in the New Statesman.)6 As he acknowledged towards the end of his life, Hobsbawm’s desire to write about jazz was partly stimulated by the traumas that engulfed the world communist movement in 1956. Shaken to the core by Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ and the subsequent Soviet invasion of Hungary, he found that jazz punditry afforded him ‘occasional respite from the personal and political convulsions’ to which all committed communists seemed prone in that ‘year of . . . crisis’ (Hobsbawm 2010: 41). What seems evident in retrospect is that the crisis of world communism not only occasioned Hobsbawm’s career as a jazz critic but also shaped its major themes. The single biggest effect of 1956 on Hobsbawm was that it transformed him into a much more ambivalent communist than he had been previously. Although he refused to renounce his membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), he felt himself transmogrifying under the weight of Stalinism’s crisis from a ‘militant’ into a ‘sympathizer or fellow-traveller’ and ‘spiritual member . . . of the Italian CP’ (Hobsbawm 2002: 216). There was one way in particular in which this new sense of political ambivalence affected his writings on jazz. His unstated project in The Jazz Scene and elsewhere was to challenge the CPGB’s prevailing line on popular culture while simultaneously incorporating some of its main principles into a form of cultural criticism better suited to the dawning consumer age. By no means entirely hostile to communist cultural doctrine, Hobsbawm clearly aspired to preserve its living elements and discard its encrusted dogmas at one and the same time.7 British communist thinking about popular culture was shaped in the early postwar era by two cultural movements in which the CPGB played a central role. One was what some writers have called the Second English Folk Revival, which began as early as the mid-1930s with the establishment of the Workers’ Music Association but only really hit its stride in the 1950s.8 The other was the much less admirable campaign to protect British culture against the perceived dangers of ‘Americanisation’.9 The cultural assumptions associated with both these movements need to be briefly rehearsed if we are to understand the intellectual climate in which Hobsbawm was operating. The ideology of the English Folk Revival

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received its most authoritative expression in the work of the great A. L. Lloyd (1908–1982), whose booklet The Singing Englishman (1944) was the bible of folk revivalists for much of the 1950s (Lloyd 1944).10 At the heart of Lloyd’s writings was the belief that ordinary people had been culturally disenfranchised by the rise of commercial entertainment. In the days before the emergence of the culture industry, or so it was argued, labouring men and women had actively participated in the production of their own culture. Unfortunately the rise of large companies specialising in entertainment had done much to bring this tradition of popular creativity to an end, leading to a situation in which popular texts were produced by a small number of professional entertainers for a largely passive audience. The great virtue of folk songs was that they were the product of an age in which ‘the common people . . . made up music too’ (Lloyd 1944: 3), in the process puncturing the myth that the labouring classes were somehow culturally inferior to their more socially favoured counterparts: [O]nly a dryboned old professor could think of the folksongs as archives merely. . . . Much better to think of the folksongs first of all as music and poetry, the peak of cultural achievement of the English lower classes; and, believe me, it is a very high peak. (Lloyd 1944: 3–4) An important consequence of this suspicion of commercial entertainment was that the folk revivalists saw no merit at all in the large companies which disseminated it. Lloyd and his co-thinkers took it for granted that no good could come out of them under any circumstances. However, they were willing to acknowledge that small independent companies with lofty motives could sometimes serve valuable cultural ends. Convinced that organisations like EMI, Decca and Rank were condemned by their vast size to disseminate ‘commercial pap’, they called on conscientious left-wingers to establish a network of cottage industries in order to make folk songs and other radical forms available to the masses. Indeed, one of the Folk Revival’s most important achievements was the establishment as early as 1939 of Topic Records, an independent record company initially overseen by the Workers’ Music Association. Most of the Folk Revival’s leading creative talents, including Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and Lloyd himself, released seminal albums on Topic over a period of more than thirty years. The folk revivalists did not simply admire folk music because it proved that labouring men and women had once produced their own culture. They also ascribed a range of politically progressive characteristics to it. Their most distinctive claim was that folk music’s relations of production provided a sort of aesthetic model of the correct relationship between the individual and society. The fact that folk songs were not written down meant that the first responsibility of any performer was to memorize a body of already existing material in order to safeguard its passage from one generation to the next. The men and women who sang ‘Cutty Wren’ or ‘The Western Wind’ were not so much individual creators as participants in a collective tradition that stretched into the past and the future. At the same time,

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their relationship to the tradition was by no means an oppressively constricted one. As songs passed down the generations, they were invariably altered by the people who performed them, sometimes to the point where a succession of molecular changes ultimately transformed a song beyond all recognition: ‘Folk-songs have no one author; not only that, they have no fixed and final form, no version is more “authentic” than another, and it is hard to say with most of the songs what period they date from’ (Lloyd 1944: 13–14). Implicit in the writings of Lloyd and others was the sense that the collective authorship of folk songs went some way towards prefiguring the structure of socialist society. Insofar as the history of folk music showed that individual creativity was compatible with membership of a collectivity – insofar as singers and musicians had once expressed their particular concerns by building on a corpus of existing songs – it gestured towards an age in which free individuals would pursue their rational self-interest in a social order characterized by public ownership, economic planning and mass democracy. The ultimate message of the folk tradition was that the individual and the collective were not antagonistic but complementary. At a rather less abstract level, folk revivalists also put considerable emphasis on the subversive content of folk songs. To a writer like Lloyd, it seemed self-evident that most folk songs expressed a sense of deep plebeian dissatisfaction with the ruling class and the status quo. In a highly speculative passage towards the beginning of The Singing Englishman, Lloyd suggested that the inherent rebelliousness of the folk tradition was in part a function of the circumstances in which it emerged. England’s rich tradition of popular music-making can ultimately be traced, or so it was argued, to the profound cultural changes that resulted from the Norman invasion in 1066. For several centuries the Anglo-Saxon elite had retained the services of innumerable ‘minstrels’, ‘jesters’ and ‘gleemen’ to provide them with musical entertainment. With the consolidation of a new ruling class under William the Conqueror, these ‘fine, honest and talented’ musicians were expelled from the houses of the powerful because of their inability to speak French. Plunged into poverty and thrown back on their own aesthetic resources, many of them went among the people and eked out a living as popular entertainers. The music they created under the weight of their recent humiliation was so bitter, so potent in its evocation of poverty, inequality and lower-class ressentiment that subsequent folk singers had little choice but to emulate it (Lloyd 1944: 4–5). The result was that the folk tradition in England has been defined by its commitment to protest from the closing decades of the eleventh century onwards. Surveying the evolution of folk music over the course of nearly a thousand years, Lloyd argued that successive generations of musicians had gone out of their way to register lower-class anger at such traumatic developments as the dissolution of feudalism, the enclosure of common land and the rise of industry. However, he was at pains to emphasize that the folk tradition had rarely been crudely propagandistic in its engagement with social issues. Implicitly aligning himself with Frederick Engels’s famous strictures against excessive partisanship in the arts,11 Lloyd noted that very few folk songs exhorted their listeners to adopt a particular course of social or political action. Instead they expressed their ‘longing for a

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better world’ through vigorous satire and through ‘transpos[ing] the world on to an imaginative plane, neither renouncing it, nor trying to change it, but colouring it with fantasy’ (Lloyd 1944: 22). Lloyd’s dislike of partisanship in music perhaps stemmed from a certain scepticism towards Soviet artistic doctrine, whose emphasis on the importance of partiinost in the arts had long since condemned the so-called ‘Socialist Realist’ tradition to extreme aesthetic vulgarity. At any rate the idea that art should evoke but never exhort became a cardinal principle of the Second Folk Revival. If communist writings on the folk tradition were only tangentially influenced by Soviet cultural doctrine, the same cannot be said of the woefully reactionary campaign against the Americanisation of British culture which the CPGB mounted between 1947 and the late 1950s.12 Astonishingly virulent in tone and determinedly Eurocentric in content, the campaign was a direct response to the Soviet government’s pronouncements on cultural policy in the early post-war years. As such it closely reflected the thinking of the notorious A. A. Zhdanov (1896–1948), who became ideology secretary to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in 1946. In a series of hard-line speeches and articles, many of them published in Britain in the book On Literature, Music and Philosophy (Zhdanov 1950), Zhdanov argued that communists throughout the world had a duty to defend their respective national cultures against the spreading influence of American popular culture. Underpinning this call to action was the assumption that the post-war world had effectively been divided into two irreconcilable ‘camps’ – a peaceloving progressive camp led by the USSR and a war-mongering imperialist camp led by the United States. Since the United States aimed to rally other nations to its bellicose plans by exporting its cultural values as widely as possible, it followed that the defence of national cultures against American cultural imperialism represented a major component in the struggle to preserve world peace. The British communists elaborated on Zhdanov’s thinking at a conference entitled ‘The USA Threat to British Culture’ at Holborn Hall in London on 29 April 1951.13 (The conference proceedings were later published in the literary journal Arena.) It was at this event that the CPGB’s reasons for opposing American culture were spelled out in their definitive form. Although the speakers paid lip service to the idea that the American tradition contained much that was healthy and progressive, they took it for granted that the modern United States differed from other nations in giving dangerously unrestrained expression to everything that was most objectionable in the capitalist worldview. In his opening report the economist Sam Aaronovitch tried to explain this state of affairs by referring both to the United States’ history and to its current strategic objectives. The peculiar circumstances in which American capitalism was created – the fact that market relations were introduced by immigrants rather than the indigenous population – meant that the bourgeoisie had been able to forge a culture ‘untrammelled by a feudal past’ (Aaronovitch 1951: 4). Of even greater consequence was the fact that post-war American governments had acquired chillingly expansionist ambitions. Intent on replacing the old European powers as the dominant imperialist influence in the developing world, the USA also recognized that the only way

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to stem the advance of socialism was to subject the Soviet Union, China and the new ‘people’s democracies’ to a decisive military defeat. No culture exposed to this unhealthy nexus of historical, economic and political influences could be anything other than deeply tainted. Citing a range of statistics to show that American films, songs, magazines and books had thoroughly penetrated the British market, the communists identified at least three characteristics that made these and other forms especially dangerous. The first was their unashamed and thoroughgoing racism. Already scarred by the legacy of slavery, American culture was preparing itself for its new imperial role by vigorously demonising ‘Negroes’ and other people of colour. Closely related to its racism was its shameless glorification of violence. The brutal and amoral detectives, soldiers and gangsters who populated American popular culture were not there to provide ordinary citizens with a harmless means of working off their frustrations. Their purpose was to prepare the populace for the harrowing imperialist wars that the ruling class soon intended to launch. By contrast, American culture also contained an element of sheer emotional vulgarity whose function was essentially an escapist one. In a striking demonstration of their contempt for democratic values, the bourgeoisie knew that they would only enjoy the support of the public if they distracted it from what was really going on. The result was the tidal wave of overheated romanticism and sleazy sexuality with which the culture industry sought to befuddle the popular mind: Wish-fulfilment, sloppy eroticism and similar features are not harmless simply because we take them for granted. They are useful aids in drugging the minds of the people while U.S. big business goes about its plans. (Aaronovitch 1951: 9) As astonishing as it seems in retrospect, the CPGB seemed confident of its ability to lead a campaign that would eventually rid Britain of the United States’ cultural detritus. Delegates to the 1951 conference were urged to adopt a range of strategies to resist the ‘arrogant gum-chewers’ (Aaronovitch 1951: 22), including putting pressure on legislators, sponsoring cultural action by the trade unions and drawing public attention to the rich traditions of English radicalism. And for a few years the communists did enjoy a modicum of success in their efforts to turn back the cultural tide. Indeed, as Martin Barker has shown in his book A Haunt of Fears (1984), they exerted enough clout in the campaign against American comics to persuade Parliament to introduce the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act in 1955. Still on the statute books after more than fifty years, this thoroughly illiberal piece of legislation prohibited the sale of any comic or comic-like publication thought likely to ‘corrupt a child or young person’ with its depictions of ‘crimes’, ‘acts of violence or cruelty’ or ‘incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature’.14 The fact that the CPGB could put such faith in government censorship serves as a disconcerting reminder of how much its political culture had been corrupted by Stalinism.

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The Jazz Scene as a transitional text One of the most serious problems with the CPGB’s post-war approach to culture was that it failed to take account of the changing cultural realities of the nascent consumer age. From the early 1950s onwards, the electronic media began to reshape the British cultural landscape in their own image. Thousands of young people came to regard American popular culture not as an agent of enslavement but as a harbinger of liberation. The idea that the CPGB had enough influence to establish an alternative culture based on hostility to the commercial media, hatred of the United States and veneration of the folk tradition had always been wildly unrealistic. In the age of Elvis, teddy boys and coffee bars, its implausibility was thrown into even sharper relief. Although Hobsbawm in no way regarded himself as a spokesman for the rock generation, one of his most important goals in The Jazz Scene was to show that not all British Marxists were as ill-equipped as the likes of A. L. Lloyd, Ewan MacColl and Sam Aaronovitch to understand the new media culture. Frequently critical of the mainstream media and often intellectually indebted to his communist predecessors, he nevertheless set out to show that what he later called the ‘cultural revolution’ of the post-war decades contained much that was valuable as well as much that was degraded. By writing so positively – and sometimes rhapsodically – about a form of popular music that most people regarded as a central plank of the American culture industry, he served notice to the left that there was nothing dishonourable about taking an interest in the ‘lunatic’ and ‘out of control’ world of the mainstream media. Even the most nakedly commercial products of Tin Pan Alley or Hollywood occasionally had something of interest to say, or so Hobsbawm appeared to claim. None of this means that The Jazz Scene was wholly unorthodox in its approach to the popular arts. Hobsbawm was not in any straightforward sense describing jazz as a commercial form, nor was he claiming that it owed its existence to the sort of large companies on which the CPGB’s folk revivalists and anti-American fanatics had pronounced an anathema. As we shall see, his argument was that jazz originated outside the entertainment industry but subsequently became a major influence within it – in the process subverting any simplistic distinction between mainstream and alternative culture. Moreover, Hobsbawm was by no means the first communist to take jazz seriously. The world communist movement’s attitude towards the music had been highly contradictory in the years since Stalin came to power. In the countries of ‘actually existing socialism’ it was widely dismissed as a ‘music of spiritual poverty’ (to use the phrase of the Zhdanovist critic Victor Gorodinsky),15 whereas communists elsewhere in the world often embraced it with heretical fervour. The American Communist Party officially endorsed jazz in 1935, and a number of party members and fellow travellers made important contributions to the so-called Dixieland Revival and the popularisation of Swing.16 In France a love of jazz was one of the cultural signatures of the young communists who participated in the Resistance. Even in Britain there were quite a few communist jazz fans, some of whom (as Kevin Morgan has pointed out in a pioneering essay) played in professional dance bands in London or in the smaller combos associated

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with the New Orleans Revival (Morgan 1998). Many of these musicians participated in the folk revival and were generally accepted as legitimate contributors to it.17 Nevertheless, it is probably fair to say that the average member of the CPGB either detested jazz or regarded it with a certain ambivalence.18 The party’s cultural line made it all but impossible for a form that had achieved commercial success in the United States to be accepted without misgivings. When Hobsbawm set out to make the case for the music, he could only rely on the instinctive support of a few of his fellow communists. In the final analysis, Hobsbawm wanted to transcend the limitations of communist cultural theory not by dismantling its main assumptions but by remaking them from within. It is this more than anything else which makes The Jazz Scene such an important transitional text. The thing that binds the book together is its implicit and curiously Janus-faced dialogue with Marxist orthodoxy. Each of its most important arguments seeks either to extend or to overturn the cardinal principles of the CPGB’s cultural consensus. Hobsbawm’s decisive move in his attempt to persuade sceptical left-wingers of the merits of jazz is to describe it as a form of urban folk music. Recognizing that his most doctrinaire readers would give him a hearing only if he signalled his allegiance to their favourite musical form, he argues in the first few pages of his book that jazz is best regarded as a modern equivalent of the sort of pre-industrial folk music which Lloyd, MacColl and other Marxist spokesmen had done so much to keep alive: If I had to sum up the evolution of jazz in a single sentence, I should say: It is what happens when a folk-music does not go under, but maintains itself in the environment of modern urban and industrial civilization. For jazz in its origins is folk-music of very much the type studied by the collectors and experts: both rural and urban. And some of the fundamental characteristics of folk-music have been maintained in it throughout its history; for instance, the importance of word-to-mouth tradition in passing it on, the importance of improvisation and slight variation from one performance to the next, and other matters. (Hobsbawm 1989: 9) The idea that folk music could not merely exist but actually flourish in industrial society was by no means new. Although Lloyd and his followers originally claimed that the rise of industry sounded the death knell of folksong, they began to realize in the late 1940s that many working-class communities had sustained a vigorous tradition of independent musical production.19 One of the most important fruits of this realization was Come All Ye Bold Miners, an anthology of miners’ songs collected by Lloyd and published by the National Coal Board in 1952. Hobsbawm was not even being particularly original when he described jazz as a form of folk music, since American communists such as Sidney Finkelstein had taken much the same line since the 1930s. (Finkelstein’s classic text Jazz: A People’s Music was recommended by Hobsbawm in his ‘Guide to Further Reading’, where it was interestingly described as ‘non-sectarian’.)20 Nevertheless, The Jazz Scene was distinguished from other communist texts by the thoroughness with which it made

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its case. Whereas other writers had described jazz as folk music without giving any precise impression of what they meant, Hobsbawm went beyond a purely rhetorical invocation of folk and tried to pin down the sociological, political and aesthetic implications of the idea. Two aspects of Hobsbawm’s analysis are especially worthy of attention. The first is his account of the relationship between race and class in jazz. Unlike some of his Marxist contemporaries, Hobsbawm realized that the attempt to equate jazz with folk ran the risk of obscuring the music’s debt to American blacks. In characterizing the likes of Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton or Bessie Smith as latter-day folk musicians, Marxists were implicitly – and perhaps inadvertently – rejecting the idea that jazz had its roots in those forms of historical experience that distinguished blacks from their white counterparts. Instead they were groping towards the idea that jazz reflected the experiences of the urban working class as a whole. Hobsbawm’s solution to the problem is to argue that the unique historical trajectory of American blacks gave them a distinct advantage over whites in evoking the common aspects of working-class life. At bottom it is wrong to regard jazz as the expression of a separate black sensibility, or so Hobsbawm implies. In spite of the fact that it was usually created by ‘professionals’, jazz began life as ‘poor men’s music’ and grew out of bedrock working-class experiences of poverty, unemployment and slum living (see Hobsbawm 1989: 193–194 and 256–257). If black Americans had always dominated the form, it was only because their long experience of racism caused them to respond to working-class conditions more viscerally than anyone else. ‘Because Negroes are and were oppressed even among the poor and powerless’, Hobsbawm writes, ‘their cries of protest are more poignant and more overwhelming, their cries of hope more earth-shaking, than other peoples’ [are]’ (Hobsbawm 1989: 262). Jazz is ultimately a form that testifies to the realities of dual oppression. Taking the travails of all working people as its basic subject matter, it hints at what happens when economic hardship is compounded by racial prejudice.21 Hobsbawm’s other main argument about the relationship between folk and jazz traces a link between jazz’s distinctive emotional character and the conventions governing its performance. In spite of the fact that jazz has engendered a considerable body of recorded work, or so Hobsbawm insists, its most arresting achievement has been to take folk music’s emphasis on ‘continuous creation’ to new heights. Whereas musicians in the pre-industrial era unconsciously altered songs from one performance to another because their work was transmitted on a purely oral basis, jazz musicians have consciously embraced the idea of continuous variation and regard it as the essence of their art. Contemptuous of the idea that a piece of music could ever receive a definitive performance, they strive to add something new to established numbers whenever they gather to play them: the ‘natural unit of jazz’ is not a recording but a live session in which each piece is remade from the inside out (Hobsbawm 1989: 128). Perhaps the most salient expression of jazz’s hunger for variation is the prestige attached to the practice of improvisation, which Hobsbawm describes in an unusually unbuttoned passage as the ‘constant living re-creation of the music’ (Hobsbawm 1989: 130). Crucially, this emphasis

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on change, spontaneity and improvisation lies at the heart of jazz’s commitment to ‘the intensified communication of human emotion’ (Hobsbawm 1989: 130). The purpose of jazz is to liberate its listeners from the emotional ambivalence of everyday life. It works by taking common-or-garden feelings and expressing them in a ferociously unrestrained and uncompromising form. In most cases its emotional intensity depends on each player entering into an almost telepathic state of responsiveness to all the others. Jazz is not a form of music in which geniuses can be sharply distinguished from their less gifted peers. The astonishing expressivity of men like Louis Armstrong or Charlie Parker is rooted in their ability to derive inspiration and energy from their fellow musicians – or, to put it another way, ‘[jazz’s] supreme contribution to the popular arts is its combination of individualism and collective creation, which has long been forgotten in our orthodox culture’ (Hobsbawm 1989: 128). In making this point, Hobsbawm implicitly recalls those earlier writers who believed that folk music prefigured the relationship between the individual and the collective under socialism. Hobsbawm’s emphasis on the importance of supercharged emotion in jazz raises an obvious question. To what sort of feelings does jazz generally give expression? It is at this point that Hobsbawm’s distance from his communist contemporaries is most evident. As we have seen, many of the CPGB’s cultural spokespersons had castigated American popular culture for its emotional vulgarity. Hobsbawm’s instinct is to celebrate it for precisely the same reason. In a chapter entitled ‘Jazz as a Protest’, he argues that the music draws its substance from the ‘low-life zone of large cities’ (Hobsbawm 1989: 257). Although it grows naturally out of the wretched conditions in which the unskilled working class is obliged to live, it usually evokes personal feelings rather than collective states of mind. Its typical subject matters are sexual longing, unhappiness in love, soul-sapping despair and the booze-fuelled quest for good times. Hobsbawm’s point, contra the majority of his Marxist contemporaries, is that this intense evocation of low-life emotion is neither reactionary nor immoral but intrinsically progressive. Anticipating a later generation’s interest in what Mikhail Bakhtin famously called the ‘carnivalesque’ aspects of culture,22 he insists that jazz’s shameless vulgarity goes a long way towards temporarily overturning cultural hierarchies. When a jazz band takes the untutored feelings of working people and imbues them with an irresistible intensity, it launches a sonic offensive so uncompromising that the redoubts of middle- and upper-class refinement seem to tremble under its force. Jazz can best be regarded as a ‘musical manifesto of populism’ (Hobsbawm 1989: 254). The scandalous proposition on which it is based is that the vulgar, the demotic and the hedonistic are ultimately more life-affirming than the refined, the exclusive and the decorous. It is important to recognize that The Jazz Scene’s argument about the role of emotion in jazz is essentially a pre-political one. At no point does Hobsbawm claim that the music’s capacity to disrupt cultural norms necessarily provokes its listeners into seeking political change. The majority of jazz fans are content to register a symbolic protest in the sphere of consumption, putting their overwrought emotions on display but stopping short of a direct challenge to the status quo. On the other

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hand, Hobsbawm is well aware that there have been many occasions on which jazz has been used by dissident groups to buttress political protest. Young blacks in Johannesburg, the so-called stilyagi in Moscow, ‘white intellectual Californian tramps’ – these and other groups have embraced jazz as a means of reinforcing their desire to overturn an unjust social order. There is nevertheless a clear sense (at least in Hobsbawm’s opinion) in which political interpretations of jazz tend to conflict with the real spirit of the music. When listeners detect an element of outright subversion in jazz – when they claim that the music is enjoining them to overthrow apartheid, capitalism or Soviet communism – they are usually projecting their own concerns onto a body of work whose creators are more interested in venting their spleen than in adumbrating a positive social vision. ‘Jazz by itself ’, or so Hobsbawm writes, ‘is not politically conscious or revolutionary’ (Hobsbawm 1989: 263). (There is a clear echo here of the folk revivalists’ dislike of out-and-out propaganda in music.) In claiming that political subcultures often annex popular texts to their own ideological concerns during the act of consumption, The Jazz Scene implicitly raised the idea that interpretation has as much to do with the subjective responses of the audience as with the objective properties of the text. In so doing, it showed considerable theoretical prescience. Precisely the same point would be taken up and expanded by the Gramscian strain of Cultural Studies that began to take root in Britain in the 1970s. At first sight, Hobsbawm’s remarks about the aesthetics and cultural impact of jazz seem to entail a complete rejection of the orthodox communist position on the political economy of culture. The folk revivalists had been arguing since the early 1940s that the main function of the entertainment industry was to brainwash the masses with cultural trash. By contrast, The Jazz Scene celebrates a form of music which in large part owed its prominence to the efforts of the entertainment industry. By acknowledging that large companies like Columbia Records had not merely marketed jazz but transformed it from a ‘local music into a national one’ (Hobsbawm 1989: 159), Hobsbawm seems to the incautious reader to be rejecting the idea that big capital is inclined to play a culturally reactionary role. In fact his position on the entertainment industry is more nuanced than that. Surveying the political economy of popular music in two of the most detailed chapters of his book, Hobsbawm once again tries to accommodate communist orthodoxy while seeking to move beyond it. To a surprising extent, he agrees with men like MacColl, Lloyd and Aaronovitch that the entertainment industry makes the bulk of its profits from marketing insipid pap to an undiscriminating public. But where he departs from his Marxist confrères is in arguing that large companies are sometimes forced to disseminate authentic music in defiance of their own wishes. This in turn allows him to ascribe immense importance to small independent companies, which he sees – in a subtle attempt to rework the communist orthodoxy – as playing a crucial role in keeping forms like jazz alive in the periods when large companies do not see fit to invest in them. Let us examine Hobsbawm’s argument in more detail, beginning with his extremely jaundiced account of the entertainment industry’s aesthetic instincts. Unwilling to abandon the idea that large companies have had a ‘truly . . . appalling’

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impact on cultural standards, he claims that they have generally been forced by economic considerations into denuding popular music of its vitality. Companies such as Columbia, EMI or Decca operate on a vast scale and cannot function without enormous amounts of investment capital. In order to turn a profit, they have no choice but to flood the market with records and make a shameless appeal to the lowest common denominator. This can only be achieved if the production of popular music is ‘retooled’ to ensure a continuous flow of appropriate material. Writing at a time when the assembly-line techniques of Tin Pan Alley still accounted for the bulk of popular song, Hobsbawm claims that the industry distorts the work of songwriters and musicians in two extremely damaging ways. In the first place, seeking to ensure that new material can be written at a moment’s notice in response to perceived market requirements, it insists that all songs be produced according to a rigid formula. (Hobsbawm’s emphasis on the ‘standardiz[ation]’ of popular song owes a clear debt to the contemporaneous writings of the Frankfurt School, whose leading figures he had surely read but chose not to cite.)23 In the second place, it exercises an emotionally lobotomising influence on the process of composition, compelling songwriters to eschew difficult themes in favour of the light, fantasy-drenched settings whose appeal is well-nigh universal. The result is that popular songs obsess the public mind without ever catering to its real needs. Banal and utterly lacking in individuality, they reduce music to the status of aural wallpaper.24 Most of Hobsbawm’s Marxist contemporaries would have agreed with this account of the entertainment industry and seen no need to qualify it. What makes The Jazz Scene different is its recognition that in certain circumstances the industry’s commercial aspirations meet with public resistance. Implicitly chastising the likes of Lloyd and Aaronovitch for treating popular audiences as if they were entirely passive in the face of cultural trends, Hobsbawm points out that the problem with standardized musical environments is that they rapidly become boring. The history of popular music has therefore been punctuated by moments of crisis in which ordinary consumers demand something fresh: ‘[T]he public will not stand the unchanged product for more than a short while’ (Hobsbawm 1989: 163). It is this more than anything else that has forced the entertainment industry into a cautious rapprochement with jazz. Because large companies can dilute existing styles but never produce authentic music of their own, they have no choice at times of commercial peril but to turn to established musical subcultures for new styles to exploit. This means that there have been various periods in which large companies have marketed jazz even though they have not yet learned how to dilute it. It also means that some of the most influential jazz musicians – men like Ellington, Gillespie or Parker – have generally been allowed to record what they want, even if their music has little or nothing in common with the bland styles which entrepreneurs feel comfortable promoting. Although the entertainment industry naturally prefers mediocrity to raw talent, there are times when it can only survive by bringing performers, styles and genres that have already flourished in the independent sector to the attention of a broader public. Jazz is not a product of the entertainment industry, but on more than one occasion it has come to its rescue.

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Hobsbawm’s cautious defence of big business opens out onto a series of arguments whose challenge to communist orthodoxy is equally striking. While retaining the folk revivalists’ respect for small independent companies, Hobsbawm refuses to romanticize them in the way that Lloyd or MacColl had been inclined to do. It may be true that small companies are often run by ‘fans, critic and musicians’ whose commitment to jazz ensures that the major labels have new styles to turn to at times of commercial crisis, but there is nothing necessarily enlightened or progressive about the way they do business. All too often they take the form of under-capitalized, non-unionized, fly-by-night operations which shamelessly exploit the talent at their disposal (see Hobsbawm 1989: 174–175). Nor should we underestimate the novelty of The Jazz Scene’s portrait of the popular audience. Most left-wingers of Hobsbawm’s generation took it for granted that fans of commercial entertainment were cultural dupes, lulled into a state of cretinous passivity by the mediocrity of their favourite forms. Hobsbawm could scarcely have struck a bigger blow for the dignity of fans when he portrayed them as savvy malcontents with the power to turn the culture industry upside down with their demands for new forms of entertainment. In those exhilarating moments when large companies lose control of their markets and scurry to do the bidding of the ordinary consumer, or so Hobsbawm implies, it becomes clear to everyone that audiences have a formidable capacity for cultural activism. Hobsbawm refines his understanding of audience activism in a highly compressed chapter entitled ‘The Public’. His subject in this chapter is not the mass audience for popular music but the small minority of people for whom jazz becomes a ruling passion. Noting that jazz fanatics tend throughout the world to be young, middle or lower-middle class and predominantly male, he concedes that their behaviour is often wildly sectarian. Most of them revere a particular form of jazz to the exclusion of all others and hate commercial culture with a vengeance. However, Hobsbawm admires the jazz fanatics for their belief that the music is ‘not merely to be listened to, but [also] to be analysed, studied, and discussed’ (Hobsbawm 1989: 224). Although they rarely aspire to become musicians themselves, many young people in the throes of jazz obsession bring a sort of scholarly thoroughness to their engagement with the history of the form. Even more striking is the fact that they often use their love of jazz as a foundation for learning about the social, historical and cultural realities with which it is associated. It is very common for young men of a bookish frame of mind to parlay their knowledge of Trad, Swing or Bebop into an abiding interest in the history of Afro-Americans or the development of American culture. One of the more important results of this turning outwards to the socio-economic background of the music is that they often become heavily politicized, usually to the left. Indeed, in a series of fascinating observations about the jazz audience in Britain, Hobsbawm implies that embracing jazz has sometimes been the means by which underprivileged youth have conducted a class struggle at the level of culture. Intimidated by the bourgeoisie’s historic dominance of high culture, intellectually ambitious men from the lowermiddle class have tended to regard jazz as an entrée to the world of highbrow literature, music and art. In basing a love of modern symphonies or abstract painting

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on a prior love of jazz – in approaching Schoenberg or Pollock through the defiantly populist sounds of black America – they have freed themselves from high culture’s association with their social superiors and created a space in which they can assimilate it into their own lives. In the final analysis, Hobsbawm’s jazz fans seem more akin to the ‘bricoleurs’ and ‘textual poachers’ evoked by Dick Hebdige, John Fiske or Henry Jenkins than to the passive dupes so roundly condemned by communist hardliners.25 It is another example of The Jazz Scene anticipating the concerns of a later generation of scholars in Cultural Studies.

Hobsbawm’s influence It should be clear that The Jazz Scene occupies an intermediate position in the evolution of British Marxist writing on popular culture. In its attempt to describe jazz as a species of folk music – and in its suspicion of the culture industry and respect for the independent sector – it takes its lead from the folk revivalists and anti-American fundamentalists who defined the CPGB’s approach to culture in the 1950s. At the same time, its celebration of carnivalesque emotion, its emphasis on audience activism and its willingness to take popular taste seriously look forward to some of the most important elements in modern Cultural Studies. This raises the issue of the book’s influence. Was The Jazz Scene one of the texts that played a decisive role in changing Marxist attitudes towards popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s, or was it merely symptomatic of wider ideological shifts that ultimately led to the sidelining of post-war communist orthodoxy? The evidence seems to suggest that Hobsbawm exerted a minor influence on a small group of left-wing writers but very little on others. His influence on his comrades in the CPGB appears to have been negligible. The publication of The Jazz Scene did not lead to his being touted as a major communist thinker on popular culture, nor did it prevent the party’s folk revivalists from carrying their most dogmatic prejudices into the 1960s. Even as late as 1966 it was possible for members of the Young Communist League (YCL) to alienate thousands of young people by booing Bob Dylan during his summer tour of Britain.26 On the other hand, Hobsbawm made a definite impression on some of the young scholars who began to come to prominence in Cultural Studies in the decade or so after the publication of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958). Three texts in particular seem especially responsive to The Jazz Scene’s arguments – Bill Holdsworth’s essay ‘Songs of the People’ (published in New Left Review in 1960), Donald Hughes’s essay ‘Recorded Music’ (contributed to Denys Thompson’s symposium Discrimination and Popular Culture in 1964) and Stuart Hall’s and Paddy Whannel’s seminal investigation The Popular Arts (1964).27 One of the things that bounds these texts together was their cautious embrace of commercial culture. Whereas Williams and Hoggart had excoriated the culture industry for its negative impact on working-class life, Holdsworth, Hughes, Hall and Whannel sought to instil the lesson that there was much in the popular media for progressive thinkers to analyse and enjoy. In this sense they played a similar role in relation to the founders of Cultural Studies as

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Hobsbawm had played in relation to the CPGB’s folk revivalists and opponents of Americanisation. Theirs was essentially a plea for openness and tolerance. They knew that the left could not expect to flourish if it continued to treat ordinary people’s pleasures with contempt. In spite of Hobsbawm’s influence on a handful of scholars about ten years younger than himself, it would be wrong to exaggerate his role in the development of Cultural Studies. The fact that The Jazz Scene has been cited so rarely since the 1960s suggests that its influence flared briefly and then subsided. The real question is not why the book appealed to a small group of scholars but why its circulation was ultimately so limited. In part its lack of popularity was probably due to its subject matter. Jazz has always been a minority interest in Britain, and the prospect of reading an entire book about it must have struck many intellectuals as too exhausting for words. There may also have been a sense in which young left-wingers were put off jazz by the intellectual assumptions that already surrounded it. The two most prominent jazz critics in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s were Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, the former writing primarily for the Daily Telegraph and the latter for the Observer.28 As compellingly scabrous as it frequently was, both men’s criticism was marred by hostility to innovation, contempt for progressive politics and a sort of self-satirising Tory exasperation. Between them they created the impression that jazz was primarily a form for what A. N. Wilson would later call young fogeys. Hobsbawm’s readership was much smaller than theirs and he was never realistically in a position to counter their influence. Nor can Hobsbawm himself be acquitted of a tendency towards aesthetic conservatism. Perhaps the most fundamental reason for The Jazz Scene’s lack of influence was that its author often seemed curiously self-divided. On several pages of his book, he undercuts his more optimistic arguments with a dash of cultural pessimism. As we have seen, Hobsbawm’s basic message is that jazz is deeply rooted in the lives of working people and profoundly egalitarian in its cultural effects. Nevertheless, he also seems fearful that the music is losing its populist spirit and transforming itself into something altogether too rarefied and elitist. He blames this process of ‘academic etiolation’ on jazz’s integration into the commercial mainstream. His argument is that the rise of Swing in the 1930s led to large companies making a concerted effort to market authentic jazz for the first time. The almost instantaneous result was the emergence of a new generation of musicians who loathed the commercialization of the music and aimed to restore it to its original status as the property of a minority. At the core of their strategy was the attempt to forge new styles of jazz that were too sophisticated, avant-garde or politically rebarbative to appeal to a mass audience. Bebop, Cool Jazz, Hard Bop and the like can all be regarded as ‘revolt[s] directed against the public as well as against the submergence of the player in standardized floods of commercial noise’ (Hobsbawm 1989: 76), not least in the way that they try to raise jazz to the status of ‘orthodox art music’. Although Hobsbawm respects the music of Davis, Brubeck or Parker, it is clear that he does not love it in the way he loves the music that captivated him during his youth. In the end the impression he creates is that jazz’s best days are behind it. It may well be the case that this made The Jazz

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Scene seem excessively pessimistic to a generation of young radical intellectuals who wished to liberate the study of popular culture from the gloomy assumptions of mass-culture theory. This, however, is no reason for continuing to exclude it from the radical canon. Dauntingly synoptic and scholarly, The Jazz Scene casts powerful light on the cultural politics of post-war communism while gesturing towards the theoretical innovations of modern Cultural Studies. It is high time that it is recognized for what it is – a Marxist classic every bit as accomplished as Labouring Men, Primitive Rebels, Age of Extremes and other path-breaking works in Hobsbawm’s formidable bibliography.

Notes 1 A slightly different version of this chapter appeared in Critique: A Journal of Socialist Theory, Vol. 40, No. 4, 2012, pp. 575–593. 2 I am assuming here that the early work of Raymond Williams and other members of the New Left cannot be regarded as unambiguously Marxist. 3 I have tried elsewhere to give some sense of British Marxist approaches to popular culture in the 1930s. See, inter alia, Bounds 2009: Chapter 2; Bounds 2012: 122–123. 4 The only substantial piece of writing on Hobsbawm’s approach to jazz is Coe 1982. For surveys of Hobsbawm’s work as a historian, see Kaye 1984: Chapter 5; Anderson 2005; Elliott 2010. 5 Hobsbawm also wrote occasional articles on jazz for publications such as the Times Literary Supplement, the Melody Maker and The Observer. See McClelland 1982: 361–362. Although most of Hobsbawm’s work on jazz was produced in the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote the occasional essay on the subject at various times over the last twenty years of his life. For a useful selection of his more recent writings, see Hobsbawm 1998. 6 As is well known, Hobsbawm’s pseudonym was a tribute to the American communist trumpeter Frankie Newton (1906–1954). 7 It is amusing to note that some British communists seem to have blamed Hobsbawm’s jazz punditry for what they took to be his wishy-washy politics. In Hobsbawm’s MI5 file – portions of which were released to the public in 2014 – an unnamed member of the CPGB is recorded as saying that Hobsbawm’s employment as a jazz critic would ‘explain a lot of the financial basis for his politics because he must be making a canny screw out of all this’. See Saunders 2015: 10. 8 There is now quite a large secondary literature on the Second English Folk Revival. Among the most useful introductions are Harker 1985; Porter 1998; Brocken 2003; Harker 2007. 9 For an introduction to the CPGB’s role in the campaign against Americanisation, see Callaghan 2003: Chapter 3. 10 The Singing Englishman was eventually superseded by Lloyd’s classic study Folk Song in England (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1967). However, the latter book only appeared after Hobsbawm had produced the bulk of his writings on jazz. For the development of Lloyd’s ideas about folk music, see, inter alia, Harker 1985: Chapter 11; Gregory 1997; Brocken 2003: Chapter 3. The present chapter was written before the publication of Dave Arthur’s Bert: The Life and Times of A. L. Lloyd (London: Pluto Press, 2012). 11 See Frederick Engels, ‘Letter to Margaret Harkness’ and ‘Letter to Minna Kautsky’ in Marx and Engels 1973.

