Dr Michael Bailey (Leeds Metropolitan University)
Putting Culture back into Cultural Studies
Since the publication of The Uses of Literacy in 1957, Richard Hoggart has been one of Britain’s foremost public intellectuals and cultural critics. His work challenges entrenched disciplinary and social boundaries, addressing a wide range of subjects including literature, popular culture and the development of public policy. Moreover, unlike the more theoretical abstractions of cultural studies, Hoggart’s work is committed to a ‘reformist vocation’ within the socio-political apparatuses of social democracy (including higher education), attending to the strategic nature of policy discourse and the allocation of cultural resources. And though this engagement with policy has been criticised by some on the left as an advocacy for pragmatism rather than an oppositional cultural politics, such criticisms are often founded on political ideals which look increasingly unlikely to manifest themselves in a pragmatic, realisable political form.
Following Hoggart’s example, the proposed project seeks to suggest ways in which educationalists working in the fields of cultural studies can be more proactive in trying to influence cultural policy for pedagogic purposes. The project would also heed the call of cultural policy studies for a more institutionally and reformist oriented cultural politics. The turn to cultural policy is often associated with the so-called ‘Foucault Effect’, especially within Australian cultural studies throughout the 1990s, whence a significant number of colleagues have become increasingly interested in the practical relationship between culture and power vis-à-vis government and policy. Hence Tony Bennett’s now infamous clarion call, ‘Putting Policy into Cultural Studies’, the thrust of which was to argue that cultural studies try and be more practical about ‘the actual politics of culture’. In other words, cultural studies ought to be about the training of future cultural technicians, that is to say, practical intellectuals who are adequately equipped to effect technical changes to the ways in which culture is deployed as a governmental apparatus.
However, one crucial difference between the work of Hoggart and that generally associated with the turn to cultural policy in the 1990s is that much of the cultural policy debates were concerned with what Jim McGuigan rightly identifies as ‘administrative research’, which is to say research which somehow stands outside of cultural criticism and questions of meaning and value. More crucially, so-called governmentalists rarely consider how cultural policy can be socially enabling. Hoggart’s concern with cultural policy -and institutions- on the other hand, is borne out of a deep-rooted belief in social democratic politics. So, unlike governmentalists, Hoggart has always argued for the need for maintaining cultural standards and values, both as an a posteriori principle and as a bulwark against creeping commercialism. The main purpose of the proposed project is to recover this kind of Hoggartian approach to cultural studies and to argue that it still has much to offer when it comes to advocating normative judgements or values about such things as culture, literacy, educated citizenship and social democracy.