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12 The communists were not of course the only people in Britain who objected to the growing influence of American popular culture. For a useful survey of British antiAmericanism during this period, see Hebdige 1983. 13 The conference was organised by the CPGB’s National Cultural Committee, which had been established in 1947 to enforce the Zhdanovist line in Britain. 14 A facsimile of the first page of the act is reproduced on p. 16 of Barker 1984. 15 Gorodinsky is quoted in Škvorecký 1988: 106. 16 Hobsbawm has written about the influence of the CPUSA on jazz in his essay ‘The People’s Swing’. See Hobsbawm 1998: Chapter 23. 17 For a path-breaking account of the role of jazz in left-wing culture in Britain, see McKay 2005. 18 Among the most scabrous of the detesters was the literary critic Montagu Slater, whose short speech at the 1951 conference condemned the British entertainment industry for ‘giving up music and putting in its place jazz’ (Slater 1951: 37). The approach of the more ambivalent communists was exemplified in the unpublished document A Plan for Music in Britain prepared by the CPGB Music Group in the early 1950s, which acknowledged that jazz had begun as a people’s music but implied that it was far more susceptible to commercial exploitation than folk music of the pre-industrial type. See CPGB Music Group n.d.: 8. 19 For Lloyd’s approach to the idea of industrial folksong, see Gregory 1999/2000. See also Harker 1985: 243–244. 20 See Finkelstein 1988. See also Finkelstein 1989, especially Chapter 12. For a brief overview of Finkelstein’s contribution to Marxist aesthetics, see Steiner 1958: 39. 21 There is a sense in which this aspect of Hobsbawm’s work anticipates the efforts of later cultural theorists to deconstruct the perceived opposition between ‘black’ and ‘white’ forms of popular music. For an overview of this body of work, see Negus 1999: 100–101. Hobsbawm’s point about the effects of racism on jazz is slightly undercut by some of his other arguments. In one passage, seeking to explain the fact that black musicians sometimes seemed indifferent to the issue of racial oppression, he claims that the pioneers of jazz were often relatively insulated from the worst forms of racism. As ‘cruel and unjust’ as the United States had undoubtedly been in the early twentieth century, its jazz musicians were nevertheless afforded a certain amount of ‘emotional certainty and security’ (Hobsbawm 1989: 259). Treated with condescension by the cultural establishment and in no way regarded as the equal of whites, they were still allowed to carve out a position of prestige for themselves within their own communities. The unspoken condition of their freedom was that they should never attempt to extend their influence into the white community. Arguments like these could scarcely have been more different to those of Hobsbawm’s communist contemporaries. Whereas men like Sam Aaronovitch regarded American culture as almost pathologically racist, Hobsbawm seemed to acknowledge that there were certain circumstances in which blacks could at least achieve a modus vivendi with whites. Racism may have been the United States’ original sin, but sometimes people of colour could avoid its worst effects. 22 Bakhtin’s fullest account of his theory of carnivalesque culture can be found in his great work Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin 1984). Among the many introductions to Bakhtin’s work, one of the most useful is Stam 1988. 23 Theodor Adorno’s highly dismissive writings on popular music had been appearing in English since the early 1940s. For example, his influential article ‘On Popular Music’ was published in issue 9 of Studies in Philosophy and Social Science in 1941. 24 This paragraph summarizes Chapter 10 of Hobsbawm 1989.

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25 See, inter alia, Hebdige 1979; Fiske 1989; Jenkins 1992. 26 For a recent account by a Marxist writer of British communist hostility to Dylan, see Riley 2010/2011. See also Lee 1998: 29–30. 27 See Holdsworth 1960; Hughes 1964; Hall and Whannel 1967. 28 Larkin wrote two reviews of The Jazz Scene, one in the Observer on 31 May 1959 and the other in the Guardian on 31 July 1959. The second was considerably warmer than the first, which was respectful but lukewarm. Both reviews have now been reprinted in Larkin 2004: 20–21.

Bibliography Aaronovitch, S. 1951. The American threat to British culture. Arena: A Magazine of Modern Literature, 2(8), June/July, 3–22. Anderson, P. 2005. The vanquished left: Eric Hobsbawm, in Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas. London: Verso, 277–320. Bakhtin, M. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barker, M. 1984. A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign. London: Pluto Press. Bounds, P. 2009. Orwell and Marxism: The Political and Cultural Thinking of George Orwell. London: I.B. Tauris. Bounds, P. 2012. British Communism and the Politics of Literature, 1928–1939. London: Merlin Press. Brocken, M. 2003. The British Folk Revival 1944–2002. Aldershot: Ashgate. Callaghan, J. 2003. Cold War, Crisis and Conflict: The CPGB 1951–68. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Coe, T. 1982. Hobsbawm and jazz, in Culture, Ideology and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, edited by R. Samuel and G. Stedman Jones. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 149–157. CPGB Music Group. n.d. A Plan for Music in Britain: Being a Supplement to the British Road to Socialism. Unpublished document. Dworkin, D. 1997. Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies. Durham: Duke University Press. Elliott, G. 2010. Hobsbawm: History and Politics. London: Pluto Press. Finkelstein, S. 1988. Jazz: A People’s Music. New York: International Publishers. Finkelstein, S. 1989. Composer and Nation: The Folk Heritage in Music. New York: International Publishers. Fiske, J. 1989. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Unwin Hyman. Gregory, E.D. 1997. A.L. Lloyd and the English folk song revival, 1934–1944. Canadian Journal of Traditional Music, 25, 14–28. Gregory, E.D. 1999/2000. A.L. Lloyd and the search for a new folk music, 1945–49. Canadian Journal of Traditional Music, 27, 20–43. Hall, S. and Whannel, P. 1967. The Popular Arts. Boston: Beacon, 1967. Harker, B. 2007. Class Act: The Cultural and Political Life of Ewan MacColl. London: Pluto Press. Harker, D. 1985. Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Hebdige, D. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Hebdige, D. 1983. Towards a cartography of taste 1935–1962, in Popular Culture: Past and Present, edited by B. Waites, T. Bennett and G. Martin. Beckenham: Croom Helm, 194–218.

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Hobsbawm, E. 1989. The Jazz Scene. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. (This book was originally published in 1959 under the pseudonym Francis Newton). Hobsbawm, E. 1998. Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hobsbawm, E. 2002. Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life. London: Allen Lane. Hobsbawm, E. 2010. Diary. London Review of Books, 32(10), 27 May, 41. Holdsworth, B. 1960. Songs of the people. New Left Review, 1, January–February, 48–49. Hughes, D. 1964. Recorded music, in Discrimination and Popular Culture, edited by D. Thompson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 152–175. Jenkins, H. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. London: Routledge. Kaye, H. 1984. The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis. Oxford: Polity Press. Larkin, P. 2004. Jazz Writings: Essays and Reviews 1940–1984, edited by R. Palmer and J. White. London: Continuum, 20–24. Lee, C.P. 1998. Like the Night: Bob Dylan and the Road to Manchester Free Trade Hall. London: Helter Skelter. Lloyd, A.L. 1944. The Singing Englishman: An Introduction to Folksong. London: Workers’ Music Association. Marx, K. and Engels, F. 1973. Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, edited by L. Baxandall and S. Morawski. St Louis/Milwaukee: Telos Press, 112–116. McClelland, K. 1982. Bibliography of the writings of Eric Hobsbawm, in Culture, Ideology and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, edited by R. Samuel and G. Stedman Jones. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 332–363. McKay, G. 2005. Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain. Durham: Duke University Press. Morgan, K. 1998. ‘King Street blues: Jazz and the left in Britain in the 1930s–1940s, in A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain, edited by A. Croft. London: Pluto Press, 123–141. Negus, K. 1999. Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Porter, G. 1998. ‘The world’s ill-divided’: The communist party and progressive song, in A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain, edited by A. Croft. London: Pluto Press, 171–191. Riley, F. 2010/2011. We live in a political world: Bob Dylan and the communist party. Socialism Today, 144, December–January. www.socialismtoday.org/144/dylan.html. Saunders, F.S. 2015. Stuck on the Flypaper. London Review of Books, 37(7), 9 April, 3–10. Škvorecký, J. 1988. Talkin’ Moscow Blues. London: Faber. Slater, M. 1951. Literature. Arena: A Magazine of Modern Literature, 2(8). June/July, 37–38. Stam, R. 1988. Mikhail Bakhtin and left cultural critique, in Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices, edited by E. Ann Kaplan. London: Verso, 116–145. Steiner, G. 1958. Marxism and the literary critic. Encounter, November, 33–43. Turner, G. 1990. British Cultural Studies: An Introduction. London: Unwin Hyman. Zhdanov, A.A. 1950. On Literature, Music and Philosophy. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

5

The Gramscian turn in British Cultural Studies From the Birmingham School to cultural populism Steve Jones

This chapter examines the impact on British Cultural Studies of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). In particular, it considers the use of Gramsci’s term ‘hegemony’ by British cultural theorists as they analysed the ways in which ruling powers establish their political, moral and cultural leadership over subaltern groups, and the practices of resistance, accommodation, counter-hegemony and subordination of the ruled. At the heart of the chapter is a discussion of the use of Gramsci’s theories within the early work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (the ‘CCCS’, ‘Birmingham School’ or ‘Centre’), and the subsequent diffusion of these ideas into broader intellectual currents. By looking at this ‘Gramscian moment’ (the period c. 1975–1990), the critical responses to the output of the CCCS, and the reworking of Gramsci’s concepts in relation to emergent forms of thought, the chapter shows how Gramscian ideas buttressed and refocused earlier attempts by British Marxists to portray culture as a site of ideological struggle. Thinking about the moment of Gramsci, however, is not to suggest that the adoption of his work represented some fundamental or decisive break with previous work on class and culture. As he observed, the starting point of critical work is ‘ “knowing thyself ” as a product of the historical process which has deposited in you an infinity of traces’ (Gramsci 1971: 324), and with this in mind the ‘turn to Gramsci’ can certainly be read historically. As the chapter demonstrates, Gramsci’s work had been debated in the British New Left circles discussed in chapter 2 for some time before its adoption by the Birmingham School. Moreover, the development of a form of hegemony theory to find a way beyond Marxist reductionism had been a feature of earlier engagements with culture: Eric Hobsbawm, for example, claimed that if Gramsci had not invented or adapted the term ‘hegemony’, historians ‘would have written much the same, except we would have called it something else’ (quoted in Nield and Seed 1981: 211); and in Raymond Williams’s work a nascent and native version of the concept can be detected before Gramsci’s ideas had been fully assimilated. Furthermore, isolating a ‘Gramscian moment’ represents something of a selective reading of Cultural Studies’ history. While some writers (such as Harris 1992) have characterized British Cultural Studies as overt ‘Gramscianism’, and many orthodox histories of Cultural Studies place the turn to Gramsci at the heart of their

The Gramscian turn in Cultural Studies 107 narratives, it is clear that other theories and theorists from both within and from outside Marxism either emerged at a similar time or continued to be significant in the period under discussion – not least the Althusserian or ‘structuralist’ Marxism which we examine in more detail in the next chapter. Nonetheless, if we can overstate the importance of a moment of ‘rupture’ within the history of Cultural Studies in Britain, we would be equally unwise to downplay the impact of the Gramscian turn. The central figure of the chapter is Stuart Hall (1932–2014), who was – as writer, academic, inspiration and activist – the key intellectual broker of Gramsci’s ideas within British Cultural Studies. Hall argued that Gramsci’s importance lay in the extent to which ‘he radically displaced some of the inheritances of Marxism in cultural studies’ (1996a: 267), so that British cultural Marxism became what he described as a ‘Marxism without guarantees’. This displacement took the form of a freeing-up of Marxism so that other questions (youth subcultures, ‘race’, gender) could be posed alongside those of class. The ‘moment’ therefore saw an outpouring of cultural writing which nodded towards Gramsci while synthesising hegemony theory with ideas drawn from other schools of thought, or engaging in concrete analysis of topics very different from Gramsci’s concerns with intellectuals, class and nation. The chapter maps these processes of continuity, rupture and synthesis in three sections. In the first, it examines the appearance of Gramsci’s ideas after 1957 and their dissemination by various New Left thinkers during the 1960s and 1970s, paying particular attention to the way in which Raymond Williams’s interests in culture and society were reworked along Gramscian lines. The second section looks at the adoption of Gramscian ideas by British cultural scholars, initially in the Birmingham CCCS, and their deployment in a number of key Cultural Studies texts and institutional contexts. The final section considers some criticisms of the Gramscian turn, particularly the linked propositions that hegemony theory enabled Cultural Studies to take an uncritical and celebratory position in relation to popular culture and that the hybridising of hegemony theory and post-structuralism represented a move towards ‘post-Marxism’ or, indeed, away from Marxism entirely. We turn first, though, to the genealogy of the concept of hegemony within British Cultural Studies.

The appearance of Gramsci This section looks at the early reception of Gramsci’s ideas within British intellectual life and their adoption by various socialist thinkers. As David Forgacs (1989: 70) observes, ‘[O]utside Italy, nowhere more than in Britain have Gramsci’s writings exercised so prolonged, deep, or diversified an influence’. Yet the alignment of Gramsci’s writings with the interests of the British left was by no means obvious: Gramsci’s pre-prison writings and Prison Notebooks were written from within a very different set of political, spatial and cultural contexts to those in which they were circulated and applied. Why, then, did the British left enthusiastically adopt his work, so that Perry Anderson (1977: 5) could write that ‘no Marxist thinker after the classical epoch is so universally respected’?

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This rise to prominence took place relatively quickly. There was no English translation of Gramsci’s work until twenty years after his death, at which point a brief selection by Louis Marks, entitled The Modern Prince and Other Writings, was published by the Communist Party’s publishing house, Lawrence and Wishart. Though Hobsbawm (2011: 407) suggests that only British Marxists with an Italian connection were aware of Gramsci, there is some evidence that his ideas were already in modest circulation. Christopher Hill’s review of The Modern Prince in the New Reasoner, for example, could confidently pronounce on its subject that Gramsci ‘was above all an enemy of dogmatism. He attacked this wherever he found it’ (1958: 108). What reputation Gramsci had in Britain was therefore that of a non-doctrinaire Marxist thinker, and, in line with this, the publication of Marks’s typescript had earlier been blocked by the CPGB’s Political Committee on the grounds of Gramsci’s heterodoxy (Forgacs 1989: 73). The appearance of The Modern Prince in 1957 was timely. Its initially ‘censored’ conditions of publication, as well as its themes and style, resonated with a number of events. The ‘De-Stalinization’ programme initiated by Khrushchev in Russia, and the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, led to the resignation of many members of the CPGB, the growth of a broader disenchantment with the Soviet Union on the British left and the quest for alternative traditions within socialist thought. Equally, in its address to questions of leadership, the state, corporatism, Fordism and hegemony, The Modern Prince cohered with some socialist thinkers’ growing awareness of the construction of a post-war ‘welfare capitalism’ settlement based around a cross-party and cross-class consensus. Within this settlement, the trumpeted growth of material prosperity (or climate of ‘affluence’) and the development of the forms and institutions (state and commercial broadcasting) of popular culture appeared to neutralize class antagonism or displace it into other arenas (particularly developing anxieties around ‘race’ and ‘youth’). Nonetheless, the audience for Gramsci’s work remained, for the time, highly specialist. ‘For Gramsci to be assimilated into the British cultural system’, writes Forgacs, ‘he needed first to be mediated to readers by a work of intellectual brokerage and he needed a wider reading public’ (Forgacs 1989: 74). While a number of such intermediaries were prepared to use and adapt Gramsci’s ideas in the late 1950s and 1960s, it would take major changes in the British educational system, and a more substantial translation of his writings, for them to reach a sizeable readership. An early example of intellectual brokerage came from within New Left Review where, in a series of articles published between 1964 and 1970, Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn developed a long-period historical analysis of political and cultural authority in Britain, strongly influenced by their reading of Gramsci’s work on the Risorgimento (in particular his substantial footnote on England in the nineteenth century). Making extensive use of terms such as ‘conjuncture’ and ‘crisis’, hegemony and the production of ‘organic’ intellectuals, Nairn and Anderson attempted to outline a reading of Anglo-British history which could identify the distinctive shape of the national culture and the prospects within it for social change. No attempt, writes Anderson, ‘has so far been made at even the outline of a “totalizing” ’ history of modern British society. . . . [To do so would involve]

The Gramscian turn in Cultural Studies 109 consideration of the distinctive overall trajectory of modern British society since the emergence of capitalism’ (1992: 16). Although a ‘totalizing’ analysis of this cultural and political history did not (indeed, for Anderson, could not) develop within British sociology, a persuasive national narrative, albeit of a conservative kind, had been constructed in ‘the least expected of studies’, the school of English literary criticism instituted by F. R. Leavis. Through its seemingly disinterested study of canonical literature, English had taken upon itself the role of negotiating or even ‘preserving the hegemonic collusion of the old (feudal) and the new (bourgeois) dominant classes’ (Stratton and Ang 1996: 371). This critique foreshadows Anderson’s later work: the displacement of political activity within English culture into aesthetic contemplation predicts his analysis of ‘Western’ Marxism, in which thinkers became detached from active political engagement and drawn into analysis of such ‘superstructural’ issues as culture and ideology. But equally, this form of long-period analysis anticipates Stuart Hall’s work: while adopting a different historical framework, both Policing the Crisis and the later examination of Thatcherism similarly place the ‘conjunctural’ crises of the 1970s within a narrative of the British state and British capitalism’s long-term ‘structural’ or ‘organic’ crisis. If Nairn and Anderson could depict their use of Gramsci as a way of thinking through political strategy and agency, then the second form of brokerage for Gramsci’s work came in part precisely from the ‘displaced arena’ of literary studies. As Forgacs explains, socialist intellectuals such as Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson saw a link between their own developing interests in culture and class and Gramsci’s work on hegemony. A particular interpretation of Gramsci’s work fitted in with the ‘culture and community’ strain of Marxist humanism developing at the time, and Williams’s and Thompson’s work, Forgacs writes, ‘provided a framework, an intellectual space within which Gramsci . . . could be made visible and readable, a space which his own work would, in turn, begin to illuminate and reconstruct from within’ (1989: 74). Thompson had responded to Anderson’s and Nairn’s use of Gramsci in his essay ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ (1965). His polemic accused them of a ‘crucial vulgarization’ of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony in their contention that the British working class had never become ‘a hegemonic class’ or developed a ‘hegemonic ideology’. Anderson and Nairn proposed that it was, instead, a ‘corporate’ class that looked simply to defend and, where possible, moderately improve its position without altering the fundamental conditions of society. ‘The short answer to this’, Thompson responds, ‘is that, by this definition, only a ruling-class can be a hegemonic class, and, by the same definition, a subordinate class must be “corporate” ’ (1978a: 345). Hegemony, he argues, is not something ‘adjectival’ (for example, ‘hegemonic class’): it is instead the realization of a struggle which successfully occupies the institutions and practices of civil society and captures consent through ‘far more subtle, pervasive, and therefore compulsive, forms’. While this definition encapsulates the expansiveness of hegemony, there is still a strong sense of the term being a synonym for ‘class dominance’ rather than the process by which rule may be achieved, or indeed fail.

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Over the next decade, Thompson refined his position on hegemony to incorporate a greater sense of dynamism within it. In his ‘Eighteenth Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?’ (1978b), he treats even an expansive hegemony as an act of constant negotiation in which ‘the poor imposed upon the rich some of the duties and functions of paternalism, just as much as deference was in turns imposed upon them’ (157). Summarising his view of hegemony, he writes: While cultural hegemony may define the limits of what is possible, and inhibit the growth of alternative horizons and expectations, there is nothing determined or automatic about this process. Such hegemony can be sustained by rulers only by constant exercise of skill, of theatre and concession. Second, such hegemony, even when imposed successfully, does not impose an allembracing view of life. . . . It can co-exist with a very vigorous self-activating culture of the people, derived from their own experience and resources. (164; emphasis added) The ‘defining of limits’ here refers to Raymond Williams’s discussion of determinism in his Marxism and Literature (1977), and we can see the emergence of an increasingly explicit Gramscian approach, in parallel to – and sometimes in conflict with – Thompson’s in Williams’s work from the early 1960s onwards. Of particular significance to the discussion here are the arguments contained within The Long Revolution (1961). In that book, Williams argues that British society had experienced a trio of major changes: revolutions in democracy and industry, but also in culture and communications. ‘This deeper cultural revolution’, he writes, ‘is a large part of our most significant living experience, and is being interpreted and indeed fought out, in very complex ways, in the world of art and ideas’ (12). Williams argues for the need to see this process as a whole, so that communications, politics and economics are studied in relation to one another rather than in a way that any level is determinant. The analysis of culture is, then, famously ‘the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life’, and the attempt to ‘discover the nature of the organisation which is the complex of these relationships’ (67). Having engaged in such a task, Williams argues, a cultural critic can proceed to reconstruct ‘that firm but intangible organisation of values and perceptions’ which he calls a ‘structure of feeling’. As a number of writers have argued (e.g. Eagleton 1976; Turner 1990), there is a lack of specificity at the heart of ‘whole way of life’ and ‘structure of feeling’, and these phrases seem to represent Williams’s desire to fashion his own terminology rather than to engage with cultural theory (even allowing for the relative paucity of translated Western Marxist writing on the subject at the time). Moreover, in his advocacy of a ‘common culture’, and rejection of an explicit class position, Williams tended to sidestep the exploitation and conflict involved in cultural processes, preferring instead the optimistic notion that working class institutions and values would gradually become those of society as a whole. In his review of The Long Revolution, Thompson suggested that, without some theory of revolutionary

The Gramscian turn in Cultural Studies 111 transformation, Williams’s was a ‘bland revolution’, and he argued instead for taking a view of culture as a ‘whole way of struggle’ (1961: 37). Though Thompson’s criticisms were undoubtedly perceptive, there are grounds for thinking that a ‘hegemonic’ position is already at work in Williams’s work. In an influential essay from 1960, ‘The Concept of “Egemonia” in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci’, Gwyn A. Williams argued that to read Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society ‘is to experience a certain sense of contact and continuity’ with Gramsci’s thought. Similarly, writing on the relationship between Williams’s work and the Italian left, Fernando Ferrara (1989) argues that it was precisely the concentration on national issues, and the attempt to find a Marxist language that could accommodate both general processes and local specificity, that linked Williams to Gramsci. In the same way that Gramsci’s work was an ‘an attempt to mediate between Marxian doctrines and Italian national culture’, so, he argues, ‘Williams’s concept of culture as a “structure of feeling” and Gramsci’s conception of hegemony are plainly akin’ (105). Williams’s argument, he continues, is remarkably similar to Gramsci’s concept of the ‘war of position’ by which the meanings and values of a subordinate bloc ‘gradually permeate the national culture till it gained control’ (Ferrara 1989) By the mid-1970s, Williams had begun to make this debt to Gramsci explicit, and the clearest expression of a more theorized awareness of the relationship between culture, power and struggle comes in his chapter on hegemony in Marxism and Literature. Here he presents hegemony as surpassing the two most developed perspectives on culture and determination: the idea that culture is ‘whole social process’ in which people as agents define and shape their lives, and the Marxist account of ideology in which systems of meanings and values project the interests of the ruling class onto the consciousness of a subordinate class. The problem with this latter position, he notes, is the way in which it abstracts ideas from other areas of life: if hegemony were simply the result of ideological manipulation, then it would be a relatively straightforward matter to correct such false assumptions. Using a metaphor that he deploys elsewhere in his use of the term (e.g. 1980: 37; 1989: 75), Williams describes hegemony, by contrast, as a form of ‘saturation’ which occupies all lived experience. It exists at such a depth that the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense. Hegemony is not only the articulate upper level of ‘ideology’, nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as ‘manipulation’ or ‘indoctrination’. . . . It constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the society to move. (1977: 110) Williams proposes that there are several advantages in moving from ‘ideology’ to the concept of hegemony. First, its forms of domination and subordination correspond more closely to lived reality in modern societies than some previous models

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of ideological manipulation. Parliamentary democracy, for example, involves a more complex arrangement of forces than simply the projection of the values of a ruling class. And the sphere of ‘private life’, while appearing to stand outside the manifestly ‘political’ and ‘economic’ realms, is undoubtedly caught up in processes of social and cultural leadership via its reproduction of ‘common sense’. Second, Gramscian theory opens up the possibility of seeing cultural activity not simply as a superstructural ‘reflection’ or ‘mediation’ of economic and political relationships but as participating within such processes. Because ‘culture’ is the realm within which all kinds of questions of meaning and value (about human relationships, about our place in the natural world, about creativity and expression) are fought out, it becomes a vital sphere of activity and organisation for both rulers and ruled. For a ruling power to achieve any degree of consent to its rule, it must organise itself on these grounds, as well as on more clearly material ones. Third, Williams argues that hegemony is a dynamic term rather than some static conception of ‘dominant ideology’ or ‘world view’. In the same way that he argued for a plural sense of ‘culture’ and ‘socialism’, so he argues that ‘hegemony’ takes multiple forms. Absorbing Thompson’s notion of the ‘whole way of struggle’, Williams begins to imagine hegemony not just as a particularly successful form of ideology but as an arena within which different forms of authority (‘dominant’, ‘residual’, ‘emergent’) mingle and counter-tendencies form: A lived hegemony is always a process. It is not, except analytically, a system or structure. It is a realized complex of experiences, relationships and activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits. In practice, hegemony can never be singular. . . . It does not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own. We have then to add to the concept of hegemony the concepts of counter-hegemony and alternative hegemony, which are real and persistent elements of practice. (1977: 112–113) Interest in Gramsci and a flexible understanding and application of hegemonic theory were therefore well established in British Marxist cultural theory by the mid-1970s, and some of the original features of Gramscian analysis developed by Williams – around lived cultures, the depth of hegemony and the construction of counter-hegemony – were taken up by later writers. But to understand how Gramscianism became central to Cultural Studies as an emergent teaching and research field, we need to step back a decade or so, and to parallel developments in specific institutional settings.

From the Birmingham School to Marxism Today If Anderson and Nairn were important intermediaries of Gramsci’s work for a British readership, and Thompson and Williams promoted its relevance for the

The Gramscian turn in Cultural Studies 113 study of culture, then Stuart Hall was undoubtedly the central figure in diffusing knowledge of Gramsci through the field of Cultural Studies. Like others from the New Left, Hall first encountered Gramsci’s work in the form of Louis Marks’s translation and Gwyn A. Williams’s 1960 essay, though he did not fully assimilate a Gramscian position until the mid-1970s, when he re-read Gramsci as a corrective to the structuralist Marxism that was then in the ascendant. Hall’s dissemination of a Gramscian position – both as a writer and as someone involved in a wide range of collaborative educational, political and research projects – has been deeply influential, and this section maps the uses of Gramsci within British Cultural Studies in a number of institutions in which Hall took a prominent role: the Birmingham CCCS, the Open University and the magazine Marxism Today. If Tony Bennett (1998a: 217) is entirely correct to argue that historians of ideas should be ‘careful not to idealise Birmingham as some pure moment of [Cultural Studies’] origin’ (and, by extension, Hall as its founding father), then we should still ask why the CCCS and Hall have been granted such prominent positions within accounts of British Cultural Studies. A persuasive answer lies in the flexible and ‘open’ neo-Gramscian position fashioned by Hall and others, which this section and the next outline. In the same year as the first translation of Gramsci into English, Richard Hoggart reached a far wider audience with The Uses of Literacy, his part-analysis, part-memoir of working-class life in the North of England and its annexation by the ‘candy-floss world’ of Americanized ‘mass’ culture. In the wake of the book’s publication, Hoggart was appointed professor of English at Birmingham University in 1962, with the intention of establishing a postgraduate research centre which could carry on the work in class and culture established by his own book and by Williams’s Culture and Society. As the centre’s first director, he appointed Stuart Hall as his deputy, having been impressed by the latter’s The Popular Arts (co-written with Paddy Whannel and published in 1964), despite that book’s more equivocal stance on mass culture. Hall took over the leadership of the CCCS, initially as acting director, and later, when Hoggart took up a position with UNESCO in 1968, as its director. He continued to lead the Centre until his departure for the Open University in 1979, having by then, he felt, secured the Centre’s future. One version of Gramsci’s influence on Cultural Studies argues that that we could see the ‘project’ of Cultural Studies itself in hegemonic terms, as involving the production of a stratum of what Gramsci calls ‘organic intellectuals’, individuals from subordinate classes or groups able to actively participate in social life, ‘as constructor, organiser, “permanent persuader” ’ and not just as a detached thinker. A number of authors have outlined a ‘border pedagogy’ of Cultural Studies in the various workers’ adult educational movements that preceded the large-scale expansion of higher education in the 1960s (see Steele 1997). Along similar lines, Stuart Hall has argued that the CCCS attempted to disrupt some of the institutional and pedagogic practices of the British university by ‘trying to find an institutional practice . . . that might produce an organic intellectual’ (1996a: 267). The optimistic notion of an expansive educational project continued to be a feature of the Gramscian moment, but more significant to this chapter was the gradual

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penetration of Media and Cultural Studies research at the CCCS by Gramscian ideas. Two developments were of particular consequence: first, a larger (though by no means definitive) body of Gramsci’s work became available to scholars. There was a huge growth in Gramsci scholarship from the end of the 1960s, as more of his writings were translated into English and attention turned to previously neglected aspects of his work. We have already seen the contributions made by Perry Anderson and Raymond Williams to this boom, but the major stimulus to the Gramscian moment was the publication of Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith in 1971. This translation gave a more comprehensive picture of Gramsci’s political ideas than the Modern Prince had managed to provide, bringing him to the attention of a wider readership. While some thinkers on the left rejected Gramscianism as symptomatic of the abandonment of revolutionary communism, other individuals and groups embraced the shift towards a more ‘open’ Marxism. Forgacs (1989) notes that Gramscian ideas were particularly prominent in CPGB circles, strongly influencing, for example, the redrafting of the party’s manifesto (The British Road to Socialism [1977]) and the formation of a new editorial board of Marxism Today under the editorship of Martin Jacques. More widely, Chantal Mouffe (1979: 1) argues that the turn to Gramsci represented a shift from pessimism to optimism among left-wing intellectuals who could see within it the ‘possibilities of revolutionary transformations in the countries of advanced capitalism’. The second development was that, perhaps surprisingly, the CCCS engaged with Marxism. While many of the leading figures in the study of culture during the 1950s and early 1960s were either former members of the CPGB or sympathetic to humanist Marxism, the institutional foundation of Cultural Studies in Britain was not predicated on a Marxist approach to culture. Indeed, for Colin Sparks, ‘the explicit legacy of Marxism was more or less absent’ in the early years of the CCCS as it struggled to find a position for itself between the Leavisite heritage of English Literature and the structuralist-functionalist perspectives then dominant within British sociology (Hall 1980: 23; Sparks 1996: 79). Hoggart, Sparks notes, ‘was not, and never had been, a Marxist, and his only relation to Marxism was one of dismissal’ (1996: 72), while, at this stage of his career, ‘Hall identified Marxism as an obsolete and reductivist system of thought’, which needed to be transcended in order to understand the complexity of contemporary culture (78). Hall himself has said that, even once the CCCS’s resistance to theoreticism had been overcome, there was a reluctance to ‘be, in any simple capitulation to the [post-1968] zeitgeist, Marxists’ (1996a: 266). Instead the relationship was one of ‘working within shouting distance of Marxism, working on Marxism, working against Marxism, working with it, working to try to develop Marxism’ (279). When Marxism finally did become central to CCCS theorisation, it was marked by these detours and struggles. To some extent this involved continuity with previous cultural Marxist thinking: the CCCS, for instance, continued to resist a ‘political economy’ approach to culture, as developed in the British case in the mass communications research of Graham Murdock and Peter Golding, which it felt reproduced the notion of culture as a superstructure. But it also involved two

The Gramscian turn in Cultural Studies 115 significant ‘breaks’: first, the Centre’s engagements with structuralism and semiotics and, second, a willingness to challenge some of the perceived limitations in the ‘culturalist’ tradition of humanist socialism associated with the earlier work of Williams and Thompson. Through the 1960s, the Centre experienced a ‘bewildering series of theoretical explosions’, as it assimilated ‘one continental theoretician after another’ (Hall, quoted in Dworkin 1997: 141). Most prominently, its researchers developed an interest in structuralism, encompassing the work of, amongst others, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss and, of particular importance to this chapter, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. In the work of these authors, meaning was seen not as a product of lived experience, as in culturalism, but as determined by signifying systems which precede individual experience and establish the ways in which social relations are constructed and interpreted. While Hall’s important 1980 essay ‘Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms’ acknowledges the debt to culturalism, it is clear that structuralism was then seen as the more methodologically rigorous of the two paradigms. Taking Marx’s proposition that ‘men make their own history, but . . . they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing’, Hall suggests that culturalism tends towards a ‘naïve humanism’ in which the undeniable fact that people become conscious of their subordinate positions and organise to overcome such inequality ‘must not be allowed to override the fact that, in capitalist relations, men and women are placed and positioned in relations which constitute them as agents’ (1986: 30; emphasis added). According to Andrew Tudor (1999:118), three things appealed to Hall and others at the CCCS about structuralist Marxism: first, the way in which it established the importance of ‘conceptualizing determinate conditions in cultural analysis’ (by giving due weight to the ‘relative autonomy’ and internal organisation of different cultural forms, institutions and apparatuses); second, its insistence on the need for abstraction and theorisation in conceptualising ‘otherwise concealed relationships and structures’ such as class and capitalism (but also patriarchy and racism), thereby decentring ‘experience’ as the only means by which such phenomena could be judged; and finally, and of most lasting importance, structuralism focused on ideology as the particular organisation of signifying practices which constitutes people as social subjects and which produces the ‘lived relations’ by which they are connected to class society and the dominant organisation of production. For Althusser, Hall writes, ideologies provide the categories ‘through which men “live” in an imaginary way, their real relation to their conditions of existence’ (1980: 32) Ideology was, then, central to how the CCCS understood culture and power, and for Colin Sparks ‘it was this structuralist Marxism which formed the intellectual basis of the “heroic age” of cultural studies’ (Sparks 1996: 84), his claim chiming with Tudor’s assessment that ‘Althusserianism had swept all before it in the first half of the 1970s’ (1999: 120). Nonetheless, even at the highpoint of this engagement, it is noticeable that ‘it was a very tolerant orthodoxy which permitted various unbelievers . . . to eke out a marginal existence’ (Sparks 1996: 82) and that once, as Hall puts it, the Centre’s writers moved from theoretical debate

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to concrete studies, the forms of Marxism used were far from dogmatic. Indeed, in the ways in which television audiences and youth subcultures, for example, were held to ‘negotiate’ and ‘subvert’ the intended meanings of texts and lived conditions, there was a strong sense of researchers considering both ideology and experience and therefore drawing on the socialist humanism and culturalism of the CCCS inheritance. So, for example, Hall’s 1973 ‘encoding-decoding’ model of the reception of television discourse, Dick Hebdige’s work on the resistant uses of style amongst youth subcultures, and David Morley’s work on the construction of nation through television viewing (in Hebdige 1979; Hall 1980; Morley 1980) all involved a productive use of ‘Gramscian’ positions. Nonetheless, at this stage, rather than being seen as a corrective to structuralism, Gramsci is typically drawn on as a means of enriching and sensitizing notions of ideology and the ‘relative autonomy’ of cultural forms and practices. Indeed, Hall comments that the aspects of Gramsci drawn upon ‘have structuralist rather than culturalist bearings’ (1986: 33). So, for example, in the CCCS working papers published as Resistance through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson 1976), hegemony is used as a way of extending the idea of the ways in which working-class consent to unequal power relations is won. Hegemony, the authors note, works through ideology but does not consist of false ideas and perceptions. Instead it works ‘by inserting the subordinate class into the key institutions and structures which support the power and social authority of the dominant order. It is [here] that a subordinate class lives it subordination’ (39). The high point of this structuralist-informed endeavour was the collectively authored study of the moral panic around mugging in the 1970s, Policing the Crisis (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts 1978). In its concern with the long preparation of the ideological ground for the mugging scare, and in its consideration of the ways in which the media, though autonomous of the state, helped to make the state’s version of political and social reality dominant, the book corresponds to key structuralist Marxist interests. Yet this Althusserianism is in tension with a developing Gramscianism, signalled, as Dworkin (1997: 174–175) argues, by three issues. First, Policing the Crisis, like Resistance through Rituals before it, produced a reading of post-war British history in hegemonic terms. Its outline of the full range of ‘political, juridical and ideological’ forms in circulation in Britain between 1945 and the mid-1970s showed how consent became progressively exhausted and was replaced by what its authors term the ‘exceptional state’. In this condition, they argue, the crisis of capitalism was managed through the adoption of increasingly authoritarian representations of, and solutions to, social problems, resulting in the emergence of a new hegemonic bloc founded on the linking of free-market economic liberalism to social conservatism, to which formation they give the name ‘authoritarian populism’. Second, Policing the Crisis was the first Centre project to examine the articulation of race and class in modern Britain. Hall described it as a ‘decisive turn in [his] own theoretical and intellectual work, as well as that of the Centre’ (1996a: 270), because of the initial steps it took towards unearthing a non-reductive approach to the interrelationship between the two phenomena. And third, the book moved towards a ‘radical contextualism’ which saw hegemony as a shifting field of meanings and differences, in which

The Gramscian turn in Cultural Studies 117 the aim of cultural struggle is to produce an always-provisional new ‘common sense’. For Gramsci, common sense is a way of thinking about the world that is grounded in material realities, but which is unsystematic, heterogeneous and spontaneous, containing both conservative and progressive elements (1971: 326). The task of cultural analysis is consequently to pay close attention to the diverse, often contradictory, strands within such a formation. Though not yet fully developed, the use of Gramsci at this point recognizes that there is little sense in structural Marxism of how ideological struggle takes place. ‘For all practical purposes’, Hall remarks elsewhere, ‘the domain of ideology was, for Althusser, the domain of the “dominant ideologies” ’ (1980, 34–35). Policing the Crisis by contrast predicted the direction of Hall’s later work in the stress it placed on [h]istorical specificity, the ‘non-necessary’ correspondences between practices, and the ‘discipline of the conjuncture’. This new reading viewed ‘hegemony’ as involving both the production of consent and as providing ideological horizons defining the limits of cultural and political struggle. A central arena where this took place was . . . over ‘the popular’ – not in the sense of summoning up the energies of an already constituted ‘people’ but in ‘the capacity to constitute classes and individuals as a popular force’. (Dworkin 1997: 175) Shortly after co-authoring Policing the Crisis, Hall took up a position as professor of Sociology at the Open University (OU). He described this experience as a further attempt to disrupt some of the institutional problems of higher education in the United Kingdom, arguing that the ‘more open, interdisciplinary, unconventional setting’ of the OU (its part-time, distance-teaching, and learning-model non-traditional courses and lack of entry requirements) made possible ‘some of the aspirations of my generation – of talking to ordinary people, to women and black students in a non-academic setting’ (Chen 1996: 500). If, as other commentators (e.g. Bennett 1998a; Miller 1994) have argued, this optimistic vision ignored some of the realities of OU teaching, then Hall’s vision of the OU as a site within which a broader Cultural Studies pedagogy could take place was certainly realized: ‘I thought’, he writes, ‘here is an opportunity to take the high paradigm of cultural studies, generated in the hothouse atmosphere of Centre graduate work, to a popular level. . . . I wanted cultural studies to . . . “live” as a more popular pedagogy’ (Chen 1996: 501). Plans for a Cultural Studies programme were well advanced by the time of Hall’s appointment. Although a Cultural Studies degree course had been launched at Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1975, there was little named Cultural Studies teaching in UK universities at the time. The OU responded to this absence by planning an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree in Popular Culture, with the large group responsible for putting the course together convened by Tony Bennett. The course, generally known, by its OU code, as U203, ran from 1982 to 1987, by which time approximately 6,000 students had taken the course, by far the largest undergraduate take-up for any Cultural Studies course in the United Kingdom at the time (Cubitt 1986: 90).

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In many ways, the clearest expressions of the Gramscian moment can be found in the publications associated with U203 (the course materials themselves, the readers which accompany them [which include some CCCS output], and the slightly later Popular Culture and Social Relations, written and edited by several of the course team). In an article for Screen Education, ‘Popular Culture: A “Teaching Object” ’ (1980), Bennett set out the ‘pedagogical promise’ of the course in explicitly Gramscian terms, arguing that the use of hegemony theory ‘puts one directly – and immediately – into the business of teaching processes, relationships and transactions, and to doing so historically’ (28). By setting out popular culture as a system of class relations, he observed: It brings that sphere into focus not as a heterogeneous collection of cultural forms – film, television, popular writing, music, the ‘lived cultures’ of particular social groups or classes . . . but as part of a structured field of relationships between classes. In doing so, it directs attention to the ‘play’ which takes place within this field between competing class ideologies and cultures and to the contradictory and competing ways in which these are articulated with one another within different moments and types of hegemony. (34) Bennett’s introductory essay, ‘Popular Culture and the “Turn to Gramsci” ’ in Popular Culture and Social Relations is one of the defining moments of the intellectual history outlined in this chapter. In it, Bennett simplifies and accentuates the split between culturalism and structuralism from Hall’s ‘Two Paradigms’ article, arguing that the division was compounded by a settlement of these positions within particular disciplines, each with a particular object of enquiry. Thus, structuralism preponderated within the study of texts, while culturalism was more concentrated in history and sociology and in studies of phenomena such as sport and youth subcultures. Yet despite these major differences, Bennett notes that culturalism and structuralism were, in ideological terms, mirror images of one another. Both paradigms accepted the existence of ‘a dominant ideology, essentially and monolithically bourgeois in its characteristics, which, with varying degrees of success, is imposed from without, as an alien force, on the subordinate classes’ (1986a: xiii). According to Bennett, Gramsci’s development of the notion of hegemony represented two major advances on the ‘zero-sum’ game of domination and resistance. First, it meant that, in thinking about popular culture, one had to neither celebrate it as the authentic expression of popular values nor condemn it as the servant of dominant interests. Instead culture could be seen as an arena in which ‘dominant, subordinate and oppositional cultural values meet and intermingle . . . vying with one another to secure the spaces within which they can [frame and organise] popular experience and consciousness’ (1986b: 19). The second shift of emphasis lay, despite U203’s strong framing in class terms, in Gramsci’s critique of class essentialism. While for Gramsci this is largely a matter of national and regional identity, these are clearly not the only forms of non-class identity. Other areas of cultural struggle include ‘race’, gender, sexuality and environmentalism, though

The Gramscian turn in Cultural Studies 119 Gramscian thought, with its emphasis on the ‘decisive nucleus of economic activity’, never claims that these categories can float entirely free from questions of class. Instead, the task of critical analysis is to consider ‘the complex and changing ways in which these [phenomena] may be overlapped on one another in different historical circumstances’ (1986a: xvi). The third feature of the turn to Gramsci is the issue of articulation: the notion that ideologies do not exist in some pure, dominant form but are always in transition and transformation as they seek to occupy, and live within, the common sense of their opponents. Bennett argues – as E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams had before him – that hegemony is not a synonym for domination. A class can only become hegemonic to the extent that it is able to find space for opposing class cultures and values. So, for example, since ‘bourgeois culture’ has to accommodate elements of working-class culture, it ceases to be purely or entirely bourgeois and becomes, instead, ‘a mobile combination of cultural and ideological elements derived from different class locations which are, but only provisionally and for the duration of a specific historical conjuncture, affiliated to bourgeois values, interests and objectives’ (1986a: xv). U203, therefore, largely disentangled British Cultural Studies’ use of Gramsci from its earlier association with Althusserianism and clarified and developed some of the uses of Gramsci which had found expression in the work of the CCCS and, indeed, in that of Raymond Williams: questions of articulation, of transformation and, above all, of cultural struggle, albeit struggle still predominantly framed in terms of class. After the earlier rejection of ‘culturalist’ approaches, the adoption of Gramsci’s work allowed for a return to some idea of the ‘expressive totality’, thinking together of questions of ideology and experience, structure and agency. As David Forgacs notes, Gramsci was ‘reintroduced into British Marxism after its honeymoon with Althusserian structuralism; he emerged in a new guise as a “post Althusserian” ’, a cultural Marxist who ‘gave an adequate account both of the complexities of modern political and cultural formations and of popular common sense, avoiding the functionalism of the Althusserian account of ideology’ (1989: 83). But if Bennett produced some of the clearest accounts of the Gramscian moment, we shall see that he also became one of the most prominent critics of Gramscianism from within the field. We have seen that Policing the Crisis coined the term ‘authoritarian populism’ as a way of framing the political situation of the mid-1970s, and the final part of this section looks at how Stuart Hall developed some of these ideas as tools of political intervention, largely in the magazine Marxism Today. Hall’s already established status as a leading public intellectual was bolstered by his development, within a fairly popular and non-academic medium (see Pimlott 2006), of new ways of understanding the neoliberal direction taken within Britain. These were, in turn, shaped by his original reading of Gramsci on the mechanisms of consent, common sense, the conjuncture, the ‘war of position’, crisis and Caesarism. In a series of essays first on the politics and meanings of ‘Thatcherism’ (Hall 1983, 1988), and later on the implications of what he and Martin Jacques described as ‘New Times’ (1989), Hall gave Gramscian shape to cultural and political analysis in the period.

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As Dennis Dworkin puts it, Hall’s analysis in his Marxism Today articles owes a ‘spiritual’, as much as a theoretical debt, to Gramsci. His work on Thatcherism, as he acknowledged, was very much his Gramsci, rather than the adoption of some doctrinal position. Indeed, Hall is at pains to point out that Gramsci doesn’t ‘have the answers’ to the rise of neoliberalism (1988: 161) and cannot be treated as some kind of prophet. Rather, his contribution is a way of thinking and imagining forged in conditions of terrible personal and political defeat. Having seen the prospect of a ‘proletarian moment’ defeated in Italy and elsewhere, Gramsci was forced to recognize that ‘such a moment, having passed, would never return in its old form’ (1988: 163). In this vein, Hall argued in a piece written before Mrs Thatcher’s 1979 election victory, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, that the British left refused to consider what was specific and particular about the Thatcherite counter-revolution and therefore refused to respond to the ‘discipline of the conjuncture’. Instead, ‘the crisis continues to be read by the left from within certain well-entrenched, largely unquestioned assumptions’ (1988: 40), primary amongst which was that Thatcherism was just another name for the exercise of class domination by an unchanging ruling class: ‘the same people, with the same interests, thinking the same thoughts’. Such one-dimensional thinking, Hall argued, failed to understand how the long-term crisis of British capitalism could create the conditions for ‘incessant and persistent’ efforts to resolve the crisis through the construction of new alliances and new ways of doing politics by the Conservative right. Returning to Gramsci, Hall argues that efforts to overcome the crisis ‘[c]annot be merely defensive. They will be formative: aiming at a new balance of forces, the emergence of new elements, the attempt to put together a new “historic bloc” ’. Furthermore new discourses, programme and policies will not spontaneously emerge: ‘[T]hey have to be constructed. Political and ideological work is required to disarticulate old formations, and to rework their elements into new ones. The “swing to the right” is not a reflection of the crisis: it is itself a response to the crisis’ (1988: 43). This realignment did not come, Hall argues, simply from the right, and nor was it a necessary response: things could have turned out differently. As well as the licence given by an international oil crisis and rising unemployment, the New Right also seized on earlier political moves by both Labour and Conservative administrations to discipline the working class and to tackle the ‘excesses’ of the welfare state. But it ‘extended and twisted these initiatives into new and contrary directions’ (Dworkin 1997: 256) through its construction of a new narrative of post-war history and by building a new common sense. Whereas the three decades after the Second World War had involved a common commitment to welfarist social democracy, ‘Thatcherism was a project to engage, to contest that project, and, wherever possible, to dismantle it and to put something new in place. It entered the political field in a historic contest, not just for power, but for popular authority, for hegemony’ (164). Crucially, it was a ‘project’, not an ‘ideology’ with that term’s sense of a rigorous and coherent set of propositions, for Thatcherism, Hall argues, is stitched out of what seem to be incompatible elements, ‘the resonant themes of organic Toryism – nation, family, duty, authority, standards, traditionalism – with the aggressive themes of a revived neo-liberalism – self-interest, competitive individualism,

The Gramscian turn in Cultural Studies 121 anti-statism’ (48). How, Hall asks, do we make sense of this incoherence, which, using an apparent oxymoron, he terms ‘regressive modernization’, a voice ‘which speaks in our ear with the voice of freewheeling, utilitarian market-man, and in the other ear with the voice of respectable, bourgeois, patriarchal man’ (165–166)? His answer is that it is precisely within this articulation of seemingly diverse elements that persuasive notions work. The purpose of a ‘historically effective’ ideology is to bind into a configuration ‘different subjects, different identities, different projects, different aspirations. It does not reflect, it constructs a “unity” out of difference’ (Dworkin 1997). Despite its backward-looking dimension, Hall notes that Thatcherite tropes of regressive modernization were primarily forward-oriented: they looked towards the construction of a permanent settlement in which future generations of Thatcherites can ‘dream about real cultural power’. By contrast, the left was unable to construct an alternative, future-focused vision which could engage with the desires of the British people and their ‘collective fantasies’ and ‘social imaginary’. While endorsing Gramsci’s point that there can be no hegemony without ‘the decisive nucleus of the economic’, Hall berates the British left for seeing society and culture purely in terms of the economy. The Labour Party, he argues, has no cultural politics and has failed to engage with the increasingly diverse nature of subjectivity in modern societies (171). By contrast, even the most committed socialist is caught up in the neoliberal project: ‘We go to Sainsbury’s’, he argues, ‘and we’re just a tiny bit of a Thatcherite subject’ (165). Hall uses this provocative thought as a way of disrupting the idea that Thatcherism is a dominant ideology. Perhaps, he suggests, we should turn the argument upside down and ask which emergent identities are being (mis) understood through their articulation to forms of political representation. Returning to this theme in his work on ‘New Times’, he asks what the phrase might mean: are New Times a product of Thatcherism? Was Thatcherism really so decisive and fundamental (1996b: 223)? If so, for some on the left the only inference that can be drawn from this situation is that it must move right to be electorally successful (and this was the conclusion drawn by many within the Labour Party). But, Hall argues, a different interpretation would suggest that Thatcherism itself was, in part, produced by New Times, the ‘social, economic, political and cultural changes of a deeper kind now taking place in western capitalist societies’. Seen in this way, Thatcherism represents ‘an attempt (only partially successful) to harness and bend to its political project circumstances which were not of its making, which have a much longer history and trajectory, and which do not necessarily have a New Right political agenda inscribed in them’ (Hall 1996b). Two issues are particularly relevant to this analysis. First, ‘New Times’ is an example of Hall again reworking the relationship between base and superstructure within a Gramscian frame of reference. Against the criticisms that we shall see in the next section, accusing Cultural Studies of having no interest in material conditions, Hall is clearly conscious of major changes in the ‘base’ and the role of these changes in reshaping political and social life. The globalisation of production, the emergence of new working practices and labour organisation, the appearance of

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niche production and ‘flexible specialisation’, and the growth of hi-tech industries and computerisation all find expression within the cultural life of New Times. But Hall draws on Gramsci’s work on ‘Americanism and Fordism’ to show that the relationship between economy and culture is co-constitutive: Fordist production was constituted by discourses of nation, consumption, the individual and the family as much as it shaped and directed these phenomena. Similarly, post-Fordism is ‘relentlessly material in its practices and modes of production. And the material world of commodities and technologies is profoundly cultural’ (233). Furthermore, production is itself shaped by new forms of identity and belonging. In a postFordist economy, with its niche markets and fast-changing styles, Hall writes, we can see ‘wider processes of cultural diversity and differentiation, related to the multiplication of social worlds and social logics typical of modern life in the West’ (234). Related to this, the second issue is what Hall describes as the ‘return of the subject’, or the developing significance of identity within Cultural Studies. This was certainly not new: identity and subjectivity were also discussed within CCCS and OU work (as well as being related to earlier accounts of ‘experience’). But as Angela McRobbie suggests, Hall’s ‘is an axiomatic point because it indicates the decisive turn away from the Althusserian assumption of people being the subject of ideology, to a more active account of new subjectivities emerging precisely from the different constellation of social and economic forces’ (McRobbie 1996: 247). Hall is certainly not arguing for an end to class identity: his point is that such collective subjectivities have become ‘pluralized’. But as we shall see in the next section, this move into non-class forms of identification indicated some of the limitations of the Gramscian model and at the same time signalled new developments and lines of dispute within the study of culture.

From cultural populism to post-Marxism This section looks at some of the objections raised to Gramscian Cultural Studies, both from within the field as it moved to new theoretical positions and from other areas of the humanities and social sciences. For some writers, the development of the question of articulation within a hegemonic framework represented a first engagement with broader post-structuralist and postmodernist philosophical currents, within which questions of class and capital could be decentred and rethought. At times this involved a renunciation of Gramsci for his concentration on a single social ‘contradiction’ – that between capital and labour – rather than the multiplicity of other forms of power and resistance. From other thinkers came the criticism that the Gramscian turn within Cultural Studies represented a retreat from political engagement and a move towards the celebration of consumers’ and viewers’ active and creative engagements with popular culture, even when such activities operated under the fundamental closure offered by market capitalism. To borrow a Gramscian term, this line of critique claimed that Cultural Studies had itself been ‘transformed’ by its contact with consumerism. What these criticisms share, albeit from different positions, is the notion that Gramscianism represented a

The Gramscian turn in Cultural Studies 123 move away from Marxism: for some a necessary move in the field’s development, for others evidence of its political and theoretical apostasy. To take this latter criticism first, the accusation that Cultural Studies acts as a cheerleader for, and even an actor within, a new phase of capitalism appeared at a similar time as, and sometimes in response to, the New Times agenda outlined in the previous section. Amid claims that Cultural Studies represented a turn to ‘decorative sociology’ (Rojek and Turner 2000) or that ‘contemporary cultural studies’ was the home of academics with a ‘new found respect for sales figures’ (Frith and Savage 1992: 107), the most strident criticisms came from Jim McGuigan (1992) in his book Cultural Populism and in a chapter in Cultural Studies in Question (1997), edited by Marjorie Ferguson and Peter Golding. While claiming to be broadly in favour of hegemony theory, McGuigan argues that its detachment from a political economy approach had led to a celebratory and ‘fashionable’ drift in the study of popular culture. Although he acknowledges that the adoption of Gramscianism was an attempt to think base and superstructure together dialectically, he argues that an interest in the culture of the people split into a ‘productionist’ variant concerned with more democratic representations of subaltern experience, and therefore the control of the means of cultural production, and a ‘consumptionist’ view which wildly overestimated audience and consumer agency. Despite its claims to be equally interested in both sides of this divide, McGuigan claims, Gramscianism acted as a licence for a postmodernist fixation on the subversive pleasures of consumption. Unconcerned with either Hall’s arguments about postFordism in ‘The Meaning of New Times’ or the debates over structure and agency that led to the Gramscian turn, McGuigan argues: Hegemony theory offered a means of cohering the field. But it has never done so adequately, due to the original schism with the political economy of culture. . . . The uncritical drift of popular cultural study is encouraged by the failure to articulate consumption to production. Hegemony theory bracketed off the economics of cultural production in such a way that an exclusively consumptionist perspective could emerge from its internal contradictions. (76) Returning to the theme that Cultural Studies is complicit with capitalism, McGuigan argued later that, despite its stated opposition to economism, Cultural Studies offers an echo of the transformations taking place in the post-Fordist economy. In its (as he sees it) view of the symbolic realm as an ‘economy’ in which material goods have been replaced by ‘weightless’ or ‘experiential’ commodities, Cultural Studies transposes ‘economic logic on to the plane of the insistently noneconomic with no recourse to an economy conceived in terms of the circulation of wealth’ (1997: 140). And later yet, while ostensibly exempting Hall from criticism, McGuigan argues that Cultural Studies represents a ‘historic reconciliation with prevailing arrangements and a sale’s rush into headlong hedonism that dispenses with the miserabilism of Marxism’, being just the educational and publishing form taken by the ensemble he terms ‘cool capitalism’ (2010: 151).

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Ferguson and Golding argue similarly that Cultural Studies had given itself entirely over to the embrace of cultural and political populism. Pointing out – not dissimilarly from Hall – that the 1980s had seen a raft of political, economic, spatial and organisational changes, they argue, ‘The impact of all these mediating factors on cultural choice, cultural fashion and consumption had little or no place in the cultural studies theoretical universe’ (1997: xxiii). Instead, they claim, Cultural Studies has taken part in an ‘ironic retreat from politics per se’ (xxv). Cultural politics, they therefore imply, is not real politics, which can only be studied through empirical analysis of change. Cultural Studies, by contrast, has failed to deal ‘with the deep structural changes in national and global political, economic and media systems through its eschewing of economic, social or policy analysis’. It has no interest in globalisation, system change or developments in production. ‘Where do questions of inclusivity stand’, they ask, ‘when issues of changing media technology, ownership, regulation, production and distribution are shrugged off and only those of consumption are addressed?’ (xiii–xiv). McGuigan’s and Ferguson’s and Golding’s accusations are caricatures, involving a misreading of the New Times debate and of Cultural Studies more generally. The authors identify instances where there is some uncritical celebration of ‘consumerism’ or subcultural creativity from an author with Cultural Studies affiliations (above all in the work of John Fiske) and use that as evidence of the foundational misconceptions of the Cultural Studies project (its rejection of a base and superstructure notion of cultural production and cultural struggle and its theoretical open-endedness). So, for example, Fiske’s form of cultural analysis, which combines audience ethnography with semiotic textual analysis, ‘can be traced’, writes McGuigan, ‘to the abolition of political economy within cultural studies . . . [and this] goes back to the theoretical codification of [CCCS] under the leadership of Stuart Hall’ (1997: 149). Nonetheless, in at least one regard, these ‘cultural populism’ criticisms engage with the debate that Cultural Studies has staged with itself. In their polemics against what they see as ‘over-textual’ studies, their analysis gels with a history of Cultural Studies in which a Gramscian approach gave way to the primacy of notions of ‘discourse’, in which the work of Michel Foucault took a leading position. From more sympathetic positions than either McGuigan or Ferguson and Golding, Colin Sparks (1996) and Dennis Dworkin (1997) argue that the 1970s was both the culmination and the moment of disintegration of Marxism in British Cultural Studies. Sparks, while not mentioning Gramsci in his history of Cultural Studies, argues that it is possible to ‘claim that almost nobody today active in the field of cultural studies identifies themselves with the theoretical framework of what was once Marxist cultural studies’ and that ‘the central concerns with the problem of determination and the nature of ideology have more or less disappeared’ (96). By abandoning the question of determination, he claims, Cultural Studies has regressed ‘to an essentially textualist account of culture’. Although the adoption of Gramsci represented precisely such an attempt to rethink questions of determination, Sparks’s criticism of ‘textualism’ engages with a significant aspect of the Gramscian moment. At much the same time as it broke

The Gramscian turn in Cultural Studies 125 with a functionalist account of ideology, Cultural Studies also turned to the idea that elements of a ‘social formation’ are structured like a language, within which the relationship of signs and referents is arbitrary, and there are only rules of association and patterns of connotation and difference. As with Hall’s work on Thatcherism, this ‘discursive’ mode of analysis proposes that there is no necessary connection between, for example, classes and cultural practices. Instead, such connections are made through the process of articulation, and hegemony is presented in terms of the discursive struggles by which discrete groups – with divergent practices, beliefs and interests – are forged into a bloc. Although this idea owes much to the spirit of Gramsci, the term ‘articulation’ was drawn initially from structuralism and, in its more developed and politicized form, from the work of the Argentinian political theorist Ernesto Laclau. In his Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977), Laclau argues that there is no guaranteed or necessary connection between a class position and a political or ideological discourse: no idea ‘belongs’ exclusively to a particular class. Indeed, Laclau is suspicious of the notion of class itself, preferring to see an opposition between ‘the people’ and ‘the power bloc’. Instead, a discourse can be given a specific character through its articulation to a political programme. The social group that achieves the most durable leadership is the one that is best able to absorb other issues into its discourse and present them as its own. Thus, a group is hegemonic not by imposing its world view on subordinate groups ‘but to the extent that it can articulate different visions of the world in such a way that their potential antagonism is neutralized’ (quoted in Slack 1996: 119). Together with Chantal Mouffe, Laclau reworked this notion of articulation in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) and, in doing so, broke decisively with Marxist notions of class struggle. While celebrating the fact that, ‘in Gramsci, politics is finally conceived as articulation’ (85), Laclau and Mouffe reject Gramsci’s proposition that ‘there must always be a single unifying principle in every hegemonic formation, and this can only be a fundamental class’ (69). Declaring themselves ‘post-Marxists’, Laclau and Mouffe argue that the left is in crisis as a consequence of its outdated faith in the working class as a ‘universal’ class that can liberate everyone. For them, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is an essential move forward since it establishes a ‘logic of the social’, within which discrete subject positions and social groups in a particular historical conjuncture will be bound together into a historical bloc. In modern societies, there has been a proliferation of new identities and social movements. No left politics could ignore these struggles, but nor could they exist independently of a left. Thus, they argue that ‘the political meaning of a local community movement, of an ecological struggle, of a sexual minority movement’ cannot be contained within these issues alone. Instead, ‘it crucially depends upon its hegemonic articulation with other struggles and demands’ (87). Laclau and Mouffe’s original use of Gramscian theory represents an important contribution to understanding how hegemony might operate in modern democracies. Any ‘expansive’ hegemony must reach out to an array of social groups, and Laclau and Mouffe are rightly critical of projects that can only conceive of politics in terms of singular ‘contradictions’. Their purpose in doing so is to hold onto

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some version of a unified and democratic left. As Richard Johnson notes of their work, ‘[W]ithin such a general politics of the left, different claims – on grounds of class, race and gender, for instance – could be negotiated and some unity won’ (Johnson 2007: 100). However, their rejection of the idea of a leading group within a bloc and their claim that ‘socialism is one of the components of a project for radical democracy, not vice versa’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 16), raise some questions. Whereas Gramsci uses the term ‘hegemony’ to conceive of how one fundamental class exerts moral and intellectual leadership over another through its co-construction of a lived and experienced ‘common sense’, Laclau and Mouffe treat it as a synonym for voluntary ‘federation’ in which different groups come to share an elaborated ‘philosophy’. Within their use of hegemony it is difficult to see who would provide the leadership of a struggle, how any group could – or would wish to – shape another’s common sense, or what issues would form a ‘decisive nucleus’. As Hall comments, ‘[T]here is no reason why anything is or isn’t potentially articulatable with anything. The critique of reductionism has apparently resulted in the notion of society as a totally open discursive field’ (Hall 1996d: 146). Despite their use of hegemony, the real inspiration behind Laclau and Mouffe’s work is Michel Foucault, and an – at times – problematic linking of Gramsci and Foucault was a key feature of the later Gramscian moment in Cultural Studies. Just as Tony Bennett’s earlier work had set out a clear Gramscian position on the study of popular culture, so his article ‘Cultural Studies: The Foucault Effect’ (1998b) is unequivocal in making the argument that a Gramscian approach was insufficient to the task of understanding the relations of culture and power. Bennett acknowledges that Foucault had been present in Cultural Studies since the 1970s, but this was only a Foucault who could be ‘fitted into a Gramscian mould’, in other words a Foucault whose objections to Marxism were systematically sidestepped. While noting that Hall’s ‘Two Paradigms’ essay makes approving use of Foucault’s thought as a means of doing concrete analysis, Bennett argues that Hall erroneously criticizes Foucault for his scepticism around economic determinacy, or, as Hall puts it, Foucault’s commitment to the ‘necessary non-correspondence of all practices to one another’ (1986: 36). For Bennett, this is itself a form of reductionism since ‘all those aspects of Foucault’s work which he had directed, polemically and strategically, against Marxism, were directed back at him because they were not Marxist!’ (1998b: 63). Bennett points out that ‘to say that practices do not necessarily correspond with one another is not to say that they necessarily do not correspond’ (83), though, like Laclau and Mouffe, he does not indicate under what conditions such a correspondence might take place. Beyond the issue of determination, Bennett’s critique of Gramscianism lies in its lack of concern for institutional and cultural specificity. Despite Gramscian Cultural Studies’ claims to be interested in the precise make-up of civil society – the media, subcultures, the school system and so on – and its supposed emphasis on lived social relations rather than ideology, Bennett argues that Gramscianism is really a means of establishing a generalized theory of consent in which class power operates repetitively and predictably across any cultural field. Given its stress on the psychological dimension of consent, he argues, ‘It is the battle of ideas that

The Gramscian turn in Cultural Studies 127 matters most, and . . . this battle of ideas is viewed as taking much the same form and posing much the same issues for analysis, no matter what the fields of its occurrence’ (1998b: 69). Because of this, Gramscianism has been unconcerned with the specific properties of cultural institutions and ‘apparatuses’, being more concerned with the invariant manner by which hegemony is organised. Bennett concludes from this that Cultural Studies self-definition as a counterhegemonic educational activity was misguided, since it failed to address the ‘real world’ of actually existing political arrangements. Its notion of itself as a political project was narcissistic, ignoring both the institutional embeddedness of Cultural Studies within British universities and the social marginality of its Marxist position-taking. A better role for Cultural Studies was therefore to engage with culture, through analysing the complex ways in which it is managed and administered in modern societies. This meant both studying as well as participating in cultural policy and unpacking the many forms of modern ‘governance’ rather than Gramsci’s more limited concentration on the state. Ironically, however, this approach has itself been chastised for its uncritical turn. McGuigan (2010: 146) argues that ‘the logic of Bennett’s position was to turn Cultural Studies into a kind of management consultancy for neoliberal social democracy. . . . That Cultural Studies should have something to say about cultural and other policy questions is incontestable, but it is unfortunate if all it can do is supplement already wellestablished administrative and instrumental agendas for research’. A final objection to the Gramscian turn claims that despite Hall’s rejection of Marxist ‘reductionism’, Cultural Studies’ commitment to the notion of culture as an autonomous field did nothing to disrupt the base-superstructure model, simply privileging the latter over the former. Janice Peck (2001), whose view this is, notes how Cultural Studies was committed, at an early stage, to moving away from Raymond Williams’s notion of the ‘expressive totality’, which attempted to think culture and ‘not culture’ (society, politics and economy) together. In line with much fellow Western Marxist thinking, Cultural Studies reformulated its version of Marxism by way of a consideration of the superstructure (culture, ideology and discourse) rather than by engaging with the question of the base. Its concentration on hegemony as a struggle over ideas was simply one version of this idealism. Like Sparks (1996: 86), Peck calls for a Cultural Studies which sees base and superstructure as mutually constitutive rather than, as she implies Cultural Studies accepts, culture reflexively impacting upon the economy. Capitalism, she says, is not restricted to the economic domain and is not a ‘thing’. Instead it is a dynamic, conflictual system of social relations and as such is always a source, site, and object of signification. If we wish to grasp culture in relation to the social totality, we might heed Williams’s call to look again at the received notion of the base that has so long evaded interrogation. (243) Yet here, as in all the positions outlined in this section, it is difficult to see how this criticism differs, fundamentally, from Hall’s neo-Gramscianism. Hegemony,

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as used by Cultural Studies, is precisely the conflictual field and site of signification referred to by Peck, and Hall’s work on New Times was an interrogation of the ‘base’, which he sees as operating in co-constitutive terms with culture. Like Bennett, Laclau and Mouffe, Hall also took seriously the notion that there is ‘no necessary correspondence’ between social position and subjectivity, though that did not lead him to reject the idea of forging a new common sense (together with a new ‘philosophy’). And he provocatively said that any analysis of contemporary culture which does not take seriously the pleasures of consumption is seriously deficient. All the criticisms above therefore identify ‘problems’ with the Gramscian turn in Cultural Studies which are issues with which Hall’s work offered a long-term engagement. Hall’s regularly repeated point that the turn to Gramsci enabled the construction of a ‘Marxism without guarantees’ is precisely an encouragement to think about the field as always having unfinished business, as well as being an invitation to future work. With that open-endedness in mind, several points should be clear from this chapter. First, the Gramscian moment was not something that originated in the CCCS. Instead it had a long history, going back into the 1950s and 1960s, during which many of the ways of thinking about Gramsci had already been established. Second, Gramsci was only one figure – if the most prominent – in a theoretical ensemble that included (amongst others) Althusser, Foucault and Laclau. And third, Stuart Hall had an extraordinary centrality in bringing these perspectives together within a ‘neo-Gramscian’ framework. While a number of authors (e.g. Rojek 2003; McGuigan 2010) have critically characterized Cultural Studies as a ‘Hallian’ field, it is better to see Hall as taking an enabling role – ‘permanently persuading’ – rather than being some dominating figure. In this regard, he resembled his own characterization of Gramsci in the 1986 essay ‘Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’: not a general theorist but someone whose work is of a ‘sophisticating’ kind. Never ‘a “marxist” in a doctrinal, orthodox, or “religious” sense’ (Hall 1996c: 412) but ‘open’, insightful, attuned to ‘new questions and conditions’ and ‘analytic approximations’. As Dick Hebdige has argued, his great contribution to Cultural Studies was to share conceptual ground with what Hebdige calls the ‘Posts’ (postmodernism, post-structuralism, post-Fordism) without entirely surrendering such ‘pre-Post-erous’ categories as class, ‘roots’, and ‘rights’. Against both the charges of complicity made by the cultural populism critics, and the rejection of Marxism by post-structuralists, Hebdige argues that Marxism underwent major transformation in the years covered by this chapter, without being subsumed: The kind of marxism Stuart Hall proposes bears little or no relation to the caricatured, teleological religion of marxism which – legitimately in my view – is pilloried by the Post. A marxism without guarantees is a marxism which has suffered a sea change. It is a marxism which has ‘gone under’ in a succession of tempests . . . and yet it is a marxism that has survived, returning perhaps a little lighter on its feet (staggering at first), a marxism more prone perhaps to listen, learn, adapt and to appreciate, for instance, that words like ‘emergency’

The Gramscian turn in Cultural Studies 129 and ‘struggle’ don’t just mean fight, conflict, war and death but birthing, the prospect of new life emerging, a struggling to the light. (Hall 1996c: 207)

Bibliography Althusser, L. 1969. For Marx. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Anderson, P. 1977. The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. New Left Review, 100, 5–35. Anderson, P. 1992. English Questions. London: Verso. Bennett, T. 1980. Popular culture: A ‘teaching object’. Screen Education, 34, 20–36. Bennett, T. 1986a. Popular culture and the ‘turn to Gramsci’, in Popular Culture and Social Relations, edited by T. Bennett, C. Mercer and J. Woollacott. Buckingham: Open University Press, vi–xxiii. Bennett, T. 1986b. The politics of the ‘popular’ and popular culture, in Popular Culture and Social Relations, edited by T. Bennett, C. Mercer and J. Woollacott. Buckingham: Open University Press, 6–21. Bennett, T. 1998a. Out in the open: Reflections on the history and practice of cultural studies, in Culture: A Reformer’s Science. London: Sage, 214–231. Bennett, T. 1998b. Cultural studies: The Foucault effect, in Culture: A Reformer’s Science. London: Sage, 60–84. Chen, K.H. 1996. The formation of a diasporic intellectual: An interview with Stuart Hall, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by D. Morley and K.H. Chen. London: Routledge, 484–503. Cubitt, S. 1986. Cancelling popular culture. Screen, 27 (6), 90–95. Dworkin, D. 1997. Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain; History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies. London: Duke University Press. Eagleton, T. 1976. Criticism and politics: The work of Raymond Williams. New Left Review, 95, 3–23. Ferguson, M. and Golding, P. (eds.) 1997. Cultural Studies in Question. London: Sage. Ferrara, F. 1989. Raymond Williams and the Italian left, in Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, edited by T. Eagleton. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 95–108. Forgacs, D. 1989. Gramsci and Marxism in Britain. New Left Review, 176, 70–88. Frith, S. and Savage, J. 1992. Pearls and swine: The intellectuals and the mass media. New Left Review, 198, 107–116. Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Writings. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, S. 1980. Cultural studies and the centre, in Culture Media, Language, edited by S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis. London: Hutchinson, 15–47. Hall, S. 1986. Cultural studies: Two paradigms, in Culture, Ideology and Social Process, edited by T. Bennett, G. Martin, C. Mercer and J. Woollacott. London: Batsford, 19–37. Hall, S. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso. Hall, S. 1996a. Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by D. Morley and K.H. Chen. London: Routledge, 262–275. Hall, S. 1996b. The meaning of new times, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by D. Morley and K.H. Chen. London: Routledge, 223–237. Hall, S. 1996c. Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by D. Morley and K.H. Chen. London: Routledge, 411–440.

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Hall, S. 1996d. On postmodernism and articulation: An interview with Stuart Hall, edited by L. Grossberg, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by D. Morley and K.H. Chen. London: Routledge, 131–150. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan. Hall, S. and Jacques, M. (eds.) 1983. The Politics of Thatcherism. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, S. and Jacques, M. (eds.) 1989. New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds.) 1976. Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson. Harris, D. 1992. From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: The Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Hebdige, D. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Hebdige, D. 1989. Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. London: Comedia. Hill, C. 1958. Antonio Gramsci. New Reasoner, 4, 107–113. Hobsbawm, E. 2011. How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism. London: Little, Brown. Johnson, R. 2007. Post-hegemony? I don’t think so. Theory, Culture and Society, 24(3), 95–110. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. McGuigan, J. 1992. Cultural Populism. London: Routledge. McGuigan, J. 1997. Cultural populism revisited, in Cultural Studies in Question, edited by M. Ferguson and P. Golding. London: Sage, 138–155. McGuigan, J. 2010. Cultural Analysis. London: Sage. McRobbie, A. 1996. Looking back on new times and its critics, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by D. Morley and K.H. Chen. London: Routledge, 238–261. Miller, R. 1994. ‘A moment of profound danger’: British cultural studies away from the Centre’. Cultural Studies, 8(4), 417–437. Morley, D. 1980. The Nationwide Audience. London: BFI. Mouffe, C. 1979. Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Nield, K. and Seed, J. 1981. Waiting for Gramsci. Social History, 6(2), 209–227. Peck, J. 2001. Itinerary of a thought: Stuart Hall, cultural studies, and the unresolved problem of the relation of culture to ‘not culture’. Cultural Critique, 48(1), 200–249. Pimlott, H. 2006. Write out of the margins: Accessibility, editorship and house style in Marxism Today, 1957–91. Journalism Studies, 7(5), 782–806. Rojek, C. 2003. Stuart Hall. Cambridge: Polity. Rojek, C. and Turner, B. 2000. Decorative sociology: Towards a critique of the cultural turn. Sociological Review, 48(4), 629–648. Slack, J.D. 1996. The theory and method of articulation in cultural studies, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by D. Morley and K.H. Chen. London: Routledge, 112–127. Sparks, C. 1996. Stuart Hall, cultural studies and Marxism, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by D. Morley and K.H. Chen. London: Routledge, 71–101. Steele, T. 1997. The Emergence of Cultural Studies: Adult Education, Cultural Politics, and the ‘English’ Question. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

The Gramscian turn in Cultural Studies 131 Stratton, J. and Ang, I. 1996. On the impossibility of a global cultural studies, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by D. Morley and K.H. Chen. London: Routledge, 361–391. Thompson, E.P. 1961 The long revolution. New Left Review, 9/10, 24–39. Thompson, E.P. 1965, The peculiarities of the English, in Socialist Register 1965, edited by J.Saville and R. Miliband. London: Merlin Press, 311–362. Thompson, E.P. 1978a. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. London, Merlin Press. Thompson, E.P. 1978b. Eighteenth century English society: Class struggle without class? Social History, 3(2), 133–165. Tudor, A. 1999. Decoding Culture: Theory and Method in Cultural Studies. London: Sage. Turner, G. 1990. British Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Williams, G.A. 1960. The concept of ‘egemonia’ in the thought of Antonio Gramsci: Some notes on interpretation. Journal of the History of Ideas, 21(4), 586–599. Williams, R. 1961. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus. Williams, R. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, R. 1980. Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso. Williams, R. 1989. Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism. London: Verso.

6

Blind spots Re-reading Althusser and Lacan in Cultural Studies Jason Barker

It seems we will never be done with the re-reading and re-evaluation of Louis Althusser. His legacy looms large again following the publication, in spring 2014, after almost twenty years, of Verso’s English translation of Sur la reproduction, his unfinished manuscript from which ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ was drawn: a misrepresentative sample of a ‘book’ if ever there were, of which I will say more. Two more posthumous publications – Initiation à la philosophie pour les non-philosophes and Être marxiste en philosophie – were released by Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) in 2014 and 2015 respectively. If one also considers secondary literature and then the publication, in 2013, of Warren Montag’s monograph Althusser and His Contemporaries, and of the Althusser special issue of Diacritics in 2015, ‘Other Althussers’, edited by G. M. Goshgarian and myself, then both help to expand the picture significantly. But the story hardly ends there, since with the staggered release of the remainder of Althusser’s many unpublished texts from the archives of IMEC1 a far more complicated picture of Althusser is emerging which contradicts much of what we thought we knew about a philosopher who for many years now most people in the Cultural Studies community have been happy to pass over discreetly with as little fuss as possible. This chapter does not attempt anything as ambitious as a comprehensive survey of Althusser literature. (For anyone curious enough to want to grasp Althusser’s thinking in light of recent archive research, then Montag’s monograph would be a good place to start.) My task instead is to map out the blind spots in the reception of Althusser’s ideas in Cultural Studies. Given the extent to which so much of what we take for granted today about Althusser has been influenced by publishing constraints which are gradually loosening, it’s time to begin a reappraisal which can reveal more of the ever-expanding Althusser jigsaw. As well as Althusser, and in order to gauge the full context in which his work needs to be understood, I also consider one of the theorists without whom Althusser’s work would certainly have taken a different turn, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. During the 1970s, in the pages of the British film journal Screen, both Althusser and Lacan’s influence was somewhat incendiary, igniting all

Althusser and Cultural Studies 133 manner of arguments and polemics around the question of cinema spectatorship, and in the process transforming the ideological terrain in Marxism, Feminism and most points in between. Particularly important in this respect for understanding the nature of Lacan’s reception is Laura Mulvey and her seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975). As with Althusser, Mulvey’s reading of Lacan is partial and lacks context, although this is to take nothing away from its importance and originality. For every blind spot, let’s admit the potential for a new insight.

(Con)texts ‘[T]he political character of a body of thought’, Perry Anderson once wrote famously in a cautious defence of Althusser, ‘can only be established by a responsible study of its texts and context’ (Anderson 1980: 105). With this firmly in mind, let us return to the French context in which Althusser’s ideas emerged. Politics were the driving force behind theory in post-war France. But the signal moment which would define Althusser as a leading French theorist came in the aftermath of 1956. In the 1950s an intellectual battle was being waged in France between phenomenologists (principally Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty on one side), and so-called ‘structuralists’ (principally Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser on the other) – although in Althusser’s case the label is somewhat debatable. Among the ‘structuralists’, only Althusser was a Marxist and member of the French Communist Party (PCF). However, what they all shared was a commitment to the human sciences and its politically progressive approach to knowledge. The key political figure for Althusser during this period was Mao Zedong, who in 1949 had become the de facto leader of the newly established People’s Republic of China. Of course, Mao had no stake in the intellectual battles being waged in France. But Mao was the author of important essays which provided Althusser with the impetus to think his position as a French Marxist philosopher. In Mao’s essay On Contradiction, published in 1937, Althusser would find the raw materials to fuel his battle against phenomenology and so loosen its hold on French intellectual life. Besides phenomenology, Althusser’s other battle, which lasted throughout the 1960s, was being waged against ‘theoretical sterility’ in the PCF, of which Althusser would remain a lifelong member. In February 1956, Khrushchev’s speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party had opened the way to ‘de-Stalinization’. Although supposedly a liberation from the dogmatism of Stalin’s post-war brand of Marxism – a liberation welcomed by Jean-Paul Sartre in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) – the response of the PCF’s chief theoretician, Roger Garaudy, was not one of which Althusser approved. Faced with the unimaginative and revisionist response of his own party to this moment of liberation in the ‘history’ of Marxism, Althusser believed that Mao shone like a beacon of renewal, especially since Mao himself had, during the 1920s and 1930s, waged his own successful battle against dogmatism in the Chinese Communist Party.

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That Althusser had a high regard for Mao is well known. But the depth of the allegiance, suppressed for obvious party political reasons during Althusser’s lifetime, has only in more recent years come to light with the drip-feed release of his unpublished work. Mao represents a deep conceptual paradox for any presumed continuity of ‘Marxist philosophy’. In the context of de-Stalinization and the SinoSoviet split of the late 1950s, the figure of Mao helped to open up a new theoretical universe in French intellectual life. Mao is in this context both a conservative and a radical figure, both orthodox and avant-garde, proclaiming his political allegiance to the revolutionary tradition of Marx, Engels and Lenin while at the same time surpassing and (re)inventing that very same tradition. As Alain Badiou argues persuasively, Mao’s conceptual paradox, the fact that he only fits very awkwardly into the institutional grid of theoretical discourse (the French university system) and politics (the PCF), helps to explain his appeal and significance as a revolutionary figure in the wake of the Chinese Cultural Revolution – that is, from 1966 until 1976 – particularly among French students (Badiou 2005). Mao’s impact on both the French student movement and leftist politics, particularly in the aftermath of the French general strike of May 1968, must of course be mentioned. During this period, leftist politics took a decisively Maoist turn in France, notably through the formation of La Gauche Prolétarienne in the latter half of 1968, along with several other grassroots Maoist organisations (see Belden Fields 1988: 87–130). However, the extent to which Althusser, a notable PCF member, could publicly endorse Mao’s ideas was limited for ideological reasons. And so after the publication of Althusser’s For Marx in 1965, which included his Mao-inspired essay ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, references to Mao faded away in his published work. However, we mustn’t forget that Althusser still had ways and means of introducing Maoism into the battleground of Marxist theory. Consider, for instance, the article he published anonymously in Cahiers marxistes-léninistes in November 1966 entitled ‘Sur la révolution culturelle’, essentially a eulogy to new ‘mass organisations, distinct from the [Communist] Party’ – clearly an endorsement not intended to appeal to the PCF leadership (Althusser 1966: 15). Edited by Dominique Lecourt and other students of Althusser’s at the Ecole Normale and distributed by the Union of Communist Students, the journal was Althusserian-Maoist in everything but name (Dosse 1997: 280–283). The importance of Mao in Althusser’s thinking has always been seen as somewhat marginal. However, in the wake of Badiou’s recent reconstruction of the late Mao’s influence on the theoretical conjuncture of the 1960s and early 1970s, it is necessary to develop a more nuanced appreciation of the political dimensions of ‘French theory’. In passing, it no longer seems adequate, for instance, given Althusser’s camouflaged Maoism, to consider his output after the failed revolts of 1968 as a ‘theoretical detour’, a point I will set out in greater detail below. However, for the moment I have merely described the context which is so often passed over in Althusser’s reception in Anglophone Cultural Studies. Although the importance of that oversight is not to be over-exaggerated, for instance in the work of Stuart Hall and Terry Eagleton respectively, it will be revealing to reflect broadly on quite how selective the reception has been.2

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Rebel theory Might Althusser’s cautious and discrete application of Mao in his published work be conceived as an exercise in institutional subversion? This question could equally be posed in relation to Jacques Lacan. Like Althusser, Lacan was an outspoken voice in his field, who in the 1950s would find himself institutionally marginalized as a practising psychoanalyst. However, following a disagreement with his colleagues at the Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse in 1953, Lacan did what Althusser never managed to do: he left the party. Lacanian institutional subversion would continue uninterrupted for the next twenty-eight years, at least until Lacan’s death in 1981, either by way of Lacan’s mercurial ‘return to Freud’ (a re-reading of Freud initially through structural linguistics, then later through logic) or else indirectly through a political hybrid of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Maoist politics known as Lacano-Maoism.3 Unlike Mao’s influence on Althusser, Lacan’s was largely out in the open. Here was an allegiance that Althusser had no reason to conceal from his party colleagues. In 1964, Lacan began teaching seminars at the Ecole Normale with Althusser’s support and with regular attendance by Althusser’s philosophy students. The same year, Althusser published his essay ‘Freud and Lacan’ in which he compared Lacan’s return to Freud with his own ‘return to Marx’. This is a defining moment in theory in the sense that, through Althusser’s public endorsement of Lacan, the ‘politics’ of Lacanian theory were now on the record. The point is often lost on Anglophone readers of Lacan, but let there be no doubt. Lacan certainly never endorsed political interpretations of his work, or the subsequent applications of his theory by French Maoists in the aftermath of May 1968. However, having said that, the ideological allegiances of Lacanianism were a constant of French intellectual life of the period, especially following Lacan’s excommunication from the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1963. Deprived of official accreditation from the governing body of psychoanalysis in France, Lacan effectively became a rebel leader. I repeat the point about institutional subversion: being deprived of official accreditation by the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and therefore of the right to train analysts meant that Lacan would have to bear the burden of training them under the umbrella of his own rival organisation, the Ecole freudienne de Paris. And his outcast status in the French psychoanalytic community meant that trainee analysts would more and more have to come from the ranks of the increasingly politicized students now attending his seminars, thanks to the support he was receiving from Althusser and other influential professors like Claude Lévi-Strauss. And so Lacan’s subversion or ‘recruitment’ of young minds got underway, in a series of annual seminars, attended by large, enthusiastic audiences, first at the Ecole Normale and then, from 1969 onwards, at the Law Faculty of the Panthéon. Quite what the effect of his rebel status was on the direction of his work at this time is worth considering – although this is not the place for such speculation. The salient point here is that, in both the lead-up to and the aftermath of May 1968, Lacanian theory did its fair share to subvert dominant paradigms, primarily

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in psychoanalysis, but also in philosophy and the social sciences, throughout the French university system. In this respect Cahiers pour l’analyse, the AlthusserianLacanian journal set up by Ecole Normale students in 1966, remains an unrivalled benchmark of interdisciplinarity, bringing logic and mathematics, political philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature into unlikely creative tension.4 ‘Suture’ by Jacques-Alain Miller, published in the first issue, and republished in the British cinema journal Screen in 1977, went on to exert a defining influence on film theory in Britain. Of the five editorial board members of Cahiers pour l’analyse, four would become members of La Gauche Prolétarienne – Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, Alain Grosrichard and François Regnault – and another, Alain Badiou, would co-found a separate Maoist organisation, the UCFML. Badiou was one of the contributors to Althusser’s Philosophy Course for Scientists along with Pierre Macherey, Étienne Balibar, François Regnault, Michel Pêcheux and Michel Fichant. Opening at the Ecole Normale in October 1967, the course was eventually interrupted in May the following year when, during Badiou’s mathematical demonstration of the concept of model, French riot police attempted to smash in the front door (Feltham 2008: 1). What should be clear from these opening remarks is something of the specific context or conjuncture in which the ideas of Althusser and Lacan first emerged, the nature of their audience and reception, and the intellectual battles being waged which – crucially – must be conceived as a necessary condition of the ideas themselves. Althusser was always an advocate of what he termed ‘partisanship in philosophy’: ideas are never neutral. The struggle over their elaboration creates divisions, transforming in the process the theoretical stakes, changing perspectives in and on theory and its relation to practice, redrawing the boundary between them. This is an observation that most of the time appears to have escaped commentators and critics of Althusser and Lacan: as if theory’s ‘relevance’ was to be gauged purely in terms of its ‘fit’ or application to British or other (non-French) contexts. As I have tried to show here, the rebel theory inspired by Althusser and Lacan distinguishes itself in seeking to invent side by side both the discursive and the institutional conditions in which creative thinking becomes possible. Far from being a question of ‘relevance’ or of how to apply theory to the ‘real world’, this is theory as the creation of worlds: creative thinking unbound.

Althusser’s ‘structuralism’ It is difficult to find any discussion of Althusser in Cultural Studies, literary criticism or philosophy which doesn’t mention structuralism or refer to him as a ‘Marxist structuralist’. The label has a notable heritage. In an essay first published in 1980 but republished several times since, Stuart Hall discusses ‘Althusser’s work and that of the Marxist structuralists’ and the ‘active presence in Althusser’s thinking of the linguistic paradigm’ (Hall 1980: 65–66). In Literary Theory – first published in 1983 but since republished in second and third editions in 1996 and 2008 – Terry Eagleton notes that, ‘Althusser has sometimes [sic] been seen as a

Althusser and Cultural Studies 137 “structuralist” Marxist, in that for him human individuals are the product of many different social determinants, and thus have no essential unity’. He then goes on: As far as a science of human societies goes, such individuals can be studied simply as the functions, or effects, of this or that social structure – as occupying a place in a mode of production, as a member of a specific social class, and so on. (Eagleton 2008: 149) I cite these authors simply on the grounds of authority, but the view is so pervasive that it would be pointless to cite anyone else. The most perplexing aspect of this is that for all such descriptions of Althusser’s structuralist Marxism, not once, in my recollection, does Althusser ever refer to himself or to his work as structuralist or structuralist Marxist. Throughout the 1960s Althusser is often at pains to distance his work from structuralism. Should Eagleton and Hall have at least acknowledged Althusser’s aversions? Althusser’s harsher criticisms of structuralism have only been widely known about since 1990, when his unpublished works and seminars first began to see the light of day (see Althusser 2003: 19–32). However, his foreword to the English edition of Reading Capital (1970) should have at least sounded a note of caution: We believe that despite the terminological ambiguity, the profound tendency of our texts was not attached to the “structuralist” ideology. It is our hope that the reader will be able to bear this claim in mind, to verify it and to subscribe to it. (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 7) Perhaps it was asking too much for everyone who read him to ‘verify and subscribe to’ Althusser’s claim. I repeat the importance of context or conjuncture in relation to theory, and particularly in terms of its political dimensions. The fact that Althusser’s ‘hope’ for his readers may have gone unheeded is not meant as an indictment of his many British enthusiasts. On the contrary: the fact that theory is born and grows up in a specific context is ever more reason not to ‘verify and subscribe’ to such a claim. Contexts are subjective as well as objective, and what goes unheeded or unseen often marks the beginning of new intellectual breakthroughs or insights. This is equally true for Althusser as it is for cultural and literary theorists like Stuart Hall and Terry Eagleton, whose adaptations of Althusser and structuralism contributed to the invention of the ‘structuralist paradigm’ – one that is comparable to Althusser’s in its scope and significance. And nothing could be truer in the case of Althusser himself. After all, here is a thinker who in Reading Capital devised the so-called ‘symptomatic reading’ of Marx (itself adapted from Freud), which aims to listen to Marx’s ‘silences’ – by which Althusser means the concepts Marx didn’t have time to formulate explicitly during his lifetime, but which are nonetheless latent in Marx’s mature work – in order to complete the theoretical revolution Marx began.

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Structuralism is clearly a long way from – some would say diametrically opposed to – the culturalism of Raymond Williams, with the latter’s emphasis on lived experiences, traditions and practices: what Stuart Hall labels ‘humanism’ (Hall 1980: 63). ‘It was Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism’, Hall observes, ‘which, in its appropriation of the linguistic paradigm, after Saussure, offered the promise to the “human sciences of culture” of a paradigm capable of rendering them scientific and rigorous in a thoroughly new way’. Hall continues: And when, in Althusser’s work, the more classical Marxist themes were recovered, it remained the case that Marx was “read” – and reconstituted – through the terms of the linguistic paradigm. In Reading Capital, for example, the case is made that the mode of production – to coin a phrase – could best be understood as if “structured like a language” (through the selective combination of invariant elements). The a-historical and synchronic stress, against the historical emphases of “culturalism”, derived from a similar source. (Hall 1980: 64) It would certainly be difficult to find a more muddled appraisal of Althusser’s work than this (in passing, the phrase “structured like a language” is not Althusser’s, but from Lacan’s 1957 talk at the Sorbonne, ‘Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud’, later published in Lacan’s Ecrits). However, Hall’s juxtaposition of Lévi-Strauss and Althusser, and his observation that their respective methods derive from ‘a similar source’, at least provides a fortuitous introduction to my next point, which will serve to dispel an imagined kinship. In his essay Hall highlights the humanism/anti-humanism dualism in differentiating between British culturalism and French structuralism. For Althusser this dualism is the dialectic, the driving force, of his entire philosophical enterprise. Throughout the 1950s – and indeed earlier, since 1949, when Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship was published – Althusser had been fascinated by structuralism. But beyond fascination there was no allegiance. Althusser needed structuralism for tactical reasons, in other words to the extent that it could assist in his battle against phenomenology. François Dosse, in his brilliant two-volume study History of Structuralism, entitles his opening chapter ‘The Eclipse of a Star’, contrasting in the immediate post-war years the fading fortunes of Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher par excellence who made it his duty to question everything, with the emergence of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose allegiance to scientific rationality rendered superfluous any pronouncement beyond his own field of expertise (Dosse 1997: 3–9). For Althusser, if structuralism, with its particular brand of scientific rationality, could hasten the decline of Sartrean humanism and phenomenology, then all well and good. But as far as structuralism itself was concerned, and what it might be able to contribute to his theoretical renewal of Marxism, Althusser was decidedly non-committal. But by the mid-1960s, following the publication of For Marx and Reading Capital in 1965, Althusser’s previous indifference to Lévi-Strauss and structuralism had switched to outright hostility. Althusser opens an animated and polemical seminar

Althusser and Cultural Studies 139 from 1966 by observing that ‘there are certain things in Lévi-Strauss that authorize his epigones to utter and write inanities’. Althusser then goes on: ‘[Lévi-Strauss] claims to draw his inspiration from Marx, but doesn’t know him’ (Althusser 2015: 19–20). One in particular of Althusser’s criticisms of Lévi-Strauss is worth analysing, for it turns on a concept of central importance for cultural and literary theory, that of ideology. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels employ their metaphor of the camera obscura through which ‘men and their circumstances appear upside down’: ‘[T]his phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process’. They go on: ‘The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises’ (Marx and Engels 1974: 47). Interestingly, ‘false consciousness’ is an expression Marx himself never actually used in print, although it is often attributed to him. The meaning of ideology as distorted or illusory ideas – ‘phantoms formed in the human brain’ – arising on the basis of the ‘historical’ or ‘material life-process’, nevertheless emerges fairly clearly from this jointly authored ‘transitional’ work. Lévi-Strauss and Barthes were the first structuralists to overhaul ideology in line with Marx’s ‘mature’ conception of its autonomy as a ‘religion of everyday life’. Ideology – or ‘myth’ in structuralist terms – is a ‘type of speech’. It is a universal (synchronic) feature of human societies, both ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’, rather than a (diachronic) outgrowth of the ‘historical life-process’ of industrial capitalism. Through his extensive fieldwork in tribal communities the world over, Lévi-Strauss sought out the universal grammar of the ‘savage mind’ – that is, the structures which could explain the practices of diverse communities with no evolutionary history in common. Such myths are not ‘primitive’ in the sense of illusory, inverted or backward. By myth is meant any narrative which helps build up a coherent picture of the world. In this conception myth is practised or integrated into the ‘material life-process’ itself, not its ‘sublimate’, as Marx and Engels would have it. But practices differ. ‘If the content of a myth is contingent’, Lévi-Strauss asks, ‘how are we going to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar?’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 208). A standard criticism of structuralism is its emphasis of form over content, forcing intrinsic cultural differences into a pre-established itinerary or framework. However, Althusser’s criticisms of Lévi-Strauss are directed not at the latter’s formalism but at his ‘wrong kind of formalism’ (Althusser 2015: 21). Lévi-Strauss’s primitive society is an ideological notion, presuming as it does to unearth the truth of ‘complex’ Western societies from among primitive tribes. For Althusser, no such binary opposition can be set up. Instead, one must begin – as does Marx in Althusser’s estimation – from the concepts of ‘social formation’ and ‘mode of production’, which then translate into superstructural effects (political, legal, ideological), which may often be paradoxical in nature (e.g. certain remnants of feudal ideology under capitalism, or emergent capitalist ideology under feudalism) (Althusser 2015: 22–24). For Althusser, Lévi-Strauss’s failure essentially boils down to not having accounted for the real social diversity of

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such effects. The real question is how diversity is produced as diversity, rather than how diversity can be conceived on the basis of relations which are always and everywhere the same. On the basis of his differential take on Marxism, we could even define Althusser as a ‘post-structuralist’ avant la lettre, lining him up alongside Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. The chronology implied by ‘post-structuralism’ for Cultural Studies scholars is misleading to the point of caricature. ‘Post-structuralism’, writes Terry Eagleton, ‘was a product of that blend of euphoria and disillusionment, liberation and dissipation, carnival and catastrophe, which was 1968’ (Eagleton 2008: 123). Although Derrida, a student and later colleague of Althusser at the Ecole Normale, avoided Marxist debates throughout the 1960s, he was no less preoccupied than his former professor with structuralism’s phenomenological ancestry (see Montag 2013: 36–52). As for Deleuze, he cites Althusser’s For Marx with approval in Difference and Repetition, concurring with Althusser that ‘ “the economic” is never given properly speaking, but rather designates a differential virtuality to be interpreted, always covered over by its forms of actualization’ (Deleuze 1994: 186). If Deleuze’s conceptual vocabulary was somewhat ‘different’ from Althusser’s, then the question of how to conceive the economic as such, without merely reducing the diversity of social relations to monolithic economic forces, covered remarkably common ground. The wide scope and subtle nuances of Althusser’s theoretical research of the 1960s, and especially the unevenness of its ‘battleground’, should make us deeply sceptical of any attempt to label it structuralist or structuralist Marxist. And the key point is this: by 1966 Althusser’s theoretical battle against phenomenology was in practical terms equivalent to his battle against structuralism. His energetic writings of the mid-1960s prove it – writings that do all but convince us that the legendary anti-Althusserian graffiti, scrawled on Parisian walls, could have been put there by him: ‘Structures don’t walk the streets’.

Ideology without the brain The impact in Cultural Studies of Althusser’s ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, first published in the PCF journal La Pensée in 1970, is unprecedented. The text has generated reams of secondary literature, bearing on everything from class to feminism, race to sexuality. But familiarity often breeds complacency, and, in the case of Althusser’s most famous work, complacency has given way to ignorance – not that its reception has been overwhelmingly ‘wrong’. Debates which it helped to provoke – particularly in the pages of Screen – were pertinent and pressing in their own right. But where the text is read in isolation from Althusser’s other work – for example, as a response to May 1968 and/or as an ‘oblique leftist critique’ of the failure of the PCF to offer revolutionary leadership (Benton 1984: 96–103), a failure which would become synonymous with Althusser’s own philosophy for some (see Rancière 2011) – then clearly we are left with a partial and misleading summary of a far more nuanced position. Given Althusser’s differential Marxism, one might certainly want to guard against the pitfalls of reading history

Althusser and Cultural Studies 141 chronologically. In Reading Capital the point is strenuously made that the order in which events occur does not equate with their historical significance (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 101ff.). Viewed as an isolated event, does May 1968 really mark a turning point for class politics on a global scale? Nothing about the significance of May 1968 would seem at odds with Althusser’s Leninist observation from what is arguably his most original essay, written in 1962, that every revolutionary situation is ‘exceptional’, an ‘intense overdetermination of the basic class contradiction’ (Althusser 1969: 104). ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’, to give the text its full title, was in fact drawn from a manuscript Althusser was working on in the late 1960s, but which only saw publication in 1995, five years after its author’s death. English readers could hardly have known the hidden context – that is, that these ‘Notes’ (often misleadingly referred to as an ‘essay’) were a patchwork Althusser had put together from a much more substantial work in progress entitled ‘The Reproduction of the Relations of Production’. Finally published as Sur la reproduction in 1995, we can only speculate on how the completed manuscript might have changed Althusser’s reputation as a structuralist, or structuralist Marxist, had it been published at the same time as the ISAs text. Would Cultural Studies have acquired its facetious reputation as ‘ideological studies’ (Tudor 1999: 103) without its impact? Standard commentaries invariably criticize the text for ‘functionalism’. ‘In its original form’, Andrew Tudor alleges, ‘[Althusser’s] account conceived social agents as, more or less, victims of ideology’ (Tudor 1999: 104). In Marx and Engels’s account, ideology is conceived in terms of illusory ideas, ‘sublimates’ or ‘phantoms formed in the human brain’. For Althusser, however, ideology is a practice, not an idea, and certainly not one which takes shape in the human brain. ‘The brain’ is an ideological notion for Althusser, a refuge of ignorance, so to speak: a fact made explicit in his Lévi-Strauss polemic (Althusser 2015: 25). Needless to say, Althusser is not suggesting that human beings can do without brains. What he is saying is that ‘ideas’, or knowledge, do not originate in human brains. In recent years cognitive science has done its utmost to prove that localized impulses in the cerebral cortex can be correlated with distinct psychological behaviours. But for Althusser nothing could be more un-scientific, or ideological, than attempts to elevate the human brain into the Alpha and Omega of human intelligence. Ideology does not rely on ideas to stimulate brains into action. Ideology is a practice: it is performative. Althusser illustrates the point in the ISAs text by citing Pascal, for whom ideology is not a matter of psychological indoctrination or the brain-washing of ‘victims’. Instead, Pascal ‘scandalously inverts the order of things’ by contending that ideological practice establishes ideological belief: ‘Pascal says more or less: “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe” ’ (Althusser 1971b: 168). As Slavoj Žižek never tires of repeating, it is in the very nature of ideology to work even when we don’t believe in it. ‘Consciousness’ no more than ‘the brain’, in other words, can assist us when trying to resist ideology. We are captive to it, not when we consciously believe in it, but when we act as if we do.

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The originality and counter-intuitive reasoning of Althusser’s ISAs text should be patently obvious – although on the strength of the criticisms from cultural theorists, one would hardly know it. Slavoj Žižek is the exception to the rule in having developed the core aspects of Althusser’s argument in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) and in subsequent works. But what are we to make of the charge often levelled at Althusser’s controversial claim that ideology is eternal or ‘has no history’? It may seem paradoxical for a self-declared revolutionary communist to admit that individuals are ‘always-already subjects’, and therefore subject to the interpellation of the State, which Althusser likens to ‘a Unique, Absolute, Other Subject, i.e. God’ (Althusser 1971b: 178). Siding with the functionalist criticisms, Stuart Hall agrees: From this position, it is indeed impossible – as culturalism would correctly argue – to conceive either of ideologies which are not, by definition, “dominant”: or of the concept of struggle (the latter’s appearance in Althusser’s famous ISAs article being – to coin yet another phrase – largely “gestural”). (Hall 1980: 69) Hall’s criticism of Althusser is that ideologies, in being always dominant, deprive individuals of the capacity for ‘conscious struggle’. But for Althusser the brute fact of ‘being conscious’ no more qualifies individuals for struggle than ‘having a brain’ does. Althusser would always insist on reading ‘consciousness’ in the phenomenological (and therefore ideological) sense, not the political sense. For Althusser there is class struggle, which is unconscious, but not class consciousness in the Lukácsian sense of a subject of history acquiring knowledge of its material circumstances in order to struggle against and ultimately overcome them. For Althusser, political class struggle produces knowledge; but such knowledge can only be grasped objectively, scientifically, by adopting a ‘proletarian class position’; otherwise it remains ideological (see Althusser 1971a). Althusser would eventually respond directly to the functionalist charge in a short essay published in German in 1977 and in Spanish the following year.5 Entitled ‘Note on the ISAs’, the essay underlines the ‘primacy of class struggle’. ‘[D]ominant ideology’, he writes, ‘although this is its function, never manages to resolve totally its own contradictions, which are the reflection of the class struggle’ (Althusser 1995: 255). Let us recall that Althusser’s objective in his ISAs text was initially to think how ideology serves ‘the reproduction of the conditions of production’. For Althusser, ideology is but one practice, the others being political and economic, which taken together as a ‘combined process’ serve the reproduction of a society’s productive forces and relations. However, if the ISAs text did adopt a somewhat fatalistic tone in concentrating solely on the reproduction of capitalist relations of production (the word appears twenty-six times, whereas ‘socialism’ appears only once), Althusser concludes his ‘Note on the ISAs’ in a decidedly Maoist register: The conditions of existence, the (productive and political) practices, the forms of proletarian class struggle have nothing to do with the conditions of

Althusser and Cultural Studies 143 existence, the (economic and political) practices, and the forms of capitalist and imperialist class struggle. This results in antagonistic ideologies, which, entirely like the (bourgeois and proletarian) class struggles are unequal. This signifies that proletarian ideology is not the direct opposite, the inversion, the overthrow of bourgeois ideology – but a wholly other ideology, bearer of other ‘critical and revolutionary’ ‘values’. (Althusser 1995: 267) Here, then, Althusser clarifies ideology as being divided between bourgeois and proletarian ideologies, the latter ‘not the direct opposite’ of the former but instead ‘wholly other’. He concludes his essay with the grandiloquent claim that ‘proletarian ideology anticipates what the Ideological State Apparatuses of the socialist transition will be and, on this basis, even anticipates the suppression of the State and of the Ideological State Apparatuses under communism’ (267). Overall, then, we have the revolutionary stakes of capitalist reproduction: proletarian ideology anticipates the suppression not just of the ISAs, whose role is to ensure capitalist reproduction, but of the State itself. Althusser wrote his clarifications precisely in response to allegations of functionalism. Shouldn’t Hall and the other critics who followed his lead6 have been aware of Althusser’s qualification of his own position, in the 1977 article ‘Note on the ISAs’, before preparing their own criticisms (Hall’s influential essay was published in 1980)? However we choose to answer this, the accusation that Althusser’s account of ideology conceives ‘social agents’ as ‘victims’ is, on this evidence, incorrect. There is clearly much work to be done in Cultural Studies in correcting this false reading of Althusser.

The male gaze The following ‘Thesis’ from the ISAs text would become a theoretical slogan for cultural theorists in the 1970s, particularly feminists: Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. Althusser was clearly alluding to Jacques Lacan when he wrote it. And as I have argued, Lacan’s influence extended beyond philosophy to the French Maoism of the 1960s and 1970s. In the British context, Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, originally published in the British film journal Screen in 1975, remains to this day the journal’s most notable, if not defining, manifesto of the 1970s. ‘Psychoanalytic theory’, as Mulvey begins her essay, ‘is thus appropriate here as a political weapon’ (Mulvey 2009: 711). Although Mulvey’s reading of Lacan is somewhat limited, the essay’s speculative range, aiming decisively at ‘patriarchal ideology’, far outweighs the technicalities, making it a model for contemporary cultural theory. Indeed, as Žižek argues in a book introduced by former Screen editor Colin MacCabe, ‘ “Theory” is not about description or its application

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to texts’ (Žižek 2001: 9). Instead, theory’s work is to produce concepts which hit their target with the full force of a ‘political weapon’.7 Cinema is one of those seemingly insatiable contradictions of capitalism whose spectacle alternates between fascination and revulsion, pleasure and pain. This is the narrative function of Hollywood drama in film. Desire: the compulsive allure of images on screen which leave spectators always wanting more. Mulvey’s essay is concerned with the cinematic pleasure of looking but also aims at the ‘destruction of pleasure’. In this sense it shares the concerns of Althusser’s ISAs text: namely, (1) the ‘interpellation’ of spectators (‘identification’ in psychoanalytic terms); (2) the reproduction of cinema’s conditions of existence, or relations of production; and (3) the revolutionary prospect of a wholly other cinema of ‘passionate detachment’, in place of the emotional exploitation of Hollywood. The relations at stake are not class (bourgeois and proletarian) but sexual (male and female). Cinema, as narrative spectacle, operates on the basis of the sexual division of labour which constructs and positions spectators along gender lines: the condition of ‘phantasy’. Mulvey highlights parallels between voyeuristic scopophilia in psychosexual development – that is, the privilege of seeing without being seen – and the situation of the spectator in the darkened auditorium. She also draws on Lacan’s ‘Mirror Phase’ article,8 which describes the pre-Oedipal child’s encounter with its mirror reflection. The identification of this unknown ‘other’, or the child’s mis-recognition of its true ‘self’, is ‘the first articulation of the “I”, of subjectivity’. ‘Quite apart from the extraneous similarities between screen and mirror (the framing of the human form in its surroundings, for instance) the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego’ (Mulvey 2009: 714). Lacan’s text thinks the internal tension and sexual ambivalence of the child’s primary encounter with the image. But to what extent can the cinema screen be conceived as a mirror, or the spectator be likened to a pre-Oedipal child in its imaginary phase of identification? Cinema is an economy of looks. Such is the narrative structure of film. Consider the shot/reverse shot – that is, a view of a scene from one actor’s point of view, then the opposite view looking back at the actor looking. Then there is the shot/reverse shot with the actor in frame, so that the audience sees him looking and identifies with his point of view. Then there is who is looking and who is being looked at: who holds the gaze – that is, the dominant or privileged look – and who is held in the gaze. This is what concerns Mulvey: the who. The economy of looks is a sexual economy, much like the one in everyday life, where looks are shared out on the basis of gender. In Hollywood and rival cinemas, the who who holds the gaze is male, while the who who is held in the gaze is female – the latter who Mulvey terms woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness. In narrative cinema, woman represents exhibition-value. The mannequin in the shop window presents us with an idealised ‘look’, an abstract vision of style or beauty which in reality is unobtainable. The sexual economy of looks is reinforced by what is being looked at, or how the camera frames, carves up the female body for male viewing pleasure; through the abstract framing of legs, breasts and so forth, the spectator is interpellated as male. Finally, there is the narrative function

Althusser and Cultural Studies 145 of woman, how her place in the narrative helps or hinders the diegesis. Film protagonists are typically male and represent the ego-ideal which the spectator, male or female, is meant to identify with. Any action which threatens the well-being of the male protagonist, or hinders the resolution of the narrative, of which he is the central force, thereby threatens the spectator’s identification with him. For Mulvey, woman represents the threat, inducing the castration anxiety of a figure without a penis, which threatens the male spectator with ‘unpleasure’ (718). In Freud the castration complex describes the male child’s fear of the father’s punishment in return for its incestuous desire of its mother. The child resolves the fear by accepting that, since it cannot have its mother, it must relinquish this particular desire and transfer it to another object, another man/woman. Freud’s term for the relinquishing of desire is ‘primary repression’: the desire is repressed, removed from conscious thought in the sense of being actively forgotten. This repression of desire is ‘unconscious’. As Freud puts it, ‘The separation of the sexual idea from its affect and the attachment of the latter to another, suitable but not incompatible idea – these are processes that occur without consciousness’ (Freud 2001: 53). In cinema, woman is this ‘not incompatible idea’ to which the male protagonist transfers his attachment, what he must either possess or repress. Woman is the narrative’s primary object of desire; the male protagonist can never escape the orbit of Woman in the narrative. Consider in passing a relatively contemporary example from Hollywood cinema, The Dark Knight Rises, in which Batman’s duty to protect Gotham City from the evil Bane is by turns assisted and frustrated by the sexuality of the film’s two female characters: Selina Kyle – the cat burglar – and Miranda Tate, a high-powered executive at Wayne Enterprises and Bruce Wayne’s love interest. At first Batman/Bruce Wayne initially represses his desire for Selina (an alluring and tortured victim of circumstance) in favour of Miranda (a kind and sensitive type who, in helping Wayne regain his dignity, proves truly worthy of his love). Later, when it emerges that Miranda is in league with Bane, Wayne represses his desire for Miranda, enabling him to heroically save the city, ably assisted by Selina, who thus takes the place of Miranda in proving herself truly worthy of Wayne’s love. The castration complex is also at work in the sense that both women represent sexual temptation and the dangers of giving in to it: the compulsive-neurotic Selina and the fanatical-psychotic Miranda, who, in punishment for her misplaced fanaticism, is reduced to a blabbering corpse in the penultimate scene. All along the narrative is driven by this dialectic of desire, the good/bad woman, possessing the one while repressing the other, then repressing the other while possessing the one. In this example we see how film narrative can be conceived, in structuralist terms, through a series of binary relations: male/female, subject/object, active/ passive, and so forth, where the first term is always valued more highly than the second. We recall that, in structural linguistics, identity (what a sign is) is incidental, its meaning or value arbitrary, and ultimately depends on the relations it holds in a given context. Cinema thrives on shifting identities, and The Dark Knight Rises is a perfect example of this. Here the identities are rarely fixed for

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long. Apart from Wayne – who is Batman in disguise – Selina and Miranda both take turns in active and passive roles. Mulvey’s point, however, in assuming the male gaze to be the dominant subject position in cinema, is that the woman always ends up feminised, objectified, pacified. Such is the narrative closure of Hollywood cinema, its ‘happy ending’: resolve the trauma of the male protagonist and make the spectators identify with his subject-position.

From pleasure to desire The contribution of Mulvey’s essay to feminist thinking in and beyond film studies is unrivalled. But as an essay drawn from a specific context, how does it pass the test of time? I am not going to extend my survey of criticism very far in what follows, confining my remarks instead to conceptual issues. However, an obvious criticism is that Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze is male-centred. ‘Most importantly’, writes Mark Jancovich, ‘it has been pointed out that Mulvey assumes a male, heterosexual spectator, but this assumption raises questions about how women watch films and gain pleasure from them’ (Jancovich 1995: 144). Now, this is not a serious criticism. In fact, it is not a criticism at all. Instead it is a strategy often encountered in contemporary Cultural Studies of objecting to a theory precisely on the basis of what it does not do or claim to do. One could extend our criticism of this type of ‘criticism’ to post-colonial theorists of gender and race, such as Manthia Diawara, who object that Mulvey and other film theorists such as Stephen Heath and Christian Metz ‘have not so far accounted for the experience of black spectators’ (Diawara 2009: 767). The ultimate logic of this type of objection, of course, is that no one is ultimately able to make any consistent theoretical statement whatsoever, since every statement is inevitably partial and therefore excludes the experience of some minority voice or other. This phenomenon is often identified as ‘post-theory’, and its dubious methodological assumptions have been taken to task elsewhere (see Žižek 2001: 1–9; Eagleton 2004). Jancovich’s objection that Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze doesn’t take account of female viewing pleasure is true: that’s the point. Mulvey wrote the article precisely in response to the fact that female viewers generally ally their own ‘pleasures’ of Hollywood films by identifying with those of male viewers. Mulvey doesn’t consider the ‘female spectator’ because, for her, there isn’t one. In Hollywood films, ‘woman’ is the object of the male gaze and subject to the narrative functioning of a film centred around the male protagonist. The fact that Mulvey doesn’t account for the ‘experiences’ of female spectators – or black female spectators, or black male spectators and so forth – does not by itself weaken the theoretical principle on which her argument is based, which is this: all particular ‘experiences’ or ‘identities’ aside, the spectator is a construct of language. Working from within a structural linguistic paradigm is to accept that any a priori form of experience or identity independent of language cannot exist. To respond to it on the basis of what the theorist did not say, or should have written instead, represents the worst form of cultural relativism.

Althusser and Cultural Studies 147 Having said this, Mulvey’s essay does raise certain theoretical problems which stem from a restricted reading of Lacan and an exaggerated reliance on structural linguistics. Consider the following extract: Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety. (Mulvey 2009: 718) This rather convoluted passage alternates between two opposing positions. On one hand Mulvey is arguing from the militant feminist standpoint that sexual identity is a linguistic construct to be challenged: the male gaze does not concern men as such; rather it is established in relation to the ‘meaning of woman’. But at the same time Mulvey would also seem to be arguing that men profit from the arrangement more than women: ‘the woman as icon’ is ‘displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look’. Overall, then, Mulvey is claiming that the male gaze is a construct to which both male and female spectators are subject, while also claiming that ‘men’, rather than ‘women’, are the ones who control the look and gain enjoyment from it. The contradiction here is that, for Mulvey, sexual identity is both a linguistic construct and a biological fact. Mulvey would appear to believe that the contradiction can be resolved by way of a synthesis, arguing that, although male and female gender roles are both constructs, men’s enjoyment prevails at the expense of women’s. Now of course it may be the case that when Mulvey refers to the ‘enjoyment of men’ she is really talking about the male gaze, the idea being that cinematic pleasure, regardless of who enjoys (men, women, white men, white women, black men, black women etc.), presumes a male subject position. But what suggests otherwise is the problem phrase ‘the male unconscious’. There is no such thing as a ‘male unconscious’ in psychoanalysis. The unconscious is not sexed or gendered. The revolution of psychoanalysis at the end of the Victorian era was founded on the demolition of the pernicious gender stereotypes surrounding psychological illness. For example, until the nineteenth century, hysteria was seen as a female disease originating in the womb and to be ‘treated’ by childbirth, genital stimulation (by male doctors) and all manner of humiliating, quack-sexist procedures. Freud’s breakthrough in clinical research lay precisely in his discovery that hysterical symptoms were the result of repressed childhood experiences of sexual abuse in both women and men. The unconscious results from the repression of sexual trauma. But there are not male and female versions of it. If by ‘male unconscious’ Mulvey means that the unconscious is ‘phallic’, then she would seem to be on much stronger ground. Lacan follows Freud in his distinction between penis and phallus, the latter being the former’s symbolic function.

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However, Lacan’s originality lay in conceiving the phallus as a ‘primary signifier’ of repression in the sense that, once repressed, desire would return in the form of a linguistic sign. Unlike Freud, for whom the unconscious was always driven by sexual desire (libido), Lacan famously proposed that ‘the unconscious is structured as a language’, and he rejected the idea of desire as sexually motivated drive. Male desire was ‘phallic’, certainly – but a phallic signifier, a representation, a stand in, for what the child wants and means to have. Language (in the form of speech) provides the ‘means’. Lacan’s application of structural linguistics to psychoanalysis is supported by his insistence on Freud’s widely misunderstood distinction between instinct (Instinkt) and drive (Trieb). If desire is determined linguistically, through language and signification, rather than sexually, through the body and its ‘natural instincts’, then so too the subject-object relations of desire, and human sexuality in all its forms and identities, will depend on language and signification, and the articulation of desire in speech. The sexual economy is henceforth driven by the circulation (the articulation) of desire, in the form of this male, phallic signifier. But circulation is the key term since the phallus as signifier, unlike the penis, is a detachable object, a stand in, which is never truly had. Granted, the phallus signifies male enjoyment, and feminine enjoyment has no choice but to articulate itself in relation to it – or else risk being rendered incoherent and ultimately hysterical. But bear in mind that, when Lacan defines desire as manque-à-être, he is attributing a ‘lack of being’, as well as a ‘wanting to be’, to the phallic signifier. In the sexual economy, ‘man’ desires to have, while ‘woman’ desires to be the phallus – although by virtue of its symbolic and circulatory function, alternating between one and the other subject position, neither sex is ever truly fulfilled. Mulvey’s militant aims are clear enough in wanting to overturn the voyeuristic pleasures of Hollywood cinema, with ‘woman’ as the stand in or signifier for male fantasy, in favour of the real desires of spectators (2009: 713). The problem today, however, is that capitalism has never been more adept at fashioning desires, even and especially when the desires in question imagine themselves to be revolutionary or oppositional. As Slavoj Žižek has made his intellectual career out of reminding us, the problem today is not that The System peddles false or imaginary pleasures in the guise of ‘real’ desires, for example by distorting our cinematic vision through the male gaze. The problem is not ideology; the problem is reality itself, or what Lacan calls the real. In order to account for it, we need to reverse Althusser’s formula that ‘ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ so it reads as follows: Ideology represents the real relationship of individuals to their imaginary conditions of existence. Whereas reality is perfectly knowable, Lacan terms ‘real’ the realm of the impossible. Similar to the unconscious, the real is the realm of plenitude, in-difference and uninterrupted drive, knowing neither lack nor privation. Lacan’s concept of desire on the other hand is what, despite promising real pleasure and fulfilment, never delivers. Lacan says, ‘Man’s desire is the desire of the Other’ (Lacan 1981:

Althusser and Cultural Studies 149 235), driven not by what he ‘really’ wants but by what the other has. The grass is always greener on the other side. Desire is therefore the desire purely for recognition in the eyes of the other, to see one’s Self from the other’s point of view, and so occupy the place from where the other sees us. This place is the subject not of the gaze but its object, the blind spot in the economy of looks. Consider the final shot in Hitchcock’s Psycho when Norman’s gaze into the camera disrupts the diegetic space (see Žižek 1992: 244–245). This is the real of the gaze: the momentary subversion of drama-voyeurism, or the point where the tables are turned on the spectator, who finally realizes the Other’s gaze. Can such subversion be adapted in film theory and practice, as Mulvey would like, ‘to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire’? (2009: 713). One might respond by noting that Hollywood excels not only at constantly devising (appropriating?) new techniques for ‘subverting’ the gaze (the horror genre even depends on it) but at converting them into gimmicks. Indeed, the ‘seventh art’ is no less a gimmick in its founding moment, as confirmed by the programme of the first fee-paying spectacle held at the Grand Café in December 1895, at which the Lumière brothers unveiled their ‘apparatus’. What counted then (as now) was the exhibition itself, the projection of ‘life size’ images ‘on a screen before an entire audience’, while the titles of the films to be projected were ‘relegated to the bottom of the programme sheet’ (Heath 1981: 221). This is the real meaning of cinema as spectacle – not the imaginary ‘suspension of disbelief’, or the projection of fantasy, but on the contrary the realization of what we know to be impossible. A real fantasy. And we only need consider Hollywood’s latest 3D revival in order to recognize that the public’s desire for a cinema more real than reality, or real enough to render imaginary the somnolent experiences of their day-to-day lives, is no less diminished.

Conclusion: beyond the pleasure principle Following my summary of the original French context of Althusser and Lacan’s ideas, followed by my attempt to correct some of the errors surrounding their reception, I have illustrated here the ongoing importance of their ideas for questions of ideology, subjectivity, sexuality, spectatorship. Had the theoretical questions raised by Althusser and Lacan been more consistently understood over the years, through more rigorous attention to their context and texts, then it is tempting to imagine, as I also noted in relation to Althusser, that Cultural Studies might have evolved in a different, perhaps more ‘militant’, direction. Then again there is ample reason to doubt it. Theory never operates in a vacuum. Contrary to the objections of certain cultural theorists to psychoanalysis (Hall 2005: 150), theory is not ‘trans-historical’. Where does this leave theory as a ‘political weapon’? It seems to me that Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze has far from exhausted its potential for confronting the trivial, unimaginative and demeaning ‘pleasures’ of Hollywood cinema. In continuing to export its white-male-chauvinist-orientalist ‘vision’ to the four corners of the world, Hollywood conditions our ways of seeing. However, in

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confronting our ways of seeing, we first need to consider the extent to which the sexual economy of Hollywood and rival mainstream cinemas is not only unequal through the visual exploitation of sexual relations but unequal through visual asymmetry. By ‘asymmetry’, I mean that male viewing pleasure is itself subject to what Lacan calls feminine jouissance (that is, more than pleasure) – that which, according to Freud, lies ‘beyond the pleasure principle’. The potential for challenging this asymmetry does not reside in exposing male viewing pleasure as ‘false ideology’ but rather resides in exposing the extent to which such pleasure is conditioned by jouissance. For instance, Tania Modleski provides a convincing case for how voyeurism in Hitchcock’s Rear Window ends up exhausting James Stewart – his desire to assume the all-seeing God’s eye view (‘the desire of the desire of the Other’) rendering him doubly immobile – while feminine jouissance prevails in Grace Kelly’s final look (Modleski 2009). I am not here trying to turn the tables on women spectators, pretending that male viewing pleasure is equally subject to a female gaze. On the contrary, the purpose is to expose the extent to which the male gaze is always on the brink of exhaustion, its vision forever distorted or blinded by the impossible desire for mastery and plenitude. This mastery would appear only to be realizable beyond the pleasure principle – that is, in death. Consider, for example, the final ‘act’ of The Dark Knight Rises when Batman, realizing that the bomb which has been set to destroy Gotham City cannot be disabled, sacrifices himself by detonating it at sea, thereby refusing to give up on his desire (for superhero immortality).9 What we require today in Cultural and Film Studies, and theory in general, are more in the way of reading strategies which can follow (such) potentially subversive and un-pleasurable desires to the letter, revealing in the process their contradictions and ethical constraints, both in the sexual economy and beyond.

Notes 1 Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Paris, where Althusser’s collected unpublished works are held. 2 John Ellis was a notable exception among British cultural theorists of the 1970s in having grasped the significance of Mao in French theory, although beyond Althusser his reading was limited to the work of Tel Quel. See e.g. Ellis 2005. 3 For a brief survey of Lacano-Maoism and its ongoing influence in contemporary theory, see Barker 2014. 4 Selected essays from the journal’s ten issues were published in 2012 in a two-volume edition as Concept and Form, edited by P. Hallward and K. Peden (London: Verso). 5 ‘Note sur les AIE’ was published in the collections Ideologie und ideologische Staatsapparate (Hamburg/Berlin: VSA) and in Nuevos escritos (Barcelona: LAIA). 6 See also e.g. Eagleton 1994. 7 Mulvey is alluding to the title of Althusser’s ‘Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon’ from 1968. 8 See Lacan 1977. The parallels with Althusser’s ISAs essay are striking here in that this short text, presented in 1949 at the Sixteenth International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Zurich, proceeded to exert a disproportionate influence on Cultural Studies at the expense of Lacan’s greater work, especially that of the 1970s. Ironically, this skewed reception

Althusser and Cultural Studies 151 of Lacanian theory has provided critics with an easy target for their own objections to psychoanalysis as a whole – its ‘phallocentrism’, ‘trans-historicism’, ‘Eurocentrism’ etc. 9 Whether Batman’s desire in this case would count as a selfless or narcissistic act would depend in turn on whether we define the ethics of psychoanalysis either as tragically insatiable, as Lacan does in his early work, or as pathologically meaningless, as in his later work. On the distinction between the ethics of desire and drive, see Zupančič 2000.

Bibliography Althusser, L. 1966. Sur la révolution culturelle, in Cahiers marxistes-léninistes 14, 5–16. Althusser, L. 1969. For Marx, translated by B. Brewster. London: Allen Lane. Althusser, L. 1971a. Philosophy as a revolutionary weapon, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by B. Brewster. London: New Left Books, 11–22. Althusser, L. 1971b. Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by B. Brewster. London: New Left Books, 127–187. Althusser, L. 1995. Note sur les AIE, in Sur la reproduction, edited by Jacques Bidet. Paris: PUF, 253–267. Althusser, A. 2003. On Lévi-Strauss, in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, edited by F. Matheron and translated by G. M. Goshgarian. London: Verso, 19–32. Althusser, L. 2014. Initiation à la philosophie pour les non-philosophes, edited by G. M. Goshgarian. Paris: PUF. Althusser, A. 2015. Être marxiste en philosophie, edited by G. M. Goshgarian. Paris: PUF. Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. 1970. Reading Capital, translated by B. Brewster. London: NLB. Anderson, P. 1980. Arguments Within English Marxism. London: New Left Books. Badiou, A. 2005. The cultural revolution: The last revolution?, edited by B. Bosteels. Positions: Asia Critique, 13(3), 481–514. Barker, J. 2014. Master signifier: A brief genealogy of Lacano-Maoism. Filozofia, 69(9), 752–764. Barker, J. and Goshgarian, G.M. (eds.) 2015. Other Althussers. Diacritics Special Issue, 43(2). Belden Fields, A. 1988. Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Benton, T. 1984. The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism: Althusser and His Influence. London: Macmillan. Deleuze, G. 1994. Difference and Repetition, translated by P. Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Diawara, M. 2009. Black spectatorship: Problems of identification and resistance, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, seventh edition, edited by L. Braudy and M. Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 767–775. Dosse, F. 1997. History of Structuralism. Vol. 1, translated by D. Glassman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eagleton, T. 1994. Ideology and its vicissitudes in western Marxism, in Mapping Ideology, edited by S. Žižek. London: Verso, 179–226. Eagleton, T. 2004. After Theory. London: Allen Lane. Eagleton, T. 2008. Literary Theory. An Introduction, anniversary edition. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Ellis, J. 2005. Ideology and subjectivity, in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972–79, edited by S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis. London: Routledge, 177–185. Feltham, O. 2008. Alain Badiou: Live Theory. London Continuum. Freud, S. 2001. 1894. The neuro-psychoses of defence, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 3 (1893–99), translated by J. Strachey in collaboration with A. Freud. London: Vintage Classics, 43–61. Goshgarian, G. M. 2003. Introduction, in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, edited by L. Althusser and F. Matheron and translated by G. M. Goshgarian. London: Verso, xi–lxii. Hall, S. 1980. Cultural studies: Two paradigms. Media, Culture and Society, 2, 57–72. Hall, S. 2005. Recent developments in theories of language and ideology: A critical note, in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972–79, edited by S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis. London: Routledge, 147–153. Heath, S. 1981. Questions of Cinema. London: Macmillan. Jancovich, M. 1995. Screen theory, in Approaches to Popular Film, edited by J. Hollows and M. Jancovich. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 123–150. Lacan, J. 1977. The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience, in Ecrits. A Selection, translated by A. Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1–7. Lacan, J. 1981. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by J.A. Miller and translated by A. Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. 1990. Television, edited by J. Copjec and translated by D. Hollier, R. Krauss and A. Michelson. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1963. Structural Anthropology, translated by C. Jacobson and B. Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books. Marx, K. and Engels, F. 1974. The German Ideology, edited by C. J. Arthur. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Modleski, T. 2009. The master’s dollhouse: Rear Window, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, seventh edition, edited by L. Braudy and M. Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 723–735. Montag, W. 2013. Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War. Durham: Duke University Press. Mulvey, L. 2009. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, seventh edition, edited by L. Braudy and M. Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 711–722. Rancière, J. 2011. Althusser’s Lesson, translated by E. Battista. London and New York: Continuum. Tudor, A. 1999. Decoding Culture: Theory and Method in Cultural Studies. London: Sage. Žižek, S. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. Žižek, S. (ed.) 1992. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). London: Verso. Žižek, S. 2001. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski Between Theory and PostTheory. London: BFI. Zupančič, A. 2000. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. London: Verso.

7

Profit and power British Marxists on the political economy of the media Enda Brophy and Vincent Mosco

Over the period 2011–2012, dozens of employees of News Corporation, one of the largest and most powerful media companies in the world, were arrested and charged with an array of offences, including illegal surveillance, hacking into phones and bribing law enforcement officials. On one day alone, a former chief of News International, a former newspaper editor and five other senior employees were charged with significant criminal offences. In the face of these charges, the company has been obstructionist, covering up its activities at every opportunity. To accomplish this, it has reportedly bribed law enforcement authorities and carried out surveillance and black ops against its adversaries (Carr 2012). Moreover, as the scandal unfolded the close ties between the company’s upper echelons and the most senior figures in the British state slowly came to light. Among the many implications of this monumental scandal at one of Great Britain’s most powerful corporations, two stand out for media scholars. First, the extent of the scandal challenges neoliberal accounts that the media industry can police itself.1 According to this view, mechanisms built into the market system provide the controls necessary to maintain a clean and ethical press. Government oversight, neoliberals insist, is all but unnecessary. Instead, after three decades of unrelenting promotion and implementation of free market principles, Britain is now experiencing what the Guardian calls the greatest scandal in the four centuries of British newspaper history (Greenslade 2012).2 Second, while the scandal has attracted widespread international media coverage, the media industry has done little to use the scandal at News Corporation as an opportunity to address the systemic issues that made this unprecedented disaster more likely. As David Carr (2012) of the New York Times puts it, ‘If this happened in any other industry – the banking sector during the financial crisis, the oil companies after the BP spill, or Blackwater during the Iraq war – you would expect to see a full-court press by journalists seeking to shine a light on a corrupt culture allowed to run amok’. But this has not happened. Instead, as Carr maintains, ‘because it is the news business and the company in the sights is News Corporation, the offenders are seen as outliers. The hacking scandal has mostly been treated as a malady confined to an island, rather than a signature event in a rugged stretch for journalism worldwide’ (Carr 2012). Why have four centuries of the press resulted in this? And why does the industry treat it as an isolated event? What are the systemic forces that made this scandal

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if not inevitable, then a likely occurrence? For media scholars, the scandal and the ensuing questions make it all the more important that we give full attention to a political economy of the media. That is because political economy, more than any other approach to media study, addresses the systemic forces and challenges the dominant myths that permit media companies to behave in such a profoundly antisocial manner in the pursuit of greater profits and market share. If nothing else, the scandal at News Corporation prompts consideration of some basic questions. Who owns the media? What is the nature of the relationship between the media and political power? How do radio, television and the press reinforce the ideas of dominant groups in society and marginalize voices of dissent? How can media be used as a force for social change? Questions such as these have animated Marxist political-economic approaches to the analysis of media, culture and communication for at least half a century, and they have important roots in Britain. This chapter surveys the context, characteristics and legacies of the political economy of communication (PEC) as it emerged within a set of classic texts authored by Peter Golding, Graham Murdock, Nicholas Garnham, James Curran, Colin Sparks and other intellectuals on the British left during the 1970s and 1980s. While identifying a clear starting point for political and intellectual currents is rarely a straightforward endeavour, Golding and Murdock’s (1974) call ‘For a Political Economy of Mass Communications’ was a critical point of departure for the Marxist PEC in the United Kingdom. In this piece, Golding and Murdock proposed an exploratory attempt ‘to outline some of the basic features which underpin and shape the economic context and political consequences of mass communications in contemporary Britain’. The article, while tentative in its proposal to suggest ‘some directions in which an analysis might usefully proceed’ (Golding and Murdock 1974: 205), was nonetheless deeply influential, setting the foundations of a critical political-economic approach to the mass media which would make its mark on media and communication studies in the United Kingdom and beyond. The Marxian PEC perspective developed a powerful critique of mass media processes and institutions at a time of profound historical transition, engaging in key debates on media control, cultural production and the agency of audiences. Returning to the roots of the British PEC, therefore, offers an opportunity to reflect on the history and contemporary direction of this militant tradition of inquiry.3 In what follows, we begin by considering the political context of, the intellectual influences upon, and the adversaries engaged by the first-generation political economists of communication in Britain. Describing the institutional context of their early scholarship and political activity, we delineate some of the distinguishing features of their research agenda, including an orientation toward the critical analysis of media ownership in the United Kingdom, the commodification processes shaping media products, and the erosion of public broadcasting systems. We move on to consider this tradition in its encounters with the PEC perspective as it was developing elsewhere during the same period, particularly in North America. We also address the importance of its commitment to ‘decenter’ the media and the emergence of tensions arising from the challenge of Thatcherism

The political economy of culture 155 and the ascendance of neoliberalism. The conclusion considers the tradition’s legacy against the shifting media landscape of subsequent decades, proposing the analysis of labour in the media, telecommunications and ‘creative’ industries as one of the more promising ways in which the tradition and its critical approach to the relationship between media and power is being renewed.

Historical context, institutional settings and early influences The sustained development of a political economy approach in Britain and Europe began with the appearance between 1974 and 1982 of a set of theoretical and programmatic pieces that contributed substantially to placing the field on the European intellectual map (Mosco 2009). Early contributions to a critical politicaleconomic analysis of the British mass media elaborated a formidable challenge to liberal-pluralist theories of the media, which had maintained that media were the outcome of a plurality of social groups striving for control and that private ownership of mass communication outlets constituted a ‘Fourth Estate’ which by and large preserved liberal democracy. In constructing this critique, British political economists placed themselves in opposition to the dominant behaviourist and functionalist strand of mass media research that emerged from the United States, where more radical currents of analysis had suffered the chill of Cold War repression. As media scholar James Curran suggests, ‘In particular, we wanted to resist the American domination of the field, with what seemed to many of us at the time as its sterile consensus, its endless flow of repetitive and inconclusive “effects” studies situated in a largely “taken-for-granted” pluralist model of society, and instead generate a debate that reflected the diversity of European intellectual thought’ (Curran 1990: 137).4 Golding and Murdock also note a common denominator of scepticism toward the liberal-pluralist tradition of analysis and its ‘broad acceptance of the central workings of advanced capitalist society’ (1996: 11; Garnham 2005, 2011). Through the 1970s and 1980s, British scholars produced work which energetically challenged the assumption that the media acted as a vigilant ‘watchdog’ against manipulation of a nation’s cultural and symbolic environment by its most powerful groups. Through the empirical studies and theoretical reflection that we survey below, Marxist political economists charted the changes in the structure of the British mass media system since the end of World War II – even as it stood on the brink of a neoliberal counter-revolution that would reshape that mass media system. Against this backdrop, the Marxist political-economic approach to mass media in the United Kingdom first developed within faculties of social science, drawing its practitioners from the ranks of scholars trained in economics, political science and sociology (Murdock and Golding 1996). While the emergent critique of the British mass media system was associated primarily with a loosely connected group of scholars rather than with any one institution in particular, the Polytechnic of Central London (renamed the University of Westminster in 1992) and Leicester University were nonetheless important incubators of a Marxist analysis of mass media processes. Scholars at these institutions were influenced by a diverse set

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of intellectual and political currents, and it is not possible to claim a unified PEC approach in either of them. In his intellectual history of what he calls the ‘Westminster School’, for example, James Curran (2004) highlights the differences between the formative influences that would shape the work of researchers at the two institutions rather than their similarities. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify the basic elements of a critical PEC approach across these settings and figures during the 1970s and 1980s. The Centre for Mass Communication Research at the University of Leicester – established in response to concerns raised by the British Home Secretary in 1961 about youth crime and the interest in assessing television’s impact – was an important starting point for the British PEC tradition. There the tradition is closely associated with the formative influence of James Halloran, who headed the centre, and with Peter Golding and Graham Murdock, who produced work that would set the research agenda for the political economy of communication more broadly. Halloran influenced the development of communication studies worldwide with close to two decades of service as president of the International Association for Mass Communication Research (now the International Association for Media and Communication Research), the professional association with arguably the strongest commitment to advance political economy research.5 While Curran (1990: 139) suggests that research produced by this school ‘adopted a political economy interpretation which tended to emphasize the centrality of economic ownership, the indirect influences exerted by the state and the structures and logic of the market’, Halloran himself did not identify with the approach, choosing to situate his work and that of the centre within the tradition of critical sociology and social psychology (Mosco 2009). The PEC approach is therefore more accurately seen as one offshoot, rather than the focus, of the centre’s research. According to Graham Murdock, the centre received few grants for political economy research, and most of these – such as Phil Harris’s work on news agencies (1981), Paul Hartmann’s on industrial relations (1975) and Murdock’s on the advertising industry (Murdock and Janus 1985) – incorporated several approaches along with political economy. Following a pattern common throughout the field of political economy more broadly, what appears to be an institutionalized programme of research is actually a collection of individuals, in this case Graham Murdock and Peter Golding, who, along with Philip Elliott and from time to time others, pursued political-economy research.6 They did so in a setting congenial to critical social research, but not one that gave particular attention to political economy (Mosco 2009). Another important site for early PEC research, albeit as with Leicester one that is not reducible solely to this approach, was the Media Department at the Polytechnic of Central London, later renamed the University of Westminster. This programme introduced the first media studies degree in Britain in 1975, and the scholars working there, including James Curran, Colin Sparks, Nicolas Garnham and others, launched Media, Culture and Society – a journal that would become a premier venue for the presentation of critical political economy work on the media – in 1979. Influencing the early work of the ‘Westminster School’ was, Curran (2004) recalls, a media policy debate in Britain extending back to the

The political economy of culture 157 1920s, energized by inquiries into the state of broadcasting and the press. Curran (2004: 15) describes how this policy discussion included what he calls a ‘radical Keynesian’ approach to mass media regulation, one which was important because it resonated with and made its mark upon PEC analysis as it was practised at Westminster and elsewhere. The participation of Westminster scholars in the mediapolicy process during the 1970s and 1980s was significant, shaping the approach of both the Labour Party (Freedman 2003) and the trade unions to the media. As an example of the latter, before joining the Polytechnic, Nicholas Garnham worked in the television industry, where he was active with the Association of Cinematographic, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT). As the main trade union for workers in film and television, ACTT produced the Report on Nationalizing the Film Industry and the Television Commission Report (Garnham 2005). In addition to these policy debates, the importance to Westminster scholars of Marxism, on the one hand, and of literary theory, on the other, highlights the eclectic nature of the tributaries drawn on in their scholarly work. As Garnham (2005: 475–476) suggests, the work of figures associated with the University of Westminster distinguished itself from classic media sociology, especially the American effects tradition, by taking both history and culture (the meaningfulness of communication) seriously. At the same time it also took both economics and technology seriously as developments or aspects of the media to be analysed in their own right rather than simply read off from ideology or power. These institutional settings and influences would leave their mark on the British political economists’ distinctively critical approach to the mass media. They would also play a part in determining a critical break between the political-economic and Cultural Studies traditions over their approaches to the mass media during the 1990s.

Culture and the ‘means of mental production’: early theoretical influences and debates The theoretical touchstone for early applications of a Marxist political-economic lens to the study of media processes in the United Kingdom was provided by The German Ideology (1998: 67). Here Karl Marx and Friederick Engels’s famous formulation offered an entry point through which PEC scholars began to probe the relationship between political-economic power, dominant ideology and class subordination in the era of mass media: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it.

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As Nicholas Garnham maintained (1979a: 128), the ‘central purpose’ of a political economy of mass communication was to inquire into the shifting patterns of control over the ‘means of mental production’. Uniting the first texts in the tradition was, therefore, the goal of developing a materialist approach to the mass media, one that was capable of revealing the ways in which media products were the result of, embedded in and reinforcers of capitalist class relations. While the German Ideology offered, for Murdock and Golding (1977: 33), a ‘pertinent general framework within which to begin looking for answers’, and while fragments of a radical political economy of communication and culture could be disinterred from Marx’s writings, these were nonetheless insufficient to develop a broad-based analysis of the role of the media in the twentieth century. British political economists would turn to more contemporary theoretical influences and political debates in their bid to develop a critical framework capable of contrasting complacent liberal-pluralist and positivist visions of the mass media. Prominent among these influences was Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s (1944) analysis of the ‘culture industry’. Despite their utter repudiation of American mass culture, the German critical theorists offered a model for the analysis of industrialized, Fordist production of popular cultural forms which could not be found in Marx. Murdock and Golding’s 1977 work, for example, provided a detailed theoretical effort to place the political economy approach within the wider framework of critical theory. In the theoretical genealogy proposed in their piece, a critical reading of the Frankfurt School’s analysis of the cultural industries offers one of the primary links between the Marxist legacy and their application of it to communication studies. Significantly, Adorno and Horkheimer had traced the outlines of how the logic of the factory production system had transformed the realm of popular cultural production. In his ‘Contribution to a Political Economy of Mass-Communication’ (1979a: 130), Garnham applauded the way the original Frankfurt School position addressed the relationship of base and superstructure, crediting the critical theorists with recognizing that ‘under monopoly capitalism the superstructure becomes precisely industrialized; it is invaded by the base and the base/superstructure distinction breaks down via a collapse into the base’. Adorno and Horkheimer (1944: 123) had also pointed to the connections between the incipient cultural industries and other major economic interests, including banks, media equipment producers and advertisers: The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven. All are in such close contact that the extreme concentration of mental forces allows demarcation lines between different firms and technical branches to be ignored. The meticulous exploration of such processes and links, as we shall see below, would feature heavily in political economists’ empirical analyses of the British media industries of the 1970s.7 Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s insistence that cultural

The political economy of culture 159 domination has its roots in the economic dynamics of the culture industry was, therefore, according to Murdock and Golding (1977: 18) an ‘indispensable starting point for any Marxist analysis’. At the same time, the bleak vision of an all-encompassing American culture industry, one which seemed to presage similar developments for the British mass media system, was ‘only the first step’ in the rigorous analysis envisioned by PEC scholars. For Murdock and Golding (1977: 18–19), it was ‘also necessary to demonstrate how this process of reproduction actually works by showing in detail how economic relations structure both the overall strategies of the cultural and the concrete activities of the people who actually make the products that the “culture industry” sells – the writers, the journalists, actors, and musicians’. Important as the work of the Frankfurt School was for a Marxist political economy of the British media industries, Adorno and Horkheimer had offered ‘only a very general and schematic description of the basic features of capitalism’, one which did not go far enough towards explaining ‘how the American “culture industry” actually works’ (Murdock and Golding 1977: 19). Like Murdock and Golding, Garnham (1979a: 131) also took issue with the Frankfurt tradition: [T]he real weakness of the Frankfurt School’s original position was not their failure to realize the importance of the base or the economic, but insufficiently to take account of the economically contradictory nature of the process they observed and thus to see the industrialization of culture as unproblematic and irresistible. Not only were the critical theorists’ analyses of the complex dynamics at work within the industries comprising the mass media insufficiently detailed, but Adorno and Horkheimer’s dismissiveness toward the products of an allegedly monolithic culture industry were equally dissatisfying to British political economists of the media. If, as James Curran (1979a: 1) pointed out in his introduction to the first issue of Media, Culture and Society, the mass media had generally been ‘represented as the enemies of true art and culture’ by the left, political economists such as Garnham and others would adopt a much more nuanced relationship to cultural forms, one that echoed a ‘Leavisite drive to engage critically with popular culture’ (Curran 2004: 14). The question of culture was to be a defining one for PEC scholars, a concern that inevitably brought them into contact – and conflict – with the other major Marxist intellectual tradition engaged in the analysis of cultural forms in Britain during that era, Cultural Studies. British Cultural Studies – associated primarily with the scholarship of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and Edward Thompson but spanning the work of many others – had similarly been engaged in an attempt to theorize the relationship between class and cultural production in the United Kingdom after World War II. While neither tradition is homogeneous, there were nonetheless common influences upon, and an overlap between the respective analytic domains of, political-economic approaches to the media and Cultural Studies perspectives (Schiller 1996). For example, both drew upon British literary theory

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and continental Marxist analyses of culture, influences which united politicaleconomic and Cultural Studies approaches in their repudiation of functionalist epistemologies and liberal-pluralist political orientations to the media (Hall 1982). At the same time, the tensions operating within both approaches to the media – caught as they were between casting a critical eye toward the construction of capitalist hegemony via popular culture on the one hand, and a sympathetic approach to proletarian cultural forms on the other – would lead to vigorous interchange between them as they became consolidated international traditions of inquiry. While British political economy of the media and Cultural Studies shared some features and sympathies, their epistemological approaches and intellectual styles differed notably on at least two counts. The first was the departure point for their respective analyses: while PEC scholars began with an analysis of the structures of ownership and control characterizing the media industries and cultural production, Cultural Studies theorists tended to be more concerned with the audience’s interaction with popular cultural forms, highlighting what American political economist Dan Schiller (1996: 106) describes as the tradition’s ‘pivotal concerns of human agency and lived experience’. Political economists of the media – while sympathizing with the attempts made by Hall, Williams and others to link mass media to the reproduction of the class system in Britain – were nonetheless vocal about what they felt offered a more useful materialist starting point (Murdock and Golding 1977; Garnham 1979a, 1979b). As Murdock and Golding stated (1977: 17), [I]nstead of starting from a concrete analysis of economic relations and the ways in which they structure both the processes and the results of cultural production, they start by analysing the forms and content of cultural artefacts and then working backwards to describe their economic base. The characteristic outcome is a top-heavy analysis in which an elaborate autonomy of cultural forms balances insecurely on a schematic account of economic forces shaping their production. Garnham put his assessment even more bluntly: ‘[T]he superstructure/culture is and remains subordinate and secondary’ (1979a: 126). As Golding and Murdock (1974) suggested in their early call for a PEC approach, ‘[T]he mass media play a key role in determining the forms of consciousness and action which are made available to people’. The decoding of cultural forms that occurred in the living rooms of the working classes, however important, was determined (in the sense assigned to the word by Raymond Williams, of ‘setting limits and exerting pressures’ [1991]) by those social groups who controlled the means of mental production. The analysis of these institutional structures, as we shall see, would become the key focus of the PEC approach. The second major point of divergence between the British PEC and Cultural Studies, by no means unrelated to the first, lay in their theoretical points of reference. Here the analysis developed in the pages of Screen, the British film journal that played an important part in the development of the Cultural Studies approach,

The political economy of culture 161 is key, as it was especially problematic for scholars committed to political-economic analyses of the media. In what Curran (1990: 138) later described as a ‘separatist and esoteric niche’ of Marxist analysis, contributors to this journal drew upon French structuralist Marxism, semiotics and psychoanalysis in their analysis of filmic texts. In the linguistic turn taken by their fellow Marxists and the eagerness to explore such categories as subjectivity, difference and authorship through an analysis of texts, political economists sensed an idealist reading of the media process, one that was unanchored in the materiality of empirical analysis. Screen represents, therefore, an important point of both theoretical contact and friction between the PEC tradition and Cultural Studies. Garnham served on the editorial board of Screen, only to step down (along with others – see Buscombe, Gledhill, Lovell and Williams 1976) because, in his words (2005: 474), ‘we could no longer stomach the formalist and sectarian imposition of a strictly Althusserian orthodoxy’. The divergences with this area of the Cultural Studies approach, which Garnham (1979a: 125) described at the time as being ‘dangerously dominant’ within media analysis in the United Kingdom, had become significant enough by the end of the 1970s for Curran (1979a) to place the Althusserian-inflected analysis of Screen alongside US media effects scholarship as the other main rival to the PEC tradition in the analysis of the mass media process. According to Garnham, the journal Media, Culture and Society was set up in ‘conscious and express opposition’ to Screen (2005: 474). While it was true, therefore, that ‘many of the important questions about the mass media and about ‘culture’ more generally’ during the 1970s were being posed ‘within Marxism rather than between Marxism and other accounts’ (Curran, Gurevitch and Woollacott 1982: 23), the formative split of the 1990s between PEC and Cultural Studies was well underway in these early skirmishes. For political economists like Graham Murdock, the Cultural Studies project had started out as a vital effort to redefine the cultural by discarding traditional notions that equated culture with elite practices embodying a universal aesthetic. Rather, culture was to be associated with popular practices that follow a range of aesthetic and social principles, including opposition to established cultural and social practices (Murdock 1989a, 1989b). Political economists acknowledged the importance of conceiving of audiences as active subjects, but they also worried that stressing this aspect of the communicative process could ‘easily collude with conservative celebrations of untrammelled consumer choice’ (Golding and Murdock 1996: 13). The divergence between Cultural Studies and political-economic approaches to mass media processes was, therefore, largely played out around debates over culture.

Integration and diversification: political economy of the British media For British political economists, the stakes involved in these discussions were high. ‘So long as Marxist analysis concentrates on the ideological content of the mass media’, Garnham (1979a: 145) maintained, ‘it will be difficult to develop coherent political strategies for resisting the underlying dynamics of development

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in the cultural sphere in general which rest firmly and increasingly upon the logic of generalized commodity production’. In the volatile political context of 1970s Britain, the broad-scale, rapid-pace and top-down nature of the transformations these scholars were witnessing in the media held significant potential to foreclose the possibility of progressive social change. In order to better understand and explain these shifts, Marxist scholars developed a methodology and a conceptual lexicon which would become characteristic of the PEC critique more broadly in subsequent decades. In this section we survey some of the changes they observed in the British mass media system, highlighting the analytic tools developed in their analysis. As Murdock and Golding pointed out in their earliest appeal for a critical politicaleconomic approach, the mass media needed to be understood first and foremost as industrial and commercial organisations which produced and distributed commodities. Changes in the British mass media system could not therefore be grasped in isolation from broader political-economic shifts, and such an approach required a holistic and historical view that was capable of clarifying these connections in its response to liberal-pluralist visions of the media. James Curran’s (1977, 1979b, 1982) work on the development of the British press, for example, consistently challenged the prevailing notion that advertising had brought political independence to journalistic practice, maintaining that, since the mid-nineteenth century, market forces had succeeded where legal repression had failed in establishing social control. This historical approach would become a key pillar of the PEC in the decades to come (Mosco 2009: 109–113). In Britain, according to Murdock and Golding (1974: 207), an analysis of the ‘changing economic base’, of which the mass media were a part, revealed the growing importance of industrialization and the concomitant growth of increasingly interconnected and global mass markets across a range of sectors. The dominance of Keynesian economic policies and the steady expansion of Fordism/ Taylorism in the decades following World War II had produced heavy concentration in numerous industries, including the mass media. Echoing Adorno and Horkheimer’s findings of decades earlier in the United States, Murdock and Golding (1977: 23) spoke of an ‘underlying shift in the structure of advanced capitalist economies in which the ownership of the means of production has become progressively less dispersed and increasingly concentrated in the hands of a relatively few large corporations’. While the steady advance of concentration and monopoly had been ‘a persistent and dominant theme in analyses of the communications industries since the end of World War Two’ (Murdock and Golding 1977), by the 1970s it became clear that this process was producing major transformations in the British mass media system. Within this scenario, Murdock and Golding’s 1974 work was a ground-breaking exercise because, while admittedly provisional, it set out a conceptual map for a political-economic analysis of the media where none existed in the British literature.8 They examined the processes of consolidation and concentration at work in the country’s publishing, press, broadcasting, cinema and recording sectors, addressing what have since become accepted dimensions of media concentration – integration and diversification – but also taking on what

The political economy of culture 163 for that time was a new development, the internationalization of British media. Finally, they examined the wider implications of such transformations, including restricted choice in entertainment and information. A particularly significant example of these trends was the British newspaper industry, a highly symbolic sector of the so-called ‘fourth estate’, which, as James Curran (1977, 1979b) documented, had increasingly become the source of public scrutiny and concern. Three Royal Commissions on the Press and thirteen official inquiries into the economic organisation of the British press highlighted, for Curran, a veritable crisis of press legitimacy. From its modern roots in the Victorian era and the development of the party system, the British press had drifted away from control by the major political parties. But having successfully fought off the worst of state repression, the press now had to face the consequences of integration into an economy that had become thoroughly industrialized. There it was subject to the ‘remorseless economic forces’ (Curran 1977: 226) of capitalist competition. As Golding, Murdock, Curran and others pointed out, by the 1970s a substantial part of the British daily press had been bought out by multinational corporations, a process that had begun in the 1950s with the acquisition of British news interests by the Thomson Corporation, a Canadian company. The pace of this transformation was especially striking, as the lion’s share of all acquisitions in the sector after World War II had taken place during the decade of the 1970s. This process of horizontal integration, where firms acquire additional units at the same level of production (i.e. a newspaper buying out another newspaper), resulted in growing concentration of ownership in the press, including a steady succession of newspaper closures, declining competition and the spread of ‘extensive monopolies’ across the country (Curran 1979b: 71). As the 1977 Royal Commission noted, the British press had become a subsidiary of other industries, and by the end of the decade the communist Morning Star was the only remaining national newspaper with no business interests outside of publishing. While some scholars found this process had resulted in a more depoliticized press (Curran, Douglas and Whannel 1980), for Murdock and Golding (1977: 22) the political views that tended to predominate in its pages were those of its new masters, the private sector: ‘To the extent that national newspapers are part of large industrial enterprises, they can and will act as flagships for those enterprises as a whole, and the values and beliefs they represent’. That these profitable conglomerates were also willing to sustain the financial losses of many dailies (in a bid to forestall what Golding and Murdock saw as the declining rate of profit accompanying the industrialization of production in mass media) was seen as further proof of their pivotal ideological role for capital. Taken together, the changes in the press since World War II highlighted the increasingly untenable status of liberal-pluralist theories of the mass media. If freedom of the press was guaranteed by the dispersed private ownership of print technology, then the number of free presses was certainly diminishing very rapidly. As Golding and Murdock showed as early as 1974, these trends were not limited to newspapers but could be witnessed increasingly within and (even more significantly) across sectors of the British media. Thus far these industries had

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been examined ‘in isolation from one another, creating a fragmentation in both academic and governmental analyses’ (Murdock and Golding 1977: 25), but the emergent PEC approach would be distinguished by its broader analysis of the emergent interconnections among heretofore distinct sectors. In addition to horizontal integration, interconnection also meant vertical integration, where firms acquired units along the different stages of the production process. A significant instance of vertical integration occurred in the British publishing industry in 1970, when the leading newspaper and magazine publisher IPC merged with the Reed Group Limited, an international corporation with interests in wood, pulp, papers and newsprint (Murdock and Golding 1974: 214). The trajectory of EMI, the dominant force within the British recording industry in the 1950s, also illustrated the need for scholars to move beyond a narrowly sectoral analysis of communications industries. EMI’s activities had remained focused within the music business and electronics until the 1960s, but in 1969 it purchased the Associated British Picture Corporation, giving the corporation a substantial interest in both film production and exhibition, and in 1970 it acquired Anglo Amalgamated Film Distributors Ltd., providing the conglomerate an interest in every stage of the film production process, from finance through production to distribution and exhibition (Murdock and Golding 1974; Murdock 1982). During the 1970s, EMI continued to diversify and expand into other sectors, acquiring bingo halls, hotels, sports clubs and a range of other leisure facilities, until in 1979 it was bought out by Thorn Electrical Industries, producing Thorn-EMI. The growing economic interconnections between media sectors and cultural industries was, according to Murdock and Golding (1977: 25), indicative of a basic shift in the structure of the media industry, away from the relatively simple situation of sector specific monopolies and towards something altogether more complex and far-reaching . . . increasingly, the largest concerns command leading positions in several sectors simultaneously. Sociologists Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, whose research overlapped with the trajectory of British PEC, noted the same trends at work in the emerging computing, software and telecommunications consumer markets at the end of the 1970s: ‘At a more general level even these systems are merging into what may be seen as an over-arching communications industry which incorporates, most importantly, computing and various forms of telecommunications’ (1979: 285). Crucially, the emergence of large, diversified multimedia conglomerates nationally was not unique to Britain but rather part of a ‘trend which is discernible throughout the advanced capitalist economies’ (Murdock and Golding 1977: 27). The trends of integration and diversification pointed to by first-generation political-economic analyses of the British media were to be deeply significant in setting the stage for a round of global integration and the creation of a global mass media sector on the heels of deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s (Freedman 2008). As Graham Murdock reflected several decades later (2011), political economy’s examination of the commodification process within culture and communication was important in that

The political economy of culture 165 it revealed how this process ceded enormous control over public culture to private interests, provided vital platform to advertisers, and extended the ‘naturalization of commodity culture’ through dominant pop culture genres. The implications of such processes within the media for the class structure in 1970s Britain were, however, hotly debated.

Ownership and control: from the private to the public sector Illuminating the shifting sands of British mass media ownership and the steadily dwindling number of information sources in the country were not the only tasks of the critical political-economic approach to communication. If the owners of mass media conglomerates constituted ‘an identifiable capitalist class with recognizable interests in common’, Murdock and Golding (1977) also noted the need to ‘examine the structure and operations of the large companies and more particularly to find out who the owners are and how far they control company policy and company operations’. The most significant steps in this direction during the perspective’s early history were taken by Graham Murdock (1982), who moved beyond an analysis of ownership to confront the question of whether, how and to what extent it translated into effective control of mass media outlets and their production of symbolic content. In doing so, Murdock was once again explicitly taking on liberal-pluralist perspectives. These maintained, much as they do today, that in an era of media conglomerates control of the day-to-day operations at media companies could be and often were divorced from the broader concerns of their owners. Professional ideologies, work routines and competing demands within the media organisations themselves all contributed, liberal pluralists asserted, to a production of media messages that had the capacity to contradict the status quo. As Murdock noted, such arguments dovetailed quite conveniently with dominant understandings of the mass media production process, according to which ultimate power over content rested with the invisible hand of the audience’s consumer sovereignty, expressed through their ever-changing tastes. The problem, then, for Marxian political economists, was to further an understanding of how the British elite shaped the mass media process without – as some of the PEC’s critics maintained – implying that the outcome of such a process was given. Nicholas Garnham (1979a: 136) had already noted that media ownership did not necessarily provide a direct transmission belt for homogeneous ideological content: Because capital controls the means of cultural production in the sense that the production and exchange of cultural commodities becomes the dominant form of cultural relationship, it does not follow that these cultural commodities will necessarily support, either in their explicit content or in their mode of cultural appropriation, the dominant ideology. By extension, the structures of ownership characterizing the British mass media did not in and of themselves guarantee that media products were exclusively

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productive of popular consent. ‘How’, therefore, asked Murdock and Golding (1977: 21), ‘do we explain the emergence of cultural output without making the mistake of assuming its simple and direct reproduction of the ideological pattern congenial to those groups who own and control the media?’ This question would prove to be one of the most vexing in political-economic analyses of the media. The qualified answer to it, provided by Murdock (1982: 171) several years later, would be to propose that mass communication ‘is indeed bounded with, and bounded by, the interests of the dominant institutions in society, but that these interests are continually redefined through a process to which the media themselves contribute’. In other words the media production process, while strongly determined by ownership and control, was nonetheless contested and potentially contradictory. In formulating this position, Murdock and others sought to counter the emergent critique according to which in PEC analysis ‘[i]deology becomes the route through which struggle is obliterated rather than the site of struggle’ (Curran, Gurevitch and Woollacott 1982: 26). The charge, levelled with increasing frequency during the 1990s by North American Cultural Studies scholars in particular, would be one with which subsequent generations of political economists would have to come to grips. The decade of the 1970s was far from free of struggles over the direction of the British mass media, however, and political economists were deeply involved in these contests. As Graham Murdock (2011) recalls, the historical context within which the PEC approach developed featured a two-part cultural sector, for-profit and public, and it is around the latter that the interventions of these scholars would predominantly be clustered. The promise of public broadcasting to democratically counterbalance the trends occurring in the private sector complicated simple depictions of the media as a transmission belt for the ideas of dominant groups. At the same time, as one of the first and most important countries in which neoliberal principles of privatization and deregulation were put into practice, the United Kingdom became a focal point for the attacks on the idea of public service broadcasting that would predominate in the 1990s. Opposition to the commodification of the public broadcasting system was therefore a characteristic which undoubtedly united British PEC scholars in their writing and their political engagement (Curran 2004; Murdock 2011: 17). The forms this commitment took were, most often, an engagement with the policy process, something Golding and Murdock underscored when they pointed out how PEC ‘has no qualms about addressing issues of pragmatic and policy concern’ (1996: 12). That having been said, it would be inaccurate to identify a homogeneous political position among different PEC practitioners, or even for individual researchers over time. In Structures of Television, for example, along with Joan Bakewell, Nicholas Garnham (1978) advocated grassroots and worker control of the BBC, but radical positions such as this one would be more difficult to find within the PEC perspective over the years. According to James Curran (2004: 16), one of the characteristics of the Westminster approach, for example, was that it developed a ‘reformist view of the democratic state as an empowering agency that could enhance potentially the contribution that the media made to society’, something that in his view separated

The political economy of culture 167 it from the ‘majority in the radical tradition of media research during the 1970s’. While quick to point out that the British Broadcasting Corporation behaved ‘in many ways as though it were itself a commercial undertaking’ (Murdock and Golding 1977), it is nonetheless fair to suggest that public broadcasting was still seen by early political economists as the most promising bulwark against private domination of the airwaves. This position was cemented with the end of the Cold War and amid a resurgent, Thatcherite neoliberalism during the 1980s and into the 1990s. By 1996, Golding and Murdock came to the conclusion that the ‘main institutional counter to the commodification of public activity has come from the development of institutions funded out of taxation and oriented towards providing cultural resources for the full exercise of citizenship’ (1996: 17). By the 1990s, Garnham suggested that the public service model of broadcasting was an ‘embodiment of the principles of the public sphere’ (1990: 109). Thus, for Curran, ‘[t]he theoretical view of a repressive bourgeois state and a normative view of the enlightened state as the sponsor of public sphere openness and freedom gave way to a more contextualized understanding of the role of the state in relation to the media’ (2004: 21). These themes drew out the work of the Frankfurt School’s most liberal-democratic philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, whose writing on communicative action (1984) and the public sphere (1991) resonated with critical media study. For Habermas, communicative action was a form of rational decision-making taken after consensual discussion and deliberation, and a wellorganised public media system was a means to achieving communicative action. Communicative action takes place best in the public sphere, a literal or figurative space where individuals can come together to discuss social problems and, through this discussion, influence political decision-making. For media scholars, public media had the potential to provide just such a space.

Engagement with North American and European scholarship These contributions by a small group of scholars in Britain were assisted and reinforced by stirrings of critical media scholarship outside the United Kingdom, primarily in North America and Europe. The development of a political economy approach to the media actually began earlier in North America than in the United Kingdom mainly through the work of Dallas Smythe who taught the first course in the field in the 1950s at the University of Illinois and wrote a foundational study in 1957. Finding the political climate of the United States deeply repressive for a critical scholar, Smythe returned to his native Canada and was replaced at Illinois by Herbert Schiller who continued to build a tradition of critical media analysis in the United States. Although they worked largely in isolation, Smythe and Schiller developed a strong following of students in both Canada and the United States, as well as in what was then called the Third World, through the turbulent decade of the 1960s and the early 1970s. This brought both scholars and their students into contact with the burgeoning of critical media analysis in Britain, particularly through the growth of the International Association for Mass Communication Research (now the International Association for Media and Communication

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Research). It was primarily through the IAMCR that British and North American scholars came together to share and critique their work. By the early 1980s, North American critical scholars had their own association, the Union for Democratic Communication, whose founding conference included Nicholas Garnham, who contributed to the discussion of its founding principles. Garnham also made available the new journal Media, Culture and Society, which from its first issue in 1979 published the work of Marxist communication scholars in North America. Reciprocally, the US-based Journal of Communication, under the editorship of the critical scholar George Gerbner, made a home for British Marxist media scholars. British and North American scholars were largely in agreement about the major issues in the field. Aside from attention to their own national experiences, differences emerged over matters of emphasis with British scholars paying closer attention to theoretical problems and North Americans concentrating on political issues of global significance such as media imperialism and dependency. Debates emerged particularly between Smythe and Murdock over the role of the audience in capitalist media with Smythe contending that the audience was the primary commodity (indeed that its activity constituted labour) and Murdock challenging this view (Smythe 1977, 1978; Murdock 1978). In addition to connecting with media scholars in North America, British scholarship benefited from engagement with European Marxist research on the media. One of the key sources of critical media analysis on the continent was Armand Mattelart, who, with the assistance of his co-editor Seth Siegelaub, provided the earliest collections that proved invaluable to Marxist scholars around the world (1979, 1983). Mattelart’s primary substantive contribution was to extend the concerns of British Marxists on issues like power and control by addressing contradiction, class struggle and the development of alternative media systems and cultures within a global context. He did so most importantly by providing a nuanced analysis of cultural imperialism that, in addition to comprehending patterns of communication power, accounted for complex forms of ‘secondary imperialism’ and resistance in Latin America and Asia. He also broadened the field by taking up the manifold social practices that these cultural imperialisms take (e.g. sports and tourism) and different ways to conceptualize contradictory and conflictual relations of production and reception. Finally, along with his partner, Michele Mattelart, he developed a powerful critique of popular culture which demonstrated how it is constituted by people who become the active subject of their own cultural life and create cultural experiences that are directly connected to their own liberation movements (Mattelart 1977; Mattelart and Siegelaub 1979: 56). In addition to promoting British Marxist scholarship in his collections, Mattelart engaged with his UK counterparts through the IAMCR.

Pressure points As within any school of thought, differences inevitably arose over matters of emphasis within critical British scholarship. Notwithstanding their continued interest in a broad range of issues, Murdock (1989a and b, 2004) and Garnham (2000, 2004)

The political economy of culture 169 gave particular attention to theoretical matters with the former concentrating on media and culture and the latter on the growing field of telecommunication. Meanwhile, Golding, working with Murdock (2004), directed his attention to policy issues surrounding the emergence of computer communication (e.g. the digital divide), and Curran (1977) to critical historical scholarship. Furthermore, Kevin Robins and Frank Webster gave considerable attention to critical assessments of technology, including its growing use and misuse in education (1979, 1986). In addition, as the relatively progressive political climate of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to Thatcherism and the neoliberal project, tensions began to emerge among critical scholars in Britain. Specifically, concerns arose about what James Curran called a ‘new revisionism’ in critical scholarship (Curran 1990). Although Curran made the claim carefully and with reference to important exceptions, he concluded that ‘a sea change has occurred in the field’: The most important and significant overall shift has been the steady advance of pluralist themes within the radical tradition: in particular, the repudiation of the totalizing, explanatory frameworks of Marxism, the reconceptualization of the audience as creative and active and the shift from the political to a popular aesthetic. (Curran 1990: 157–158) Each of these areas concerned critical scholars, but it was Curran’s view of ‘revisionist accounts of media organizations’ that touched political economy most directly. Here Curran charged that ‘disenchantment with the class conflict model of society’, influenced by the widespread impact of Michel Foucault’s work, led to a ‘retreat from former positions’. Although these developments were felt in most radical accounts, ‘the political economy approach . . . was the first to buckle’ (Curran 1990: 142). Specifically, he claimed that Golding, Murdock and Curran himself ‘began to back off’ in the 1980s. Golding did so by giving increased attention to ideological management and the individual values of reporters over press ownership to account for tabloid attacks on welfare recipients. Moreover, Curran charged that Murdock did so by turning to the analysis of sources and discourses over ownership and management pressure to explain coverage of the 1981 race riots. In addition to raising critical points about the political economy perspective, Curran suggested a convergence trend. Pluralist scholars, he maintained, were shifting away from an emphasis on the individual autonomy of journalists to take up structural constraints and power. They were also departing from a traditional interest in defending market neutrality to take up market shortcomings and failures. Although he insisted that the outcome of these reciprocal shifts was not full convergence because pluralists and political economists continue to differ in how they theorized economic and political power, Curran, nevertheless, concluded that ‘an intermediate perspective situated between these two positions has emerged as dominant’ (Curran 1990). In the context of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the more extreme free market ideology of neoliberalism, and its displacement of

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liberal-pluralism as the dominant perspective on media regulation, it appeared as if the former intellectual adversaries had begun to converge. Golding and Murdock, as well as James Halloran, took issue with Curran’s interpretation. All three agreed (Interviews, April 19929) that he was off the mark in claiming that the political economy approach was, in Curran’s description, ‘associated with the Leicester Centre for Mass Communication Research’, and could be counterposed against ‘an alternative, radical culturalist approach, associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ (Curran 1990: 139). They maintained that the Leicester Centre never identified itself with a political economy approach in anything approaching Birmingham’s mission to advance Cultural Studies. According to them, political economy was a primary interest of Golding and Murdock and had practically nothing to do with the centre’s mission, which was principally taken up with traditional sociological, socio-cultural and social problem-oriented research. This is important because the ‘new revisionist’ thesis implied some change in a sustained centre of activity which these principal participants contend never existed. Golding and Murdock also expressed fundamental disagreement with Curran’s interpretation of the field of communication studies, including political economy. Murdock summarizes their view by asserting that ‘this is not a map of the field I inhabit’. Notably, both contended that the suggestion of revisionism, buckling or back-tracking neglected to take into account the breadth of their work which encompassed a broad view of Marxist theory that incorporated ideological critique, semiotics, social policy analysis and an account of the complete circuit of communicative activity, including production, distribution and reception. Both noted that they always worked on a broad range of problems, following particularly Golding’s interest in social policy and Murdock’s in semiotics and discourse analysis. Hence, even as their research led them to address Thatcherite social welfare ideology and audience reception, they returned (Golding and Murdock 1991) to the essential principles of their political economy approach. In sum, they contended that Curran’s interpretation of their work as a back-tracking from the Leicester approach misread the programme at Leicester, their work and political economy. Curran appeared of two minds about Golding and Murdock’s 1991 map of the field. On the one hand, he considered it simply a ‘re-presentation of a political economy perspective’ and, on the other, an effort ‘to distance themselves from simple instrumentalist and structural views of marxist political economy, and define “economic determination” as an initial limitation and constraint’ (Curran, in Curran and Gurevitch 1991: 10–11). Golding and Murdock maintained that they have consistently positioned themselves against simplistic political-economic readings and argued for limiting economic determination to the ‘first instance’. In their view, Curran’s interpretation followed the popular caricature of the rigid early Marxist transformed into a more flexible, indeed revisionist, scholar, but it did not match the evidence. One might also imagine that liberal-pluralists would share some of Golding and Murdock’s concerns. For example, Curran claimed (1990: 144) a shift in pluralism from a focus, exemplified in Tunstall (1981), on the

The political economy of culture 171 individual autonomy of journalists to a concern for ‘the interconnections between media organizations and power centres’. In spite of its surface appeal, this thesis can be challenged by examining Tunstall’s own work. Were Curran to begin in 1977 rather than 1981, he would have found Tunstall’s The Media Are American, a work that is arguably more structural and less centred on the individual autonomy of media workers than anything he produced subsequently. Testing a revisionist thesis is no simple matter. It requires a clear sense of what constitutes revision and what constituted the original vision or conceptual position, and it requires an understanding of the history that comes between original vision and the hypothesized revision. Although the debate about Leicester, the reading of Golding’s and Murdock’s work, and the wider interest in a ‘new revisionism’ were important, what made the debate most interesting is what it revealed about different conceptions of political economy. Golding and Murdock consistently took a broad view of the approach that – in addition to the standard interest in social class – the commodity circuit, corporate structure and the state insisted on a critical understanding of the wider social totality. Regarding the latter, they saw the task of political economy to ‘focus on the interplay between the symbolic and economic dimensions of public communications’ (1991: 15). Their vision of political economy was so broad that it appeared to Curran as the task of communication studies in general. Although Curran did not offer us an explicit definition of political economy, it appeared from his assessment of the field that he saw it in far narrower terms, comprising principally the analysis of economic ownership and managerial control and the influence of these on media content. From his criticism of Golding and Murdock, one can conclude that Curran did not consider the analysis of media sources to be a primary dimension of political-economic analysis (Curran 1990: 143). But source analysis has a central element of most political economies of the media, including the strongest political economy readings such as those offered by Herman and Chomsky (1988) in their propaganda model. The debate about revisionism, at least as it applied to political economy, pointed to the broader question of what constituted the central dimensions of a Marxist or political-economic understanding of the media. At stake therefore was more than whether there was back-tracking and buckling. Rather, the important implication of Curran’s critique was that political economy needed to reflect on its central agenda and on how the approach differs, if at all, from what should constitute the general field of Media and Cultural Studies. However one responds to Curran’s critique, it was important because it opened opportunities for serious debate that had been lacking within political-economic analysis. Indeed it was among the few substantial published exchanges on central issues in the field. Nicholas Garnham’s (1979b) exchange with the board of Screen on the relationship between production and representation was one, as was the debate over Smythe’s contention that the audience was the primary commodity of the capitalist media. Although Curran’s work addressed more than the political economy approach, it raised questions that were particularly central to it, including the relationship of political economy to Cultural Studies, to Marxist theory and to the broader range of approaches to communication studies.

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Labour and praxis in the Marxian political economy of communication Political-economic approaches to communication and media have recently been the subject of renewed reflection and commentary, most notably in two edited volumes charting the breadth, depth and diversity of the field (Wasko, Murdock and Sousa 2011; Winseck and Jin 2011). In a chapter published in one of these volumes, Nicholas Garnham (2011: 42) cements his turn away from the British Marxist analysis of the media we have surveyed, combining neoclassical economic categories and a liberal political orientation in his analysis of contemporary media processes. Stating that the PEC has become associated with a ‘tired and narrow orthodoxy’, Garnham maintains the term ‘political economy’ (PE) has become a euphemism for a vague, crude, and unself-questioning form of Marxism, linked to a gestural and selfsatisfied, if often paranoid, radicalism. The story it tells has become drearily familiar. The capitalist mass media are increasingly concentrated on a global scale under the control of corporations and media moguls leading to a decline in cultural diversity, the suppression of progressive political views, and the destruction of local cultures. The proposed cure for this situation is some form of regulation and/or state-supported public service media and cultural production sometimes linked to ‘democratization.’ Garnham is not the only one to raise questions of critical political economies of the media in recent years. The perspective has been taken to task from the left for focusing overwhelmingly on forms of domination rather than modes of resistance (Dyer-Witheford 1999), for neglecting the perspectives and experience of women (Meehan and Riordan 2002) and for remaining narrowly focused on Europe and North America (Chakravartty and Zhao 2008). In a twenty-first century increasingly characterized by communicative abundance rather than scarcity, some might ask whether control of the ‘means of mental production’ still matters within a political-economic media formation the American political theorist Jodi Dean (2009) calls ‘communicative capitalism’. Do the political concerns raised by British Marxists that we examined in this chapter still hold in an era of ubiquitous apps, instant tweets and proliferating status updates? Should critical practitioners of the PEC approach rethink what Garnham (2011: 42) describes as their ‘crude and unexamined rejection of the market per se’? While the News of the World scandal in the United Kingdom is a striking reminder of why the PEC’s classic concern with the relationship between media ownership and political power deserves ongoing critical scrutiny, the perspective must nonetheless be renewed in order to remain relevant and incisive within a political, economic and cultural environment that has changed a great deal since the 1970s. However, in the midst of the ongoing global economic debacle produced by neoliberal governance – a debacle that has brought unprecedented attacks on public education, health care, pensions, social services, welfare

The political economy of culture 173 supports, broadcasting and trade unions in the name of austerity and the market – we disagree that abandoning a radical critique of capitalism and its elites is the best way to renew the political-economic analysis of media. As the market generates unprecedented social inequality, and at a moment when social movements such as the Indignados in Spain, the Occupy movement and those of university students across the world are fighting back against austerity measures and the unprecedented power of finance capital,10 radical critiques have an important role to play within political-economic analyses of the media. These industries, topped by Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and a handful of media firms, still have tremendous power to shape the discourse through which we make sense of the world that surrounds us. Seeking to democratize them is neither naïve nor unrealistic but rather stands as a vital collective project if we are to repair the near-catastrophic social and environmental damage wrought by those advocating free market economics. One of the more promising examples of how political-economic critiques are being renewed is through critical scholarship exploring the labour that produces profit in the media, communication and cultural industries. While celebratory narratives such as Richard Florida’s (2002) discussion of the ‘creative class’ have tended to portray a hip, flexible and well-remunerated workforce toiling out of coffee shops and urban lofts, critical PEC scholarship has offered a very different picture of the growing, transnational and highly diverse labour force fuelling the ‘creative industries’. Engaged analysis of the interaction (and conflict) between capital and labour in these industries has been one of the most dynamic areas of contemporary research within the PEC (Fuchs 2010; de Peuter 2011; Mosco 2011; Cohen 2012; Fuchs and Mosco 2012). This research expands upon a less-remarked tradition of attention to work, workers and workplaces that has characterized the PEC (Mosco and Wasko 1983; Schiller 1996). One of the effects of the formative influence of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Culture Industry essay on the PEC has been the latter’s focus on the ownership and control of institutional structures in the media and telecommunications sector at the expense of attention to the labour that produces profit in those industries. Had the German critical theorists given more attention to emergent forms of labour in California’s cultural industries, they might have noted that these were the scene not only of the application of factory production methods to culture but also of the development, often through harsh struggle, of a persistent trade unionism in the cultural sector (Denning 1997; Ross 2000; McKercher 2002; Tracy 2011). Contemporary trade unions in the cultural sector are one of the legacies of that era (Mosco and McKercher 2008). Moreover, the deregulation and privatization of telecommunications sectors across the world has enabled a fresh attack on the unions that have historically offered a means toward job security and a living wage for operators, repair workers and others working in the industry (Shniad 2007; Brophy 2009). As new branches of the informational industries have risen to prominence, so have unprecedented forms of labour exploitation. British researcher Ursula Huws (2003) has posited the formation of what she calls a ‘cybertariat’ of call

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centre workers, data entry employees, warehouse sorters and other workers whose largely invisible labour underlies these sectors. Brett Caraway’s (2010) research has highlighted the intense flexibilization and panoptic surveillance of the labour that builds the Internet through online temp agencies such as oDesk and Elance. An extreme example of the post-Fordist pattern of outsourcing the production of software, code or user ratings sustaining Web 2.0 is Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk site, a company that crowdsources infinitesimally small pieces of work to an online workforce making somewhere around $1.50 US an hour on average, enjoying no worker protections, and deriving no benefits (Cushing 2012). In a contemporary update of Dallas Smythe’s visionary theory of the audience commodity, perhaps the most cutting-edge example of this centrifugal process of online labour outsourcing is so common as to be banal: the quotidian production and reproduction of the web through vast quantities of unremunerated content provision by end users (Terranova 2004; Coté and Pybus 2007; Cohen 2008). Significantly, the growing attention to labour in the so-called ‘creative’ industries has allowed the PEC to address some of the aforementioned criticisms that have been made of it. Reflecting the spread of the PEC’s influence and attention beyond European and North American horizons, current research in the field has highlighted the growth of a global and interlinked labour force required to produce the hardware, software and services without which the creative economy could not operate (Park and Pellow 2002; Mosco, McKercher and Huws 2010; Dyer-Witheford 2011). Miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, many of them children, dig coltan out of the earth for armed militias so the mineral can be included in digital devices ranging from PlayStation consoles to Nokia phones (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009). On the other side of the world, Jack Qiu (2010) has traced the composition of China’s emergent, ‘grey collar’ labour force, put to work assembling hardware at the Foxconn factory, developing virtual avatars for Westerners in videogame sweatshops, or generating SMS text advertisements for propagation among wireless consumers. Xiang Biao (2006) has illuminated the struggles of a transnational and highly precarious labour force of Indian computer programmers, living at the whim of Western security regimes and flexible high-tech labour markets. When the information technology gets discarded at the end of its lifecycle, workers in China, Ghana or other developing regions of the world scavenge through mountains of highly toxic e-waste for valuable metals. However, the racialized labour force that produces and reproduces the ‘creative industries’ through e-waste ‘recycling’ also toils in the global North: US government contractor Unicor uses its inmates for electronics recycling in seven federal prisons (Brophy and de Peuter 2014). A recent United States Department of Justice (2010) report described prison staff and inmates working coated in toxic dust and trailing heavy metals back to their homes and cellblocks at the end of their shift. Beyond being highly racialized, the labour that builds the ‘creative economy’ is also strongly gendered (Mosco, McKercher and Stevens 2007): the more exploitative and dangerous this work, the greater the chance one will find women doing

The political economy of culture 175 it. The workforce within the global call centre industry for example, one of the fastest-growing sources of employment in recent decades, is 70 per cent female (Holman, Batt and Holtgrewe 2007). Research into the feminization of labour (Morini 2007), a process which describes both the greater proportion of women in the overall workforce and the increasing association between women’s work and particular professions, stands as a vital way in which the PEC can cast a critical light onto forms of labour exploitation in the communication, media and cultural industries that manifest along gender lines. These inequities occur further up the labour hierarchy as well, as early investigations of female new media freelance workers has illuminated how they experience highly precarious working conditions, lower pay and gender-based barriers to their job prospects (Gill 2002; Gregg 2008). Finally, the recent growth of scholarship into contemporary forms of labour resistance and organising has allowed the PEC to move beyond its traditional focus on the ways in which modes of domination are expressed through media.11 At the precarious margins of the creative industries, political economists are exploring how freelance workers are responding collectively to the unpaid internships, unstable labour conditions and workforce fragmentation marking their employment by organising unions, advancing innovative welfare policy proposals and developing labour awareness campaigns (Bodnar 2006; Brophy 2011; Cohen 2011; Cohen, de Peuter and Brophy 2012). Yu Hong (2010) has begun to document the stirrings of labour unrest and subterranean forms of collective organisation occurring in China, a vital front for the global labour movement. The focus of these PEC studies is frequently transnational, charting the development of convergent unions organising across international borders (Mosco and McKercher 2008; Stevens and Mosco 2010). These studies offer us one of the most important ways in which the media industries are being democratized – from below, by their workers and the collective associations they are forming. Political economy has rarely limited itself to placid descriptions of the world that exists. One of the formidable characteristics of the approach has been its perpetual ability to imagine what ought to be, beyond simply telling us what is. From Adam Smith’s analyses of the industrial revolution to our era, political economy has situated itself ethically in relation to that which it investigates, whether it was the child labour of Marx’s time or the silicon chip assembly by Malaysian women today. More than this, political economists have actively engaged with and been a part of the movements and organisations aiming to bring about a different and better world. Like the British PEC of the 1970s, those who are refashioning the perspective in the early twenty-first century are doing so in a world characterized by systematic injustice and inequality. Along with Marx, who offered a powerful example of how to forge a radical critique of industrial capitalism that was completely immanent to the social movements struggling against its effects, we hope not only that contemporary practitioners of the PEC will retain the radical spirit of their British forerunners but that they will continue to animate those struggles for a world beyond the market.

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Notes 1 In this chapter we survey the formative opposition between the British Marxist political economy of communication and mainstream liberal-pluralist perspectives on media regulation in the 1970s. With the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, liberalpluralist perspectives lost out to the more extreme neoliberal belief in the market as the most efficient and ethical means to distribute media resources. For the differences between liberal-pluralist and neoliberal approaches to media regulation, see Freedman 2008. 2 The official response to the scandal continued into 2013. It consists of Operation Weeting, a police investigation that began in 2011, under the Specialist Crime Directorate of the Metropolitan Police Service into allegations of phone hacking. It is being carried out alongside Operation Elveden, which is examining allegations of payments to the police by those involved with phone hacking, and Operation Tuleta, an investigation into alleged computer hacking for the News of the World. 3 The PEC tradition is not uniform but rather characterized by diverse political perspectives and methodological approaches (see Mosco 2009; Winseck and Jin 2011). While acknowledging that this diversity is important, our chapter, given the scope of this edited collection, focuses on critical and Marxian variants of PEC in the United Kingdom rather than, for example, on institutional political-economic approaches to the mass media. Even here, however, caution is warranted, because, as we shall see, these critical and Marxian perspectives contain internal tensions and differences. 4 This view of behaviourism as the principal intellectual adversary for early political economy was confirmed in interviews with Herbert Schiller (January 1992) and James Halloran (April 1992). Mosco 2009: 78. 5 See Hamelink and Linné (1994) for a collection of essays in honour of Halloran. 6 Golding, Murdock and Schlesinger produced a book (1986) to honour the late Philip Elliott, an anthropologist who made a substantial contribution to research in political communication and, with Golding, wrote one of the early materialist analyses of the media (Elliott and Golding 1979). 7 For a view on the relationship between the thought of Theodor Adorno and Canadian political economist of communication Dallas Smythe which further explores the significant links between critical theory and PEC, see Babe 2012. 8 They noted (1974: 205) that the media, unlike the study of education, ‘has gone largely unexamined’, and they cite a 1972 collection of writing on Power in Britain (Urry and Wakeford 1973) which not only lacked a chapter on the media but contained no reference to the media in its index. 9 Some of the information in this sentence is derived from interviews which Vincent Mosco conducted with Graham Murdock, Peter Golding and James Halloran in April 1992. 10 See Almiron (2010) for a thorough exploration of the relationship between corporate media, finance capital and the broader process of economic financialization that is part and parcel of neoliberal capitalism. 11 British political economists of the media primarily addressed resistance to constituted forms of media power through their aforementioned analyses of, and engagement with, the forces aiming to protect public broadcasting from the privatizing pressures of British neoliberalism. Also relevant here is the more recent work by Murdock and Golding (2004) on the struggle against the digital divide.

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Bibliography Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. 1944. The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception, in Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 120–167. Almiron, N. 2010. Journalism in Crisis: Corporate Media and Financialization. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Babe, R. E. 2012. Theodor Adorno and Dallas Smythe: Culture industry/consciousness industry and the political economy of media and communication, in Revisiting the Frankfurt School: Essays on Culture, Media and Theory, edited by D. Berry. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 91–116. Biao, X. 2006. Global ‘Body Shopping’: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bodnar, C. 2006. Taking it to the streets: French cultural worker resistance and the creation of a precariat movement. Canadian Journal of Communication, 31(3), 675–694. Brophy, E. 2009. Resisting call centre work: The Aliant strike and convergent unionism in Canada. Work Organization, Labour and Globalisation, 3(1), 80–89. Brophy, E. 2011. The subterranean stream: Communicative capitalism and call centre labour. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 10(3/4), 470–483. Brophy, E. and de Peuter, G. 2014. Labours of mobility: Communicative capitalism and the smartphone cybertariat, in Theories of the Mobile Internet: Materialities and Imaginaries, edited by T. Swiss, J. Hadlaw and A. Herman. New York: Routledge, 60–94. Buscombe, E., Gledhill, C., Lovell, A. and Williams, C. 1976. Why we have resigned from the board of Screen. Screen, 17(2), 106–109. Caraway, B. 2010. Online labour markets: An inquiry into oDesk providers. Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation, 4(2), 111–125. Carr, D. 2012. Journalism’s misdeeds get a glimpse in the mirror. New York Times, July 29. Available at www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/business/media/holding-up-a-mirror-tojournalism-the-media-equation.html. Chakravartty, P. and Zhao, Y. (eds.) 2008. Global Communication: Toward a Transcultural Political Economy, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Cohen, N. 2008. The valorization of surveillance: Towards a political economy of Facebook. Democratic Communiqué, 22(1), 5–22. Cohen, N. 2011. Negotiating writers’ rights: Freelance cultural labour and the challenge of organizing. Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society, 17–18, 119–138. Cohen, N. 2012. Cultural work as a site of struggle: Freelancers and exploitation. Triple C: Cognition, Communication, Cooperation, 10(2), 141–155. Cohen, N., de Peuter, G. and Brophy, E. 2012. Interns of the creative industries unite! You have nothing to lose – literally. Briarpatch Magazine, Work and Labour Issue, November 9. http:// briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/interns-unite-you-have-nothing-to-lose-literally. Coté, M. and Pybus, J. 2007. Learning to immaterial labour 2.0: MySpace and social networks. Ephemera, 7(1), 88–106. Curran, J. 1977. Capitalism and control of the press, 1800–1975, in Mass Communication and Society, edited by J. Curran, M. Gurevitch, and J. Woollacott. London: Arnold, 195–230. Curran, J. 1979a. The media and politics. Media, Culture and Society, 1(1), 1–3. Curran, J. 1979b. Press freedom as a property right: The crisis of press legitimacy. Media, Culture and Society, 1, 59–82. Curran, J. 1990. The new revisionism in mass communication research: A reappraisal. European Journal of Communication, 5, 135–164.

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The political economy of culture 179 Garnham, N. 2011. The political economy of communication revisited, in The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications, edited by J. Wasko, G. Murdock and H. Sousa. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 41–61. Gill, R. 2002. Cool, creative and egalitarian? Exploring gender in project-based new media work in Europe. Information, Communication & Society, 5(1), 70–89. Golding, P. and Elliott. 1979. Making the News. London: Longman. Golding, P. and Murdock, G. 1991. Culture, communication, and political economy, in Mass Media and Society, edited by J. Curran and M. Gurevitch. London: Edward Arnold, 15–32. Golding, P. and Murdock, G. 1996. Culture, communications, and political economy, in Mass Media and Society, second edition, edited by J. Curran and M. Gurevitch. New York: Arnold., 70–92. Golding, P., Murdock, G. and Sclesinger, P. 1986. Communicating Politics: Mass Communications and the Political Process. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Greenslade, R. 2012. Phone hacking charges – how the newspapers covered the story. The Guardian, July 25. Gregg, M. 2008. The normalization of female flexible labour in the information economy. Feminist Media Studies, 8(3), 285–299. Habermas, J. 1984. Theory of Communicative Action, translated by T. McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, translated by T. McCarthy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hall, S. 1982. The rediscovery of ‘ideology’: Return of the repressed in media studies, in Culture, Society and the Media, edited by M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. Curran and J. Woollacott. New York: Methuen, 56–90. Hamelink, C. J., and Linné, O. (eds). 1994. Mass Communication Research: On Problems and Policies. The Art of Asking the Right Questions. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Harris, P. 1981. Reporting South Africa: Western News Agencies Reporting from Southern Africa. Paris: Unesco. Herman, E. and Chomsky, N. 1998. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon. Holman, D., Batt, R. and Holtgrewe, U. 2007. The Global Call Centre Report: International Perspectives on Management and Employment. Available at www.ilr.cornell.edu/ globalcallcenter/upload/GCC-Intl-Rept-UK-Version.pdf. Hong, Y. 2010. The politics of socialist harmonious society in the aftermath of neoliberalism. Chinese Journal of Communication, 3(3), 311–328. Huws, U. 2003. The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World. New York: Monthly Review Press. Marx, K. and Engels, F. 1998. The German Ideology. Amherst: Prometheus Books. Mattelart, A. and Siegelaub, S. (eds.) 1979. Communication and Class Struggle, Volume 1: Capitalism, Imperialism. New York: International General. Mattelart, A. and Siegelaub, S. (eds). 1983. Communication and Class Struggle, Volume 2: Liberation, Socialism. New York: International General. Mattelart, M. 1977. Création populaire et résistance au système des medias. Paper presented at the International Conference on Cultural Imperialism, Algiers, 11–15 October. McKercher, C. 2002. Newsworkers Unite: Labor, Convergence, and North American Newspapers. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Meehan, E. and Riordan, E. 2002. Sex and Money: Feminism and Political Economy in the Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Morini, C. 2007. The feminization of labour in cognitive capitalism. Feminist Review, 87, 40–59. Mosco, V. 2009. The Political Economy of Communication: Rethinking and Renewal, second edition. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Mosco, V. 2011. The political economy of labour, in The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications, edited by J. Wasko, G. Murdock and H. Sousa. Malden: WileyBlackwell, 358–351. Mosco, V. and McKercher, C. 2008. The Laboring of Communication: Will Knowledge Workers of the World Unite? Lanham: Lexington Books. Mosco, V., McKercher, C. and Huws, U. (eds.) 2010. Getting the Message: Communications Workers and Global Value Chains. London: Merlin Press. Mosco, V., McKercher, C. and Stevens, A. 2007. Convergences: Elements of a feminist political economy of labour and communication, in Feminist Interventions in International Communication: Minding the Gap, edited by K. Sarikakis and L. Shade. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 207–223. Mosco, V. and Wasko, J. (eds.) 1983. The Critical Communications Review. Volume I: Labor, the Working Class, and the Media. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Murdock, G. 1978. Blindspots about Western Marxism: A reply to Dallas Smythe. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 2(2), 109–119. Murdock, G. 1982. Large corporations and the control of the communications industries, in Culture, Society and the Media, edited by M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. Curran and J. Woollacott. London: Methuen, 114–147. Murdock, G. 1989a. Cultural studies: Missing links. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 6(4), 436–440. Murdock, G. 1989b. Critical inquiry and audience activity, in Rethinking Communication Volume II: Paradigm Exemplars, edited by B. Dervin, L. Grossberg, B. O’Keefe and E. Wartella. Newbury Park: Sage, 226–249. Murdock, G. 2004. Past the posts: Rethinking change, retrieving critique. European Journal of Communication, 19(1), 19–38. Murdock, G. 2011. Political economies as moral economies, in The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications, edited by J. Wasko, G. Murdock and H. Sousa. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 13–26. Murdock, G. and Golding, P. 1974. For a political economy of mass communications. Socialist Register, 10, 205–234. Murdock, G. and Golding, P. 1977. Capitalism, communication, and class relations, in Mass Communication and Society, edited by J. Curran, M. Gurevitch and J. Woollacott. London: Arnold, 12–43. Murdock, G. and Golding, P. 2004. Dismantling the digital divide: Rethinking the dynamics of participation and exclusion, in Towards a Political Economy of Culture: Capitalism and Communication in the Twenty-First Century, edited by A. Calabrese and C. Sparks. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 244–260. Murdock, G. and Janus, N. 1985. Mass Communication and the Advertising Industry: Reports and Papers on Mass Communication (No. 97). Paris: Unesco. Office of the Inspector General Oversight and Review Division. 2010. A Review of Federal Prison Industries’ Electronic-Waste Recycling Program. Available at www.justice.gov/ oig/reports/BOP/o1010.pdf. Park, L. and Pellow, D. 2002. The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy. New York: New York University Press.

The political economy of culture 181 Qiu, J. 2010. Network labour and non-elite knowledge workers in China. Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, 4(2), 80–95. Ross, A. 2000. The mental labor problem. Social Text, 18(2), 1–31. Schiller, D. 1996. Theorizing Communication: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shniad, S. 2007. Neo-liberalism and its impact in the telecommunications industry: One trade unionist’s perspective, in Knowledge Workers in the Information Society, edited by C. McKercher and V. Mosco. Lanham: Lexington Books, 299–310. Smythe, D. 1977. Communications: Blind spot of western Marxism. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 1(3), 1–27. Smythe, D. 1978. Rejoinder to Graham Murdock. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 2(2), 120–127. Stevens, A. and Mosco, V. 2010. Prospects for trade unions and labour organisations in India’s IT and ITES industries. Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, 4(2), 39–59. Terranova, T. 2004. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto. Tracy, J. 2011. Our union is not for sale: The postwar struggle for workplace control in the American newspaper industry, in A Moment of Danger: Critical Studies in the History of U.S. Communication Since World War II, edited by I. Stole and J. Peck. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 57–81. Tunstall, J. 1977. The Media are American. New York: Columbia University Press. Tunstall, J. and Walker, D. 1981. Media Made in California: Hollywood, Politics, and the News. New York: Oxford University Press. Urry, J. and Wakeford, J. (eds). 1973. Power in Britain. London: Heinemann. Wasko, J., Murdock, G. and Sousa, H. 2011. The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Webster, F. and Robins, K. 1979. Mass communications and ‘information technology’. Socialist Register, 285–316. Webster, F. and Robins, K. 1986. Information Technology: A Luddite Analysis. Norwood: Ablex. Winseck, D. and Jin, D. (eds.) 2011. The Political Economies of Media: The Transformation of the Global Media Industries. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

8

Them and Us in contemporary Cultural Studies Julian Stallabrass, Mike Wayne, Ben Watson David Renton

When Marxists of the generation of Jack Lindsay imagined the change for which they were striving, they thought about three great forces which gave them hope. One was revolution in the Soviet Union, China and Cuba. A second was the progress of parliamentary communism in western Europe, exemplified by the electoral successes of the French and Italian Communist Parties in the post-war period. (The British Communist Party won two parliamentary seats in the 1945 election and for a time aspired to become a major electoral force.) A third force was working-class struggle, typified by strikes in giant workplaces, which enabled Marxists and others to imagine the working class in charge. As one Labour MP told the Tory MP R. A. Butler, ‘Your class is a class in decline; my class is the class of the future’ (quoted in Hobsbawm 2011: 362). By the early years of this century, the Russian elites had long abandoned their previous ideological loyalty to Marxism and presided instead over an authoritarian state with a private economy. China was barely distinguishable. The Russian Revolution is no longer regarded as a model for the creation of a socialist society. Instead its history tends to be treated as a cautionary tale of what happens when a revolutionary regime becomes isolated.1 By 2000, Communism in Europe was doing little better than Communism in the USSR. Eric Hobsbawm evoked the nature of the defeat: ‘My opinion of the French Communist Party since 1945 had never been high, and I had long regarded its leadership under Georges Marchais as a disaster, yet it would be dishonest of me not to admit that its decline from the greater mass Party of the French working class to a rump of less than 4 per cent of voters caused an old communist pain’ (Hobsbawm 2002: 334).2 For independent-minded socialists with less loyalty to Russia, the greatest tragedy of all has been the demise of the countless workplaces in every large town and city engaged in primary production, engineering and industrial manufacture. Work of this sort still happens, of course, but there are many fewer workers in the factories (at least in the Western hemisphere), the jobs have been relocated, and the new workers working in their place do not yet share the habits of collective solidarity which gave the idea of revolution an obvious class reference. From the demise of these traditions and these people, it might follow that the situation of all humanity is absolutely without hope. Any revolutionaries are like

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Wile E. Coyote, with our bodies suspended in mid-air and our legs frantically turning. In the time left to us, there is no prospect save descent into the canyon. Certainly, this has been the usual message of popular culture: that we are beyond the end of history (Fukuyama 1989; Callinicos 1991), and that any question of capitalism’s intrinsic worth or otherwise has been settled decisively in capital’s favour (Fisher 2009). There is nothing for any of us to do other than buy.3 The cultural innovations of the past two decades, the Internet,4 corporate branding (Klein 2000), new music (Hatherley 2008a), video films (Barker 1984), computer games, quasi-modernist architecture (Hatherley 2008b), 3G and 4G digital media, Web 2.0 etc. are portrayed as revolutions of consumption. History is reduced to a series of chances to shop. The most interesting contemporary writers are those who point to resources of hope which might enable us to avoid this diminished future. This chapter focuses on three of them, Julian Stallabrass, Mike Wayne and Ben Watson. Stallabrass, Wayne and Watson are by no means the only contemporary Marxist critics whose work is worth reading. Others such as Esther Leslie, China Miéville, Matthew Beaumont and Nina Power have also made important contributions to our understanding of modern culture. Nevertheless, Stallabrass, Wayne and Watson are singled out for examination here because their writings are characterized by an unusual degree of theoretical ambition.

Julian Stallabrass Julian Stallabrass is an art historian, photographer,5 curator and member of the editorial board of the journal New Left Review.6 His first major book, Gargantua,7 surveys a series of visual mass media, including television, advertising and the design of cars and of shopping malls. Each of these forms is described as a stage in the triumph of commercialization over deep human need. This is how Stallabrass portrays digital amateur photography – for example, a form which prizes equipment and technological features over any real control over the final image: Photography, in potentially losing its veracity while retaining its power of resemblance, takes something away from all of us, and brings closer the postmodern nightmare in which people are mere conglomeration of signs, to be exchanged, altered, or dispersed. (Stallabrass 1996: 37) Gargantua contrasts the futility of amateur photography to the utility of professional photography, a style which eschews the accumulation ‘features’ (the term of the mid-1990s; today it would be ‘apps’), in favour of reliance on skill and the naked eye. The point is backed up in the book by a series of thirty-five of the author’s own photographs taken over the preceding years in Haringey, Battersea and Islington and outside Britain. They include sunsets photographed through terrace windows, decaying cars, and gamers in a condition of trance-like devotion to their consoles (see images 1, 2 and 5–8 in Stallabrass 1996). The most interesting

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of the images give a fresh life to discarded waste objects (i.e. materials liberated from the exchange cycle): a discarded toy parrot, a broken Moulinex vacuum cleaner, a prostitute’s card beside a scrunched up newspaper (see images 2, 19 and 27 in Stallabrass 1996). Some of these waste images are reminiscent of Picasso’s use of rubbish in sculpture, as for example his model of a female monkey, her face made from one of Picasso’s children’s discarded toy cars.8 But Stallabrass has not ‘merely’ found beauty in discarded things; the images also include the decaying and sinister face of a Mickey Mouse doll emerging from the dirt, a decaying woman’s supplement and fading newspaper print (see images 23, 31 and 32 in Stallabrass 1996). Stallabrass does not just celebrate rubbish; he envisages a stillcontingent future in which consumerism might yet have lost its hold. Gargantua is contemptuous of the cyberspace fad, which Stallabrass terms ‘a literal expression of the situation of the individual in contemporary society, and more specifically of business people and their camp followers spinning universalizing fantasies out of their desire to ride the next commercial wave’ (Stallabrass 1996: 77). Stallabrass also finds little hope in the popularity of computer games, which he summarizes in a reference to an image from the film Terminator 2: ‘the jarring crunch of a human skull under the bright chrome of a robot foot’ (Stallabrass 1996: 110). Beneath all these examples is a common critique, which could be restated as follows. In most epochs of human civilisation, technological advance represents an increase in the collective ability of people to lead fulfilled lives: the stagecoach was an advance on the horse; canals were an advance on the stagecoach; rail was an advance on canals (see Beaumont 2008). Under conditions of late capitalism, superficial innovation marks a deeper stagnation of our general power to live creatively in our world. The car (whose design takes up another chapter of Gargantua) isolates, pollutes and diminishes people’s interaction with the cities in which they live. The transition from rail to the car is a retreat – not an advance – on the path to collective freedom. Stallabrass’s next major book, High Art Lite, is a study of the Young British Artists of the 1990s. Again, his general approach is to emphasize the shallowness of their art, the self-boostering of which the collectors and curators have been guilty, and the absence in the art of any critique of contemporary society: ‘The majority of artists purveying high art lite’, he writes ‘have been content to play the well-remunerated role of court dwarf’ (Stallabrass 1999: 295). High Art Lite describes the art of Damien Hirst, famous for placing a shark’s body in a tank full of formaldehyde: Hirst exemplifies the ‘death (and resurrection) of the author’ in a particularly clear fashion. In the first stage, the artists expressed universal themes in traditional works of art, but those themes are banal and instantly recognisable, like clichés in advertising. Being accessible, suitable for illustration in lifestyle magazines, it is an art that by necessity requires instant recognition and works using short cuts. Then, gradually, the clichés become associated less with their ostensible content and more with the figure of the artist himself, so

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that cigarettes, for instance, become a sign not of life and death but of Hirst’s media profile. . . . Hirst says of his shark: ‘You kill things to look at them. . . . You expect it to look back at you. I hope at first glance it will look alive.’ And the resurrection of the artists is similar; a half-life only, like that of the zombies and vampires of his beloved horror films. As many writers pointed out on seeing the shark on display at the Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition, after years in storage, it looked tired, patched up in places, less alive than when it was freshly in its tank. So with the artist: no longer the font of expressive feeling, or a site of conflicting impulses, but rather a media image from which the work is by no means clearly separated. (Stallabrass 1999: 31–32)9 At the start of the new millennium, Stallabrass published an important book on the phenomenon of Internet art. As before, Stallabrass is alive to the Net’s capacity to recreate hierarchy: The Internet is the overarching network of the many public networks of connected computers. The first computer network was established between a few machines used in academic and government institutions in the United States from the late 1960s. As is well known, the Internet, if not exactly invented for warfare, was sold to state funders as a defence system, designed to maintain government and military communications during nuclear war. If a communication structure is centralised and hierarchical, with a hub serving many nodes that branch from it like the spokes of a wheel, destroying that centre destroys the entire network. In contrast, if no single node in the system is more important than any other, and all are capable of routing messages independently, then even if the majority of nodes are destroyed, the system will continue to function, routing messages around the damage. (Stallabrass 2003: 16) But here the story of business moving into the Net, introducing hierarchies, and publicising and selling things is intermeshed with a new emphasis on the capacity of digital space to produce (albeit only occasionally) truly extraordinary art. One opening to the latter, Stallabrass insists, is the new and enhanced capacity the Internet provides for artists to work together.10 There has also been a fruitful relationship between online art and activism. Online art chooses to avoid the mainstream market to which online artists are largely hostile. One of the examples given by Stallabrass concerns the group ®™Mark, who became part of the inner sanctum of modern American art when they were selected for the Whitney Biennial in 2000. The ®™Mark collective responded by auctioning their invite on eBay; they refused to play the art world’s game. Another collective, ‘etoy’, was challenged by a corporation, ‘Etoys’, who accused them of identity theft. They responded by cyber-squatting the ‘Etoys’ website, causing the company eventually to fold. The ®™Mark and etoy stories are ones to which Stallabrass has returned more than once. So too is another example of political protest, a 1996 Reclaim the

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Streets protest on the Westway,11 ‘where activists with huge hoop skirts on stilts sort were wandering about the closed down motorway. A huge sound system was playing, so it was very difficult to hear what was going on underneath the skirts. And what was going on was that they were digging up the road with drills and planting trees’. For Stallabrass, this action epitomizes the ideal merging of art and politics – a righteous and timely assault against the cultural economy of late capitalism (see Simoniti 2010): ‘I am inspired by the idea that we might use cultural innovation for political effect, that we can have demonstrations and can have fun at the same time’.12 In 2008, Stallabrass curated the Brighton Photo Biennial.13 The keynote exhibition, ‘Iraq through the lens of Vietnam’, compared the two wars in terms of a growing tendency for states to torture, and the effectiveness of photography as a means of galvanising anti-war activism. Images seemed to be less effective mobilisers, Stallabrass noted, than they had been. This shift he explained in terms of the effectiveness of coalition policy of embedding journalists among their soldiers; the coalition repression of ‘unilaterals’ (journalists who operate independently and do not travel with the armed forces); the planning of images of war by the Pentagon; and the diminished independence of a news media debilitated by the rise of ‘churnalism’ (Davies 2009: 69–70) and the decline of weekly news magazines in particular. The last missing ingredient, Stallabrass wrote, was ‘an opposition with a coherent world view, that could assemble the evidence – words, picture and video – into a condemnation of the war that could not be ignored’ (Stallabrass 2008). The theme of Stallabrass’s latest book, Art Incorporated, is that capitalism degrades art.14 Our general notion of art distinguishes it from mass production. The latter is produced by machine, and its quality is degraded by the search for a mass audience. By contrast, art is hand-made and free from focus groups and advertising, and it is generated by an avant-garde of artists working autonomously in search of something new. Yet even the avant-garde, Stallabrass insists, is compromised by corporate interests: ‘The economy functions strictly and instrumentally according to iron conventions, imposed unequally on nations by the great transnational economic bodies; it establishes hierarchies of wealth and power; it enforces on the vast majority a timetabled and regulated working life’ (Stallabrass 2004: 2–3).15 Fine art might have the allure of autonomous production; the space for free art is however being constantly diminished. Art is produced for a market utterly dominated by the Western rich. Its emphasis on novelty and provocation, while ostensibly immune from assimilation into market capitalism, is in fact an emulation of the continual evaporation of certainties produced by capital. ‘It is possible’, Stallabrass concludes, ‘to see free trade and free art not as opposing terms but rather as forming respectively a dominant system and its supplement’ (Stallabrass 2004: 17). Art, in other words, is not opposed to but implicit in the authoritarianism of late capitalism.16 It is if course deeply unfashionable for any contemporary writer to end a work ‘pessimistically’ – that is, by emphasising the constant capacity of capitalism to absorb the avant-garde.17 But sometimes in life pessimism is the best route to

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finding a deeper resource of hope.18 The chief point to take from Stallabrass is that contemporary mass culture is redeemed only at the margins; if we are all to live co-operatively, it will only be as a result of revolutionary political change.

Mike Wayne Mike Wayne is a historian of cinema and documentary maker.19 Born to a Jewish family, and the grandchild of refugees from Tsarist Russia (Wayne 2012a), Wayne’s uncle Wolf was a founding member of the 43 Group of Jewish ex-servicemen who harried Oswald Mosley’s British fascists after 1945 and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain until its demise in 1991.20 Mike Wayne was a student from 1985 to 1988 and has described the liberating effect of studying film at the Polytechnic of North London,21 an institution then in the news because of the students’ campaign to exclude a student called Patrick Harrington who belonged to the neo-fascist National Front.22 In Wayne’s work there is a recurring defence of the university as a part of the public sector and subject to the same public service ethos as (for example) public sector broadcasting.23 These politics lead him (along with Ben Watson, although in Watson’s case for different reasons)24 to a defence of the Frankfurt School writers of inter-war Europe, such as Theodor Adorno, who criticized popular music for its sham populism (and has been criticized, ever since, as a supposed ‘cultural elitist’): While some contemporary theorists are tempted to dismiss Adorno and Horkheimer as excessively pedestrian and prone to elitism, their critique should instead stand as a salutary reminder that concepts of diversity, subversion and resistance, which are today part of every ‘radical’ cultural theorist’s lexicon, are also the stock-in-trade of capitalist mass culture and its endless self-promotion. (Wayne 2005a: 2) Marxism plays a role in Wayne’s thinking as a bridge towards politica l activism; it is distinguished from competitor philosophical approaches such as postmodernism by its refusal to bow to the prevailing orthodoxy of endless consumerism: If postmodernism has an economic underpinning, it is in the increasing role played by information technologies in production and the attraction to capital of investing in the hardware and software of cultural consumption. (Wayne 2005a: 18) Marxism provides, potentially, a substantive antagonist to those socioeconomic relations in their dominant form (capitalism) at a time of much conformism and resignation. (Wayne 2005a: 31–32)

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Wayne became a Marxist at university: ‘The Socialist Workers Party was very strong as was the Revolutionary Communist Party. . . . I was involved in occupations and wrote for the student magazine. The miners’ strike had just finished as well. I became a Marxist in those years; it became very clear to me that there was a class struggle’. He retains a guarded affection for the organised left: ‘I’ve never been attracted to Labour. I read the SWP publications but I don’t want to join’ (Wayne 2012a). One example of how Wayne has used these ideas as a cultural critic is provided by an essay he published in 2005, reflecting on the politics of American films such as Dog Day Afternoon and The Matrix through the work of the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson. Jameson found in the first of these films a coded message of generalized human defeat. The airport (to which Al Pacino’s bank robber Sonny is desperate to escape) Jameson read as a signifier of the impending globalized economic order. Sonny, the bank robber, cannot get there, because his rival, the FBI chief Sheldon, is better self-controlled, a sleeker and more efficient worker.25 Jameson applied similar ideas to The Matrix, reading the connected space of its title and its modernist aesthetic as the universal privatized space of globalized capitalism. Wayne adopts Jameson’s reading but takes it further, focussing on the paranoia of the film. Paranoia, he observes, is a recurring theme of contemporary life; it is an idea which ostensibly challenges existing elites, but by displacing the nature of the problems of late capitalist life onto the existence of small groups (the Jews, or David Icke’s shape-shifting aliens) it leaves existing power structures intact: The connection of young people to trade unions is very attenuated. The resources for a socialist critique of capitalism have been weakened. What’s filled its place, to a very large extent, are paranoiac beliefs, including the idea that there really is a very small group of people meeting in boardrooms and controlling the levers. People have a sceptical notion, and articulate anxieties about late capitalism, that corporations are malevolent forces shaping every aspect of their lives. Paranoia as a model for explaining the world is particularly popular among the most marginalized of the working class. Their access to education has got worse over the last 30 years. (Author interview with Mike Wayne, 20 March 2012) Matrix-era paranoia and postmodernism are portrayed by Wayne as similar: each denies that any group of people is capable of effective action save for the global rich. This in turn begs the question of whether humanity is already living in a state of utter absorption into the market – that is, a position akin to that of The Matrix. Wayne concludes: not yet; ‘[p]erhaps postmodernism . . . is a warning. But we have not arrived there yet. There is still some time to make sure we never do’ (Wayne 2005b: 125). Mike Wayne’s 2001 book, Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema, is a study of a series of films, including Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, which share a common starting reference point: the inequality between the West and the

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Third World. Ali, the protagonist of Battle of Algiers, is a petty criminal and illiterate who becomes a fighter for national liberation. The film ends in the 1960s with mass protests which will inevitably bring French colonial rule to an end. Wayne shows how the film both absorbs and surpasses narrative conventions drawn from previous waves of American and European cinema. Ali is at times a Hollywoodstyle hard-man; the style of the film is minimalist in common with European cinema. ‘Third Cinema’, writes Wayne, ‘is a utopian cinema, anticipating radical change, harbouring its potential in the present and remembering where it has flowered in the past’ (Wayne 2001: 11). Part of the purpose of Wayne’s book was to remind readers of the emancipatory potential of national liberation struggles. Wayne’s best-known film, Listen to Venezuela (2008), made with his partner Deirdre O’Neill, tells the story of the Venezuelan revolution through a series of interviews with rank-and-file activists. Its theme, as is apparent from the title, is to emphasize the revolution’s success: You have to achieve state power to achieve anything. But once you get there, there are all sorts of difficulties. What I think is underappreciated about the Venezuelan revolution is that it is democratic at different levels. Venezuela has formal democracy; it is also making experiments in popular democracy. The community councils and the workers’ co-ops are still going on. They are potential seeds of a much more substantive democracy. The language of direct democracy and Marxism is part of popular language in Venezuela. (Wayne 2012a) This emphasis on the success of the revolution in Venezuela takes Wayne away from his closest allies in Britain, who tend to be more sceptical of the revolution: There’s a sense in the SWP that if only Chávez was a bit more revolutionary, everything would be ok. In a real revolutionary context it’s never that easy. You don’t start from a blank sheet of paper. You start from a hundred-year history which has left all sorts of problem. My sense was that millions of people had been brought into politics and Marxism was the common currency. (Wayne 2012a) A further illustration of Wayne’s approach can be found in an article he published in 2007, ‘Theses on Realism and Film’, reflecting on the inter-war debate among left-wing artists as to whether or not political art should be produced according to the conventions of ‘realism’. There have been two main answers. One, which was the usual approach of writers associated with the Communist International (Zhdanov, Lukács), was to insist that all left-wing art should be realist or even ‘socialist realist’ in approach: that is, presenting life as it was, the suggestion being that, if workers were made to confront the reality of their subordination, they would inevitably resist that reality.26 During the inter-war years, independent-minded socialists (including the Surrealists, Diego Rivera and Bertolt Brecht) tended to argue that only art which eschewed the illusion of realism and

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was conscious of its own artistic autonomy could persuade most people to confront the absurdities of day-to-day life. In ‘Theses on Realism and Film’, Wayne maps out a position of his own. In common with Lukács, he argues that realism is a ‘central . . . philosophical principle’ – that is, a position that Marxists must support. Art influenced by realism is needed to retune ‘our perceptions of life that have become dulled by the routines and habits of an alienated world’. Wayne then comes closer to Brecht, in arguing that realism requires an innovative approach towards form (i.e. opposition to naturalism and socialist realism) and that anti-realism is often the preliminary to a deeper realism. The examples given by Wayne to illustrate his approach are films which millions have seen: 28 Days Later, Run Lola Run and Land and Freedom. ‘Theses on Realism and Film’ ends by invoking Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, and in particular the scene in which Spurlock makes himself so ill by over-eating that he is forced to vomit up his own food. Wayne sees in this episode of the film both a good example of the engaged, fantastic realism for which he argues and a lesson of general application about how capitalism can distort even something as basic as the simple human need to eat. With Spurlock’s film in mind, he writes: Realism must inevitably be reflexive, not in a narrow stylistic sense, but in the sense that it explores the relation between consciousness and its material ground. When social being is conflictual and contradictory, when what we do (e.g. harm ourselves with the food we eat) and what we aim at (e.g. stay alive by taking daily intakes of nourishment) part company so systematically, then consciousness and social being also become estranged. The goal of a critical, dynamic realism is to spin some connecting webs that pull consciousness and social being closer together. (Wayne 2007) This, we can observe, is also Stallabrass’s argument: capitalism makes more and more things; the things which are produced make people less and less free.

Ben Watson Unlike Stallabrass and Wayne, who are professors at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Brunel University respectively, Ben Watson is an independent (i.e. freelance) writer and indexer of books. Watson is also a novelist and a poet (under the pen-name Out to Lunch), and since 2002 he has hosted a weekly programme on Resonance Radio.27 The resources of hope on which he chiefly draws are the theories of Theodor Adorno, the music of Frank Zappa, rubbish and its relationship to capitalism, sadomasochistic sex, and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Taking Adorno first, Watson’s book Adorno for Revolutionaries uses Adorno as an authority to argue for the desirability of a kind of fused cultural and political activism. Watson sees (Clash-era) punk and free improvisation (the jazz of Derek Bailey, or its counterpart in rock, the music of Frank Zappa)28 as music which

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trusts the instincts and is therefore a short and direct route to the politics which is needed to change the world. These artists cut away the ballast of inherited culture; they constantly show the potential of people to resist and to make themselves free. Watson quotes Adorno as a revolutionary: Even the best-intentioned reformers who use an impoverished and debased language to recommend renewal, strengthen the very power to the established order they are trying to break. (Watson 2011a: 5) Watson cites Adorno as an opponent of capitalism’s absorption of the avant-garde: Anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in. Once his particular band of deviation from the norm has been noted by the industry, he belongs to it as the social-reformer does to capitalism. Realistic dissidence is the trademark of anyone who has a new idea in business. (Watson 2011a: 6) Watson also quotes Adorno as a champion of musical, and generalized, freedom: Only music which is in control of itself would be in control of its own freedom from every compulsion even its own. This would be on the analogy with the argument that only in a rationally organised society would the elimination of scarcity lead to the disappearance of organisation as a form of oppression. (Watson 2011a: 21) It is not entirely clear whether Watson’s writings on such post-war forms as punk and free jazz genuinely represent an extension of Adorno’s ideas. As Watson has accepted elsewhere, Adorno’s writings on music end in the era of Mahler and Schoenberg; Adorno writes directly about ‘jazz’ but did not survive to write about ‘popular music’ in which the contradiction of popular access and commercialized content operates more urgently than ever before.29 But if Adorno is expendable, the true kernel of Watson’s theory is his insight that some forms of popular culture have been a resource tending against market liberalism. ‘Punk’, in particular, ‘refurbished chart music and mass celebrity as potential sites for critique, bringing back into social dialogue drives and ambitions which would otherwise have been driven underground into daydreams, classical revolutionary politics or backwater academia’.30 It is impossible to read Watson without being reminded of the anger of the Clash and the Sex Pistols (two bands he cites frequently), of the Gang of Four, of the Dead Kennedys (the Clash’s American progeny) or of the punk utopianism of films such as Penelope Spheeris’s Suburbia, let alone the utopianism of sporting genius: Dalglish’s agile turn, Ovett’s red top, Viv Richards’s swagger. This insurrectionary potential in popular culture is not reducible to some dreary cod-Marxist formulation to the

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effect that ‘popular culture is a potential auxiliary of the revolution’. Culture is rather an actuality of revolt. When Watson began to publish on Frank Zappa, his choice of material discomforted a number of his comrades (see Watson 2011a: 198). Watson’s answer to them was that Zappa was engaged in a sustained polemic against the pieties of liberal America. In 1968, when Zappa sang ‘We’re only in it for the money’ (making a pastiche of the Sergeant Pepper-era Beatles), he was pointing to a basic truth, that music is impossible under capitalism on any other basis than commercially, and it is more honest to acknowledge this than to pretend that music is being made for any other reason (Watson 1998: 19). ‘Greed’, Watson reminds us, is a more complex vice than it is presented in such liberal homilies as Wall Street.31 Striking workers may be greedy,32 but their ‘avarice’ tends to corrode the prevailing class hierarchies.33 Watson argues that Zappa relished physical and carnal pleasure (‘invention, spontaneity and play’)34 and wanted his audience to share his enjoyment of them. He cites Zappa’s 1971 album, Just Another Band from LA: ‘[I]t’s fucking great to be alive, and if there’s anyone here who doesn’t think it’s fucking great to be alive, I wish they would go right now because this show will bring them down so much’ (Watson 2012a). At several points in his work, Watson has commented on the presence in Zappa’s music of recurring images of the poodle. It is not just Zappa, Watson observes, who made use of this particular dog. In Goethe’s Faust, the protagonist’s nemesis is a large, black, shaggy poodle. Faust’s assistant Wagner says, ‘I saw him long ago, but I didn’t think it was important’ (Out to Lunch 1994: 2). Faust tells the poodle to make noise. Faust then has difficulty translating the Greek of St John’s Gospel. Faust tries to write the phrase ‘In the beginning was the word’ but finds himself incapable of finishing it. He starts to write, ‘In the beginning was the deed’ – the poodle barks approvingly. The poodle then rises and takes the shape of Mephistopheles (i.e. pure libidinous energy). ‘Faust has aroused himself with the thoughts of action, the idea that the Deed rather than the Word might be the first principle; the poodle here is surely his risen phallus – the voice of nature standing out against the intellect’ (Out to Lunch 1994: 3). It is the same energy of course which Watson finds in punk and free improvisation. As for rubbish, this is a recurring device Ben Watson uses to relate cultural production to the famous circuits of commodity exchange studied by Marx. ‘When writing refuses to give up meaning, it is like a commodity without exchange value; we become archaeologists sifting the royal midden, A. J. Weberman pouring over Bob Dylan’s garbage’ (Out to Lunch 1996: 1). In more than one work, Watson has quoted the Cambridge poet Jeremy (J. H.) Prynne in praise of wasted things: Rubbish is pertinent; essential; the most intricate presence in our entire culture; the ultimate sexual point of the whole place turned into a model question.35 We can see a similar step at work in Stallabrass’s photographs of discarded things, or indeed in the work of the philosopher of rubbish John Scanlon for

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whom waste (or, his preferred term, ‘garbage’) represents a continuous habit of the wasting of knowledge. Western technology, he argues, has established itself by a continuous process of self-cleansing, expressed in not merely the disposal of redundant objects but also the separation of the mind from the natural. Thus waste becomes the terrain of what is outside material and intellectual production (and what has to be brought into it); waste is the source of all that counts.36 There is a clear family resemblance between Scanlon’s approach to rubbish and Watson’s defence of punk and free improvisation as forms of music which cut away the accumulated ignorance of ages and return us to what is instinctive and therefore right. Sex fulfils a similar function in Watson’s work, where it is associated with primitive psychic forces lying beneath the barren relationships of exchange associated with class society. ‘Libidinal gratification’ is counterposed to ‘organised culture’ (Watson and Leslie 2012). Here are just a few examples of a recurring theme of Watson’s writing: Writing must be raided for irreducible documentation of the lie in high culture, the physical bottom to elevated discourse, the libido that bursts in language when it most denies it. (Out to Lunch 1987: 2) Sadomasochism relates to modernism because both insist on abstraction and reversal, the delight of a practice that both summarizes contemporary behaviour and puts itself beyond the pale. Ideology would hold us ever grateful for the freedom to choose between brands of exploitation. The practice of sadomasochism reveals the arbitrary nature of our constituted place in the structures of domination that mask themselves as communication: in ‘ourselves’ we are nothing, anything – only social limitations allow us to be what we are. (Out to Lunch 1987: 38) Breezeblocks, fork-lift trucks, a tumulus of tomes: the weightiness of discourse is the librarian’s hernia and the student’s lament. Another slab from the fab lab. It’s like trying to strangle a skinhead in a dream. The juice keeps flowing despite the damned slab that ought to stem the dribbling tide, the asphalt rolled on the quivering matter. (Out to Lunch 1994: 1)37 Watson’s writing, as was once said of the novelist Jack Kerouac, ‘is hostile to civilisation’ – he ‘worships primitivism, instinct, energy, blood’ (Podhoretz 2007). Finally, as for the Socialist Workers Party, Ben Watson was a member of that party for twenty-five years from 1978 to 2003. He was active in the SWP in Cambridge, Leeds and Camden and helped to organise the Leeds Rock Against Racism carnival in 1981. He has described how he was influenced by SWP theorists such as Tony Cliff and Chris Harman, who sustained a systematic anti-Stalinist politics through the long years of the Cold War. He has also described his debt to various

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dissident members of the SWP such as David Widgery38 and Peter Sedgwick, who placed a greater emphasis on a quasi-libertarian (‘workerist’) politics, and who (unlike Cliff or Harman) developed a Brechtian cultural politics. Watson left the SWP in 2003 and has recently been associated with a dissident group of exmembers who belong to the Association of Musical Marxists (AMM).39 AMM’s goal is to re-establish a space in British political culture for the SWP’s authentic dissident traditions.

The limits of cultural Marxism It will be clear from the above summaries that there are as many ways of doing ‘Marxist cultural studies’ in contemporary Britain as there are cultural Marxists. Julian Stallabrass, Mike Wayne and Ben Watson find in popular culture different reasons to hope. They even differ as to the extent to which they look for hope; Stallabrass’s relentless critique of capitalist incorporation is at a different point of the spectrum from Watson’s activist Marxism, for which the critique of degraded mass culture is assumed to be so obvious that it is barely worthy of comment. That said, when their writings are seen together, what emerges is a single, contested and vital project; a shared attempt to look beyond the limit of the present. Yet it is worth being honest about the limits of their achievement. When the Russian Revolution happened, it changed human history, and in ways indeed that are still working themselves out. The events of 1917 set a template for revolution which was so powerful that it dominated the thinking of radicals of all sorts for the next seventy years. Indeed, the left has still not recovered from the trauma of the Soviet Union’s demise. Really, one cannot help but thinking, if the Russian Revolution was wrong, Western Communism was a false turn, and the working class is dead, how could phenomena as transient as ®™Mark, Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, or ‘London’s Burning’ have found any sort of alternative hope? ‘We are in an age of revolutions’, Stallabrass counters, ‘admittedly revolutions against more dictatorial regimes than capital, but by and large dictatorships which had the backing of, and helped to prop up, the West’.40 Another answer is that any successful revolution will be a movement of living breathing, and hopeful people. In order to guard against setbacks (which all movements face), those engaged in revolution will have to believe that there is a genuine alternative to the status quo. Some of this is inevitably about the creation of generalized utopias (Marxism, Communism etc.), and some of this is inevitably about the self-idealisation of people: the sans-culottes of 1789 or the workers and soldiers of 1917. The occasional utopianism of popular culture operates between these two categories. It provides an imaginative fabric so that people can re-envisage the detail of their own lives and retell it as a story tending from personal resistance to general rebellion. I have put this conception of culture to each of the three writers studied in this piece. For Stallabrass, cultural criticism is not in its first movement an opportunity to unite, so much as a chance to break asunder the visual culture that sustains capitalism. ‘Our whole social order is saturated with culture. Everything is designed,

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everything is sold through advertising. We are surrounded by photography, by cultural effects. They invade urban space in particular’.41 The cultural critic brings out what is already a half-grasped popular critique of the false metaphors that underlie advertising, ideology and so forth. An engaged public is better able to resist. Mike Wayne is more enthusiastic: ‘Culture provides an imaginative map by which the individual can link themselves to a wider collective . . . that of course requires a debate that can distinguish between when metaphor is working well (critical communication in a sensual imaginative form) and when it “fails” ’.42 ‘You can’t have socialism without a huge improvement in people’s understanding of themselves and their world’, Wayne continues. Social consciousness, which Gramsci understood, is when people get to an understanding of the world around them. Unless they do that, it will always be someone else doing it for them, in which case you haven’t got a socialist revolution. The attraction to socialists of culture has always been its democratic inclusiveness. it is a place where you can mull over things, join things up and see the world in a different way. (Wayne 2012a) Ben Watson suggests that the true picture is rather simpler: ‘My cultural heroes are people who fight against capitalism. It doesn’t matter to me whether they were doing it in music or wherever; they have the same enemies as me’.43

Notes 1 Key texts include Trotsky 1972; Cliff 1975. 2 For younger Marxists, the near suicide of Communist Refoundation in Italy in 2004–2008 has caused similar sadness. 3 I discuss the attrition of public space in Renton 2003a. 4 ‘All sorts of individuals and companies are betting their futures on building components for the interactive network. I call it the Internet Gold Rush’ (Gates 1996, quoted in Renton 2002a). 5 Stallabrass’s artistic practice began in the early 1980s during a trip to the Soviet Union. ‘One of the things that struck me about the USSR was how little visual propaganda there was. The streets were incredibly bare. They were without the exhortations we face all the time. The weight of the commercial propaganda wasn’t there’ (Interview with Julian Stallabrass, 11 February 2012). 6 Stallabrass acknowledges the influence of other members of this collective including the New Left Review’s fellow art historian Malcolm Bull. See Marshall 2004. 7 ‘Gargantua’, first named in a sixteenth-century novel by the satirist Rabelais, is a giant of enormous appetite; in Stallabrass’s metaphor the giant stands for the totalising appetites of corporate culture. 8 See Penrose 2010: 33. Also, for rubbish as a process, see Alÿs 2010: 51, 69, 147. 9 Cf. the Marxist defence of the Young British Artists that appears in the work of Stallabrass’s contemporary John Molyneux. See Molyneux 1998; Molyneux 2005. 10 There is a similar message in Stallabrass’s commendation of the anti-war writings of the Retort collective. See Stallabrass 2006.

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11 The Clash, one of Watson’s key reference points, grew up in the vicinity of the Westway, and this stretch of road provides the title of Don Letts’s 2000 biopic of the band, Westway to the World. 12 Interview with Julian Stallabrass, 11 February 2012. 13 The biennial was publicised via a website, 2008.bpb.org.uk/2008/, onto which fresh content was still being added as recently as summer 2011. 14 One of the drawbacks of this approach is that it tends to emphasize the sociological limitations of liberated art over the interventions of the individual artist. This is a point acknowledged by Stallabrass himself: ‘One of the drawbacks to the sorts of analysis I do tends to be that all the complexities, personal motivations and particular histories and so on of the single person’s work may get flattened by that analysis. That’s right, but there are certain things you can only see by looking at them in that way’. See Marshall 2004. 15 Art Incorporated was also published as Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 16 Cf. Murphy 2012. 17 Nina Power, in a similar vein to Stallabrass, criticizes the ‘deflationary acceptance’ of feminism under conditions of late capitalism; vacuous optimism is tolerable, in this account, because it guts a revolutionary impulse of its original radical edge. See Power 2009: 61–67. 18 Ben Watson makes this point by comparing the Marxism of 1883–1914, which promised the inevitable destruction of capitalism, with the Marxism that followed it, for which liberation was never more than a contingent chance. Only the latter produced a successful revolution (1917). See Watson 2012a. 19 His films include Listen to Venezuela (2009 [http://www.listentovenezuela.info]) and The Condition of the Working Class in England (2012 [http://www.conditionofthework ingclass.info]). 20 For Wolfe Wayne, see Morgan 2011; Wayne 2011. For the 43 Group, see Beckman 1992; Renton 2000. 21 ‘PNL politicised me. I hadn’t done fantastically well at school. I found the institution of school fairly crushing. PNL unlocked doors in my mind. The power of education to change the world and how you see it has always been with me ever since’ (Mike Wayne). See Wayne 2012a. 22 ‘In film I was taught by Bob Barker, who was a Marxist and was probably the most influential teacher I had. On the English side, Malcolm Evans was a deconstructionist. I remember an early lecture in the first year, his deconstruction of a Times editorial on the Patrick Harrington case. It was an eye-opener’ (Mike Wayne). See Wayne 2012a. 23 ‘Television is currently poised between two modes of production, possibly a transitional moment where a strong residual public service ethos still animates cultural workers and commissioning editors in various departments within the broadcasting institutions, while at the same time it is increasingly interlocked within an emerging and rapidly dominating market-led television’ (Wayne 1998: 3). 24 Wayne’s approach to canonical writers is one of careful investigation, whereas in Watson’s Blake in Cambridge the central contradiction is between the malign ‘institutional thinkers’ of Cambridge and the benign ‘anti-authoritarian, almost comedic . . . defiantly amateur, ungainly’ milieu of the popular Protestant sect for whom Blake was writing (Watson 2012b: 2–4). 25 In Jameson’s original essay, this was explained by reference to Al Pacino’s outdated ‘method’ acting style, in contrast to James Broderick / the FBI agent Sheldon’s technocratic acting.

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26 Perhaps ironically, this genre of art tended to take the form of a neoclassical (i.e. unrealistic) style with a bizarre idealisation of the bodies of what were supposed to be representative workers – an art form which liberal critics have rightly compared to the neo-classicism of fascist art. 27 The best guide to Watson’s radio performances is Bamberger 2012. 28 See Watson 1994; Watson 2004. 29 Watson has admitted that his approach to Adorno is ‘provocative speculation’, continuing, ‘If so, such provocative speculation is just what we need right now’. See Watson 2011b. 30 See Watson and Leslie: n.d. A number of Watson’s articles on punk have been co-written with Esther Leslie, who appears in his novel Shit-Kicks and Dough-Balls (Watson 2003) as Esther Punk. Leslie is the author of key texts of cultural Marxism including Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Leslie 2005), Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde (Leslie 2002) and Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Leslie 2000). 31 Where, of course, the superficial critique of Gecko’s philosophy of ‘Greed is good’ is combined with the unmissable message that greed is also sexy and desirable. 32 Watson was shaped by the 1970s, when press stories of greedy strikers were pervasive. 33 Stallabrass compares Zappa to the art collective etoy, which protected itself by adopting the full persona of a corporation, by, for example, both issuing and trading share certificates. Its critique of corporatism involves more than mere ironic emulation (Interview with Julian Stallabrass, 11 February 2012). 34 See Watson 2012c. 35 These lines are quoted in Out to Lunch 1996: 1–2; and again in Watson 1994: 184. 36 See Scanlon 2005. There is a similar logic behind the title of China Miéville’s blog, ‘Rejectamentalist Manifesto’ (http://chinamieville.net/). 37 But why should libidinous politics only be the preserve of the far left? In a number of papers, Watson has drawn a comparison between the politics of punk and those of the pre-1914 British futurists in the magazine Blast. The best-known futurist was of course Wyndham Lewis, later the most prominent exponent of fascism among British artists. 38 For David Widgery, see Renton 2002b; Renton 2003b. 39 Ben Watson, Andy Wilson, and Keith Fisher of AMM are interviewed in ‘The AMM speaks to Germany’, http://www.unkant.com, 30 January 2012. 40 Interview with Julian Stallabrass, 11 February 2012. 41 Interview with Julian Stallabrass, 11 February 2012. 42 E-mail from Mike Wayne, 4 February 2012. Wayne develops the idea that metaphor can fail (as ideology) or succeed (as reflective judgment) in Wayne 2012b. 43 Interview with Ben Watson, 28 January 2012.

Bibliography Alÿs, F. 2010. A Story of Deception. London: Tate Publishing. Bamberger, W.C. 2012. Can radio be revolutionary? Some notes on Late Lunch with Out to Lunch. Perfect Sound Forever, February–March. Available at www.furious.com/perfect. Barker, M. (ed.) 1984. The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media. London: Pluto. Beaumont, M. 2008. The railway and literature: Realism and phantasmagoria, in The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam, edited by I. Kennedy and J. Treuherz. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 35–43. Beckman, M. 1992. The 43 Group. London: Centreprise.

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Callinicos, A. 1991. The Revenge of History: Marxism and the East European Revolutions. Cambridge: Polity. Cliff, T. 1975. State Capitalism in Russia. London: Pluto. Davies, N. 2009. Flat Earth News. London: Vintage. Fisher, M. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zero Books. Fukuyama, F. 1989. The end of history? The National Interest, Summer, 3–18. Gates, B. 1996. The Road Ahead. London: Penguin. Hatherley, O. 2008a. Uncommon. Ripley, Hampshire: Zero Books. Hatherley, O. 2008b. Militant Modernism. Ripley, Hampshire: Zero Books. Hobsbawm, E. 2002. Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life. London: Allen Lane. Hobsbawm, E. 2011. How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism. London: Little, Brown. Klein, N. 2000. No Logo. London: Flamingo. Leslie, E. 2000. Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism. London: Pluto. Leslie, E. 2002. Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde. London: Verso. Leslie, E. 2005. Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry. London: Reaktion. Marshall, R. 2004. Interview with Julian Stallabrass. 3am Magazine, May. Molyneux, J. 1998. State of the art. International Socialism Journal, 79, 79–104. Molyneux, J. 2005. Emin matters. International Socialism Journal, 106, 166–171. Morgan, D. 2011. In memory of Wolf Wayne. Socialist History Society Newsletter, May, 14. Murphy, S. 2012. The Ark Kettle. London: Zero Books. Out to Lunch [Ben Watson]. 1987. So Much Plotted Freedom: The Cost of Employing the Language of Fetishized Domination – Poodle Play Explores the Sex Economy of Henry James’ Lingo Jingo. London: Reality Studios. Out to Lunch [Ben Watson]. 1994. Faust’s Poodle Become Long and Broad: St. John, Wolfgang and the Shake of Jazz to Cum. London: Form Books. Out to Lunch [Ben Watson]. 1996. Knot You! J.H. Prynne’s Not-You Examined by Out to Lunch. London: Involution. Penrose, A. 2010. The Boy Who Bit Picasso. London: Thames and Hudson. Podhoretz, N. 2007. The know-nothing bohemians, in The Norman Podhoretz Reader, edited by T. L. Jeffers. London: Simon and Schister, 481–493. Power, N. 2009. One Dimensional Woman. London: Zero Books. Renton, D. 2000. Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s. London: Macmillan. Renton, D. 2002a. The end of the internet. What Next?, 24, 1–8. Renton, D. 2002b. The life and politics of David Widgery. Left History, 8(1), 7–31. Renton, D. 2003a. Economic globalisation versus social justice? Rosa Luxemburg and the ‘frontier of control’. Society in Transition, 34(2), 1–12. Renton, D. 2003b. David Widgery: The poetics of propaganda. Soundings, 22, 109–125. Scanlon, J. 2005. On Garbage. London: Reaktion. Simoniti, V. 2010. The underlying term is democracy: An interview with Julian Stallabrass. Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, 7(3), 1–12. Stallabrass, J. 1996. Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture. London: Verso. Stallabrass, J. 1999. High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s. London: Verso. Stallabrass, J. 2003. Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce. London: Tate Publishing. Stallabrass, J. 2004. Art Incorporated. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Stallabrass, J. 2006. Spectacle and terror. New Left Review, 37, 87–106. Stallabrass, J. 2008. The power and impotence of images, in Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images, edited by J. Stallabrass. Brighton: Photoworks, 6–12. Trotsky, L. 1972. The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? New York: Pathfinder. Wayne, M. 1998. Introduction, in Dissident Voices: The Politics of Television and Cultural Change, edited by M. Wayne. London: Pluto, 1–12. Wayne, M. 2001. Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema. London: Pluto. Wayne, M. 2005a. Introduction, in Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives, edited by M. Wayne. London: Pluto, 1–33. Wayne, M. 2005b. Jameson, postmodernism and the hermeneutics of paranoia, in Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives, edited by M. Wayne. London: Pluto, 105–130. Wayne, M. 2007. Theses on realism and film. International Socialism Journal, 172, 165–184. Wayne, M. 2011. Obituary: Wolfe Wayne. Socialist History Society Newsletter, August, 11. Wayne, M. 2012a. Interview with David Renton. Available at dkrenton.co.uk. Wayne, M. 2012b. Kant’s philosophy of the aesthetic and the philosophy of practice. Rethinking Marxism, 24(12), 1–17. Watson, B. 1994. Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. London: Quartet. Watson, B. 1998. Frank Zappa. London: Omnibus Press. Watson, B. 2003. Shit-Kicks and Dough-Balls. London: Spare Change Books. Watson, B. 2004. Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation. London: Verso. Watson, B. 2011a. Adorno for Revolutionaries. London: Unkant. Watson, B. 2011b. The quivering psychophysique: A reply to Ian Birchall. Available at www.unkant.com. Watson, B. 2012a. Free Paul Blackledge from academic bondage. Available at www. unkant.com. Watson, B. 2012b. Blake in Cambridge. London: Unkant Publishers. Watson, B. 2012c. Zappa, Hegel, or not again (again). Available at www.unkant.com. Watson, B. and Leslie, E. 2012. Comic Marxism: Punk rock and the Bash street kids. Available at www.militantesthetix.co.uk. Watson, B. and Leslie, E. n.d. The punk paper: A dialogue. Available at www.militantesthetix. co.uk.

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Index

Aaronovitch, Sam 6, 91–2, 93, 97, 98, 103n21 Abel-Smith, Brian 53 Adorno, Theodor 13, 77, 78, 80, 103n23, 158–9, 173, 187, 190–1, 197n29; ‘The Culture Industry as Mass Deception’ 13, 173; ‘On Popular Music’ 103n23 Aeschylus 34, 72, 74, 82 Alleyne, Brian 77, 79 Althusser, Louis 5, 7, 9, 10, 17–18n5, 77, 87, 107, 115, 117, 128, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 149, 150n2; ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ 134; Être marxiste en philosophie 132; ‘Freud and Lacan’ 135; ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ 132, 140–3, 144, 150n8; Initiation à la philosophie pour les non-philosophes 132; For Marx 134, 138, 140; ‘Note on the ISAs’ 142, 143; ‘Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon’ 150n7; Reading Capital 137, 138, 141; Sur la reproduction 132, 141; ‘Sur la révolution culturelle’ 134 Althusserianism 2, 9–10, 17–18n5, 115–17, 119, 122, 132–52, 161 Amazon (company) 173, 174 Amis, Kingsley 48, 49, 53, 54, 55, 101; ‘At the Jazz Band Ball’ 54; Lucky Jim 48, 54, 55; ‘Martians Bearing Bursaries’ 54; ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals’ 54; ‘Why Lucky Jim Turned Right’ 54 Anderson, Lindsay 53 Anderson, Perry 5, 13, 44, 48, 52, 55, 107, 108–9, 112, 114, 133; Towards Socialism (edited with Robin Blackburn) 48 Anglo Amalgamated Film Distributors Ltd 164 Apple (company) 173

Arena ( journal) 91 Aristotle 85 Armstrong, Louis 96 Arnold, Matthew 32 Associated British Picture Corporation 164 Association of Cinematographic, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT) 157; Report on Nationalizing the Film Industry 157; Television Commission Report 157 Association of Musical Marxists (AMM) 194 Aveling, Edward 3 Badiou, Alain 134, 136 Bailey, Derek 190 Bailey, Lucy 76 Bakewell, Joan 166 Bakhtin, Mikhail 8, 12, 31, 96 Balibar, Étienne 84, 136 Ball, John 25 Barker, Bob 196n22 Barker, Jason 10; ‘Other Althussers’ (special edition of Diacritics, edited by Jason Barker and G.M. Goshgarian) 132 Barker, Martin 18n7, 92; A Haunt of Fears 92 Barthes, Roland 8, 9, 12, 17n4, 115, 133, 139 Bax, Ernest Belfort 3 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 50, 55, 167 Beatles 48, 192 Beaumont, Matthew 183 Beethoven, Ludwig van 75 Behrend, Hanna 41n3 Bell, Daniel 48 Benedict, Ruth 54; Patterns of Culture 54 Benjamin, Walter 7, 77, 79, 87

202

Index

Bennett, Tony 56, 113, 117, 118–19, 126–7, 128; Bond and Beyond (with Janet Woollacott) 56; ‘Cultural Studies: The Foucault Effect’ 126–7; ‘Popular Culture and the “Turn to Gramsci” ’ 118–19; ‘Popular Culture: A “Teaching Object” ’ 118 Berenson, Bernhard 17n2 Berger, John 53 Bernal, J.D. 34 Bernay, Edward 77 Berry, David 6 Biao, Xiang 174 Bill Grundy Show 14 Birmingham School see Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Blackburn, Robin 48; Towards Socialism (edited with Perry Anderson) 48 Black Papers on Education 49, 54 Blackwater (company) 153 Blake, William 196n24 Blast ( journal) 197n37 Bogues, Anthony 67 Bolden, Buddy 95 Bonefeld, Werner 69 Booker, Christopher 44 Borg, James 35, 42n23 Bounds, Philip 3, 6 Bourdieu, Pierre 52, 77 Braine, John 48; Room at the Top 48 Brecht, Bertolt 5, 189, 190 Brighton Photo Biennial 186, 196n13 Brit Awards 14 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 50, 55, 167 British Petroleum (BP) 153 British Road to Socialism, The (CPGB programme) 21–2, 114 Broderick, James 196n25 Brophy, Enda 10–11 Brouwer, Joel R. 22, 23 Brubeck, Dave 101 Brunel University 190 Buhle, Paul 66; C.L.R. James’s Caribbean (edited by Paul Buhle and Paget Henry) 66 Bull, Malcolm 195n6 Bunyan, John 24, 26; Grace Abounding 26; The Life and Death of Mr Badman 26; Pilgrim’s Progress 26 Butler, R.A. 182 Cahiers marxistes-léninistes 134 Cahiers pour l’analyse 136

Cambridge Ritualists 42n23 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 5, 46, 50–1, 55 Canclini, Néstor García 81, 82, 83, 85 Caraway, Brett 174 Carr, David 153 Castells, Manuel 16 Caudwell, Christopher 23, 28, 36, 42n28; Illusion and Reality 36 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) 5, 7–8, 17–18n5, 44, 48, 49, 52, 55–6, 87, 106, 107, 113–17, 119, 122, 128, 170; Unpopular Education 49 Centre for Mass Communication Research 156 Certau, Michel de 8 Chaplin, Charlie 68, 84 Chartists 25 Chávez, Hugo 189 Childe, V. Gordon 35, 36; Man Makes Himself 35 Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955 92 Chomsky, Noam 171 Christ, Jesus 25 Churchill, Winston 45 Clash, The 190, 191, 196n11; ‘London’s Burning’ 194 Cleavage 14 Cliff, Tony 193, 194 Coleridge, S.T. 22 Columbia Records 97, 98 Comintern see Communist International Communist International 23–4, 34, 189 Communist Party of China (CPC) 133 Communist Party of France (PCF) 10, 93, 133, 134, 140, 182 Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) 3, 6, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 40, 45, 88, 91, 92, 93, 96, 100, 101, 102n7, 103n13, 108, 114, 182, 187 Communist Party of Italy (PCI) 88, 182 Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) 91, 133 Communist Party of the Unites States of America (CPUSA) 93 Communist Refoundation 195n2 Consumers’ Association 47 Courtauld Institute of Art 190 CPGB Music Group 103n18; A Plan for Music in Britain 103n18 Crosland, Anthony 47, 48, 50, 53, 54, 55; Can Labour Win? 47; The Conservative Enemy 50; The Future of Socialism 47,

Index 53; ‘The Future of the Left’ 53; ‘The Mass Media’ 50 cultural populism 2, 8–9, 12, 13, 15, 123–4 Cultural Revolution (China) 134 Cultural Studies 1, 2 passim Curran, James 11, 154, 155, 156, 159, 161, 162, 163, 166, 167, 169, 170, 171 ‘Cutty Wren’ (folk song) 89 Daily Telegraph 101 Daily Worker 24 Dalglish, Kenny 191 Dante, Alighieri 34 Dark Knight Rises, The 145–6, 150 Davis, Miles 101 Dead Kennedys 191 Dean, Jodi 172 Debord, Guy 31 Decca (record label) 89, 98 Declaration of Independence 79 Deleuze, Gilles 140; Difference and Repetition 140 Derrida, Jacques 9, 17n4, 140 Descension (band) 14 Dhondy, Farrukh 65–6, 68, 71, 78, 79 Diacritics ( journal)132 Dialectics ( journal) 36 Diawara, Manthia 146 Dickens, Charles 4, 24 Diggers, The 25 Dimitrov, Georgi 24, 25, 26; ‘The Working Class against Fascism’ 24 Dog Day Afternoon 188 Dosse, François 138; ‘The Eclipse of a Star’ 138; History of Structuralism 138 Dworkin, Dennis 1, 16, 116, 120, 124 Dylan, Bob 100, 192 Eagleton, Terry 10, 12, 134, 136–7, 140; Literary Theory 136 Ecole freudienne de Paris 135 Ecole Normale 134, 135, 136, 140 Education Act (1944) 49 Eliot, T.S. 21, 22, 32, 54; Notes towards the Definition of Culture 54 Ellington, Duke 98 Elliott, Philip 56, 156, 176n6; Demonstrations and Communication (with James D. Halloran and Graham Murdock) 56 Ellis, John 150n2 EMI 89, 98, 164 Encounter 46, 48, 50, 53, 55

203

Engels, Frederick 3, 30, 90, 134, 139, 141, 157; The German Ideology (Marx and Engels) 35, 139, 157, 15 etoy (art collective) 197n33 Euripides 82 Evans, Malcolm 196n22 Fabian Society 46, 53, 54, 55 Ferguson, Marjorie 123, 124; Cultural Studies in Question (edited by Peter Golding and Marjorie Ferguson) 123 Ferrara, Fernando 111 Fichant, Michel 136 Finkelstein, Sidney 94; Jazz: A People’s Music 94 Fischer, Louis 52–3 Fiske, John 8, 12, 100, 124 Florida, Richard 173 Ford, Henry 79 Forgacs, David 107, 108, 109, 114, 119 Forrest-Johnson faction 5 43 Group 187 Foucault, Michel 2, 17n4, 124, 126, 128, 169 Frankfurt School 67, 76, 77, 78, 81, 83, 98, 158, 159, 167, 187 Fraser, James 29, 35 Freud, Sigmund 135, 145, 147–8, 150 Friedman, Milton 12 Fry, Roger 17n2 Gaitskell, Hugh 53 Galbraith, J.K. 46, 47 Gang of Four (band) 191 Garaudy, Roger 133 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 24 Garnham, Nicholas 10, 11, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 165, 166, 167, 168, 168–9, 171, 172; ‘Contribution to a Political Economy of Mass-Communication’ 158; Structures of Television 166 Gasset, Ortega y 32 Gerbner, George 168 Gide, André 53 Gillespie, Dizzy 98 Godard, Jean-Luc 9 God That Failed, The (edited by Richard Crossman) 51, 52–3 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 192; Faust 192 Golding, Peter 10, 17, 114, 123, 124, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 171, 176n6,

204

Index

176n9, 176n11; Cultural Studies in Question (edited by Peter Golding and Marjorie Ferguson) 123; ‘For a Political Economy of Mass Communications’ (Golding and Murdock) 154 Gone with the Wind 78–9 Google 173 Gorodinsky, Victor 93 Goshgarian, G.M. 132; ‘Other Althussers’ (special edition of Diacritics, edited by Jason Barker and G.M. Goshgarian) 132 Gosling, Ray 48 Gould, Chester 70 Gramsci, Antonio 5, 7, 8, 12, 18n5, 51, 56, 87, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 128, 195; The Modern Prince and Other Writings 108, 114; Prison Notebooks 7, 107; Selections from the Prison Notebooks (edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith) 114 Gramscianism 2, 7–8, 9, 10, 12, 17–18n5, 25, 56, 97, 106–31 Grosrichard, Alain 136 Guardian 55, 104n28, 153 Habermas, Jürgen 11, 52, 167 Haldane, J.B.S. 34 Hall, Stuart 7, 10, 17, 44, 46, 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 55, 65, 66, 71, 73, 74, 87, 100, 107, 109, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119–22, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 134, 136, 137, 138, 142, 143, 160; ‘C.L.R. James: A Portrait’ 66; ‘Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms’ 115, 118, 126; ‘Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’ 128; ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ 120–1; ‘The Meaning of New Times’ 123; ‘Notes on Deconstructing the “Popular” ’ 73; Policing the Crisis (with Chas Critcher, John Clarke, Tony Jefferson and Brian Roberts) 56, 109, 116–17, 119; The Popular Arts (with Paddy Whannell) 100, 113; Resistance through Rituals (edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson) 116; ‘A Sense of Classlessness’ 46 Halloran, James D. 56, 156, 170, 176n4, 176n9; Demonstrations and Communication (with Philip Elliott and Graham Murdock) 56 Harman, Chris 193, 194 Harrington, Patrick 187, 196n22

Harris, Phil 156 Harrison, Jane 35 Hartley, Anthony 5, 54 Hartmann, Paul 156 Hayek, Friedrich von 12 Heath, Stephen 146 Hebdige, Dick 7, 17, 100, 116, 128 Hegel, G.W.F. 22, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 84; History of Philosophy 69; ‘Logic of Essence’ 71; Smaller Logic 69; ‘Three Attitudes of Thought towards Objectivity’ 69 Henry, Paget 66; C.L.R. James’s Caribbean (edited by Paul Buhle and Paget Henry) 66 Herman, Edward 171 Hill, Christopher 108 Himmelweit, Hilde 50; Television and the Child 50 Hirst, Damien 184–5 Hitchcock, Alfred 149, 150; Psycho 149; Rear Window 150 Hitler, Adolf 22, 24 Hoare, Quintin 114 Hobsbawm, Eric 6–7, 17, 48, 87–105, 106, 108, 182; Age of Extremes 102; The Jazz Scene 6–7, 87–8, 93–102, 104n28; Labouring Men 102; Primitive Rebels 102 Hoggart, Richard 4, 6, 21, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 65, 100, 113, 114; The Uses of Literacy 7, 45, 46, 49, 54, 65, 100, 113, 159; ‘The Uses of Television’ 50 Holborn Hall 91 Holdsworth, Bill 100; ‘Songs of the People’ 100 Horkheimer, Max 77, 78, 158–9, 173, 187 Hudis, Peter 69 Hughes, Donald 100; ‘Recorded Music’ 100 Huws, Ursula 173 Hyndman, H.M. 2 Icke, David 188 Ignatiev, Noel 73–4; ‘The World Views of C.L.R. James’ 73–4 Industry and Society (Labour Party pamphlet) 47 Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) 132, 150n1 International Association for Mass Communication Research 156, 167

Index International Association for Media and Communication Research 156, 167–8 International Psychoanalytical Association 135 International Publishing Corporation (IPC) 164 ‘Iraq through the lens of Vietnam’ (exhibition at the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennal) 186 Jackson, T.A. 26, 32 Jacques, Martin 114, 119 James, C.L.R. 2, 5–6, 17, 17n1, 17n2, 65–86; American Civilization 69, 74, 77, 78; Beyond a Boundary 5–6; ‘Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity’ 67; ‘The Invading Socialist Society’ 73; Notes on Dialectics 6, 68, 71; ‘Popular Arts and Modern Society’ 69, 74; At the Rendezvous of Victory 66; ‘The Struggle for Happiness’ 84; ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture’ 75; ‘What is Art?’ 5–6 Jameson, Fredric 2, 12, 13, 15, 188, 196n25 Jancovich, Mark 146 Jenkins, Henry 8–9, 100 Joan of Arc 24 Johnson, Richard 56, 126 Jones, Steve 8 Journal of Communication 168 Kain, Philip J. 85 Kautsky, Karl 3 Kelly, Grace 150 Kermode, Frank 63 Kerouac, Jack 193 Kettle, Arnold 55 Khrushchev, Nikita 88, 108, 133 KLF 14 Kluge, Alexander 52 Koestler, Arthur 53 Kracauer, Siegfried 77 Labour Party 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 120, 121, 157, 188 Lacan, Jacques 2, 9, 10, 132, 133, 135–6, 138, 143, 144, 147–8, 149, 150, 150n8, 151n9; Ecrits 138; ‘Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud’ 138; ‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience’ 144

205

Laclau, Ernesto 125–6, 128; Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (with Chantal Mouffe) 125–6; Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory 125 Lafargue, Paul 3 La Gauche Prolétarienne 134, 136 Land and Freedom 190 Lane, Allen 44 La Pensée 140 Larkin, Philip 101, 104n28 Lawrence and Wishart 108 Leavis, F.R. 21, 22, 26, 38, 109 Le Carré, John 56; The Spy Who Came In from the Cold 56 Lecourt, Dominique 134 Lee, David 69 Lefebvre, Henri 31 Left Review 23, 24, 39, 41n16 Leicester Centre for Mass Communication Research 170 Lenin, V.I. 66, 67, 72, 134 Leslie, Esther 15, 183, 197n30; Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde 197n30; Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry 197n30; Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism 197n30 Lessing, Doris 45, 53 Letts, Don 196n11; Westway to the World 196n11 Levellers 25 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 115, 133, 135, 138, 139, 141; The Elementary Structures of Kinship 138 Lewis, Wyndham 197n37 Lindsay, Jack 2, 3–4, 7, 17, 21–43, 182; ‘The Aesthetic Fact’ 36, 37, 39; Anatomy of Spirit 41n2; England, My England 24–5; Perspective for Poetry 36; A Short History of Culture 3–4, 23, 26–36, 37, 39, 40, 41n3, 41n9; A Short History of Culture from Prehistory to the Renascence 41n9; Volunteers for Liberty (edited by Lindsay and Edgell Rickword) 24; ‘William Shakespeare’ 41n16 Lloyd, A.L. 6, 89–91, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 102n10; Come All Ye Bold Miners 94; Folk Song in England 102n10; The Singing Englishman 89–91, 102n10 London School of Economics (LSE) 54 Lukács, Georg 189, 190 Lyotard, Jean-François 2

206

Index

MacCabe, Colin 9, 143 MacColl, Ewan 89, 93, 94, 97, 99 Macdonald, Dwight 55 MacGibbon and Kee 88 Macherey, Pierre 136 MacInnes, Colin 48, 53; Absolute Beginners 48 Mackenzie, Norman 53; Conviction 53 Mahler, Gustav 191 Manchester Guardian see Guardian Marchais, Georges 182 Marcuse, Herbert 55, 76, 78, 87; One Dimensional Man 76 Marks, Louis 108, 113 Martin-Barbero, Jésus 81, 82, 83 Marx, Eleanor 3 Marx, Karl 1, 2, 3, 16, 46, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 80, 85, 115, 134, 137, 139, 141, 157, 158, 175, 192; Das Kapital 1; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 71; The German Ideology (Marx and Engels) 35, 139, 157, 158; Grundrisse 68 Marxism 1, 2 passim Marxism and Culture (book series) 15 Marxism Today 55, 56, 113, 119, 120 Maschler, Tom 53, 54; Declaration 53, 54 Matrix, The 188 Mattelart, Armand 168 Mattelart, Michele 168 Mayne, Roger 48 McClendon, John H., 65 McGuigan, Jim 8, 12, 123–4, 127; Cultural Populism 123–4 McRobbie, Angela 122 Media, Culture and Society 156, 159, 161, 168 Mehring, Franz 3 Melody Maker 102n5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 133 Merrifield, Andy 15, 55 Metz, Christian 146 Microsoft 173 Miéville, China 183, 197n36; ‘Rejectamentalist Manifesto’ 197n36 Miliband, Ralph 48; The State in Capitalist Society 48 Mill, John Stuart 55 Miller, Jacques-Alain 136; ‘Suture’ 136 Mills, C. Wright 47–8; The Power Elite 47 Milner, Jean-Claude 136 Mises, Ludwig von 12 Modleski, Tania 150

Molyneux, John 195n9 Montag, Warren 132; Althusser and His Contemporaries 132 Monty Python’s Flying Circus 50 Morgan, Kevin 93 Morley, David 116 Morning Star 163 Morris, William 2, 7, 21, 22, 24; News from Nowhere 3 Morton, A.L. 26 Morton, Jelly Roll 95 Mosco, Vincent 10–11 Mosley, Oswald 187 Mouffe, Chantal 114, 125–6, 128; Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (with Ernesto Laclau) 125–6 Mulhern, Francis 4, 21–2; ‘Culture and Society, Then and Now” 21–2 Mulvey, Laura 9, 10, 17, 133, 143–8, 149; ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ 10, 133, 143–8, 150n7 Murdock, Graham 10, 17, 56, 114, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168–9, 170, 171, 176n6, 176n9, 176n11; Demonstrations and Communication (with James D. Halloran and Philip Elliott) 56; ‘For a Political Economy of Mass Communications’ (Golding and Murdock) 154 Mussolini, Benito 24 Nairn, Tom 108–9, 112 National Coal Board 94 National Front 187 NATO 51 Needham, Joseph 34, 42n22 Negt, Oskar 52 Newby, Howard 69 New Critics 38 New Left 4–5, 21, 44–64, 102n2, 106, 107, 113 New Left Review 5, 44–5, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 56, 100, 108, 183, 195n6 New Reasoner 44, 45, 48, 108 New Right 12 News Corporation 153, 154 News International 153 News of the World 173, 176n2 New Statesman 46, 59, 63, 88 Newton, Francis (pseudonym of Eric Hobsbawm) 48, 88 Newton, Frankie 102n6 Newton, Isaac 4

Index New York Daily News 69, 70, 74 New York Times 153 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey 114 Observer 101, 102n5, 104n28 O’Connor, Alan 4–5 O’Neill, Deirdre 189; Listen to Venezuela (with Mike Wayne) 189, 196n19 Open University 49, 113, 117–19, 122 Orwell, George 48, 55 Osborne, John 53 Out to Lunch (pseudonym of Ben Watson) 190 Ovett, Steve 191 Paananen, Victor N. 22, 23 Pacino, Al 188, 196n25 Packard, Vance 77; The Hidden Persuaders 77 Page, John 68, 71 Panthéon 135 Parker, Charlie 96, 98, 101 Partisan Review 44 Pascal, Blaise 141 Pawling, Christopher 42n28 Peasants’ Revolt (1381) 24, 25 Pêcheux, Michel 136 Peck, Janice 127–8 Penguin Books 44, 48, 56 Petley, Julian 18n7 Picture Post 55 Pilkington Report 44, 50 Pilsudski, Josef 24 Plekhanov, Georgi 3, 36 political economy school 2, 9, 10–11, 15, 67, 97–9, 114, 123, 124, 153–81 Pollock, Jackson 100 Polytechnic of Central London 18n6, 155, 156 Polytechnic of North London 187, 196n21 Polytechnic of Wales 8 Pontecorvo, Gillo 188; Battle of Algiers 188–9 Pop, Iggy 14 Popular Culture and Social Relations (edited by Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott) 118 Portsmouth Polytechnic 117 Potter, Dennis 53; The Glittering Coffin 53 Power, Nina 183, 196n17 Presley, Elvis 93 Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) 132 Prynne, J.H. 14 192

207

Qiu, Jack 174 Quartet Books 48 Rabelais, François 195n7 Rank (record label) 89 Reagan, Ronald 176n1 Reed Group Limited 164 Regnault, François 136 Renton, David 11 Resonance Radio 190 Retort (collective) 195n10 Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) 188 Richards, I.A. 21, 38, 42n28; Practical Criticism 38; Principles of Literary Criticism 38, 42n28; Science and Poetry 38 Richards, Viv 191 Rickword, Edgell 24; Volunteers for Liberty (edited by Rickword and Jack Lindsay) 24 Rivera, Diego 189 Roberts, Michael 15 Robeson, Paul 75 Robins, Kevin 164, 169 Roubini, Nouriel 1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 28 Royal Academy of Arts 185 ®™Mark (arts collective) 185, 194 Run Lola Run 190 Ruskin, John 2, 21 Rutter, Carol Chillington 76 Samuel, Raphael 46, 48, 53 Sartre, Jean-Paul 133, 138; Critique of Dialectical Reason 133 Saussure, Ferdinand de 115 Scanlon, John 192–3 Schiller, Dan 160 Schiller, Friedrich 75; ‘Ode to Joy’ 75 Schiller, Herbert 167, 176n4 Schlesinger, Philip 176n6 Schoenberg, Arnold 100, 191 Schopenhauer, Arthur 67–8 Screen 9–10, 17–18n5, 132–3, 136, 140, 143, 160–1 Screen Education 118 Second English Folk Revival 88–91, 100–1 Sedgwick, Peter 194 Seeger, Peggy 89 Sensation (Royal Academy Exhibition) 185

208

Index

Sex Pistols 14, 191 Shakespeare, William 4, 32–3, 34, 76; Love’s Labour’s Lost 33; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 33; Romeo and Juliet 32, 33; The Winter’s Tale 76; As You Like It 33 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 3 Shils, Edward 54 Sholette, Gregory 15 Sidwell, Keith 72, 74 Siegelaub, Seth 168 Siegfried, André 85; America Comes of Age 85 Sillitoe, Alan 48; Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 48 Silone, Ignazio 53 Situationist International 15 Sixteenth International Congress of Psychoanalysis 150n8 Slater, Montagu 103n18 Smirnov, A.A. 32 Smith, Adam 175 Smith, Bessie 95 Smythe, Dallas 167, 168, 174 Social Democratic Federation (SDF) 2 Socialist Appeal 79 Socialist League 2, 3 Socialist Workers Party (SWP) 15, 188, 189, 190, 193–4 Social Relations of Science Movement (SRSM) 34–5, 42n22 Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse 135 Sonic Youth 14 Sophocles 82 Sorbonne 138 Soros, George 1 Soviet Union 1, 66, 67, 88, 91, 92, 97, 108, 133, 182, 194, 195n5 Sparks, Colin 114, 115, 124, 127, 154, 156 Spectator 46, 51, 54 Spender, Stephen 53 Spheeris, Penelope 191; Suburbia 191 Springsteen, Bruce 74–5; ‘This Depression’ 75; ‘Jack of All Trades’ 75; ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’ 75; ‘Shackled and Drawn’ 75; ‘We Are Alive’ 75; ‘We Take Care of Our Own’ 75; ‘Wrecking Ball’ 75; Wrecking Ball 74–5 Spurlock, Morgan 190, 194; Super Size Me 190, 194 Stalin, Joseph 93, 133 Stallabrass, Julian 11, 13, 15, 18n7, 183–7, 190, 192, 194, 195n5, 195n6, 195n9, 195n10, 196n14, 196n17, 197n33; Art Incorporated 186, 196n15; Contemporary

Art: A Very Short Introduction 196n15; Gargantua 13, 183–4; High Art Lite 183–4 Stewart, James 150 Storey, John 1 Stracey, Frances 15 structuralist Marxism see Althusserianism Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 103n23 Surrealists 189 Tally, Robert T. 15 Tate Gallery 14 Tel Quel 150n2 Terminator 2 184 Thatcher, Margaret 54, 120, 176n1 That Was the Week That Was 50 Thompson, Denys 100; Discrimination and Popular Culture 100 Thompson, E.P. 2, 4, 6, 22, 40, 44, 45, 46, 48, 53, 65, 66, 109–10, 111, 112, 115, 119, 159; ‘Commitment in Politics’ 46; ‘Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?’ 110; The Making of the English Working Class 40; Out of Apathy 48, 53; ‘Peculiarities of the English’ 109; William Morris 45 Thomson Corporation 163 Thorn Electrical Industries 164 Thorn-EMI 164 ‘Time on Our Hands’ (television programme) 55 Times 196n22 Times Literary Supplement 102n5 Titmuss, Richard 46 Tocqueville, Alexis de 79; Democracy in America 79 Topic Records 89 Townsend, Peter 53 Trotsky, Leon 33–4, 66, 67, 73 Tudor, Andrew 115, 141 Tunstall, Jeremy 170, 171; The Media Are American 171 Turner, Graeme 1 Twentieth Century 46, 48 28 Days Later 190 Tylor, E.B. 35 UNESCO 44, 113 Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste (UCFML) 136 Union for Democratic Communication 168 Union of Communist Students 134 Universities and Left Review 44, 45, 46, 48, 55

Index University College, London 53 University of Birmingham 49, 113 University of Cambridge 54, 196n24 University of Illinois 167 University of Leicester 10, 49, 155, 156 University of Oxford 53, 54 University of Westminster 10, 18n6, 155, 156–7 University of Wisconsin-Madison 8 Urry, John 176n8; Power in Britain (with John Wakeford) 176n8 ‘The USA Threat to British Culture’ (CPGB conference) 91, 103n13, 103n18 USSR see Soviet Union Verso (publisher) 132 Wagner, Richard 192 Wain, John 48, 53; Hurry On Down 48 Wakeford, John 176n8; Power in Britain (with John Urry) 176n8 Wall Street 192 Washington, George 79 Watson, Ben 11, 13–15, 18n8, 183, 187, 190–4, 195, 196n11, 196n18, 196n24, 197n29, 197n30, 197n32, 197n37; Adorno for Revolutionaries 190–1; Art, Class and Cleavage 13, 14; Blake in Cambridge 196n24; Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play 13; Shit-Kicks and Dough-Balls 197n30 Wayne, Mike 11, 15–16, 183, 187–90, 194, 195, 196n19, 196n21, 196n22, 196n24; The Condition of the Working Class in England 196n19; Listen to Venezuela (with Deirdre O’Neill) 189, 196n19; Marxism and Media Studies 15–16; Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema 188–9; ‘Theses on Realism and Film’ 189–90 Wayne, Wolf 187 Weberman, A.J. 192 Webster, Frank 164, 169 West, Alick 26, 36, 38–9, 41n19, 42n28; Crisis and Criticism 38–9, 42n28; One Man in His Time 41n19 ‘Western Wind’ (folk song) 89 Westminster School (of political economy) 156, 156–7, 166–7 Whanell, Paddy 100, 113; The Popular Arts (with Stuart Hall) 100, 113 White Room (television programme) 14 Whitney Biennial 185 Widgery, David 50, 194

209

Williams, Gwyn A. 111, 113; ‘The Concept of “Egemonia” in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci’ 111, 113 Williams, Joy 54 Williams, Raymond 4, 6, 13, 17, 21–2, 23, 40, 44, 45, 47, 48–9, 50, 51–2, 53, 54–5, 56, 65, 100, 102n2, 106, 107, 109, 110–12, 113, 114, 115, 119, 127, 138, 159, 160; Border Country 54; Communications 40, 54; Culture and Society 21–2, 40, 45, 47, 54–5, 100, 111, 113; ‘Distance’ 13; The Existing Alternatives in Communications 55; The Long Revolution 7, 21, 40, 47, 49, 52, 54, 110–11; Marxism and Literature 110, 111–12 Williams, W.E. 44 William the Conqueror 90 Willis, Paul 8, 12, 49 Willmott, Peter 47; Family and Kinship in East London (with Michael Young) 47 Wilson, A.N. 101 Wilson, Colin 49, 53, 54; The Outsider 49 Wilson, Harold 45 Wollen, Peter 9 Wollheim, Richard 53–4; Socialism and Culture 53 Woollacott, Janet 56; Bond and Beyond (with Tony Bennett) 56 Workers Educational Association (WEA) 44, 45, 54 Workers’ Music Association 88, 89 Workers’ Party (USA) 5 Wright, Richard 53 Young British Artists 184, 195n9 Young Communist League (YCL) 100 Young, Michael 47, 49; Family and Kinship in East London (with Peter Willmott) 47 Zappa, Frank 18n8, 77, 190, 192, 197n33; Bongo Fury 77; Just Another Band from LA 192; Slime 77 Zedong, Mao 133, 134, 135, 150n2; ‘On Contradiction’ 133 Zhdanov, A.A. 91, 189; On Literature, Music and Philosophy 91 Žižek, Slavoj 71–2, 141, 142, 143, 148; ‘Hegel’s “Logic of Essence” as a Theory of Ideology’ 71; The Sublime Object of Ideology 142